Category: The Dish

A reader writes an eloquent email on the question of Leo Strauss and his impact on today’s Republicans. It’s long but so good I’m running it. Scroll down if it bores you:

Like you, I studied with Straussians, both as an undergraduate and in graduate school (at the University of Chicago, in the Committee on Social Thought, when Allan Bloom was there). Like you, I admired the thinker and at least some of his followers without becoming part of the (very real!) cult following.

I think you are largely right about the disconnect between Strauss’s moderate defense of liberal democracy and contemporary Neocon hubris.

But you are more surprised by this disconnect than you should be.

I observed during my time at Chicago two distinct strands of Straussians. I’ll call one strand "the gentlemen" and the other strand "the Nietzscheans."

Granting your point about Strauss’s skepticism, there are two paths you can go down from there; but first, there is an intermediate step: once you grant that the most appropriate response to the most difficult questions about life is skepticism, what does one do with "the many," as the Straussians call them? Can ALL human beings (ALL prisoners in Plato’s cave) really accept that there are no certain answers to life’s most pressing questions? Can everyone be a philosopher?

Strauss’s answer seems to have been: No, they cannot. Most human beings need answers, and they become very dangerous when denied them. Bear in mind what they did to Socrates, after all. So, the next question is, what answers to give them? To give a definite answer when you don’t really have one (remember: skepticism is a given here) is to lie. To lie in order to prevent harm is to lie nobly. For Strauss, the many need noble lies.

So now the difference between the gentlemen and the Nietzscheans:

The gentlemen (for example, Cropsey), as best I could tell, believe that skeptical moderation is good for its own sake, and that moderate noble lies are also best for a stable polity. That means one’s political myths must encourage the decent virtues as much as possible. It means that the noble lies ("All men are created equal," for example) are not entirely false or implausible. The gentlemen are thus very close to the Strauss described by Smith in his book.

The Nietzscheans (for example, Bloom) take another path from the skeptical starting point. For them, there is one truth that IS certain: the distinction between those human beings who CAN endure the fact that there are no certain answers and those who CANNOT endure it. The Nietzschean Straussians that I knew as graduate students were utterly dismissive of the many ordinary human beings; they believed the scales had fallen from their own eyes and that they had been liberated from ordinary morality. Moderation is good only as a means or a mask, not good in itself. Yet at the same time, they understood Strauss’s cautions about the limits of general Enlightenment and public reason. And so for them, the best regime was the American one, a regime that permits freedom of thought for the philosophers and, for the many, freedom for politics, for hard work, and (alas) for self-indulgence — despite the risk of a plunge into consumerism and philistinism. Hence "The End of History and the Last Man" — by a student of Bloom’s. (Everyone forgets the last man part: it’s not necessarily a happy ending.)

These Nietzscheanized Straussians that I observed truly believed in their superiority and in their right to influence politics and public affairs. Yes, as a student in his 20’s mellows into his 40’s and 50’s, he will lose some of the Nietzschean hubris — but perhaps not the conviction that the many need noble lies that he knows to be false. Not the conviction that he knows best, and can apply this knowledge universally. Hence Wolfowitz, the WMD feint in order to bring on war in Iraq, the plan to seed democracy throughout the Middle East and end all tyranny, the Rumsfeldian arrogance, etc. Disaster.

Gentlemen Straussians, I believe, have been appalled by the hubristic, millenarian idealism of the Neocons and the Iraq adventure. The recognize in it a version of the excessive faith in reason and progress.

But everything depends on how you find your way from the starting point of skepticism. It can lead to moderation, but one needs a very mature body politic for it to do so, since skepticism is usually acid to so-called traditional values, which generally depend on absolutes ("revelation"). There is also always the risk that some skeptics will recognize in their own valiant skepticism a distinction from almost all other mere mortals, a distinction which grants them the right to govern with a contempt for ordinary people and for the truth.

I share your faith in skepticism (quite an oxymoron!), but there is always this caution: How deeply can a body politic truly embrace such skepticism as a founding value? A conservative must always say: it depends. It depends on which body politic you are talking about, and at what time.

Is the American body politic ready for a healthy, not a nihilistic, skepticism? Not if today’s faith-based Republicans have anything to do with it. Apparently, they no longer believe we are strong enough and free enough for it. For them, healthy skepticism is equivalent to relativism or nihilism.

But I still have faith, and I am glad you do, too.

