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From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Raphael’s Plato and Aristotle, from the wall of the Pope’s apartment
I’m sometimes accused of having created a vast secret corpus of sinister ideas that I keep carefully hidden away from the millions of words I’ve published.
I’ve always wondered: When exactly would I have had the time to do this? And do I really seem like the kind of writer who would cunningly keep his best ideas unexpressed, especially when there is a big “Publish” button staring me in the face and all I have to do is click on it?
On the other hand, what about the giants of the past who had the brainpower to pull off something as complicated as this? The political scholar Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and many of his neoconservative acolytes have long argued that greats such as Plato and Aristotle had both inoffensive doctrines for the public and “esoteric” teachings for their inner circles. …
We haven’t heard much about Straussianism lately due to the unfortunate series of events in Iraq that befell the best-laid plans of the sages. But that doesn’t mean that Strauss was necessarily wrong about the ancients. And that has interesting implications for how we should read current works.
As the approaching 20th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve reminds us, the best minds of our age have reasons for being less than wholly frank. …
A new book—Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, by Michigan State political scientist Arthur Melzer—vindicates the Straussian view that:
Philosophical esotericism—the practice of communicating one’s unorthodox thoughts “between the lines”—was a common practice until the end of the eighteenth century.
What were the secret doctrines of the ancients?
Read the whole thing there.
In the comments at Taki’s, Simon in London notes:
Our modern culture is not based on esotericism – esotericism requires that the commoners are allowed comfortable platitudes while philosophers revel in The Real Truth. Instead we have a culture of Orwellian Crimestop and Newspeak where people are forced to humiliate themselves through the cant of evident falsehoods, the opposite of comfort. Virtue is marked by the ability to believe in contradictory falsehoods through effort of will. A tyranny of the philosophers?
My impression from discussions among the actual leftist intelligentsia is that they are able to believe in these falsehoods, although their own discussions are much more nuanced and reasonable-sounding than the dogmatic assertions of the lumpen-intelligentsia enforcer class.
The rise to dominance over the culture of the lumpen-intelligentsia — basically, the lower IQ students of Crooked Timber folks — is a fascinating subject.
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My respect for the late lefty journalist IF Stone went up exponentially when I read about how he spent the last years of his life learning classical Greek so he could consult primary sources when writing his book about how Socrates was an enemy of democracy who sort of had it coming. I can’t fully dislike anyone who realized what a fraud Socrates was.
As you pointed out at the end, there is nothing hidden or esorteric in Plato’s political philosophy; he was a fascist. Aristotle was a conservative, and his comments that maybe it was OK if the masses had some say in how the place they lived in was run was the closest any philosopher got to praising democracy until Rousseau and Mill.
Steve writes:
Punishing those who deny the official dogma is one thing. But it is important to note that the prevailing belief system has an explanation for the failure to achieve equality: racists.
Dissenters who mock the idea that people are created equal will get a taste of the lash, but racists who prevent equality from being achieved will be punished much more severely.
Is there a secret cabal controlling esoteric knowledge with regards to modern mainstream economics? It makes more sense than people actually being true believers with what we hear in the public.
Read Foucault’s Pendulum and you’ll see why going down this line of reasoning is a very bad idea.
Promulgating lies makes one start to believe in them, with disatrous results. Honesty is a better policy … a reality check on elite folly and wishful thinking adventurism or cowardice and timidity, and creates a society with lower friction based on truth and more flexibility.
Look at how issuing lies in China had elites believe them and then fall prey to the West and Japan.
We have no margin. We must have honesty. Even the rich can’t lie to themselves forever.
Spengler(the columnist) speculated that Strauss was simply a confused atheistic Jew who bamboozled a bunch of American kids who didn’t know ancient Greek and made them look for what amounted to ancient Easter eggs embedded in the works of Plato and Aristotle.
That’s a rabbit hole you do not want to go down unless you want to end up like some of those who studied the Cabala or the Gnostic Gospels.
Here’s the thing, people have been studying Plato and Aristotle for a very long time and some of them were pretty smart(maybe not as smart as the HBD crowd) and to assume that a German ex-pat figured it all out is rather a tall order at best.
Sailer wrote:
“A culture that doesn’t believe in God but does insist that He created all persons equally is increasingly going to have to discourage snickering with the lash.”
Not really. Modern secular states don’t practice equality at all. The West is full of protected or super classes of people based on sexual orientation, political affiliation, wealth, ethnicity or religion. The only class that has a equality of sorts are working class whites. And that equality is simply equal opportunity to get screwed by the government or by members of the protected classes.
Sure the Left makes a lot of noise about “equality” but it’s just a ideological tactic aimed at the proles who can’t see through the lies of the state, the corporations and their agents.
As for Democracy that’s another false god of modern day secularists who wave it around as some sort of fetish, because it doesn’t exist anymore than Zeus did. Probably haven’t really had a say so in anything for a long time. We just have the illusion of it given to us by the monied party with two faces like Janus for the fools who think their vote counts and their opinions are valued.
“As you pointed out at the end, there is nothing hidden or esorteric in Plato’s political philosophy; he was a fascist.”
I dunno. I find Alan Blooms introduction to his translation of The Republic quite convincing. ‘Socrates’ spins out a tale of a City where no one is happy — not the citizens, not the guardians — no one, from first principles. It is a cautionary tale. Then ‘Socrates’ draws back from the brink and says — and this is a small c conservative message from Augustine to Solzhenitsyn to Adenauer, that for the philosopher, thinking and acting correctly in the circumstances — whether they be benign or malignant — is the surest path to happiness.
And, as Bloom pointed out, this isn’t exactly ‘esoteric’ (though I have read Strauss did get a bit into ‘numerology’ in the Ur-texts, etc), it’s right in the open. After all ‘Socrates’ says, right there, in the text , you folks are going to laugh at me but I think this … [‘the guardians’ etc].
This is, of course, right in line with the bloghosts insistence that his ideas are influence more ‘correct’ writers (I believe he is right there), or that maybe Tyler ‘Cheap Chalupas’ Cowen is actually pulling our collective leg.
Strauss is a good example of Jewish guilt ie “not being ethnocentric enough to please his ancestors.” That certainly applies to Strauss, the Epicurean but also a Zionist. Strauss’s writing can be seen as his “apology” for not being ethnocentric enough but also as a defense of ethnocentrism. Strauss reads the Republic as a vindication of the “barking dogs” as the true philosophers. One of his students, Anastaplo, said Strauss was never as comfortable around non-Jewish students.
Strauss was not just an active Zionist in his younger days, but a Jabotinsky Zionist.
In his later life in mid-Century America, he eased off on the Jabotinskyism in favor of pro-Americanism. But, like I was saying in my discussion of guys you want to have on your side not on somebody else’s side, America used to do a pretty good job of embarrassing naturally right-wing Jews like Strauss to be pro-American rather than to invest all their innate loyalist passions in Israel. Lately … not so much.
Someone here in the last week linked to a letter from FDR to the Canadian PM. There was frank talk about immigrants, assimilation etc. Its hard to imagine any current leader indulging in such realtalk. I suspect the powers that be would use the same language in public and private today. So not very esoteric and not very Deep State.
The battle today is not over hiding the truth, but who gets to do the hiding. Most people can’t deal with these ideas, going up into (admittedly dumbed down) college educated. The issue is whether we are ruled by a progressive elite that spread lies instead of truth and build a dystopian nightmare in the process, or if there’s a return to a conservative elite who allow society to function based on reality and smooth over the rough edges to maintain stability.
There were contemporary observers who noted that Socrates’ entire legal strategy at his trial was only explicable if he wanted to have the death penalty assigned and administered, and that he was an old man at the time without much long to live anyway, and that he realized that even if his accusers (who literally left every door open for him to escape) didn’t.
I once was smitten by what I knew of Socrates: the Apology and the Death of. But as a grownup, I think Plato intentionally obscured the causes of the public hatred of Socrates. Surely Socrates’ snideness contributed, but I believe his non exemplary behavior in the arrest of Leon of Salamis — he didn’t help but he didn’t hinder — or some other similar but unrecorded act of public cowardice was the basic reason. Why wouldn’t a man who had spent his life saying virtue is the only good not face death the day he was sent to arrest Leon? Because he was a fraud? Is that why the Athenians hated him?
OT:
Ellissa Shevinsky, the subject of this article
(http://isteve.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/nyt-white-nerds-cant-live-with-em-cant.html)
favorited one of your tweets.
(https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/514690514847666176)
Looks like you might have won this girl over.
The influential original thinkers create in their wake large numbers of epigones who simplify things down to cant and formula. For the masses it takes the form of slogans; it becomes vulgarized and watered down. It can’t be any different. Things are understood varyingly at the level of capability of the different audiences. One problem is the establishment of a class of people who are the designated interpreters of the doctrine and who are in a position to enforce the doctrine; they grow abusive and totalitarian if given the chance. The usual trajectory follows Eric Hoffer’s idea of going from movement to business to racket. At present we seem to be in the transition phase of going from business to racket.
“As you pointed out at the end, there is nothing hidden or esorteric in Plato’s political philosophy; he was a fascist.”
I thought it was commonly understood that The Republic is a metaphor of the soul, not actually a work of political philosophy.
I’ve always thought that “All men are created equal, … they are endowed by their Creator…” had an implied “in that” between the two phrases.
Current thinking asserts that the two phrases are independent. Not only that they are created equal. But that also they have certain rights.
In view of Jefferson’s known beliefs about blacks how could he possibly have believed that all men are created equal in their capabilities? Presumably he did believe that all men should have equal rights before the law even though his own slaves did not. It would be an aspiration.
If only we could get back to equal before the law.
Ah, if you want to avoid such accusations in the future, the first step would be to avoid any topic having anything to do with Russia. For some reason, that really brings the neocon thought police out of the woodwork – some of whom rarely even post on other threads. It’s really quite bizarre.
It’s not hard to imagine that, in times and places where heresy could get you imprisoned or killed, many philosophers placed their more controversial theories between the lines.
To use one example, I (a faithful Catholic) find Rene Descartes’ “proof” of the existence of God absurdly weak. Now, Descartes was a far more brilliant man than I’ll ever be. If his “proof” is so bad that even I can disprove it, it stands to reason that Descartes himself didn’t really believe it.
So, Strauss may well have been right to see hidden messages in the works of great thinkers. But it was silly of him to assume they all had essentially to SAME hidden messages.
And that was the problem of neo-con lackey George W. Bush – he actually believed that democracy “beat in the heart of every human being” and that all are equal. That would explain his invade the world/invite the world policies. It would explain why he doggedly believed that democracy could be “installed” in nations that had ZERO cultural basis for it.
I suspect that the “esotericists” never believed this and were only in it for the handsome long term profits from selling weapons and the procurement contracts
Leo Strauss was a student of political philosophy, a classicist who believed in close reading, and by many accounts a magnetic teacher. Nothing more than that–and he passed away in 1973. So it makes little sense to me to make connections between his thought and our present problems.
Ten years ago, Strauss’s co-editor of The History of Political Philosophy, Joseph Cropsey, was still teaching at the U of Chicago, and you could get a glimpse of the old-time aura, the example of quiet seriousness. I was in a seminar there with Nathan Tarcov, a second-generation Straussian, and his attentiveness to Rousseau’s Emile was inspiring. A lot of the younger people at the Committee on Social Thought were hucksters by comparison. Allan Bloom was another serious second-generation Straussian, whose Closing of the American Mind is splendidly eccentric and illuminating. People like Wolfowitz were merely the students of Bloom. I highly recommend Bloom’s eulogy of Strauss in Giants and Dwarfs. (That book is full of great essays, including a splendid philosophical takedown of multiculturalism. Bloom also echoes Strauss and sounds like Steve Sailer when says things like, “A man must prefer his family to other families, and his country to other countries…”)
For the master himself, the essays in What is Political Philosophy are accessible.
On reflection, some of the continuing influence of Strauss has to come from the fact that he was really one of the last of the serious readers (and he was so serious that he didn’t need jargon). Wayne Booth and David Grene were both still teaching and available at Chicago ten-fifteen years ago, but they both seemed diminished by the fact that the great battle for academia had been lost (as well as diminished by age, of course).
I don’t know much about Strauss. Never read him or met him.
There was among some Chicago academics, the belief that he was insane.
One of Bloom’s big ideas was that the world or the world as it is understood creates the
reigning ideas of physics. The belief that physics independently creates truth is
simply an illusion. As he said “The large controls the small, not the small controls the large.”
He didn’t know any physics himself. But, Bloom was a great thinker, wizard, magic fairy.
The “esoteric doctrine” of the philosophers was religious, not political, and it was eventually spelled out openly by the Neoplatonists.
In the Renaissance the ruling elite misread platonism as political philosophy. Thus, the court masque, the divine right of kings, and the guillotine.
Crooked Timber is a fascinating blog – ruling class leftists, who don’t believe in HBD but are quick to criticise the (perceived) low intelligence of their political enemies.
The Brits used to say a gentlemen avoids discussing religion and politics around the staff. Professional armies segregate the officer’s mess from the enlisted men for the same reason. In a casual atmosphere it is easy to get casual with your words. There’s no need for the enlisted men to hear such talk.
In the early days of the Internet, speaking freely on a BBS or even a newsgroup was common simply because the rabble was not on-line yet. You did not have to worry about a scold lecturing you about your heresy. But then the rabble got on line and that brought the police. We’re still working out the rules, but I suspect we’ll see a return of subtle language to speak over the heads of the hoi polloi, in addition to private sites for the like minded to talk, unmolested by the scolds.
Well, from inside the academic trenches, I can certainly say that the Leftist uber-intelligentsia tends to display a more subtle and nuanced view of the world. When I was a graduate student, my fiercest interlocutors (i.e., the ones who wanted to shut down my less than orthodox observations) were nearly always found among the least intellectually agile, and there usually seemed to be a direct correlation between dullness* and the fervent espousal of Leftist orthodoxy.
