Straussian :: June 27th, 2003 ::
One of my quiet obsessions over the past few months has been with the so-called Neo-conservative movement. And believe it or not, it started with my reading Why Americans Hate Politics, and not with all the talk of Wolfowitz, Kristol, and the clique of defense hawks and conservative diplomats who many suggest have been setting the foriegn policy agenda for this country since Bush took office. In any event, I stumbled across an article in last week’s Economist that that talked a little bit about the Neo-con agenda at the White House these days; but mostly it talked about the so-esoteric-as-to-be-nearly-invisible philosophical influence of the philosopher Leo Strauss on the way the Neo-cons seem to view the world. And ater doing a quick Google search I came across a piece that suggests there are some consistencies as well:
By questioning the gods and the ethos of the city, philosophy undermines the citizens' loyalty, and thus the basis of normal social life. Yet philosophy is also the highest, the worthiest, of all human endeavors. The resolution of this conflict is that the philosophers should, and in fact did, keep their teachings secret, passing them on by the esoteric art of writing ‘between the lines.’ Strauss believed that he alone had recovered the true, hidden message contained in the ‘Great Tradition’ of philosophy from Plato to Hobbes and Locke: the message that there are no gods, that morality is ungrounded prejudice, and that society is not grounded in nature.
There needs to be some intellectual (and in our case, hawkish) elite that takes all the responsibility for the intellectualism in a society in order to preserve that society. If everyone were to see the truth of the world (that there is in fact no good or evil), the fundamental ideas (however fallacious they may be) that keep people loyal to society would fall apart, and we would decend into chaos. On the face of it, it sounds like a compelling philosophical argument. But it also sounds quite dangerous when it’s actually played out in world of politics.
