Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota OpEdNews.Com
Even the national press has sounded the alarm about the "Straussians."
The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, has been
and is still heavily influenced by neoconservative
"intellectuals" who are themselves under the influence of the
teachings of Leo Strauss. These include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans,
Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, and Elliott Abrams of the
National Security Council.
Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, came to America in the late 1930s
and was particularly interested in political philosophy and the study of
tyranny. He taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s
during the Cold War, when capitalism went on a global manic binge and
liberalism died a silent death with its conversion to "liberal"
capitalism (an oxymoran) and away from socialism (Death of the American
Politic, BushWatch, August, 2003).
Much has been written recently about Strauss and his ideological influence
on the Bush administration, and opinion varies from seeing Strauss as a
loyal defender of Democracy to seeing him as a dangerous foe of Democracy.
He is neither. He is a would-be philosopher whose Old World fears and
prejudices took him, the political right wing and American democracy
backward instead of forward. Strauss, like most conservative Americans,
simply did not understand Jeffersonian democracy at all.
Even as the Bush administration takes refuge in Straussian ideas, it
remains the Bush administration who is responsible for implementing any
action based on those ideas. It seems more likely the case that the Bush
administration is simply "using" Straussian ideas to promote
it's own agenda, as it likewise "uses" Old Testament JudeoRoman
attitudes and ideas for nothing but it's own ends.
The philosopher, Michael Polanyi ("The Study of Man, 1964), noted
that it serves no good purpose to be judgemental of the thinkers of past
worlds by the standards of our own world. So, for starters, we must be
aware that Strauss was born and raised into a harshly tyrannical world
quite different from the free world that most Americans knew in the 1960s.
Strauss was from an Old World filled with grotesque notions to which 1960s
Americans could not relate.
That Leo Strauss would occupy a conservative right wing stance during the
1960s is not surprising, but it says very little, in retrospect, about his
grasp of political causation and course. The 1960s were simply replete
with bright young Americans who were quite aware that the American
sociopolitical "system" was corrupting itself, selling out on
traditional family, community and national values at the expense of the
the people. It was self-evident to most dissenting Americans that greed
was ruining their homeland and compromising their rights, from whence
their freedoms flow.
Today, of course, the utter corruption ("Enronization") of
corporate America and the emergence of "influence-for-a-fee"
government and despotic right wing Republican dominion stand as tangible
proof that the dissenters of the 1960s were remarkably insightful. Strauss
passed away in 1973 and has been spared this awkward outcome of
"conservative" political philosophy. Strauss has not had to
witness the production of the largest gap between the rich and the poor in
human history, all in the name of conservative, right wing notions of
"fairness." There is something of a minor tragedy in not living
to see the fruits of one's labor.
Strauss, in other words, did not deal with "here and now"
reality (where all good philosophy begins). He did not deal with the
self-evident socioeconomic shortcomings of the greed-driven capitalism of
his day. He claimed to love Democracy but he unfortunately assumed, even
following two decades of post WWII capitalization and commercialization,
that the 1960s dissenters were wrong. Strauss assumed that America still
represented the democracy that Jefferson and Franklin had in mind. This
was an error common to the entire conservative right wing.
Doing philosophy, of course, is an ordered and integrated process. First
comes the development of a rigorously-defineable world view, a
conceptualization embracing the world, how it works and why it works.
Political philosophy is then derived from that larger conceptual world
view and no where else. The political philosophy emergent in Jefferson's
Declaration, for example, was derived largely from the dialectic values
science and nascent Christianity and the knowledge of science, no religion
in sight. In Jefferson's world, there was no external authority, our
problems on this earth were our own. Strauss, on the other hand, proceeded
on the assumption that one can legitimately derive new political
philosophy by re-interpreting old political philosophy.