In contrast, the higher-order Leftist intellectuals of my acquaintance (and this includes some people who are virtual saints in the Leftist academic heaven) were often intrigued by my Burkean moments and were willing to explore the chinks in the Leftist narrative.
* Of course, dullness in graduate students is not quite the same thing as dullness in the general population. They were only comparatively dull.
It's odd that Steve mentions Crooked Timber. I find them doctrinaire and lacking in nuance, at least as they present at that blog. What is he thinking about?
The political scholar Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and many of his neoconservative acolytes
There was an assistant secretary of defense in William Kristol’s social circle who took a couple of courses from Leo Strauss ca. 1969. That about exhausts the list of his ‘acolytes’.
As I understand Strauss, the idea is that we have the Esoteric knowledge that only the elite can handle, while the masses are given comforting lies. If you can penetrate to the Esoteria, it kind of proves you’re ready for it.
I can imagine something like that with regard to HBD issues. I believe that racial groups differ in average cognitive ability and in natural behaviors. At the same time, I understand that “on average” means “on average,” and that they are plenty of smart blacks and dumb whites, and I do believe that individuals should be judged as individuals.
But that’s kind of a complicated message, and I can see how widespread belief HBD would lead some people to adopt what we would now think of as bad policies. I can therefore imagine a world in which equalism is the official doctrine, but kids who go to Harvard and Yale and the University of Chicago are issued copies of The Bell Curve and told “this is the way it is, kids.” We could then base policy on actual real knowledge, while still making people feel good.
The problem is that we now have a world where the elite is more disconnected from reality. That is, the kids who go to Harvard will be told about “stereotype threat” and “patterns of oppression” and other nonsense. Much of the goal of higher education is actually anti-educational. Many HBD types assume there is an inner core that knows the truth, but I think that’s just another comforting lie. I think that Bush and his advisers actually did believe that Islam was, properly understood, a religion of peace. I think he really did think that No Child Left Behind would raise black test scores, etc.
We keep assuming there are these secret plans, when in fact the easiest explanation is that they really do believe that crap.
I think the Nixon era was the last time in which the political elite were perfectly comfortable speaking truth to one another while grinning stupidly in public performance. Nixon had no problems telling anyone around him in private what he thought about Jews, Blacks, Catholics–you name it. One has to assume his sort of banter was common among political elites up till then. Truman, FDR, Wilson–all of their private conversations showed absolutely no illusions about basic truths. The political elites’ attitudes about the country and its many elements probably had far more in common with the Common Man–Archie Bunker, if you like–than with the mumbo-jumbo of academics. Now even the poor White Working Class has been conditioned to censor their public selves–and if the latest generations’ support for gay marriage is as extreme as we’ve been told, we’ve finally entered a period in which all of society will eventually believe in Big delusions.
A few thoughts:
1.
“A culture that doesn’t believe in God but does insist that He created all persons equally is increasingly going to have to discourage snickering with the lash.”
In my lifetime, I have seen the prevailing philosophy go from:
-a general sense of ‘we should treat everybody equally’-we should give everybody an equal chance, but if they succeed or fail, well, such is life (which in essence accepted that races may be unequal, but treatment of blacks in the past was bad, and we should stop it).
to:
-everyone is equal. Therefore, any physical existence of inequality is evidence of unjust treatment by society at large. Therefore, anything is justified to eliminate inequality, because the system, by allowing inequality, is unjust by definition.
Note that the second philosophy literally has no limits to societal tinkering. Freedom of association leading to wealthier white neighborhoods and poorer black neighborhoods? Self-evident evidence that freedom of association is unjust. Freedom of speech allowing talk that is demeaning to poorer (minority) unhappier (homosexual, female) people? Self-evident evidence that freedom of speech is unjust. Women want to be infantry soldiers, and gays want to be married, but can’t (while other can?) Self-evident evidence that those decisions (whether by the military bureaucracy or the voters of Louisiana) is unjust. And so on and so on.
Equality is the lynchpin upon which everything else depends. If the consequences of a decision/policy/action don’t yield equality, that decision/policy/action is, by definition, unjust (regardless of other, competing values: freedom, efficiency, even legality). In the struggle between freedom and equality, freedom has outright lost.
And this is probably why any questioning of equality is treated so harshly (The Bell Curve, Schockley, contrary opinions about homosexuality or physical abilities of women, and so on).
(By prevailing philosophy, I mean the broadly accepted philosophy by both elites and right thinking people. The radical equality of the second view was well known at the beginning of my life, and presumably widely believed by radical academics, radical political activists, and so on. But only recently has that view filtered down to the masses.)
2. Re: the ancients. Within philosophy, there is a sense that one can learn about the values/ideals of ancient Greece by reading Plato/Socrates (and of course Aristotle and the dramatists).
I have often wondered if this is really true. The fact that Socrates was alive, and wrote, and has works that survived doesn’t indicate that he was indicative of his times any more than that Foucault’s works are indicative of his time. In 2000 years, if Foucault’s works are the only ones that survive, would it be accurate to describe the 20th century West as a civilization full of homosexual bondage fetishists?
There is so little that has survived from Ancient Greece, it is entirely possible that our (everybody’s) understanding of it is being shaped by a few crazy radicals, and our understanding is literally completely wrong.
joeyjoejoe
RE: Plato,
Well, there are tensions and contradictions in his work. Perhaps the best way to read Plato in dialogue with himself is to compare The Republic , with its idealized city, with The Laws, with its “second best” city. For one thing, Plato attacks pederasty in The Laws….
RE: Strauss,
I don’t know; his method of reading texts strikes me as being a little too akin to Biblical hermeneutics:
OT: Hasidic Townhouse Foes Seek to Dissolve Catskills Village
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-24/hasidic-townhouse-foes-seek-to-dissolve-catskills-village.html
Are rural/suburban whites finally organizing? They probably realize the income redistribution that will occur once the hasids get on welfare.
RE: Plato,
Well, there are tensions and contradictions in his work. Perhaps the best way to read Plato in dialogue with himself is to compare The Republic , with its idealized city, with The Laws, with its “second best” city. For one thing, Plato attacks pederasty in The Laws….
RE: Strauss,
I don’t know; his method of reading texts strikes me as being a little too akin to Biblical hermeneutics:
Sorry to disappoint you, but economists really do believe what they say. Moreover it’s part of every grad student’s socialization to learn that “thinking like an economist” is the most essential instrument in the economist’s toolchest.
Followup:
The history of Western values could probably be written in three phases:
1) humans are unequal, both in terms of soul and in actual existence.
This lasted a few millenia: from the dawn of man until (1750 with Rousseau, 1800 With Jefferson, 1850 with Lincoln?)
2) humans are equal in the eyes of God, and thus are worthy of equal dignity. But they are unequal in actual existence.
This lasted for 100-200 years (1750/1800/1850 until Roosevelt 1930? the 1960’s?)
3) Humans are equal in the eyes of He that doesn’t exist, and therefore should be equal in actual existence.
Who knows how long this will last. There is no reason to believe that society will finally ‘just get it’ in the near future and go back to 2. Maybe ‘2’ is an unnatural and unsustainable paradigm. Phase 1 lasted a few thousand years. Phase 2 lasted a few hundred. Is phase 3 less, a few hundred, or a few thousand? There is no inherent reason why, in 800 years, the Middle Class won’t be taxed, limited, and otherwise constrained in order to insure that the lower class (whoever they may be) achieve equality. The peasants in the Roman Empire in the year 0 were treated roughly similar to the peasants in Germany in 1700, regardless of the justice or rationality of that treatment. The middle class in the year 3000 could just as conceivably be treated like the middle class in 2000.
It may be that humans just have a hard time keeping more than one overriding value in mind. For a few thousand years, inequality was that value. For a few hundred (during the transition to ‘equality’) we were able to balance competing values. But the equality paradigm is gaining dominance, and it may very well have a long long run.
joeyjoejoe
This is you at your worst, Mr. Sailer.
The Jews (i.e. neocons) controlled the Bush family? I think not. Let’s see that 28 censored pages, and how the Bush family’s ties with Saudi Arabia exposed.
Everything that Bush the Younger did was a CIA front, IMO.
The Jews (i.e. neocons) controlled the Bush family? I think not. Let’s see that 28 censored pages, and how the Bush family’s ties with Saudi Arabia exposed.
Everything that Bush the Younger did was a CIA front, IMO."
Far be it from me to deny the extremely close Saud clan-Bush clan linkage, but the Saudis didn't want the US to invade Iraq in 2003. It was not a critical issue for them, not like (eg) the protection of the allied Bin Laden clan after 9/11. They certainly got what they really wanted from the Bushes, essentially their own survival and wellbeing. But they would have preferred to keep Saddam in power over the Iraqi Shia.
The ability to withstand contadictions — or absurb realities — is key precursor for success in modern society.
Perhaps a more polite way to put it you change your mind when the facts change. In that form, it is a longer intellectual pedigree.
Or in pop culture, a reality distortion field.
That said, you also have to have a goal. After all, the key to strategic thinking is not skating to the puck; it is skating to where the puck will be.
Jews to white gents: You must rise above tribalism.
Jews to Jewish kids: You must stick with your kind.
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/surprise-brookss-israeli
Is there a term for the opposite of Occam’s Razor? For the belief that things are never what they seem to be and that there is always some “esoteric” Truth out there which most people are unaware of? Given how widespread that attitude is it needs its own name.
Of course that attitude lends itself to the old reductio ad absurdum. Sure, those poor naive Straussians think they are privy to secret and esoteric knowledge. The very secret group of people of which I am a member (we’re so secret we don’t even have a name) actively encourages the Straussians in their silly delusion so that they never go looking for the real truth!
Ten years ago, Strauss's co-editor of The History of Political Philosophy, Joseph Cropsey, was still teaching at the U of Chicago, and you could get a glimpse of the old-time aura, the example of quiet seriousness. I was in a seminar there with Nathan Tarcov, a second-generation Straussian, and his attentiveness to Rousseau's Emile was inspiring. A lot of the younger people at the Committee on Social Thought were hucksters by comparison. Allan Bloom was another serious second-generation Straussian, whose Closing of the American Mind is splendidly eccentric and illuminating. People like Wolfowitz were merely the students of Bloom. I highly recommend Bloom's eulogy of Strauss in Giants and Dwarfs. (That book is full of great essays, including a splendid philosophical takedown of multiculturalism. Bloom also echoes Strauss and sounds like Steve Sailer when says things like, "A man must prefer his family to other families, and his country to other countries...")
For the master himself, the essays in What is Political Philosophy are accessible.
On reflection, some of the continuing influence of Strauss has to come from the fact that he was really one of the last of the serious readers (and he was so serious that he didn't need jargon). Wayne Booth and David Grene were both still teaching and available at Chicago ten-fifteen years ago, but they both seemed diminished by the fact that the great battle for academia had been lost (as well as diminished by age, of course).Replies: @Anonymouse
Alan Bloom’s big book is a bad joke – I remember only one remark in it to the effect that youth had to earn its right to sensuality, this from a flaming fairy (assuming that Saul Bellow’s account in his novel “Ravenstock” is more or less accurate. His best seller made him a rich man so he could give the lie to Platonic austerity in real life). The biggies in Plato studies of Strauss students were/are, IMO, Seth Benardete and, perhaps, Stanley Rosen. Benardete’s reminiscences about the scene in that era, in his book “Encounters & Reflections” are hilarious. Anti-Strauss joke current at the U of Chicago at that time: Why is Allan Bloom the most important person in Plato’s Republic? Because he’s not even mentioned once.
I always liked this derivation of the word allegory:
From Greek allos meaning “other” and agora meaning gathering place (especially the marketplace). In times past, it was common to do one’s chatting at the marketplace. Some of the topics discussed were clandestine in nature and when people spoke about them, for fear of being punished, they would speak indirectly. That is to say, they would speak about one thing in such a way as to intimate the actual information to the listener. Thus, the persons discussing clandestine matters were said to be speaking of “other things” in the marketplace. Eventually the words joined and became associated with the act of speaking about one thing while meaning another.
Human conquest, in my humble opinion, was the original sin that dare not speak its name, and it is remarkable how few references there are in popular literature to the institution of conquest as a decisive development in human history (the “might is right” passage in Thucydides being one of the notable exceptions).
When did conquest begin, and why was it so important?
Well, it is pretty clear it did not begin until agriculture was widely established as mankind’s major source of food, since conquering a hunter/gatherer people is generally impractical with rare exceptions (such as in the Pacific Northwest, where salmon fishing tied people down to certain restricted places much as agriculture did).
As for why conquest was such a decisive innovation, the logic is simple: once the possibility had been demonstrated, every tribe’s thought became, “If we don’t do it to them first, then it is only a matter of time before they do it to us.” Thus conquests led to the rise of political states, themselves engaged in a relentless competition for power leading to the growth of empires. Indeed, history has been little else than a story of warring states engaged in such competition, right on up into modern times (Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, pre-WWII imperial Japan being among the modern examples). In a very real and literal sense, then, conquest was the original sin that corrupted the whole world, ushering in millennia of societies based on the few ruling over the many by right of conquest.
When and where did the first conquest occur? Probably somewhere in Mesopotamia in the 4th millenium BC. This coincidence led me in my wild and crazy youth to hazard an esoteric reading of the Adam and Eve myth as the record of that terrible development: the oldest allegory in human history. I summarized this conjecture in a letter to Jack Goody several years ago. Read it and judge for yourself:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10WyvI-kW-ZyU5LOiaNWQwu4rPvl0hb6FUdeeqbUGnCz7OWNAC2VJP13IVsCN/edit?usp=sharing
Often, the most famous philosophers are not the most consistent, and it is for that reason that they are famous- they compromised more with public opinion and the demands of the elites, downplaying the aspects that would earn them scorn. Other philosophers may have said the unpopular things out loud, but got themselves run out of town or arrested, or maybe nobody wanted to read their books. So yes, there are grounds for thinking that some thinkers had esoteric beliefs.
