Category: The Dish

San Francisco, California, 7.30 pm.

The Strauss debate continues:

Since you said: "All refutations of this email gratefully received." There’s one major error in it:

Strauss’ philosophic project is not "essentially apolitical." To the contrary: the mode of philosophy that interested him most of all was classical political philosophy, and Socrates, who "call[ed] philosophy down from heaven, and "compell[ed] it to inquire about men’s life and manners as well as about the good and bad things." ("City and Man") Of that philosophy, he says elsewhere that "It was its direct relation to political life which determined [its] orientation and scope." ("What is Political Philosophy?")

The simplest thing, of course, is that all of Strauss’ work concerns political philosophy. It’s not credible that that’s "apolitical." You might look at the beginnings of the essays "What is Political Philosophy?" and "Three Waves of Modernity."

With a thinker as difficult as Strauss – someone whose thought is on such a high level that I doubt that anyone has yet understood it adequately – the best thing to do is not to try to label him or to put him in the army of one political cause of another, but just to see what he says, and apply his arguments when they’re applicable. And we must always beware of defending him by making him less interesting.

But I think the first emailer’s point was that Strauss’ fundamental interest was philosophy and/or revelation. He grappled with politics because philosophers and saints live among other humans, and the relationship between others and the self, the city and the philosopher, is a critical impediment to the purely philosophical life, or at the very least, a problem to be grappled with before getting to the important things. In that narrow sense, Strauss was apolitical. He certainly didn’t believe that politics accomplished anything of any great importance, except the freedom of a few to think. Meanwhile, another perspective:

There may be another reason for Strauss’s fondness for the D√ºrer watercolor. In a defense of her father published in the New York Times, Jenny Strauss Clay writes, ‘His own earliest passion, he confessed, was to spend his life raising rabbits (Flemish Giants) and reading Plato.’

Sounds pretty great to me.

Guess who’s Coulter’s chaperone these days?

A blog-plug for two recent columns first posted over the weekend. The first is a review of Steven Miles’ harrowing book, "Oath Betrayed." It’s his redaction of 35,000 pages of FOIAed government documents that show how the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture policy has inevitably entangled medical personnel in the military. Doctors were used to prep torture sessions, to revive tortured prisoners to keep them alive for further torture, and to cover up the consequences of the Bush administration’s policy of prisoner torture and abuse. Money quote:

Of the 136 documented deaths of prisoners in detention, Miles found, medical death certificates were often not issued until months or even years after the actual deaths. One prisoner’s corpse at Camp Cropper was kept for two weeks before his family or criminal investigators were notified. The body was then left at a local hospital with a certificate attributing death to "sudden brainstem compression." The hospital’s own autopsy found that the man had died of a massive blow to the head. Another certificate claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of "cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart." According to Miles, no mention was made that the old man had been stripped naked, doused in cold water and kept outside in 40¬∞ cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

Hey, this is Bush’s America. What did you expect? My column on the Democrats and the war can be read here.

Chevy Chase, Maryland, 9 am.

The rain keeps coming down. We’re driving to Ptown tomorrow, via NYC; and I just fedexed the final galley-proofs of the book, with typos and facts double-checked. Relief? You have no idea. I feel like sleeping for a month. Still, I have mobile wireless access so I’ll blog from the Interstate a little. Stay dry.

The mystery of Ann Coulter is solved. She’s a deadhead – in favor of the war on drugs. She claims her only drug use was passive pot-smoking. And yet we have this strange money quote:

Taylor Hill: When and how was your first Dead show?

Ann Coulter: I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than that it was awesome.

The important thing to remember about Coulter is that she means nothing. She is post-everything, a gloriously cynical post-modern performance artist. Once you understand that, it all fits into place.