In this regard, Strauss never made the grade to philosopher, being typical
of post WWII academic thinkers in America. He did not do philosophy. He
simply read and reinterpreted the work of previous philosophers who have
influenced the evolution of political thought. Had he known about Deism
and natural philosophy, and given his love of democracy, Strauss would
have begun at the evolutionary cutting ege of the art, with the ideas of
Spinoza, Locke, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. But, no. Strauss, with his
Old World background, began with philosophers of the distant past to
create a political philosophy so full of ideas rejected by America's
fathers and so full of inconsistencies, it literally required abandoning
the common sense logic of the EuroAmerican Enlightenment and Jefferson's
Declaration.
Strauss was just one of several influential American
"philosophers" who failed utterly to recognize that Jefferson's
democracy is the political philosophy of science and nascent Christianity
(no relationship to religion whatsoever), who failed utterly to comprehend
the dialectic middle human ground values upon which Jefferson and our
Deist fathers built democracy, and who failed utterly to recognize that
American democracy actually came, right out of the box, with its own
theology, based on the rejection of "external authority"
(supernatural gods) and "absolutism" (religious
self-righteousness) in order to achieve a society in which the people
could think for themselves and approach the control of their own
destinies.
Philosophy, of course, is entirely conceptual and built from contemporary
human (scientific) knowledge assembled into views embracing the world as a
whole. The very fact that the bulk of human knowledge has been generated
during the latter half of the 20th century pretty much relegates Strauss'
views to the evolutionary waste basket. Natural philosophy, for example,
can no longer be considered without the incorporation of contemporary
molecular biologic knowledge. With the mapping of the human genome, it is
clear that all people on this planet have common origins, that all people
are interrelated, that the concept of race is a good deal of superficial
nonsense. It is this kind of emergent knowledge, so integral to human
self-concept, that properly drives the continuous renewal of political
philosophy. In Jefferson's eyes, for example, the people were not children
of God but the embodiment of God.
Now more relevant than ever (and unaddressed by Strauss), Jefferson's
theology was bottom-lined in the concept that Deity was located on the
human inside, in the "head and heart" of every person, that the
highest authority is the "will of the people, substantially
declared." >From this concept of Deity and from nascent
(dialectic) Christian values comes the concept of universal human rights
(Christian Values and Human Rights, BushWatch, July, 2003).
These are the theological first precepts of Jeffersonian democracy.
Strauss had little option but to miss them in his studies, because they
are so entirely at odds with and they properly replace JudeoRoman notions
of "theology" in a democracy under Jefferson's Deist God.
Strauss saw JudeoRoman religion (which Jefferson ousted from the American
political arena for very well-defined reasons) as a necessary opiate for
those being controlled (the people) in the interest of those rightfully in
control. Strauss, in other words, did not see government "of, by and
for the people," he saw a JudeoRoman two-tiered world of the powerful
and the powerless. In this, he missed the rather obvious, that
JudeoRomanism also provides the justification for self-righteous, despotic
dominion. The Straussian world was created entirely outside the boundaries
of Jefferson's democracy, as if Jefferson and Franklin couldn't possibly
have known anything about theology.
Strauss suffered from the European delusion that philosophy never crossed
the Atlantic ocean. Liberal Democracy was wonderful but due to its own
"liberalism" (e.g., the 1950s and 1960s), America had lost its
way, to threaten not only itself but also the pillars upon which western
culture had been built.
The pillars of western culture, according to Strauss, are represented by
the great cities of Athens and Jerusalem, icons of the forces of reason
and revelation. Modern culture, in his conservative mind, was certainly
going to destroy these pillars of western culture. The
"relativism" of American society in his time was seen as a
"moral disorder" that could stop America from identifying its
real enemies. This "crisis of the West" required the impossible,
a reaffirmation of both science and religion, two mutually-exclusive
approaches to comprehension from the start.