On the other hand, the “Great Thinkers” are often not recognized as such until much, much later, frequently publishing posthumously. Contemporary public opinion may keep your work obscure, but 100 years later the same taboos may no longer exist, and your great-grandchildren find your candor refreshing.
One question that comes to mind is whether certain “Great Books” became popular largely because opponents of the ideas expressed found it a useful straw-man. Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia was, I read, not terribly popular amongst actual advocates of the Stuart cause, who very rarely cited it. Whigs like Locke and Tyrrell apparently plucked it out of relative obscurity and beat up on it as a proxy for the ideas of all their enemies. Did this sort of thing happen often? How many of the “Great Books” became popular just because they were easy to refute? I’d imagine not very many- Patriarchia would only appear on the largest, most exhaustive reading lists, and then only marginally- but it’s worth thinking about.
The big problem I find with Straussians is that their readings are often radically ahistorical. If you want to find esoteric ideas in great writers, the logical place to start would be with a writer’s personal letters and library, to find out what books he was reading, what other contemporary thinkers he was talking to, what new ideas he was discussing, etc. Then, you move on to other, lesser thinkers of his day with whom he exchanged ideas. Many Straussians instead prefer to turn to the other “Great Thinkers”, and assume that, say, John Locke must have derived his esoteric ideas from Plato or Aristotle’s esoteric ideas. This makes a neat, tidy picture- the Great Thinkers are all pretty consistent with each other- but misses the fact that the germ of a Great Idea often springs from a relatively obscure thinker.
Of course, there was also an America worth investing loyalty in. America’s actions in the last several decades? Not really ones that inspire loyalty–bombing Serbs to support Albanian Moslem terrorists, occupying Iraq on behalf of a Tehran-affiliated government, sending arms to jihadi rebels in Syria, while spending the rest of the time demanding that Uganda and Russia adopt homosexual-friendly laws.
I don’t think there was any esoteric meaning to the Iraq war.
There’s an inherent line of attack on anyone pointing out the idea of esoteric writing. As soon as a writer points out the technique, critics will claim the writer is doing it himself, and then find all sorts of “hidden meanings” in the writer’s texts. Usually meanings so deeply encrypted as to foil the NSA.
It’s perfectly reasonable to think that, say, atheists would engage in some misdirection when writing during a time when religious power could make it unhealthy to be direct.
The history of Western values could probably be written in three phases:
1) humans are unequal, both in terms of soul and in actual existence.
This lasted a few millenia: from the dawn of man until (1750 with Rousseau, 1800 With Jefferson, 1850 with Lincoln?)
2) humans are equal in the eyes of God, and thus are worthy of equal dignity. But they are unequal in actual existence.
This lasted for 100-200 years (1750/1800/1850 until Roosevelt 1930? the 1960's?)
3) Humans are equal in the eyes of He that doesn't exist, and therefore should be equal in actual existence.
Who knows how long this will last. There is no reason to believe that society will finally 'just get it' in the near future and go back to 2. Maybe '2' is an unnatural and unsustainable paradigm. Phase 1 lasted a few thousand years. Phase 2 lasted a few hundred. Is phase 3 less, a few hundred, or a few thousand? There is no inherent reason why, in 800 years, the Middle Class won't be taxed, limited, and otherwise constrained in order to insure that the lower class (whoever they may be) achieve equality. The peasants in the Roman Empire in the year 0 were treated roughly similar to the peasants in Germany in 1700, regardless of the justice or rationality of that treatment. The middle class in the year 3000 could just as conceivably be treated like the middle class in 2000.
It may be that humans just have a hard time keeping more than one overriding value in mind. For a few thousand years, inequality was that value. For a few hundred (during the transition to 'equality') we were able to balance competing values. But the equality paradigm is gaining dominance, and it may very well have a long long run.
joeyjoejoeReplies: @Chubby Ape
No I’d have to disagree with your overview of the Western world’s view of the person and equality. Your phase 1 was the pre-Christian view of things, your phase 2 was the norm of Christendom from the early days and your phase 3 is accurately dated, I’d say. Obviously the thinking you described in phase 1 has always tempted and attracted those taught to live by phase 2 thinking on the matter but it is definitely un-Christian by even medieval standards. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the fate of souls depicted in Dante’s Divine Comedy: the low and high born are thrown in together in the afterlife. That’s still the official Christian reading of things last time I checked.
So basically the people who run the world don’t see it for what it is.
“Because only
tormented persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women,
not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its life-cage and seeks further ”
Robinson Jeffers
OT, but from Obama’s speech today at the UN, I find this interesting:
“Yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.”
So I guess we will continue to poor fuel on the fire by increasing the racial and ethnic composition of this nation through my upcoming amnesty and refusal t enforce immigration law.
“And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear,”
Wrestle, reconcile? But I thought globalization and diversity were part of America’s traditions that we hold dear. And change is always good, right? Why the need to wrestle and reconcile?
Maybe this is about as close as it gets to having them admit diversity is not a strength.
I am not sure there are such contemporary observers. But I would be very interested to know anything more about them.
I once was smitten by what I knew of Socrates: the Apology and the Death of. But as a grownup, I think Plato intentionally obscured the causes of the public hatred of Socrates. Surely Socrates’ snideness contributed, but I believe his non exemplary behavior in the arrest of Leon of Salamis — he didn’t help but he didn’t hinder — or some other similar but unrecorded act of public cowardice was the basic reason. Why wouldn’t a man who had spent his life saying virtue is the only good not face death the day he was sent to arrest Leon? Because he was a fraud? Is that why the Athenians hated him?
>>In the comments at Taki’s, Simon of London notes:<<
Simon *in* London – I am in London, but not of it! 🙂
I guess I was on a roll this morning – I tried to reply over there re your query about poetry translations just now, but after another day in academia my tiredness addled brain didn't produce anything too coherent, I fear.
Steve, who has ever accused you of hiding “a vast secret corpus of sinister ideas”? And what kind of ideas? Your detractors already think you’re sinister enough, as far as I can tell!
“Our modern culture is not based on esotericism – esotericism requires that the commoners are allowed comfortable platitudes while philosophers revel in The Real Truth. Instead we have a culture of Orwellian Crimestop and Newspeak where people are forced to humiliate themselves through the cant of evident falsehoods, the opposite of comfort. Virtue is marked by the ability to believe in contradictory falsehoods through effort of will. ”
To be fair, there is indeed an esoteric element, inasmuch as certain words/phrases are used to mean different things, the meaning depending on the target audience, whether commoners or members of the Enlightened. American Marxists (including Neocons) are the main practioners of this; they hide their Marxism in the cloak of American Whig-Liberalism.
Growing up in the ’80s I remember trying and failing to understand my mother’s academic Sociology books – the language seemed impenetrable. Much later (& with the help of William S Lind’s essays on cultural Marxism) I realised that it was a deliberate code, only to be understood by the initiated. These academic works discussed plans to reshape/transform Western society along cultural Marxist lines (‘Political Correctness’); but in such a way that the meaning would not be understood by outsiders.
But those texts that baffled me were from the ’80s, when Men Were Free (per Reagan). In the ’90s the cultural Marxists won, and they generally don’t really need to hide what they’re doing anymore. You still see the use of deliberately deceitful language in the judicial sphere – ‘Living Constitution’, and certainly the Newspeak project continues, but as I said previously, Newspeak is based on humiliation not deceit: the stating of the falsehood is primarily intended to break the spirit of the speaker.
Steve, I have to say that you often do end your articles in ways that seems to leave the reader hanging, without a firm conclusion. It leads me to wonder “what conclusion do you draw from this?” And in that, one could get the impression that your conclusions are quite unsavory and thus, left unsaid, for us to figure out.
“The rise to dominance over the culture of the lumpen-intelligentsia — basically, the lower IQ students of Crooked Timber folks — is a fascinating subject.”
Yes, I don’t get the impression that the likes of Habermas (much beloved as he is by my academic collagues) are really steering the ship any more. The Lumpen Intelligentsia working in the government or writing for the New York Times seem to have a lot more influence. I’m reminded of the self-replicating killer robots in ‘Second Variety’ – eventually the weapon-tools escape the influence of their human creators, and evolving in the wild they become the true inheritors of the Earth.
Inneresting.
Esoteric nowadays means ‘specialist’ knowledge and doesn’t necessarily connote something underhanded or secretive.
So, if someone knows much about something, his or her knowledge is said to be ‘esoteric’: expert/specialist knowledge with little relevance to non-specialists.
Anyway, if there’s a clear boundary among the inner circle, outer circle, and the public, there’s no need for esoteric use of language.
Members of the inner circle, safely sealed from the others, could speak candidly and honestly about what’s really on their minds. They can feel safe and secure in knowing that what they say behind closed doors won’t be heard on the outside.
Donald Sterling spoke honestly because he thought he had the total confidence of the ho he was speaking with. If he’d known better, he would spoken more esoterically.
If the inner circle of power can speak secretly without the threat of transparency, it can have honesty within the circle and BS outside the circle(for all the suckers out there).
The problem arises when the power is no longer so absolute among the inner circle. In a system, such as a democracy, where the elites must constantly interact with the people-rivals-diverse elements, there must be some degree of open communication between the upper folks, middle folks, and lower folks. (Also, as upper folks compete for power, one bunch of upper folks could use the dirt on another bunch of upper folks to gain an advantage. We saw how some rich Jews accused Sterling of ‘racism’ to take over his empire.)
Even so, that doesn’t mean that upper folks still have vested interests of their own. But since so much of what they say is open for all to hear, they must use language in a way that it means one thing to most people but wink-wink something else for those-in-the-know.
In increasingly democratic England where upper elites had to rub shoulders with the lower elements and rival competitors(who might expose them for political gain at the expense of elite unity) in the Parliament, the upper folks could no longer just speak candidly and honestly as they would have come across as arrogant and offensive. They could sneer at the hoi polloi in their private clubs, but then, even such clubs were being opened up to different kinds of people. So, the upper crust needed to speak in ways that might sound perfectly harmless to most ears but sort of suggested something else for those-in-the-know.
When a bunch of Jews get together in Israel, they are all Jewish and can speak candidly. They can badmouth goyim and laugh about it.
But in gentile nations, rising Jewish elites, as students and teachers(and in other positions), had to deal with gentiles all the time. A Jewish teacher would have to teach Jews and gentiles together. But suppose he wanted to say something that was really in the interest-of-Jews-only but feared to speak candidly since goyim would either be offended or feel suspicious of how Jews operate.
So, there was the Straussian way. Sounds kosher to Jews, sounds generic to goyim.
The Iraq War to Jews sounds like ‘shhhhhhh, War for Israel, hehe’, but to the rest of us suckers, it sounds like ‘war on terror’ or ‘spreading freedom and democracy in the Arab world’.
Saul Alinsky was up to the same trick. Make radicalism sound generic to the middle class suckers but, wink wink, still radical to diehard radicals.
In Sparta, the Spartans had all the power and helots had no power. Spartan way was to terrorize the helots with harsh words and harsh punishment. So, among Spartans, they could speak honestly about Spartan power, interests, and privilege. That’s what they were for. They had nothing to hide. They could shout ‘THIS IS SPARTA’ and kick as many Persian Negroes into wells they wanted to.
Their power was based on ruthless power.
But in Athens, the elites had to win over the people and make all free men feel involved in the system. So, elites couldn’t be so candid. I suppose they had closed-door meetings too where they could be more candid. But even this could be dangerous because some cunning elite member who attended such a meeting might spill the beans for political gain. He might go to the masses and say, “last night, I was with my fellow rich folks, and you know what they said about your working class Athenians? They said you stink like pigs and think even worse. So, vote for me because despite my riches, I care about you poor folks.”
So, the Athenian elites had to come up with ways that could mean one thing or another.
It’s like there are code words among both Liberals and Conservatives that have double meanings. So, if Paul Ryan says there’s a problem of values in the black community, it can be construed as disrespectful and ‘racist’ OR as idealistic and caring. There are lots of ‘implicit’ meanings in lots of what politicians and thinkers say.
When Jews are only with Jews, they are likely to be more candid. (No wonder Israeli media is more candid about how Jews feel about the world.)
When Jews are with Jews and goyim, they are likely to be esoteric, saying stuff that sounds like one thing to gentiles and another thing to Jews who are ‘in the know’.
When Jews are only with goyim, they are likely to be totally bogus, saying whatever crap that dumb gentiles wanna hear from Jews.
It’s like the films of Kubrick, Mamet, and Cronenberg will mean something different to Jews than to gentiles. Gentiles might see them as being about generic/universal themes whereas Jews might pick up on meanings that specially pertain to Jews.
Jewish film critics might pick up on this stuff, but their readers aren’t only Jewish but gentile, and so, you have to read between the lines of their film reviews to sense what they get that they don’t want us to get.
Straussianism is less a philosophy than a condition.
PS. As for free thinkers, individualists, mavericks, and etc. through the ages, they had to find esoteric ways to speak since what they say could get them in trouble with the ruling elites or the church. There’s still debate as to what Machiavelli was really getting at with THE PRINCE.
Of course that attitude lends itself to the old reductio ad absurdum. Sure, those poor naive Straussians think they are privy to secret and esoteric knowledge. The very secret group of people of which I am a member (we're so secret we don't even have a name) actively encourages the Straussians in their silly delusion so that they never go looking for the real truth!Replies: @Steve Sailer
“Is there a term for the opposite of Occam’s Razor?”
Occam’s Butterknife
Better to control esoterica than be confounded by esoterika… as Joseph K discovered in The Trial.
The Jews (i.e. neocons) controlled the Bush family? I think not. Let's see that 28 censored pages, and how the Bush family's ties with Saudi Arabia exposed.
Everything that Bush the Younger did was a CIA front, IMO.Replies: @Simon in London, @Bill
“This is you at your worst, Mr. Sailer.
