We the vulgar

In this post, Alain linked to the neoconservatism issue of Logos, and I perused much of it. There were two articles about Leo Strauss and his connections to the neoconservative movement, the first of which, “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror” by Nicholas Xenos, raises some interesting questions about what the neocons mean by the words they use. As Alain and some of the commentors cautioned, we don't want to fall for some sort of idealism here and imagine that the ideas of Strauss and of his students are really what's driving the “war on terror”; of course, if there weren't money and power in it for the monied and the powerful, these intellectuals would not be allowed to drive policy in this way. But Strauss provides an ideological framework and a language, as Xenos explains, and surely tells us what the neocons think they're doing (I wouldn't be surprised if those intellectuals imagined that they were in fact piloting the ship of state rather than some vulgarian CEOs). Based on Xenos's summaries of Strauss, the ideological framework is neither impressive nor interesting: it's The Republic all over again and, you know, I really didn't care for that one the first time around.

However, this leads me to the interesting question: what the hell do these people (Kristol, Kagan, Krauthammer, Wolfowitz, Frum, Perle, Abrams, Barnes, Nafisi et al.) think they're doing?

In Strauss (as I understand Xenos), liberal democracy is pratically equivalent to Nazism and Communism: it is a regime of total control leading inexorably toward the flattening out of mankind, the heat-death of humanity as it were. The natural aristocracy, the philosopher kings with their innate capacity to discover ultimate truth, are degraded by its egalitarianism and relativism as much as by the kitschy myths of the Nazis and the grey repressiveness of the Soviets. Liberal democracy is destructive of truth because the distinctions it draws between who may rule and who be ruled (and there are distinctions) do not take into account the tripartite nature of man: there are the wise, the gentlemen and the vulgar. And the problem with 20th century fascism is that it's not actually fascist enough:

While Strauss’s review of Schmitt’s book is fairly well known among scholars, the most striking document from Strauss’s early period is a letter he wrote in May 1933, to the German scholar Karl Löwith. Strauss wrote to Löwith five months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and a month after implementation of the first anti-Jewish legislation, that “just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us,” meaning Jews, “it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original]—is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to ‘the inalienable rights of man’ to protest against the mean nonentity,” the mean nonentity being the Nazi party. In other words, he is attacking the Nazis from the right in this letter. He wrote that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries, and valued Virgil’s judgment that “under imperial rule the subjected are spared and the proud are subdued.” And he concluded, “There is no reason to crawl to the cross, even to the cross of liberalism, as long as anywhere in the world the spark glimmers of Roman thinking. And moreover, better than any cross is the ghetto.”

Lovely.

Now Strauss also believed that the philosopher had to wear one face for “The City” (all this ponderous Greek-speak, good heavens) and another for the initiate. Thus he claimed to write on two levels—one for the public at large, the media, perhaps the slow kids in the back of the room, and one for the smart kid who's got some potential, who is a philosopher king in chrysalis. This prodigy will understand Strauss's writing when he encounters it as an undergraduate and be ready for yet more info on the dangerous vulgarity of the demos and the democrats who champion them. And ready too to learn about “the dignity of the political,” the political being the contention between good (wisdom) and evil (the myriad unwisdoms), with no such mealy intermediary terms or entirely amoral analyses as various types of democrats from liberals to socialists are wont to use.

The question is: did Strauss's students understand him? Are they using one language for the hoi-polloi and an another for those in the know? For instance, when last I browsed through the aforementioned Reading Lolita in Tehran, I couldn't help but notice that Azar Nafisi not only thanks Wolfowitz on the acknowledgements page, but thanks him for introducing her to Strauss's book Persecution and the Art of Writing, apparently the one in which he describes his multi-level theory of writing. Nafisi's book is loved by liberals: here is a great defense of freedom of speech and freedom of the intellect to evade the claims of the political altogether. Is Nafisi writing on two levels? Does she mean for only the potential wise one to inhabit the realms of the aesthetic she promises, realms in fact not above politics but precisely political in their wise contention with the vulgarity around them? When she complains of philosopher kings, does she only have in mind kings of the wrong philosophy, Iranian mullahs like Hitler in their coarse control, exemplars of modern tyranny as opposed to the ancient tyranny which, according to Strauss, could be improved by wisdom? Or, take another example: Adam Bellow was on C-Span2 last weekend recommending books for young college conservatives. After giving his intellectual autobiography—Papa Saul introduced him to Allan Bloom who gave him Strauss to read—he then told the assembled members of the junior anti-sex league to read something like The Federalist Papers, in order “to understand the eighteenth century liberalism we're trying to conserve.” Was he lying? Or does he remain on the idiot-level of Strauss? Is William Kristol really an advocate of the free market or is he bullshitting? Shouldn't he think it is the source of the tyranny of the people's vulgarity? Or is he actually smarter than that and knows that it is mostly a top-down mechanism for spreading whatever noble lie needs told? Or is he not as smart as he thinks, largely due to the fact that he devoted so much of his time to Strauss?