Many exist, despite the moronic commentary from parts of the paranoid left who have never bothered to read or engage Leo Strauss. Here’s one:

I’m a liberal fan of Strauss (not to mention Allan Bloom), and I happened to attend a small (400 person) liberal arts school (St. John’s College, Annapolis) where Strauss spent his last days teaching. The school was founded, in a way, out of the University of Chicago, and educationally it represents much of what I think Strauss’s approach stood for: genuine, open-minded, thoughtful, and essentially apolitical enquiry. When seen through the lens of partisanship, that apolitical approach is branded "conservative", much in the same way that genuinely apolitical accounts in the media will strike some conservatives as "liberal". If we have to use these labels count me as an educational conservative and political liberal who nevertheless deplores the rape of texts on behalf of political agendas.

Hence despite my political views, I consider the effect of leftists in humanties academia to be nothing short of a disaster. (I would however defend their freedom to be idiots against the likes of Horowitz).

Above all, the liberal attack on Strauss is a misguided, ignorant, and nasty campaign. I have not seen a single citation from a book by Strauss in one of these critiques; that is remarkable, and frightening. Innuendo is enough to convict him – the mere suspicion that he didn’t buy into the relativist dogma that now dominates the university. It is also so self-defeating; one might take up the admittedly ambitious thesis that the leftist evisceration of the university paved the way for the triump of the neocons. Producing thoughtless people (who temporarily parrot politically correct views) is a dangerous project – such people will quickly parrot other dogmas, under the right circumstances.

Finally, Strauss was concerned about precisely the kinds of values that liberals care about; he merely treated the problem of liberalism (in the broad sense) as a genuine dilemma, not a fait accompli. Liberals ought to take the question of reason vs. revelation seriously, instead of reacting with a kind of religious fervor to the idea that anyone would dare raise such questions.

Yesterday’s and today’s post were a nice antidote.

Incidentally, I read your blog regularly for reasons similar to those that guide my views on Strauss: it’s intellectual honesty and genuine thoughtfulness that matter. (Socrates famously noted that there is more value in being refuted than agreed with).

All refutations of this email gratefully received.

(A hack attack on Robert Alter’s review can be read here. A more nuanced defense of today’s conservatism of certitude can be read here. I read Strauss as a skeptic, like Oakeshott. But I can understand why today’s hard-right dogmatists and those neocons without a philosophical bent want to enlist him in their "cause.")

Lake Tahoe, California, 3 pm.

Some good news on the hunt for those barbarians who killed, tortured and mutilated two young American soldiers. From a Cent-Com press release:

A combined and joint force of more than 8,000 Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces assembled to take part in the search. The force included three MND-B brigade combat teams, Iraqi army, national and local police, adjacent units from Multi-National Force – West, Navy and Air Force aircraft and other Coalition Forces. The Coalition and ISF used all available resources including, air, ground and water to locate the Soldiers. While Air Force para-rescue dive teams searched the canals, engineers patrolled the Euphrates River and Coalition unmanned aerial vehicles and helicopters patrolled from the sky. Twenty-five military operations were conducted, including 11 air assault missions. More than 12 villages and an old power plant were searched.

In the massive effort to locate the missing Soldiers, 12 CF Soldiers were wounded.  Six caches were discovered. Two of the weapons caches were found in the power plant. Some of the contraband found in the caches included a suicide vest, gun powder, plastic explosives with detonation cord, grenades, AK-47s, and homemade rocket launchers with several rockets. Throughout the process, Iraqi citizens from across Baghdad provided almost 80 tips, which were all investigated. Coalition soldiers engaged local religious, community and political leaders to maintain support and gain information.

In an attempt to thwart the search effort, the enemy conducted a series of harassing attacks with improvised-explosive devices and indirect fire, all of which failed to stop the search. Ten IEDs detonated and 17 were found by searchers before detonation. Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces detained 36 suspected anti-Iraqi forces involved in the murders and killed two enemy fighters. Coalition Forces surged interrogation operations around-the-clock for three days while the search for the soldiers continued.

I hope they find those monsters, kill them in battle or take them prisoner and show them how civilized people treat captured enemy combatants.

He’s a closet blue-stater. Another tribute to self-reinvention in America.