The Jews (i.e. neocons) controlled the Bush family? I think not. Let’s see that 28 censored pages, and how the Bush family’s ties with Saudi Arabia exposed.
Everything that Bush the Younger did was a CIA front, IMO.”
Far be it from me to deny the extremely close Saud clan-Bush clan linkage, but the Saudis didn’t want the US to invade Iraq in 2003. It was not a critical issue for them, not like (eg) the protection of the allied Bin Laden clan after 9/11. They certainly got what they really wanted from the Bushes, essentially their own survival and wellbeing. But they would have preferred to keep Saddam in power over the Iraqi Shia.
There is an interesting book “The Secret History of the World” written by Mark Booth that explains the history of much of this “esoteric secret knowledge.” It’s a fascinating read (except the last chapter.) But he does write, as some of the commentators pointed out, that many of these thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton could not publicly publish everything they wrote during their lifetimes. Newton was a Unitarian. The Church of England considered this a heresy (the Anglican Church is Trinitarian). If Newton had been found out about this, he would have been sentenced to death. He hid his writings about alchemy as he would have been put to death for being a “warlock and practicing witchcraft.” Mark Booth writes that these thinkers were waiting for “human consciousness” to evolve to a level where they could accept many radical writings. So, they hid them for future generations to discover. Unfortunately, we have reached a level where the i.q.s needed to appreciate these writings, and discuss them is limited to a certain race in particular. Today’s obsession (maybe demonic possession) with equality is preventing this. Today’s writings about iq and inequality are the radical writings that need to be hidden for future generations.
Everything that Bush the Younger did was a CIA front, IMO.”
More candidates for David Lifton’s writing, or David Ray Griffin’s. Waste of time.
Not really ones that inspire loyalty–bombing Serbs to support Albanian Moslem terrorists, occupying Iraq on behalf of a Tehran-affiliated government,
I’m not sure you’re capable of writing a non-tendentious statement.
Yes, I don't get the impression that the likes of Habermas (much beloved as he is by my academic collagues) are really steering the ship any more. The Lumpen Intelligentsia working in the government or writing for the New York Times seem to have a lot more influence. I'm reminded of the self-replicating killer robots in 'Second Variety' - eventually the weapon-tools escape the influence of their human creators, and evolving in the wild they become the true inheritors of the Earth.Replies: @Simon in London
“The Lumpen Intelligentsia working in the government or writing for the New York Times ”
Though the NYT, like the British ‘Guardian’, also has actual smart people writing for it, of course. The real lumpen-journalistia are writing for The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the (now oligarch-owned & cultural-Marxist) London Evening Standard…
Candide was too candid. Pangloss was too highfalutin.
But Panstrauss, he knew the trick.
One supposes that the American armed forces were just not good enough for his son. Better to die while wearing the flag of a foreign power than die while wearing the flag of the nation that gave you everything. The worst of it, of course, is that Brooks feels no shame in this.
I’ve always felt a certain level of contempt for Brooks, for his status as a “tame” quasi-conservative, etc. But now, I feel nothing but disgust for him.
Steve, any thoughts on the Bruce and Kris Jenner divorce?
Simon *in* London - I am in London, but not of it! :)
I guess I was on a roll this morning - I tried to reply over there re your query about poetry translations just now, but after another day in academia my tiredness addled brain didn't produce anything too coherent, I fear.Replies: @Chubby Ape
“Simon of London” sounds more olde timey. It sounds like the name of someone in the Middle Ages who led a peasants’ revolt, a children’s crusade or got up to some other mischief that brought him to the attention of the authorities.
I’m just finishing up teaching Plato’s *Laches*, the *Meno*, a big chunk of the *Republic*, continuing with the *Apology*, and concluding with a bit of the *Phaedo*…
The idea that either Socrates or Plato ever lied about what they really believed is about as stupid/crazy as stupid/crazy gets.
Simon [in/of] London has the same insight as Theodore Dalrymple:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-24/hasidic-townhouse-foes-seek-to-dissolve-catskills-village.html
Are rural/suburban whites finally organizing? They probably realize the income redistribution that will occur once the hasids get on welfare.Replies: @Big Bill
Get the latest scoop, daily, from http://www.FailedMessiah.typepad.com.
I’m sure I’m going to regret this but …
First of all, Strauss had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war. Nor, really, did any Straussians. Wolfowitz is often cited as some Straussian mastermind but the truth is, he took a couple of undergraduate classes from Bloom at Cornell, then (IIRC) a grand total of three graduate classes with Strauss at Chicago, where he spent the overwhelming bulk of his time with Albert Wohlstetter, who supervised his PhD. Abe Shulksy is a genuine Straussian who was somewhere in DoD in Bush’s 1st term (I forgot exactly where). And that’s about it. The one Straussian with the greatest proximity to Bush was … me. And I was nobody, powerless. My opinion was neither desired nor solicited. I had a job to do and I did it. Please read the books by Peter Minowitz and Robert Howse on this point. The facts are all there, carefully laid out.
If you want to argue that Strauss “inspired” the war somehow, that’s an almost impossible case to make based on his actual oeuvre. He never wrote about contemporary issues. There was one letter to the editor of NR on Israel in 1957. It’s about 200 words. If you want to look for “hidden meanings” then I would point you to his essay on Thucydides, which goes into great detail on the wisdom and justice of imperialism and conquest. Short version: Strauss says Thucydides comes out against, and Strauss is more or less with him. Or read his very long Thoughts on Machiavelli which goes into the same theme at great length and makes a similar conclusion, in the course of rejecting Machiavelli’s elaborate argument in favor of imperialism.
On the larger question of esotericism: you say that the notion that Greek gods weren’t real was hardly news to anyone. Not so fast. Socrates was executed in part for “not believing in the gods of the city.” So at that point, at least, Athens still took its gods seriously enough to execute Socrates on suspicion of atheism (a charge he denied).
Socrates himself wrote nothing. Only one work was written about him before his death, Aristophanes’ Clouds, which depicts Socrates as openly atheistic. It probably contributed to his eventual trial and conviction. It may also have helped convince him to change the public presentation, and even the internal content, of his teaching.
Strauss (and others) have shown that at the time of Socrates’ activity (the “golden age” of Athens), belief in the gods was weakening among the elite, though still relatively strong among the people. While Athens was formally democratic, it was really ruled be an elite aristocratic cabal throughout this period—a cabal much like the one that Steve and many of his readers imagine lied the US into Iraq. This cabal was pretty openly cynical. See the famous Melian dialogue in Thucydides (II 34-46). Thucydides however believes that this nihilistic cynicism contributed to Athens’ eventual loss.
That aside, this points to another reason for esotericism. The belief or non-belief in thunderbolt-hurling Zeus is, for a sophisticated mind, secondary to the question of natural justice. Let’s assume that no intelligent Athenian circa 400 BC could possibly believe in the literal truth of the Homeric gods. OK, once those “gods are dead” what does that mean? Does it mean that there is no justice? There is no cosmic or natural grounding for right and wrong? That “nothing is true, everything is permitted”?
Socrates steps forward to argue “No.” But his “no” is a complex and sophisticated “no” that is not easy to grasp.
All of Plato’s 35 dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. They are intended, in part, to refute the charges that led to his execution—or, as Bloom put it, they are “rehabilitation of a condemned man.” They also tell a story. They are dramas, not treatises. Plato gives indications of the temporal order in which the conversation should be understood to have taken place. There is a broad “arc” but I want to focus on one aspect.
Temporally, the first dialogue appears to be the Protagoras. In this dialogue, a relatively young Socrates (~30; cf. Christ beginning his ministry at 30) debates and defeats the most celebrated wise man (sophist) of the time, Protagoras, in front of a large audience. This establishes Socrates’ reputation. In particular, two of the most talented and high-born youths in Athens, Alcibiades and Critias, become ardent followers.
Now, Alcibiades and Critias turned out to be very bad guys. It’s quite a long story, but the former turned out to be a traitor who helped Athens lose the Peloponnesian War while the latter became one of the infamous Thirty Tyrants. This was 30+ years after the dialogue, but still. Socrates was blamed for how these two turned out and it factored into the charges at his trial (“corrupting the youth”).
The dialogues esoterically show that Socrates misjudged these two. He thought they were fit for philosophy and so he taught them “the truth.” But they “could not handle the truth.” They took it as a justification for tyranny, for their own superiority, and their freedom to crush the little people like ants.
Socrates realized he had blown it. The Republic is as it were his “correction”. He teaches a number of youths in that book. All have the political gene, but none turns out to be a tyrant. In particular, what these young people want to know is “Why should I be just? What’s in it for me?” Socrates gives a very cagey and elaborate answer. Basically, he creates a myth that becomes one of the pillars of Western Civilization. The truth is that there IS a reason to be moral, but it is not sufficiently comprehensible to any but the few who are capable of philosophy. So speaking this truth openly only serves to bolster atheism, nihilism, selfishness, tyranny and immorality. Hence it must be obscured with esotericism.
And, part of the esoteric teaching of the dialogues (and of Xenophon’s Socratic writings) is to defend, on the surface, Socrates against the charge that he is responsible for Alcibiades and Critias, while the deeper teaching is to show how in fact Socrates’ early misjudgment in fact did serve to corrupt those two. The purpose, or one purpose, of the esoteric teaching is to be true to the historical facts and more important to show what went wrong so that later philosophers won’t make the same mistake.
There’s a great deal more to esotericism in Plato than just this, it should go without saying.
Beyond this, as Strauss shows, the most ironclad examples of esotericism are the Islamic and Jewish medievals. On the surface, their books purport to show that philosophy and revealed religion are fully compatible. Beneath the surface, they show something else. We owe to these writers that philosophy survived the dark ages.\
In the muslim world both philosophers and sufis had to practice esotericism, to keep their heads on their shoulders. The ruthlessly intolerant behaviour of ISIS today highlights how dangerous it was historically to speak the rational and spiritual truths openly, since they both exposed Islam for the indefensible nonsense that it is. Case in point: the torture and execution of the Sufi pantheist Mansur Hallaj in 10th century Baghdad by the forces of religion, the ideological ancestors of the ISIS of today. To the sufis Hallaj is a saint and martyr, to the salafis he was a heretic who deserved to be killed.
The West defanged the forces of religion in Europe with the Enlightenment and look at how it took off after that.
“First of all, Strauss had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war. Nor, really, did any Straussians. Wolfowitz is often cited as some Straussian mastermind but the truth is, he took a couple of undergraduate classes from Bloom at Cornell, then (IIRC) a grand total of three graduate classes with Strauss…”
I don’t know if any of these guys were Straussians, whatever that means, and I expect it doesn’t mean much. It’s probably just a convenient label to refer to a group of people who wanted war in Iraq primarily for its perceived benefit to Israeli security. The actual means by which they came to this viewpoint was like-as-not independent, This wasn’t an explicit conspiracy, just a bunch of like-minded people self-organizing.
Of this group, the most influential were probably those in the Office of Special Plans, which apparently existed inside DOD primarily to feed the “right” kind of intelligence to the White House, in opposition to the CIA. In retrospect probably a lot of their “data” was simply wrong. Or at least they connected the dots wrong… easy to do in the best of circumstances. The human mind always loves a good story.
This internet page manages to be esoteric, as well as a wonderfully entertaining piece of psychological conditioning:
http://news.yahoo.com/punter-stunned-911-calls-bironas-crash-210958829--spt.html
I don't know if any of these guys were Straussians, whatever that means, and I expect it doesn't mean much. It's probably just a convenient label to refer to a group of people who wanted war in Iraq primarily for its perceived benefit to Israeli security. The actual means by which they came to this viewpoint was like-as-not independent, This wasn't an explicit conspiracy, just a bunch of like-minded people self-organizing.
Of this group, the most influential were probably those in the Office of Special Plans, which apparently existed inside DOD primarily to feed the "right" kind of intelligence to the White House, in opposition to the CIA. In retrospect probably a lot of their "data" was simply wrong. Or at least they connected the dots wrong... easy to do in the best of circumstances. The human mind always loves a good story.Replies: @Boomstick
nah. The bad intel on Iraq was straight from the CIA natioinal intelligence estimate, a product of the conventional intel bureaucracy.
First of all, Strauss had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war. Nor, really, did any Straussians. Wolfowitz is often cited as some Straussian mastermind but the truth is, he took a couple of undergraduate classes from Bloom at Cornell, then (IIRC) a grand total of three graduate classes with Strauss at Chicago, where he spent the overwhelming bulk of his time with Albert Wohlstetter, who supervised his PhD. Abe Shulksy is a genuine Straussian who was somewhere in DoD in Bush’s 1st term (I forgot exactly where). And that’s about it. The one Straussian with the greatest proximity to Bush was … me. And I was nobody, powerless. My opinion was neither desired nor solicited. I had a job to do and I did it. Please read the books by Peter Minowitz and Robert Howse on this point. The facts are all there, carefully laid out.
If you want to argue that Strauss “inspired” the war somehow, that’s an almost impossible case to make based on his actual oeuvre. He never wrote about contemporary issues. There was one letter to the editor of NR on Israel in 1957. It’s about 200 words. If you want to look for “hidden meanings” then I would point you to his essay on Thucydides, which goes into great detail on the wisdom and justice of imperialism and conquest. Short version: Strauss says Thucydides comes out against, and Strauss is more or less with him. Or read his very long Thoughts on Machiavelli which goes into the same theme at great length and makes a similar conclusion, in the course of rejecting Machiavelli’s elaborate argument in favor of imperialism.
On the larger question of esotericism: you say that the notion that Greek gods weren’t real was hardly news to anyone. Not so fast. Socrates was executed in part for “not believing in the gods of the city.” So at that point, at least, Athens still took its gods seriously enough to execute Socrates on suspicion of atheism (a charge he denied).
Socrates himself wrote nothing. Only one work was written about him before his death, Aristophanes’ Clouds, which depicts Socrates as openly atheistic. It probably contributed to his eventual trial and conviction. It may also have helped convince him to change the public presentation, and even the internal content, of his teaching.