In some sense, it doesn't actually matter. They aren't running things, no matter what they think, and the military-industrial types who are running things probably don't read philosophy. But Xenos observes that Straussian language is diffusing through the culture, inflecting the news and even liberal discourse. This is a form propaganda takes. And, anyway, it's probably useful to know what propagandists are thinking. Christoph's answer in the comments to Alain's post is that these people are in “epistemic la-la land”, which is true, but what's it like for them there? I mean, since we all have to live there now.

(Incidentally, the most interesting—and depressing—article in Logos is called “The Price of Heavenly Peace: Tiananmen Square 15 Years Later” by Michael J. Thompson. In it, we learn where the future is headed, in China and everywhere else. Democracy does not figure in.)

Comments

[Alain]

Jon

A wonderful post! I have been thinking about the significance of the neoconservative persuassion for quite a while. Part of me takes the attitude that Zizek suggests: since the esoteric/exoteric distinction has been well publicized in the media it really isn't relavent to understanding current policies. There is the whole Wolfowitz commment that "WMD is all we could agree on but ofcourse it was the oil."

But part of me knows better. Years ago I had the dubious honor of studying with a couple of Straussians. Once you drink the Kool aide its all over. While there are very serious differences among them, a core belief is the esoteric/exoteric distinction as it applies to writing and governing. The other single most important distinction is that of enemy and friend. They see Liberals and moderates as internal enemies, in part, because these folks do not take external threats seriously.

[Amie]

There is a scathing -- and acute -- account of Leo Strauss by Reiner Schurmann in his book, Broken Hegemonies.
I might try to post something on it later but, for the moment, just a quote:

"And what is the crucial truth that Leo Strauss himself presents exclusively between the lines? This ‘truth’ is that the historic division between the classical and modern epochs, and thus that the ‘teleological vision’ of which the division marks a loss and a mourning, are but tools of political intervention to constitute the new aristocracy and to confer on it full powers"

[rollo]

John-
When you say "...some vulgarian CEOs..." or "...the military-industrial types who are running things...", this is comforting. But it would be more comforting if you'd back it up with some evidence for the assertion.
Do you just know this innately?
Or is it the result of in-depth polling?
My own pretty hinterlandish view is that it's like a very very big ox, pulling a very very big cart, with some very very tiny men on a very very big bench seat at the front of the cart violently jostling each other for the reins.
Some of them are CEO's and some are intelligence/military and some are neocons, and some are just kind of hard to identify.

[John]

Alain:
I think the importance of the lie in Strauss is possibly overstated. I mean, there were no Straussians there to teach Johnson and Nixon and the rest of them to lie. I'm not sure these lies are qualitatively different from those lies. At least this goes for the WMD lies. But the more important lie, the one that concerns me--hell, the one that had me fooled for a while--is the one where they say they really just want to spread liberal democracy. Remember the response to Bush's state of the union in January? "Oh that starry-eyed Bush wanting to spread freedom everywhere; how awfully naive." And this lie gets them off the hook in the press and perhaps in the middle-class understanding. Well, they meant well. But they didn't.

Amie:
That quote sounds right, and also clarifies what seems to distinguish Strauss from Plato, i.e., Plato believed in the moral truth of the hierarchies on which he would have premised society, whereas Strauss was more nihilistic, more reliant on a certain concept of nature. The teleological vision is a great tool, but not necessarily a perception of truth. Shadia Drury:

"Strauss is a nihilist in the sense that he believes that there is no rational foundation for morality. He is an atheist, and he believes that in the absence of God, morality has no grounding. It’s all about benefiting others and oneself; there is no objective reason for doing so, only rewards and punishments in this life.