Strauss was seemingly unaware of the millennial conflict between science
and religion and seemingly ignorant of what America's fathers had rejected
in the interest of defining and implementing American democracy. Strauss
was unseeing and unquestioning of religion's dark side and capitalism's
greed, and he essentially recommended that conservative America preserve
itself by fighting tyranny with tyranny. This is classic Old Testament
self-righteous morality, being willing to leave Jefferson's Christian
morality behind and drop to the same moral level as that occuppied by
one's enemies.
In truth, the pillars of western democracy are Athens and Bethlehem, not
as icons of reason and revelation, but as icons of reason and compassion.
Again, Strauss missed the Enlightenment distinction between Old Testament
vengeance-based moralities and New Testament compassion-based moralities.
Nascent Christianity is a rejection of Judaism and Romanism. These were
the voices, afterall, which silenced Christian compassion.
In this, Strauss presented his conservative ignorance of history and
causation in the cultural realm. The failures of Democracy were ascribed
by the right wing to America's departure from the religious morality of
the past, when in truth those failures were due to the inherent unfairness
and injustice of post-World War II greed-driven capitalism. It was also
due to the fact that teaching Jeffersonian democracy had been largely
eliminated from public education, as lamented by Saul Padover, a Jefferson
historian ("Thomas Jefferson on Democracy") in 1939. Rather than
start where Jefferson left off, Strauss attempted to rewrite American
democracy within the context of the JudeoRoman world view rejected by
America's Fathers. Go figure.
Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,"
1974) has noted that there is a world of difference between philosophy and
rhetoric, the former an approach to comprehension and control, the latter
an approach to manipulation. All political philosophy derived from nothing
more than previous political philosophy has nothing new to offer and is
necessarily geared to manipulation. Leo Strauss held an untrue world view
of interest to the right wing and, in their hands, his contributions have
become pure rhetoric, riddled with inconsistencies, which is to say there
is no logic required.
It was not so much a matter of Strauss telling the right wing what they
wanted to hear, but of the right wing listening only to what they wanted
to hear, and they heard justifications for their political agenda. While
not out to destroy Jefferson's democracy, Strauss certainly contributed
nothing to its advancement. Carol Burnett's television show was more
richly steeped in American philosophy than anything Strauss ever
contributed.
The right wing adherents of Strauss, however, have proceeded to destroy
Jefferson's democracy and the dialectic values which gave it birth. Were
Jefferson religious, like these people, they would all burn in Jefferson's
hell. Fortunately, Jefferson was a Christian "in the only way ever
intended" by the first Christian. He knew the principles of democracy
cannot be imposed, least of all with despotic approaches, upon dull,
closed minds, they must be accepted by free acquiesence of the educated,
thoughtful and caring mind.
That someone would synthesize Old World JudeoRoman political philosophies
into a view that would ultimately justify and nourish an American takeover
by the religious right wing was inevitable, given the people's neglected
education and capitalism's thirst for dominion. Straussian views are
important only in the cultural evolutionary sense, only insofar as they
have nourished religious crony capitalism in its quest for global
dominion, only insofar as this quest ultimately leads to discrediting
vengeance-based religion and crony capitalism from the global political
arena. Would this not open the doors, once again, to democracy, this time
on a global basis?
With this glorious and necessary outcome, we will not know whether to
bless or blame Leo Strauss. Strauss was both inevitable and necessary for
this evolutionary outcome to unfold. But, of course, Strauss was wrong,
and wrong about most everything, because he failed to define and think
within the frameworks of the Enlightenment's Deist Democracy. Democracy
will be revitalized in America and the world only after that becomes
recognized and America returns to the theology from whence it emerged.
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much
liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas
Jefferson, 1791
Dr. Gerry Lower lives in Keystone, South Dakota in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. He is published in the areas of molecular pathology/oncology/epidemiology, medical theory/philosophy/ethics, and global philosophy and ethics. Gerry has recently returned from Ukraine where he presented several papers on the values of science and democracy at the Kiev Medical Academy. His primary concern is the development of a rigorously-definable global philosophy and ethics suitable for a global democracy. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Dr. Gerry Lower, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