Strauss (and others) have shown that at the time of Socrates’ activity (the “golden age” of Athens), belief in the gods was weakening among the elite, though still relatively strong among the people. While Athens was formally democratic, it was really ruled be an elite aristocratic cabal throughout this period—a cabal much like the one that Steve and many of his readers imagine lied the US into Iraq. This cabal was pretty openly cynical. See the famous Melian dialogue in Thucydides (II 34-46). Thucydides however believes that this nihilistic cynicism contributed to Athens’ eventual loss.
That aside, this points to another reason for esotericism. The belief or non-belief in thunderbolt-hurling Zeus is, for a sophisticated mind, secondary to the question of natural justice. Let’s assume that no intelligent Athenian circa 400 BC could possibly believe in the literal truth of the Homeric gods. OK, once those “gods are dead” what does that mean? Does it mean that there is no justice? There is no cosmic or natural grounding for right and wrong? That “nothing is true, everything is permitted”?
Socrates steps forward to argue “No.” But his “no” is a complex and sophisticated “no” that is not easy to grasp.
All of Plato’s 35 dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. They are intended, in part, to refute the charges that led to his execution—or, as Bloom put it, they are “rehabilitation of a condemned man.” They also tell a story. They are dramas, not treatises. Plato gives indications of the temporal order in which the conversation should be understood to have taken place. There is a broad “arc” but I want to focus on one aspect.
Temporally, the first dialogue appears to be the Protagoras. In this dialogue, a relatively young Socrates (~30; cf. Christ beginning his ministry at 30) debates and defeats the most celebrated wise man (sophist) of the time, Protagoras, in front of a large audience. This establishes Socrates’ reputation. In particular, two of the most talented and high-born youths in Athens, Alcibiades and Critias, become ardent followers.
Now, Alcibiades and Critias turned out to be very bad guys. It’s quite a long story, but the former turned out to be a traitor who helped Athens lose the Peloponnesian War while the latter became one of the infamous Thirty Tyrants. This was 30+ years after the dialogue, but still. Socrates was blamed for how these two turned out and it factored into the charges at his trial (“corrupting the youth”).
The dialogues esoterically show that Socrates misjudged these two. He thought they were fit for philosophy and so he taught them “the truth.” But they “could not handle the truth.” They took it as a justification for tyranny, for their own superiority, and their freedom to crush the little people like ants.
Socrates realized he had blown it. The Republic is as it were his “correction”. He teaches a number of youths in that book. All have the political gene, but none turns out to be a tyrant. In particular, what these young people want to know is “Why should I be just? What’s in it for me?” Socrates gives a very cagey and elaborate answer. Basically, he creates a myth that becomes one of the pillars of Western Civilization. The truth is that there IS a reason to be moral, but it is not sufficiently comprehensible to any but the few who are capable of philosophy. So speaking this truth openly only serves to bolster atheism, nihilism, selfishness, tyranny and immorality. Hence it must be obscured with esotericism.
And, part of the esoteric teaching of the dialogues (and of Xenophon’s Socratic writings) is to defend, on the surface, Socrates against the charge that he is responsible for Alcibiades and Critias, while the deeper teaching is to show how in fact Socrates’ early misjudgment in fact did serve to corrupt those two. The purpose, or one purpose, of the esoteric teaching is to be true to the historical facts and more important to show what went wrong so that later philosophers won’t make the same mistake.
There’s a great deal more to esotericism in Plato than just this, it should go without saying.
Beyond this, as Strauss shows, the most ironclad examples of esotericism are the Islamic and Jewish medievals. On the surface, their books purport to show that philosophy and revealed religion are fully compatible. Beneath the surface, they show something else. We owe to these writers that philosophy survived the dark ages.\Replies: @Bliss, @Bill, @Anonymous
What an excellent, informative post.
In the muslim world both philosophers and sufis had to practice esotericism, to keep their heads on their shoulders. The ruthlessly intolerant behaviour of ISIS today highlights how dangerous it was historically to speak the rational and spiritual truths openly, since they both exposed Islam for the indefensible nonsense that it is. Case in point: the torture and execution of the Sufi pantheist Mansur Hallaj in 10th century Baghdad by the forces of religion, the ideological ancestors of the ISIS of today. To the sufis Hallaj is a saint and martyr, to the salafis he was a heretic who deserved to be killed.
The West defanged the forces of religion in Europe with the Enlightenment and look at how it took off after that.
Chubby Ape:
The norman Rockwell picture ‘freedom of speech’ epitomizes phase 2 for me. While it may have been the ideal of Christendom, I question whether such a picture accurately reflects Western society in the year 30, 300, 1300, or even 1700. The historical period of time in which such a picture could even be entertained as a reflection of society is blisteringly short-100-200 years.
(I’ve tried to copy the picture into this comment, and either I don’t know how, or its impossible. Its the picture of the farmer/laborer standing up to speak at some public meeting (Vermont direct democracy meeting? school board? I don’t know).)
joeyjoejoe
The one Straussian with the greatest proximity to Bush was … me.
——
Bush was clearly no Straussian. And if he were, would he have invaded Iraq?
The question is ridiculous. From the newspapers though, there were thin
layers of justification like defense of freedom, Western civilization, war
against tyranny. What difference did it make that Bush was or wasn’t under
the influence of Strauss’s students or Nietszcheans, Rousseauans, Platonists,
Kantians, Thoreauites, Emersonians, Spinozans, Machiavellians, etc.
Bush just needed at that time to invade some country. Not go after the actual terror
network. No, a country. Only a country, better- multiple countries.
Any one of 10 possible countries. Iraq and Afghanistan were picked when
Bush’s darts landed on “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” on the dartboard.
The war of terror was a teeny more involved than that. But, come on.
In contrast, the higher-order Leftist intellectuals of my acquaintance (and this includes some people who are virtual saints in the Leftist academic heaven) were often intrigued by my Burkean moments and were willing to explore the chinks in the Leftist narrative.
* Of course, dullness in graduate students is not quite the same thing as dullness in the general population. They were only comparatively dull.Replies: @Bill
In private.
It’s odd that Steve mentions Crooked Timber. I find them doctrinaire and lacking in nuance, at least as they present at that blog. What is he thinking about?
Exactly right.
The Jews (i.e. neocons) controlled the Bush family? I think not. Let's see that 28 censored pages, and how the Bush family's ties with Saudi Arabia exposed.
Everything that Bush the Younger did was a CIA front, IMO.Replies: @Simon in London, @Bill
You’re not buying that W has daddy issues at all? If you said Jeb was just another Bush, I’d be with you. But W? He is one wildly vibrating chainsaw if you ask me.
Depends a lot on what you mean by “worthy of equal dignity.” Pre-modern Christians were OK with things like hereditary serfdom, slavery, unequal and hereditary station more generally, lack of liberty and equal protection of the law, and so on. So, the “equal dignity” thing was pretty supernatural before the Endarkenment. We all had the equal dignity of playing our assigned role in the Great Chain of Being.
““Simon of London” sounds more olde timey. It sounds like the name of someone in the Middle Ages who led a peasants’ revolt, a children’s crusade or got up to some other mischief that brought him to the attention of the authorities.”
You’re right – maybe when my London-born son Bill grows up I’ll encourage him to go by ‘William of London’. But I’m too much of an Ulsterman, despite being half southern English by descent.
First of all, Strauss had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war. Nor, really, did any Straussians. Wolfowitz is often cited as some Straussian mastermind but the truth is, he took a couple of undergraduate classes from Bloom at Cornell, then (IIRC) a grand total of three graduate classes with Strauss at Chicago, where he spent the overwhelming bulk of his time with Albert Wohlstetter, who supervised his PhD. Abe Shulksy is a genuine Straussian who was somewhere in DoD in Bush’s 1st term (I forgot exactly where). And that’s about it. The one Straussian with the greatest proximity to Bush was … me. And I was nobody, powerless. My opinion was neither desired nor solicited. I had a job to do and I did it. Please read the books by Peter Minowitz and Robert Howse on this point. The facts are all there, carefully laid out.
If you want to argue that Strauss “inspired” the war somehow, that’s an almost impossible case to make based on his actual oeuvre. He never wrote about contemporary issues. There was one letter to the editor of NR on Israel in 1957. It’s about 200 words. If you want to look for “hidden meanings” then I would point you to his essay on Thucydides, which goes into great detail on the wisdom and justice of imperialism and conquest. Short version: Strauss says Thucydides comes out against, and Strauss is more or less with him. Or read his very long Thoughts on Machiavelli which goes into the same theme at great length and makes a similar conclusion, in the course of rejecting Machiavelli’s elaborate argument in favor of imperialism.
On the larger question of esotericism: you say that the notion that Greek gods weren’t real was hardly news to anyone. Not so fast. Socrates was executed in part for “not believing in the gods of the city.” So at that point, at least, Athens still took its gods seriously enough to execute Socrates on suspicion of atheism (a charge he denied).
Socrates himself wrote nothing. Only one work was written about him before his death, Aristophanes’ Clouds, which depicts Socrates as openly atheistic. It probably contributed to his eventual trial and conviction. It may also have helped convince him to change the public presentation, and even the internal content, of his teaching.
Strauss (and others) have shown that at the time of Socrates’ activity (the “golden age” of Athens), belief in the gods was weakening among the elite, though still relatively strong among the people. While Athens was formally democratic, it was really ruled be an elite aristocratic cabal throughout this period—a cabal much like the one that Steve and many of his readers imagine lied the US into Iraq. This cabal was pretty openly cynical. See the famous Melian dialogue in Thucydides (II 34-46). Thucydides however believes that this nihilistic cynicism contributed to Athens’ eventual loss.
That aside, this points to another reason for esotericism. The belief or non-belief in thunderbolt-hurling Zeus is, for a sophisticated mind, secondary to the question of natural justice. Let’s assume that no intelligent Athenian circa 400 BC could possibly believe in the literal truth of the Homeric gods. OK, once those “gods are dead” what does that mean? Does it mean that there is no justice? There is no cosmic or natural grounding for right and wrong? That “nothing is true, everything is permitted”?
Socrates steps forward to argue “No.” But his “no” is a complex and sophisticated “no” that is not easy to grasp.
All of Plato’s 35 dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. They are intended, in part, to refute the charges that led to his execution—or, as Bloom put it, they are “rehabilitation of a condemned man.” They also tell a story. They are dramas, not treatises. Plato gives indications of the temporal order in which the conversation should be understood to have taken place. There is a broad “arc” but I want to focus on one aspect.
Temporally, the first dialogue appears to be the Protagoras. In this dialogue, a relatively young Socrates (~30; cf. Christ beginning his ministry at 30) debates and defeats the most celebrated wise man (sophist) of the time, Protagoras, in front of a large audience. This establishes Socrates’ reputation. In particular, two of the most talented and high-born youths in Athens, Alcibiades and Critias, become ardent followers.
Now, Alcibiades and Critias turned out to be very bad guys. It’s quite a long story, but the former turned out to be a traitor who helped Athens lose the Peloponnesian War while the latter became one of the infamous Thirty Tyrants. This was 30+ years after the dialogue, but still. Socrates was blamed for how these two turned out and it factored into the charges at his trial (“corrupting the youth”).
The dialogues esoterically show that Socrates misjudged these two. He thought they were fit for philosophy and so he taught them “the truth.” But they “could not handle the truth.” They took it as a justification for tyranny, for their own superiority, and their freedom to crush the little people like ants.
Socrates realized he had blown it. The Republic is as it were his “correction”. He teaches a number of youths in that book. All have the political gene, but none turns out to be a tyrant. In particular, what these young people want to know is “Why should I be just? What’s in it for me?” Socrates gives a very cagey and elaborate answer. Basically, he creates a myth that becomes one of the pillars of Western Civilization. The truth is that there IS a reason to be moral, but it is not sufficiently comprehensible to any but the few who are capable of philosophy. So speaking this truth openly only serves to bolster atheism, nihilism, selfishness, tyranny and immorality. Hence it must be obscured with esotericism.
And, part of the esoteric teaching of the dialogues (and of Xenophon’s Socratic writings) is to defend, on the surface, Socrates against the charge that he is responsible for Alcibiades and Critias, while the deeper teaching is to show how in fact Socrates’ early misjudgment in fact did serve to corrupt those two. The purpose, or one purpose, of the esoteric teaching is to be true to the historical facts and more important to show what went wrong so that later philosophers won’t make the same mistake.
There’s a great deal more to esotericism in Plato than just this, it should go without saying.
Beyond this, as Strauss shows, the most ironclad examples of esotericism are the Islamic and Jewish medievals. On the surface, their books purport to show that philosophy and revealed religion are fully compatible. Beneath the surface, they show something else. We owe to these writers that philosophy survived the dark ages.\Replies: @Bliss, @Bill, @Anonymous
Do you believe that three is a small or a large number of graduate classes to take from the same professor?
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."Replies: @Simon in London
>>Simon [in/of] London has the same insight as Theodore Dalrymple<<
‘the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate’
Yeah, but I think it's a pretty obvious takeaway from '1984'.
Also, the way the rules of Political Correctness keep changing, and you always have to use the latest terminology, and never question why. I think they definitely seek a permanent state of flux, to keep people off-balance and un-centred. The people it is primarily aimed at controllling are the lumpen intelligentsia in the State bureaucracies - NHS managers, for instance. Controlling the minds of the Winston Smith types is considered key to maintaining control overall. The proles are less important and are controlled more directly, through force and threat of force - thinking of eg the witch hunt against Emma West, though this analysis by 'Searchlight' seems quite fair - http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/blogs/searchlight-blog/the-sad-story-of-emma-west
“Yeah, but I think it’s a pretty obvious takeaway from ‘1984’.”