Yes: that great paradox – faith in doubt. My book is really an attempt to accept Strauss’s skepticism, while retaining much more faith in ordinary people’s sense and judgment, and far more faith in the constitutional order set up by the deeply skeptical American founders. And this is the struggle for the soul of conservatism now under way: between cynicism and trust, between lies and moderation, between executive hubris and constitutionalism. Compare some students of Strauss with most students of Oakeshott (I was fortunate enough to be a bit of both). What you see is the temptation of those ultimately drawn to power, and those who are repelled by power and seek merely freedom. Count me among the latter – but we are a dwindling, motley crew on the right.

Here’s a fun quiz I just came across. I turned out to be Spiderman.

Here’s an interesting theory:

Glad you commented on this NYT story, because it‚Äôs been baffling me as well, but you didn’t mention what I think is the most bizarre aspect of this story, which is that it this story in fact makes the administration look great. It’s a legal and intelligent way to be tracking terrorist activities at home and abroad, and I think Americans would be more shocked to discover that they weren’t doing this.

If this had been reported by Fox News, it would likely have been dismissed by most as simple conservative media cheerleading. So how‚Äôs this for a conspiracy theory? The administration wanted this story to be leaked, and they wanted it to be leaked to the Times. That way they get to a) trumpet what a brilliant job they’re doing fighting the war on terror and b) vilify the Times and the press, which is always good for firing up their conservative base. I think this was Bush and Rove at their finest, and Keller got taken for a ride.

The blogosphere played its part as well, I suppose. And who needs Tony Snow when you’ve got Instapundit?

Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, 8 am, today.

This one’s a beaut:

The BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad says there are concerns that Mr Maliki’s plan will not work as it does not seek reconciliation with those at the heart of the insurgency – the radical Islamists, many of them foreigners, who want Iraq to be the centre of a new Islamic empire.

I wondered when the BBC would acknowledge the presence of al Qaeda in the insurgency – and its non-negotiable, maximalist goals. It appears they only do so when it can be used to throw cold water on any progress in the country.

That’s the Catholic Church’s position, and they’re sticking to it. Two kids? Irrelevant. Cover of Time? Never happened. Graphic sex scenes? Hey, we’ve got a Hollywood actress plugging our brand! And she was never married anyway (except legally for a decade). A reader elaborates:

Presuming that Nicole Kidman was Catholic when she married Tom Cruise she was obligated under canon law to be married in the Catholic Church. Since she was not (she was married in a scientology ceremony) the wedding was per se invalid and therefore she had fairly straightforward grounds for an annulment. Basically the form of the wedding was incorrect. Just as a baptism performed in the name of the John, Paul and Ringo would not be valid, a wedding not performed according to the proper form also would not be valid. At least this is how the Pastor at my church described it in a recent church bulletin (suggesting that Catholics who had not been married in the church would need to have their marriage convalidated).

I love my church. Its rules are inviolable and eternal, except when they’re not. Kidman was legally married for ten years, had two kids, but, as far as the Catholic church is concerned, her marriage to Cruise did not exist! She didn’t even have to seek an annulment. But the stricture against a Catholic’s divorce and remarriage is absolute – and a Catholic who obeyed the rules all along, and got married in a Catholic first wedding, would be denied the sacraments and barred from re-marrying in church. I guess because I am deemed objectively disordered by my own church, I haven’t been as aware of this transparent nonsense as I should have been. A reader comments:

This point of canon law is the linchpin of Muriel Spark’s novel, The Mandelbaum Gate. The protagonist, a devout Catholic spinster, has fallen in love with a divorced man. Her only hope of marrying him is if to find evidence that he was baptized Catholic as an infant. If so, even though he had never practiced Catholicism, his Protestant wedding would be invalid. If not, his marriage could not be annulled.

Spoiler alert: The typical Spark twist comes when a rival character, assuming church law works the opposite way, lies about actual evidence he has uncovered and tells them that indeed the man was baptized a Catholic. He’s crushed to realize that he‚Äôs given the happy couple a straight path to the altar. In truth, of course, the first marriage is not invalid, and the annulment will be based on a lie.  But by another happy twist of Catholic theology, that doesn‚Äôt matter because it is not the couple‚Äôs lie, and they are acting in complete good faith. You could call it a marriage of invincible ignorance.

How quaint all this preoccupation with the canon law seems today. But think how many lives the Catholic Church has stunted and twisted over the years by forcing people to jump through these hoops.