But Strauss is not a nihilist if we mean by the term a denial that there is any truth, a belief that everything is interpretation. He does not deny that there is an independent reality. On the contrary, he thinks that independent reality consists in nature and its “order of rank” – the high and the low, the superior and the inferior. Like Nietzsche, he believes that the history of western civilisation has led to the triumph of the inferior, the rabble – something they both lamented profoundly."
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp

Rollo:
I'm not sure I get your analogy. What is the ox? History? Capitalism? Something else? That said, I'm not sure your vision of the men jostling for the reins is so opposed to the idea of CEO or military-industrial types running things. They are, after all, the people trying to get the reins. I acknowledge differences and disagreements among the heads of industry and government that run the show--these were visible enough in the lead-up to the Iraq war--but they are disagreements on how best to achieve one end: the continued dominance of the system over which they preside and their ability to profit from it. Some are neo-cons, some are hard to identify, but they're all in it for the same thing. How do I know that these people call the shots? I'm not sure how else to interpret the evidence. Again, Iraq: whose interests are represented by that war? By the vast military spending--on corporate products--justified by the war, by the awarding of reconstruction and other contracts to American corporations who have representatives at the highest levels of government, by the privatization of Iraq's resources? Who benefits? Who would you say is in charge of such a thing?

[rollo]

The ox would be, along with the cart, and whatever metaphorical load is in it, "things".
Running "things". Driving.
Also the sense that the ox's own metabolism is doing the "running", though all direction and purpose - all of anything to do with the where and why of the journey - is not his.
So it's this huge lumbering thing. Like the American public, a great source of raw energy - a big dumb creature easily driven toward goals that have almost nothing directly to do with its own well-being.
Except inasmuch as doing what you're told when you're a domestic animal furthers your well-being.
-
Who benefits from the invasion of Iraq is a catalog of the iniquitous.
It's like the news flash yesterday - some bubble-head in front of the NASDAQ feed talking about how oil/fuel prices are going up during and post-Katrina. And pretty much doing a discreet little victory dance while she says it. The assumption being she's got some tickets on that particular race.
But that doesn't make it clear and simple.
I can hire someone to kill my wife, and you can say they did it, and that they did it for the money, and that would be true. Because they did. Sort of.

[John]

Okay, so the American public is the ox, the cart is something like events/what we think of as "the world". Yes, I see this. However, I would argue that this is not necessarily the natural state of humanity (though I suppose we have a natural capacity to live in such a state, for a time). Big, dumb, lumbering publics are made and not born, as is their lack of control over the events and the world they create. Things now are so far out of public control and so controlled, to the extent that some of them are controllable, by those you rightly call the iniquitous, that we're possibly facing some sort of great doom just ahead (peak oil, climate change, etc.). The solution to this is to elimate this ox scenario; but, you know, I suspect the race between barbarism and some form of sustainable green socialist democracy is already won, at least till we're staggering around in the rubble and wondering what to do next.

To your last point, well, sure, human motivation is complex. I will go to work today to make a profit, but I don't really have to go to this particular job, no one is making me, I have motives beyond simple profit (though not many, and inertia is the next most important). Partially, this is what my post is about. These neoconservative intellectuals are investors, some of them work in the corporate sector, and I'm sure they're thrilled by the profits the policies they agitate for are generating; but there is also this way they represent the world to themselves, the tripartite nature of humanity and the clash between good and evil and the benefits of the tyranny of natural aristocrats, and no doubt a lot of them feel that this philosophy is their prime motivation. But their philosophy is itself underwritten by the class they were born into, by the social relations they strive to maintain. Even if they don't feel this as their motivation, it is perhaps the one that underlies the others, the one that, if subtracted, would leave the others no leg to stand on.

[Alain]

Jon and rollo:

I read a piece a while back by Drury that was a chapter in one of her books. The following quote seemed relavent:

"In the past, the debate between the right and the left proceeded on objectivist premises. At the heart of the debate was a discourse on justice, or what a just and good political order requires. But in the contemporary version of the debate, the two antagonists agree that justice and truth are fictions intended to conceal the arbitrariness of traditions and their attending customs, powers, and conventions. The left sets out to uncover the fiction, while the right upholds it. Since there are no legitimate grounds for authority, the left defends the new order simply on the grounds that it is the turn of the downtrodden to wield power, while the right tries to hold on to the power it has against the intrusion of the rabble. Both parties to the dispute share the postmodern preoccupation with power and the postmodern belief that knowledge is power. The debate is intractable because it begins from the same premises. Indeed, it is not an intellectual debate at all, but a political conflict about who should be given the liberty or privilege of shaping reality."