Also, the way the rules of Political Correctness keep changing, and you always have to use the latest terminology, and never question why. I think they definitely seek a permanent state of flux, to keep people off-balance and un-centred. The people it is primarily aimed at controllling are the lumpen intelligentsia in the State bureaucracies – NHS managers, for instance. Controlling the minds of the Winston Smith types is considered key to maintaining control overall. The proles are less important and are controlled more directly, through force and threat of force – thinking of eg the witch hunt against Emma West, though this analysis by ‘Searchlight’ seems quite fair – http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/blogs/searchlight-blog/the-sad-story-of-emma-west
This is ridiculously true. My brothers and I all joined the military, all initially as die-hard patriots (9/11 was largely the catalyst for my enlistment, along with the neocon arguments for the war in Iraq). All three of us were broken of our patriotism by our thoroughly progressive military (amongst other things). I’m pro-Americans nowadays, but not terribly patriotic. We’ve gotten too messed up with progressivism and too far away from the things that made our country great ~100+ years ago. The worst part is that the average American is by *far* better than the average anything else in the world, and yet our elites have spent the last 100+ years trying to destroy the average American. The fact that my co-ethnics are part of that elite nowadays is thoroughly revolting to many Jews (and probably all Jews who understand what’s going on), but it is nearly impossible for any of us to voice heretical ideas in public for a variety of reasons, the largest of which is that the Orthodox community still sees progressive Jews as lost and in need of saving instead of as villains who need condemning, while the non-Orthodox Jewish communities are effectively mainstream progressive Americans and not terribly Jewish excepting in the ways which Judaism intersects with progressivism (the Tikun Olam loophole).
“Do you believe that three is a small or a large number of graduate classes to take from the same professor?”
Quite small. When I was in grad school, I took every single course my principle advisor taught when I was there (at least six) plus audited all of his undergraduate courses and continued to audit even after I had finished my coursework. This was very common among fellow students studying with the same group of profs.
Strauss’ students were, from all I have read and heard, even more devoted than this. Harry Jaffa, for instance, attended every course or lecture Strauss gave for seven years, even after he had completed his Ph.D. and had a full time job. He only stopped when he moved from Chicago to Columbus, OH for a job. George Anastaplo, who never left Chicago, attended all of Strauss’ classes until Strauss’ forced retirement in 1967 (by which time Anastaplo was well into middle age). There are many stories like this about Strauss’s students from the ’50s and ’60s.
Quite small. When I was in grad school, I took every single course my principle advisor taught when I was there (at least six) plus audited all of his undergraduate courses and continued to audit even after I had finished my coursework. This was very common among fellow students studying with the same group of profs.
Strauss' students were, from all I have read and heard, even more devoted than this. Harry Jaffa, for instance, attended every course or lecture Strauss gave for seven years, even after he had completed his Ph.D. and had a full time job. He only stopped when he moved from Chicago to Columbus, OH for a job. George Anastaplo, who never left Chicago, attended all of Strauss' classes until Strauss' forced retirement in 1967 (by which time Anastaplo was well into middle age). There are many stories like this about Strauss's students from the '50s and '60s.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bill
Dear Manton,
Thanks for the most informative background on the Socrates Era.
One more thing about esotericism. I have the Meltzer book and it’s very good, but he underplays one aspect of it. The core reasons, to repeat, are:
1) To protect the author and / or his intellectual circle from persecution.
2) To avoid corrupting or undermining society with teachings that are prone to misunderstandings that have corrosive effects.
3) To make students work harder in puzzling out things for themselves, which is how they become truly educated rather than merely stuffed with pre-chewed conclusions.
4) To put a veneer on not necessarily harmful but certainly complex and almost incomprehensible teachings that are not easily amenable to clarity through words.
Meltzer, it seems to me, gives too little attention to this last one. There is a reason why, say, the Parmenides and the Timeaus are so little read in our time compared with the Republic. The former two are almost incomprehensible. The latter is no less deep, but it has a charming “surface” that the others lack. What Strauss’s scholarship (and that of his students, Bloom above all) shows is that there is real depth to the Republic that the surface hides or at least deflects the reader away from. The beautiful passages in the Republic such as the allegory of the cave are “civilization building” even if, in the final philosophical analysis, inadequate representations of the truth. So part of esotericism is to be civilizationally constructive while still pointing to the underlying truth for those capable of grasping it.
The flipside of this is that even non-harmful but incomprehensible teachings can be taken amiss by “the people” or by society at large. There is a necessary element of elitism in this assertion but that doesn’t make it false. The common people tend to mistrust what they don’t understand. This is after all a trope of science and fantasy fiction: destroy the evil machine! (That happens to be keeping us all alive …) So part of esotericism is to make the complex seem accessible when really it is not, so as to deflect envy and resentment (or worse).
To see what philosophical conversation can look like when no esotericism is used at all, check out the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence, especially the letters on Plato from the mid-to-late 1950s. No esotericism is used at all. They are speaking quite openly, one great mind to another. There is nothing “dangerous” about it. But I defy anyone to fully understand it. Certainly, such is impossible without a very deep grounding in Plato and other philosophy. They’ve made no attempt to present any kind of “surface” because the letters are intended only for one another. It’s the kind of conversation that, as Strauss points out more than once in his published works, never takes place in Plato or Xenophon’s books: one genuine philosopher speaking directly to another.
Sorry, I got at least one thing wrong in the above. The first dialogue in dramatic order is not Protagoras but Parmenides, which takes place when Socrates is about 17 or 18. It is held to have taken place in 450 BC. Protagoras comes next, in around 433 BC. Long gap.
In the Parmenides, Socrates hardly talks at all. When he does talk, in the first third, it is not in his characteristic role of chief interlocutor. Rather, he is the one learning and the conversation is directed by others. This Socrates is still learning. So he has achieved a “great leap forward” by the time we get to the Protagoras.
I think the rest of what I wrote is still basically sound, insofar as I understand the Platonic corpus.
“nah. The bad intel on Iraq was straight from the CIA natioinal intelligence estimate, a product of the conventional intel bureaucracy.”
That doesn’t seem to be the way the wikipedia page on Office of Special Plans sees it (and their article is based on a lot of direct quotes):
“…created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith… …to supply senior George W. Bush administration officials with raw intelligence (unvetted by intelligence analysts, see Stovepiping) pertaining to Iraq…
…former… (CIA) officer… Johnson said the OSP was “dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It’s a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary….”
Seymour Hersh writes that… ‘The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,’ the Pentagon adviser told me.
…These allegations are supported by… Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq published in July 2004. The review, which was highly critical of the CIA’s Iraq intelligence generally but found its judgments were right on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, suggests that the OSP… sought to discredit and cast doubt on CIA analysis in an effort to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. …in response to a cautious CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa’eda: A Murky Relationship”… stated that the June [2002] report, ‘…should be read for content only – and CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.’
…Douglas Feith called the office’s report a much-needed critique of the CIA’s intelligence. “It’s healthy to criticize the CIA’s intelligence”, Feith said. “What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government.”
…briefing to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz… condemned the CIA’s intelligence assessment techniques and denounced the CIA’s “consistent underestimation” of matters dealing with the alleged Iraq-al-Qaeda co-operation. …before the CIA’s final assessment of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, Feith briefed senior advisers to Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, undercutting the CIA’s credibility and alleging “fundamental problems” with CIA intelligence-gathering.
In February 2007, the Pentagon’s inspector general… concluded that Feith’s office “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.”
Senator Carl Levin… stated that “The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration’s decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general’s report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war.”“
It sounds like everyone, including they themselves (for instance, Feith) agrees that the OSP wanted an attack on Iraq. Would they have criticized the CIA so if the CIA was also providing the intel to justify such an attack?
Quite small. When I was in grad school, I took every single course my principle advisor taught when I was there (at least six) plus audited all of his undergraduate courses and continued to audit even after I had finished my coursework. This was very common among fellow students studying with the same group of profs.
Strauss' students were, from all I have read and heard, even more devoted than this. Harry Jaffa, for instance, attended every course or lecture Strauss gave for seven years, even after he had completed his Ph.D. and had a full time job. He only stopped when he moved from Chicago to Columbus, OH for a job. George Anastaplo, who never left Chicago, attended all of Strauss' classes until Strauss' forced retirement in 1967 (by which time Anastaplo was well into middle age). There are many stories like this about Strauss's students from the '50s and '60s.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bill
Is it a humanities thing then? Three is a lot of different graduate courses for a professor to teach in most social and hard sciences.
That doesn’t seem to be the way the wikipedia page on Office of Special Plans sees it
Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information of political topics, it’s a mouthpiece for the American Left. In spite of Wikipedias (and your own) revisionist history, it was widely accepted in the days before Bush was elected President that Iraq was an active supporter of terrorism.
You can read the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq. That was the product of the establishment intelligence apparatus. Their assessments were consistent with those of the Clinton era.
[i]Iraq’s growing ability to sell oil illicitly increases Baghdad’s capabilities to finance WMD programs; annual earnings in cash and goods have more than quadrupled, from $580 million in 1998 to about $3 billion this year.
Iraq has largely rebuilt missile and biological weapons facilities damaged during Operation Desert Fox and has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.
Baghdad has exceeded UN range limits of 150 km with its ballistic missiles and is working with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which allow for a more lethal means to deliver biological and, less likely, chemical warfare agents.
…
We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX; its capability probably is more limited now than it was at the time of the Gulf war, although VX production and agent storage life probably have been improved.
An array of clandestine reporting reveals that Baghdad has procured covertly the types and quantities of chemicals and equipment sufficient to allow limited CW agent production hidden within Iraq’s legitimate chemical industry.
Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents–much of it added in the last year.
The Iraqis have experience in manufacturing CW bombs, artillery rockets, and projectiles. We assess that they possess CW bulk fills for SRBM warheads, including for a limited number of covertly stored Scuds, possibly a few with extended ranges.[/i]
Again, this was the establishment CIA. Whatever OSP was recommending was irrelevant; the official intelligence apparatus was saying Iraq had WMD, and that was a sufficient reason (among others) to justify the war, without an assist from OSP.
@ manton – you are, of course, familiar with the Phaedo, & Socrates’ well known “intellectual autobiography,” 96a – 102a.
Do you think that his resounding rejection of the new scientific/atheistic worldview imported from Ionia to Athens by Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was insincere?
“Is it a humanities thing then? Three is a lot of different graduate courses for a professor to teach in most social and hard sciences.”
Couldn’t really say. We Straussians are in an odd situation. Most Straussian professors are in PolSci or government departments, i.e., formally in the social sciences. But they primarily teach “theory” or political philosophy, which looks a lot more like the humanities than like quant-driven political science, or even institutional analysis. So we are kind of neither here nor there.
In any case, my experience and observation is that people choose a grad school in part for the strength of the program and in part to study with one particular professor. Then you spend as much time with that prof as you possibly can. I know I did with mine. I had to take a lot of classes and took several from other profs, some because they were good, some because required, some because there just wasn’t anything better available.
Wolfowitz, having been exposed to Bloom, no doubt sought Strauss out and Strauss was an influence. But Wohlstetter was his “mentor,” the one he spent all his time with. He has done, to the best of my knowledge, no academic work on political philosophy, Straussian or otherwise. All his published work is in the realist-hard power-IR vein that he learned from Wohlstetter.
I think a big reason that Wolfowitz is considered some uber-Straussian is because he remained friendly with Bloom until Bloom’s death (1992) and they used to have long phone conversations in which Wolfowitz fed Bloom gossip about the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations. This is depicted in the Saul Bellow roman a clef Ravelstein, which is about Bloom (1999, I think). When the “Strauss Caused Iraq” mania emerged in 2003 (thanks to James Atlas, who damn well knows better), people seized on that as some kind of smoking gun.
“Do you think that his resounding rejection of the new scientific/atheistic worldview imported from Ionia to Athens by Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was insincere?”
No, I don’t think it was insincere. But I also don’t think the surface account is complete / final / exhaustive, etc.
Look, for instance, at Apology 26d where, in the course of dismissing Anaxagoras’ doctrines, Socrates slyly admits that he read all his books.
Similarly, in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, in the course of seemingly denying that Socrates investigated the cosmos like the pre-Socratics, he adds a careful qualifier: “he did not converse about the nature of all things in the way most of the others did” (I 1.11). (Emphasis added). Or, later: “he never ceased examining with his companions what each of the beings is” (IV 6.1). (Emphasis added.)
In other words, the defense against the charge of atheism seems (or at least seemed to Plato and Xenophon) to require a denial of the charge of being a “natural philosopher” as depicted in The Clouds. “Science-oriented” philosophy was considered inherently atheistic, but the “second sailing”—the dialectical inquiry the good, the noble, the just, etc.—was not. At least, that’s the case P and X try to make.
I think it’s clear from the totality of statements that Socrates DID have a “second sailing” that caused him to investigate the human things. But that he never fully abandoned the study of nature, he just concealed the extent to which it was central to his thought. Also—and this comes through the Phaedo and in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus–Socrates in part moved away from the study of nature to the study of politics and ethics because he judged that he had taken the study of nature as far as it could go, or at least as far as he could take it with the tools available. It’s not that it was no longer interesting to him. It was more that, he intuited that the study of nature was not going to lead him to wisdom about the whole, and also that the study of material nature did not yield great insight into the nature of man and the human things. Those had to be investigated on their own terms, as discreet wholes that are greater than whatever “materialistic” account of their substance could provide.
In other words, medical science cannot tell you what a man is or why the study of man is necessary or good. Science cannot answer the question “Why science?”
Socrates does, I think, reject pre-Socratic materialism but he does not so much reject the study of physical nature as turn away from it once he thinks he has gotten out of it all he can. It’s never absent from his mind, though.
“…people choose a grad school in part for the strength of the program and in part to study with one particular professor. Then you spend as much time with that prof as you possibly can…”
Well, indeed – ’cause the right connections matter more than everything else put together – if what you’re after is material success.
"...people choose a grad school in part for the strength of the program and in part to study with one particular professor. Then you spend as much time with that prof as you possibly can..."