Yes, but think of the power they have.

Here’s the first in a series of posts on the Bush presidency through the lens of a recovering alcoholic. Money quote:

In 1999, responding to questions about his use of drugs and alcohol, George Bush told the Washington Post, "Well, I don’t think I had an addiction. You know it’s hard for me to say. I’ve had friends who were, you know, very addicted…and they required hitting bottom [to start] going to A.A. I don’t think that was my case." 

Having observed the president’s behavior in office, I wonder if he might be wrong. Perhaps not only the president, but also his administration, suffers from alcoholism. After all, arrogance and the inability to take responsibility for one’s actions, classic alcoholic traits, have become trademarks of the Bush presidency. 

George Bush’s problems are not only personal. By necessity, they have become the problems of our entire country. And our country is like the family of an alcoholic, devastated by the drinker’s actions but powerless to stop them.

This is too simplistic an analysis, of course. And yet the president’s alcoholism is integral to his personality; and it’s certainly as worth debating as his predecessor’s sexual addiction.

I know we should all be talking about Jerome Armstrong and Bill Keller, but today’s news from Iraq strikes me as a big deal:

One of Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab groups endorsed the prime minister’s national reconciliation plan on Tuesday, and the government announced new benefits to help freed detainees return to normal lives.

The political moves came a day after bombs killed at least 40 people at markets in two Iraqi cities, while key lawmakers said seven Sunni Arab insurgent groups offered the government a conditional truce…

In the first tangible measure after the reconciliation plan was announced on Sunday, the council of ministers said government employees who had been detained and recently released will be reinstated to their jobs and their service should be considered uninterrupted in consideration of bonuses, promotion and retirement privileges.

The ministers said freed students will be allowed to return to school to take their final exams and will not be failed for the 2005-2006 school year despite time missed…

In another boost for the Shiite prime minister’s reconciliation proposal, prominent Sunni cleric Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie offered the support of his Sunni Endowment, the state agency responsible for Sunni mosques and shrines.

But he urged the government to move quickly to fill in the details of the plan and said it should include the disbanding of armed militias, as well as the release of all prisoners who have not been convicted.

"We bless this initiative," he said. "We see a glimpse of hope out of this plan, but at the same time we are noticing that some people are pushing the armed groups to attack some areas in Baghdad, spreading terror and chaos in the city in order to make this plan a failure."

"Thus, the government is required to take decisive actions so that the citizens feel that the state is a real protector," he added.

The only hope for Iraq is that more Sunnis can be drawn into the government and that the government finds the political will to rein in Shiite militias. The news suggests modest progress on both fronts, which would allow for better deployment of American troops. Mohammed comments here.

I confess to being a little bemused by the hysteria in some parts of the blogosphere about the NYT publishing details of the government’s close monitoring of some financial transactions in the war on terror. I should qualify that by saying that the argument against the press is the strongest I’ve yet read in any of these cases. Unlike the NSA wire-tapping program, or the secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, this program does not seem to be illegal, or only legal under the doctrine that anything the president does in the war is de facto legal. It seems carefully structured to prevent abuse of privacy, it appears to have been effective (although you and I have no way of knowing for sure). If I were Bill Keller (fat chance, I know), I probably wouldn’t publish.

On the other hand, publishing it does not, it seems to me, obviously render the program ineffective. And the Malkinesque charges of treason seem a little, er, excitable. The press publishes stuff that doesn’t always help the government in wartime. Duh. In a democracy, in a war which has sharply divided the country, this is hardly a big surprise. If the NYT didn’t do it, someone in the government would find a way to leak it in another way. One wonders what would happen in Power Line’s perfect world, where the MSM always followed the government’s advice in wartime, suppressed news of defeats and setbacks, and avoided any damaging revelations that might encourage the enemy or inform citizens of government errors or abuses. Let’s say someone within the administration still wanted to leak the program. Wouldn’t they just give the info to an anti-Bush blogger? And would the damage be any less than it is – in today’s media universe? In a paradoxical way, some bloggers both want to dismiss the NYT and then describe it as the essential gateway for all important information. It cannot be both. In today’s transparent, web-based media, wars are just going to be subject to more scrutiny – especially divisive wars, run by controversial presidents, with as many opponents within the government as outside it. Get used to it. And take a Xanax.

I’m not sure I understand. How did the Vatican agree to her second marriage? Do weddings with scientologists not count?