I do not buy her account of the "postmoderns" but I think she paints an accurate picture of how the Straussians see the conflict. And that is why they fight so fiercly, and always play to their audience.

[rollo]

Alain-
Well said, well posted, well quoted, and I concur - though I think it's political only in form, just as the invasion/occupation of Iraq is military in form.
At its base it's a biological conflict - the morality, and the other fictive costumes, are there to protect that bilogical impetus from being described and thus made vulnerable.

[Will Large]

I read Leo Strauss over the weekend, 'Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity'. It was for something else really, Rosenzweig, who is a much great thinker. I found it quite ponderous, and like most conservative thinkers he is essentially a nihilist. There is a funny episode at the end of the book where he's giving a talk about about the impossibility of not being Jewish (identity is very important to him), and some young person gets up (it just at the beginning of the great surge of counter culture in the 60s) and tells him that he is completely out of date and irrelevant. It's clear in his response that he is totally flustered and for a second experiences his own pointlessness. Strange that 40 years later he is more relevant then ever.

[Matt]

It's all too despair-inducing to even think about. One has to choose to focus one's energy elsewhere really, I think.

Of course they are still out of date, and increasingly so.

That image of the ox-cart sounds a lot like the opening allegory of Edward Ballamy's _Looking Backward_ (though no doubt he gets it from somewhere else), which is worth a closer look. Of course such naturalizing of class conflict probably has its literary limits. For instance usually instead of falling off the top every once in a while and then having to join in with the slave's pulling themselves, at the mercy of whips, the rich instead find some way to punish someone, anyone really, for their misfortunes.

[Tutor]

Wonderful post and commentary. I wonder if Strauss is not a vulgar mind writ large. He is not driving events with reason, rather he articulated a philosophy that many share, "It is all bullshit after all; we are better than others; we will get ours; to do it we need a better line of bullshit, and hopefully the power to tyrannize." That view is not too far from that of a CEO, a marketer, a lobbyist, a think tank thinker. You can gussy it up with Plato and the Ancients, but it is opportunism, and egotism and vanity. The whole scheme reeks of human fraility. Those of us who have experienced grad school have met many an ego like Strauss's, seeking disciples and offering preferment, and enchanting a generation of, well, third rate minds and sychophants.

You don't have to read Strauss if you are modern day Machiavel, but why not? It will give you good connections and make you feel better about yourself.

I happen to agree with Drury about two sides both agreeing on anti-foundationalism and one side seeking to expose the holes, the other fill them in such a way as to gain and retain power.

The alternative? Why not start with Rawls?

[Matt]

John,

Here is that Bellamy passage, from here:

http://eserver.org/fiction/bellamy/01.html

"By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons [11] were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping ad plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while [12] others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on ac- count of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toiler at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friend would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the [13] harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believe. The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers."

[John]

Thanks, Matt, that's great. I'll have to read that book. I wonder to what extent this analogy is applicable now. There are large producing masses, little better than slaves in free trade zones in the "developing world", but is this what the people at the top really depend on now? The investors and currency traders and CEOs? This is what Alphonse talks about, the current priority of finance over production. But I don't quite understand all of this--I mean, I don't really even know what's in my checking account right now, I'm very bad about understanding money. (I suppose there are a lot of people of such a temperament on the left.)

[Matt]

yep, you're talking to one.

Judging from the one semi-cum-rich person in my own family, an acute awareness of such things has rather questionable psychological and temperamental effects. Better to play at trust-fundee snob by living oblivious on student loans! Although maybe "snob" is not the right word; as Kojève says, we in (posthistorical) communist USA have already returned to animality and "no animal can be a snob."

You might really like Bellamy, with a healthy grain of salt of course. He remains a bit nationalistic and disturbingly Xtian from what I can tell.

[Ben]

Matt,

You must not be a cat owner.

[Matt]

You mean Kojève. Good point.