Well, indeed - 'cause the right connections matter more than everything else put together - if what you're after is material success.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Being a classicist is the easy road to the big house on the 18th hole of Pebble Beach.
I took a course in “Pre-Socratic Philosophy” at Rice when I was 17. I thought it would be like Socratic philosophy, just pre, with everybody standing around debating What Is the Good and other questions that appeal to the 17-year-old mind. It turned out to be that the pre-Socratic philosophers actually had conflicting scientific theories (e.g., everything is made of water, everything is made of atoms, everything is actually one thing) but no way to test them or make much progress with them once they had enunciated them. To a freshman like me looking for a class in Pre-Sophomoric Philosophy, it was tedious. (Now, at my age, it seems interesting …)
First of all, Strauss had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war. Nor, really, did any Straussians. Wolfowitz is often cited as some Straussian mastermind but the truth is, he took a couple of undergraduate classes from Bloom at Cornell, then (IIRC) a grand total of three graduate classes with Strauss at Chicago, where he spent the overwhelming bulk of his time with Albert Wohlstetter, who supervised his PhD. Abe Shulksy is a genuine Straussian who was somewhere in DoD in Bush’s 1st term (I forgot exactly where). And that’s about it. The one Straussian with the greatest proximity to Bush was … me. And I was nobody, powerless. My opinion was neither desired nor solicited. I had a job to do and I did it. Please read the books by Peter Minowitz and Robert Howse on this point. The facts are all there, carefully laid out.
If you want to argue that Strauss “inspired” the war somehow, that’s an almost impossible case to make based on his actual oeuvre. He never wrote about contemporary issues. There was one letter to the editor of NR on Israel in 1957. It’s about 200 words. If you want to look for “hidden meanings” then I would point you to his essay on Thucydides, which goes into great detail on the wisdom and justice of imperialism and conquest. Short version: Strauss says Thucydides comes out against, and Strauss is more or less with him. Or read his very long Thoughts on Machiavelli which goes into the same theme at great length and makes a similar conclusion, in the course of rejecting Machiavelli’s elaborate argument in favor of imperialism.
On the larger question of esotericism: you say that the notion that Greek gods weren’t real was hardly news to anyone. Not so fast. Socrates was executed in part for “not believing in the gods of the city.” So at that point, at least, Athens still took its gods seriously enough to execute Socrates on suspicion of atheism (a charge he denied).
Socrates himself wrote nothing. Only one work was written about him before his death, Aristophanes’ Clouds, which depicts Socrates as openly atheistic. It probably contributed to his eventual trial and conviction. It may also have helped convince him to change the public presentation, and even the internal content, of his teaching.
Strauss (and others) have shown that at the time of Socrates’ activity (the “golden age” of Athens), belief in the gods was weakening among the elite, though still relatively strong among the people. While Athens was formally democratic, it was really ruled be an elite aristocratic cabal throughout this period—a cabal much like the one that Steve and many of his readers imagine lied the US into Iraq. This cabal was pretty openly cynical. See the famous Melian dialogue in Thucydides (II 34-46). Thucydides however believes that this nihilistic cynicism contributed to Athens’ eventual loss.
That aside, this points to another reason for esotericism. The belief or non-belief in thunderbolt-hurling Zeus is, for a sophisticated mind, secondary to the question of natural justice. Let’s assume that no intelligent Athenian circa 400 BC could possibly believe in the literal truth of the Homeric gods. OK, once those “gods are dead” what does that mean? Does it mean that there is no justice? There is no cosmic or natural grounding for right and wrong? That “nothing is true, everything is permitted”?
Socrates steps forward to argue “No.” But his “no” is a complex and sophisticated “no” that is not easy to grasp.
All of Plato’s 35 dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. They are intended, in part, to refute the charges that led to his execution—or, as Bloom put it, they are “rehabilitation of a condemned man.” They also tell a story. They are dramas, not treatises. Plato gives indications of the temporal order in which the conversation should be understood to have taken place. There is a broad “arc” but I want to focus on one aspect.
Temporally, the first dialogue appears to be the Protagoras. In this dialogue, a relatively young Socrates (~30; cf. Christ beginning his ministry at 30) debates and defeats the most celebrated wise man (sophist) of the time, Protagoras, in front of a large audience. This establishes Socrates’ reputation. In particular, two of the most talented and high-born youths in Athens, Alcibiades and Critias, become ardent followers.
Now, Alcibiades and Critias turned out to be very bad guys. It’s quite a long story, but the former turned out to be a traitor who helped Athens lose the Peloponnesian War while the latter became one of the infamous Thirty Tyrants. This was 30+ years after the dialogue, but still. Socrates was blamed for how these two turned out and it factored into the charges at his trial (“corrupting the youth”).
The dialogues esoterically show that Socrates misjudged these two. He thought they were fit for philosophy and so he taught them “the truth.” But they “could not handle the truth.” They took it as a justification for tyranny, for their own superiority, and their freedom to crush the little people like ants.
Socrates realized he had blown it. The Republic is as it were his “correction”. He teaches a number of youths in that book. All have the political gene, but none turns out to be a tyrant. In particular, what these young people want to know is “Why should I be just? What’s in it for me?” Socrates gives a very cagey and elaborate answer. Basically, he creates a myth that becomes one of the pillars of Western Civilization. The truth is that there IS a reason to be moral, but it is not sufficiently comprehensible to any but the few who are capable of philosophy. So speaking this truth openly only serves to bolster atheism, nihilism, selfishness, tyranny and immorality. Hence it must be obscured with esotericism.
And, part of the esoteric teaching of the dialogues (and of Xenophon’s Socratic writings) is to defend, on the surface, Socrates against the charge that he is responsible for Alcibiades and Critias, while the deeper teaching is to show how in fact Socrates’ early misjudgment in fact did serve to corrupt those two. The purpose, or one purpose, of the esoteric teaching is to be true to the historical facts and more important to show what went wrong so that later philosophers won’t make the same mistake.
There’s a great deal more to esotericism in Plato than just this, it should go without saying.
Beyond this, as Strauss shows, the most ironclad examples of esotericism are the Islamic and Jewish medievals. On the surface, their books purport to show that philosophy and revealed religion are fully compatible. Beneath the surface, they show something else. We owe to these writers that philosophy survived the dark ages.\Replies: @Bliss, @Bill, @Anonymous
Thank you for this comment. It was enlightening, interesting, and timely, and has set my brain working on paths I had not previously delved deeply enough into.
Steve,
I never studied the pre-Socratics with any care. You have to learn a little about them when you study Plato, et al, but it’s hard because none of their works survive. All we have are fragments. The aforementioned Parmenides is though a pretty good intro to pre-Socratic philosophy. As noted, Socrates doesn’t say much. Rather, Parmenides and Zeno—two prototypical pre-Socratics—do almost all the talking. And the subject matter is just what you noted: motion v. rest, unity v. multiplicity, eternity v. “temporarity” and so on. The dialogue is considered one of the hardest in Plato, if not THE hardest, and it has defeated me many times. If you want to read it, I recommend the Whittaker translation.
Really, though, the pre-Socratics are only of historical interest at this point, unlike the Socratics. That’s because we know through modern natural science that their doctrines are almost all wrong. But not all. E.g., Pythagoras figured out before Columbus that the world is round; Thales predicted a solar eclipse attributed by others to the gods; Aristarchus posited a heliocentric universe (not solar system, but still), etc.
On this latter, as an aside, there is an old anecdote about Strauss in the classroom. Apparently they were studying some early modern text, Vico or somebody, and the discussion veered off onto Galileo. Somebody noted a famous quote by a scientifically minded cardinal of the time who said, of Galileo’s telescope, that “If it contradicts Aristotle, it is wrong; if it confirms Aristotle, it is superfluous.” To which Strauss replied, “Aristotle would be been the first one to look through the telescope.”
But Aristotle’s natural science—his Physics, Parts of Animals and so on—are all wrong, wrong, wrong. However, the Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian ethical-political teaching is still highly relevant and—this is really the core of Strauss’s life’s work—superior to all modern alternatives. The “dead end” that occasioned Socrates’ “second sailing” still stands. If Socrates were alive today, he would spend as much time as he could with a super-collider, and then with the Hubbell Telescope, and possibly with neuroscientists. But eventually he would hit the same brick wall—he would learn all he could, and it still would not explain the noble, the good, the just, and so on. And so he would turn back to dialectic, just the real Socrates did sometime between 450 and 433 BC.
“Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information of political topics”
Wikipedia is surely not reliable as a balanced source of political information, but direct quotes from people in OSP are surely a reliable source of information about the people in the OSP, about what their objectives were, and about what they were trying to achieve.
Are you claiming those quotes from the wikipeida article on the OSP are wrong?
Are you claiming those quotes from the wikipeida article on the OSP are wrong?
I’m saying they’re irrelevant, even if true. The case for war coalesced around a number of issues, including WMD, the attempted assassination of a former US President, violations of the ceasefire agreement, and violations of the oil-for-food sanctions, along with the murky connections between al Qaeda and Iraq. You’ll notice that the left always describes the contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda as not forming an “operational relationship,” which isn’t quite the same as “no relationship.” In the post 9/11 environment even murky connections between a state actor with (it was thought) WMD and al Qaeda was deeply worrying. OSP sent around a classified memo providing a list of the CIA’s raw intel reports on the contacts, so decision makers would have a better idea of what questions to ask about the IC’s interpretation of the reports.
The CIA was completely on board with the WMD issue, as they had been during the Clinton administration. The NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and vetted through untold numbers of committees and editors. A large part of the hostility towards OSP was perceived poaching on the bureaucratic turf of the IC.
I never studied the pre-Socratics with any care. You have to learn a little about them when you study Plato, et al, but it’s hard because none of their works survive. All we have are fragments. The aforementioned Parmenides is though a pretty good intro to pre-Socratic philosophy. As noted, Socrates doesn’t say much. Rather, Parmenides and Zeno—two prototypical pre-Socratics—do almost all the talking. And the subject matter is just what you noted: motion v. rest, unity v. multiplicity, eternity v. “temporarity” and so on. The dialogue is considered one of the hardest in Plato, if not THE hardest, and it has defeated me many times. If you want to read it, I recommend the Whittaker translation.
Really, though, the pre-Socratics are only of historical interest at this point, unlike the Socratics. That’s because we know through modern natural science that their doctrines are almost all wrong. But not all. E.g., Pythagoras figured out before Columbus that the world is round; Thales predicted a solar eclipse attributed by others to the gods; Aristarchus posited a heliocentric universe (not solar system, but still), etc.
On this latter, as an aside, there is an old anecdote about Strauss in the classroom. Apparently they were studying some early modern text, Vico or somebody, and the discussion veered off onto Galileo. Somebody noted a famous quote by a scientifically minded cardinal of the time who said, of Galileo’s telescope, that “If it contradicts Aristotle, it is wrong; if it confirms Aristotle, it is superfluous.” To which Strauss replied, “Aristotle would be been the first one to look through the telescope.”
But Aristotle’s natural science—his Physics, Parts of Animals and so on—are all wrong, wrong, wrong. However, the Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian ethical-political teaching is still highly relevant and—this is really the core of Strauss’s life’s work—superior to all modern alternatives. The “dead end” that occasioned Socrates’ “second sailing” still stands. If Socrates were alive today, he would spend as much time as he could with a super-collider, and then with the Hubbell Telescope, and possibly with neuroscientists. But eventually he would hit the same brick wall—he would learn all he could, and it still would not explain the noble, the good, the just, and so on. And so he would turn back to dialectic, just the real Socrates did sometime between 450 and 433 BC.Replies: @Anonymous
Aristarchus was not a pre-Socratic, but hundreds of years later. The Hellenistic astronomers are venerated as achieving great things, but their actual work does not survive (perhaps why you confused him with the pre-Socratics). You are probably referring to Archimedes’s treatment of Aristarchus when you say that he posited a heliocentric universe, rather than a heliocentric solar system. I don’t think that’s fair to him. It seems pretty clear that he believed that the Earth revolved about the Sun and that the stars were very far away. But did he believe that there was a single sphere of stars at the edge of the universe, so far away? a bit odd. Others, I think before him, had proposed that the stars were other suns, and I have seen it claimed that he held this, but that is probably also unwarranted.
“I’m saying they’re irrelevant, even if true. The case for war coalesced around a number of issues…”
But the issue here isn’t how the war started, I was trying to address who the (so-called in some circles I guess) “Strassians” were. The term seems to have been applied to the people is the Office of Special Plans, although the neo-con term became more widespread.
I don’t know the specifics on the OSP people, but I would have probably just called them “ex-Scoop Jackson Democrats”: “For decades, Democrats who supported a strong international presence for the United States have been called “Scoop Jackson Democrats””
( Jackson was the Democratic congressman/senator in whose district Boeing was in. For a long time he was the most-hawkish Democrat. This seems to have attracted a lot of political Jewish people to work for him who favored a vigorous foreign policy in the middle east (nothing particularly wrong in advocating for that, especially in the open). Later many of these ended up in the OSP, that, whatever it’s success, was trying to stovepipe intelligence into the Bush administration; a number were members of the Bush administration.)
A quick google finds this article, “Right stuff: the main players”, The Guardian, September 2003. This was written before it was known how all this would turn out.
Now, The Guardian is an unabashedly leftist paper, but that makes this description of these “rightists” all the more interesting (and the extracts here are just brief bios without a lot of editoralizing):
“Paul Wolfowitz“The most visible neocon in Washington, …power transcends his… title of deputy secretary of defence. Like almost all neocons, he is a former Democrat, combining a liberal sense of mission to spread democratic ideas with a traditional conservative readiness to use military force. …
Richard Perle Wolfowitz’s mentor… Like many a neocon, he began his career working for the hawkish Democratic senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson before defecting to the Republicans. …
Douglas Feith Another veteran Scoop Jackson Democrat, Feith stands out for his close ties with Israel’s Likud party. His former law company had offices in Washington and Tel Aviv… he became undersecretary of defence for policy, overseeing the office of special plans and its search for damning “intelligence” on Iraq, he remained open to input from Sharon government…
Elliott Abrams The White House’s chief adviser on the Middle East became notorious in the Reagan administration when he admitted misleading Congress about the Iran-contra scandal. Abrams, yet another Scoop Jackson graduate, backed Likud on the Middle East…”
But the issue here isn't how the war started, I was trying to address who the (so-called in some circles I guess) "Strassians'' were. The term seems to have been applied to the people is the Office of Special Plans, although the neo-con term became more widespread.
I don't know the specifics on the OSP people, but I would have probably just called them "ex-Scoop Jackson Democrats": "For decades, Democrats who supported a strong international presence for the United States have been called "Scoop Jackson Democrats""
( Jackson was the Democratic congressman/senator in whose district Boeing was in. For a long time he was the most-hawkish Democrat. This seems to have attracted a lot of political Jewish people to work for him who favored a vigorous foreign policy in the middle east (nothing particularly wrong in advocating for that, especially in the open). Later many of these ended up in the OSP, that, whatever it's success, was trying to stovepipe intelligence into the Bush administration; a number were members of the Bush administration.)
A quick google finds this article, "Right stuff: the main players", The Guardian, September 2003. This was written before it was known how all this would turn out.
Now, The Guardian is an unabashedly leftist paper, but that makes this description of these "rightists" all the more interesting (and the extracts here are just brief bios without a lot of editoralizing):
"Paul Wolfowitz"The most visible neocon in Washington, ...power transcends his... title of deputy secretary of defence. Like almost all neocons, he is a former Democrat, combining a liberal sense of mission to spread democratic ideas with a traditional conservative readiness to use military force. ...
Richard Perle Wolfowitz's mentor... Like many a neocon, he began his career working for the hawkish Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson before defecting to the Republicans. ...
Douglas Feith Another veteran Scoop Jackson Democrat, Feith stands out for his close ties with Israel's Likud party. His former law company had offices in Washington and Tel Aviv... he became undersecretary of defence for policy, overseeing the office of special plans and its search for damning "intelligence" on Iraq, he remained open to input from Sharon government...
Elliott Abrams The White House's chief adviser on the Middle East became notorious in the Reagan administration when he admitted misleading Congress about the Iran-contra scandal. Abrams, yet another Scoop Jackson graduate, backed Likud on the Middle East..."Replies: @Steve Sailer
My cousin was a junior staffer for Sen. Henry Jackson back in the day. I should ask him about Perle, etc.
Sorry, that was sloppy on my part.
I should have said that not only has nearly all pre-Socratic natural science been proved wrong, but all ANCIENT science, pre- or post-. (Which is why I include Aristotle in that post; he wrote more about natural science than anyone, and unlike most of the others, we have many of his works).
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al made almost no appreciable advance in the natural sciences over the pre-Socratics (math is another story). Hence studying all these doctrines—the four elements, the spheres, etc.—is of only historical interest. In the case of the pre-Socratics, since that’s their primary focus, there is pretty much no other reason to study them. Whereas Plato and Aristotle have much of value to say on topics that transcend natural science, which is why they are still worth reading beyond mere historical value (who thought what, when).
“The CIA was completely on board with the WMD issue, as they had been during the Clinton administration. The NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and vetted through untold numbers of committees and editors.”
I did a quick google on this. I don’t doubt that the NIE was vetted by all and sundry and that the CIA was on board with the WMD. But what does this mean? How deep did this “on board” go? Was it because everyone was on board in the CIA, or just key folks at the top in more political positions? Was it “on board” in a political sense or in an intel estimate sense? It’s easy to fall into groupthink at the top, and this may well have happened, especially looking back with hindsight.
It’s clear that if they were all onboard, they all got it wrong. Why was this? Isn’t it interesting that what’s probably the biggest intelligence apparatus the world has ever assembled, spending bazzilions of dollars in spy satellites, apparently able to monitor all phone metadata, track cell phone positions, spy on all computer communications, etc., got something so big and basic wrong? Where they all spoofed by Sadam? Or did they have to work hard to get it wrong because they weren’t interested in the truth?
I think it likely there was a culture of fostered expectations that lead to the intel reflecting what influential people wanted. Big picture intel no longer had that much to do with the truth. (And this wasn’t a left or right thing.)
“Richard Kerr, a 32-year CIA veteran who served three years as deputy director…, was commissioned to lead a review of agency analysis of Iraqi WMD claims… produced a series of reports, one of which is unclassified. Kerr told journalist Robert Dreyfuss that CIA analysts felt intimidated by the Bush administration, saying, “A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions … . I talked to a lot of people who said, ‘There was a lot of repetitive questioning. We were being asked to justify what we were saying again and again.’ There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had.” In a January 26, 2006 interview, Kerr acknowledged this had resulted in open antagonism between some in the CIA and the Bush White House…”
One of the reasons for these guys being called Strassians was probably because the
Office of Special Plans was directed by a guy named Abram Shulsky who did his PhD under Strauss:
“…Shulsky served as Director of the Office of Special Plans…
…Shulsky favors a military intelligence model which can be used support policy as, in Shulsky’s words, “truth is not the goal” of intelligence operations, but “victory”.
…At Cornell and Chicago, he roomed with Paul Wolfowitz. Shulsky earned his doctorate under political philosopher Leo Strauss. He is a neoconservative scholar and Straussian.
…Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advocated the creation of the pro-war OSP as he “was impatient with the C.I.A.””
Why would the CIA go along with the OSPs view? This might be one reason:
“After the OSP took control of providing “intelligence” to justify the invasion of Iraq, many veteran intelligence officers were forced into retirement or transferred to other positions despite years of service. Shulsky developed the “intelligence” received by the White House.”
From the postwar Senate report on OSP:
“The Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen.Jay Rockefeller twice alleged that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, or its former head Douglas Feith may have engaged in unlawful activities, Phase II of the report “found nothing to substantiate that claim; nothing unlawful about the “alleged” rogue intelligence operation in the PCTEG , nothing unlawful about the Office of Special Plans, and nothing unlawful about the so-called failure to inform Congress of alleged intelligence activities.”
An earlier Senate report said
“The report partially looks at the question of whether pressure was brought to bear on intelligence analysts to get them to shape their assessments to support particular policy objectives. It recounts how Sen. Roberts made repeated public calls for any analysts who believed they had been pressured to alter their assessments to speak with the Committee about their experiences. The Committee also attempted to identify and interview several individuals who had described such pressure in media reports and government documents. The report says that the Committee did not find any evidence that administration officials tried to pressure analysts to change their judgments….”
From the report:
“25. The shortened NIE coordination process did not unfairly suppress the National Ground Intelligence Center’s slightly more cautious estimates of Iraq’s CW stockpile.
26. The Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgements in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion, but the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD affected the analytic process.”
On al Qaeda contacts:
“Much of the Committee’s investigation in this area concerned the CIA’s preparation and distribution of a document titled Iraqi Support for Terrorism. An initial version of this document was distributed to senior Bush administration officials in September, 2002; an updated version of the document was provided to Congress in January, 2003. The conclusion of CIA analysts was that although Saddam Hussein’s government had likely had several contacts with al Qaeda during the 1990s, “those contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.” The CIA also attempted to determine the attitudes that Iraqi and al-Qaeda leadership held toward the possibility of working cooperatively with each other. The available intelligence in this area suggested that Iraqi and al-Qaeda leaders would be wary of working together.”
Again, in the environment that followed 9/11, any contacts between a regime like Saddam’s, which was believed to have WMD, and al Qaeda was deeply worrisome.
Essentially the CIA was hoodwinked by Iraqi deception operations. In 1990 Iraq was trying to convince the world it didn’t have a (nuclear) WMD program when it did; in 2002 they were trying to create the impression they had a WMD program when they didn’t. (This was something of a double bank shot. They couldn’t say they had a WMD program, but they wanted to create the impression they did, probably to keep the Iranians off balance.) The CIA fell for both deception operations, with nearly disastrous consequences in both instances. Most other intelligence organizations made the same errors about Iraq. One can go on for quite a long time about the failings of the CIA, including their frequent failures at human intelligence. The Cuban intelligence service has run rings around them.
The CIA’s record on discovering nuclear WMD programs is fairly poor. They seem to have blown it on India, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq 1990, Iraq 2002, and South Africa. Dunno about their reporting on Israel.
Ironically, one effect of the Iraq war was to end a genuine nuclear WMD program, that of Libya. Off by 1500 miles, but hey.
Regarding the Senate report on the OSP, there’s no suggestion in the quoted material that the OSP wasn’t trying to do everything they could to push for their view of things (an invasion was needed to make the world safe from Saddam). That was probably their purpose and they were probably good at it. The objection to the OSP isn’t that they were doing something illegal or unlawful. It’s that, as their director once must have said, “truth is not the goal”.
Now I know that truth and the intelligence world probably seem pretty funny together, but if you fool yourself long enough pretty soon you’re just screwing up big-time (did Yogi Bera say that?).
The extract of the report you quote might be from the
Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq.
The point about CIA analysts not being pressured is one of the stronger points of the quoted material. Having seen the article on the Office of Special Plans, I’m not sure this is quite in accord with the last sentence there: “When Former NSA Chief General Michael Hayden testified before the Senate Hearing on his nomination as Director of Central Intelligence in May 2006… He… acknowledged that after “repeated inquiries from the Feith office” he put a disclaimer on NSA intelligence assessments of Iraq/al-Qaeda contacts.”
The full Senate report (a PDF) is here.
The same wiki page that you may be quoting from says this:
“This was a bi-partisan majority report (10-5) and “details inappropriate, sensitive intelligence activities conducted by the DoD’s Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department.” It concludes that the US Administration “repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.” These included President Bush’s statements of a partnership between Iraq and Al Qa’ida, that Saddam Hussein was preparing to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, and Iraq’s capability to produce chemical weapons.
…
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.””
Maybe Saddam blustered and everyone believed him. Or maybe the intelligence was simply, perhaps in a lengthy institutional way, never unbiased. Or maybe the Republicans and the Democrats were playing so much politics with each other that nobody really cared about the actual truth. Everything had become politics.
A minute of goggling find this summary of the Senate report on pre-war intelligence. This link is on a George Washington University site, so it may very will be left-biased. It’s supposed to be a summary, though, so I’m guessing they’d be called to task if it’s too far off base:
“The… long-awaited SSCI “Phase II” report… …Among the findings:
* The Phase II report… indicates that political manipulation extended beyond the intelligence itself to affect investigation of the intelligence failures on Iraq…
* In conjunction with other recently declassified materials, …report shows… the… administration solicited intelligence then used to “substantiate” its public claims.
* A recently declassified draft of the CIA’s October 2002 white paper on Iraqi WMD programs demonstrates that that paper long pre-dated the compilation of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi capabilities.
* A comparison of the CIA draft white paper with its publicly released edition shows that all the changes made were in the nature of strengthening its charges against Iraq by inserting additional alarming claims, in the manner of an advocacy, or public relations document. The draft and final papers show no evidence of intelligence analysis applied to the information contained. Similar comparison of the British white paper shows the same phenomenon at work.
* Declassified Pentagon documents demonstrate that the CIA white paper was modified in ways that conformed to the desires of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and his office, in much the same way that British documents indicate that country’s white paper was changed to conform to the desires of the Blair government.
The many official investigations and unofficial investigations carried out, plus the statements and speeches of former CIA officials defending themselves against charges of distortion, have established a few points beyond question. Most important, following Saddam Hussein’s 1998 final expulsion of UN weapons inspectors from Iraq, very little new information fell into the hands of U.S. intelligence.”
The final point agrees with your (broomstick’s) core point. The US intelligence apparatus actually didn’t know much about what was going on in Iraq.
This isn’t exclusive of my point about the OSP apparently manufacturing the evidence that was needed or missing, if you will. From this googling I (think I’ve) learned that it was the OSP who was pushing Ahmad Chalabi and the Curvball informant. Is this so?
I’ve also learned that Strauss apparently was a proponent of the government using the “noble lie” to manipulate the citizens. Is that true? It fits with Steve’s article…
“I’ve also learned that Strauss apparently was a proponent of the government using the ‘noble lie’ to manipulate the citizens. Is that true?”
No. Strauss was honest about the meaning of the “noble lie” in Plato’s Republic, unlike the scholarly consensus at the time, which took the view that Plato is good, and democracy is good, therefore Plato must be in favor for democracy even though the text seems to indicate that he isn’t, and furthermore things like the “noble lie” can’t mean what they seem to mean, so let’s get to work muddying up the issue. Strauss, by contrast, was honest about what Plato really meant. I find in all his works no endorsement, much less a recommendation, to apply the lesson to contemporary use.
I’m not going to get into this pre-war intel debate, except to say this: having been there and been around these people, my overwhelming impression was that no one thought he was “lying.” Everyone who argued that Iraq was a WMD threat honestly believed it.
The purpose of the “noble lie” by the way is something Steve and his readers should appreciate. It’s not to trick the citizenry into foreign adventures or any such thing. The specific content of the lie is to convince the people that the specific earth on which their polis (often translated “city-state” but is really more like a combination of “city” and “country” or “nation”) sits is literally their mother: they were all born out of that earth. The purpose, then, is to tie their loyalties to the land which they have to defend, and to each other, as all being related by blood.
Also, Plato (or the character of Socrates) posits a natural inequality of human beings, with three classes arising from birth (though a member of any given class by nature can be born to parents of the other classes; he will then be “reassigned”). The noble lie also conditions the population to except this class division as natural and to accept without rancor “reassignment” when “gold” children are taken from “bronze” parents (e.g,).
I should have said that not only has nearly all pre-Socratic natural science been proved wrong, but all ANCIENT science, pre- or post-. (Which is why I include Aristotle in that post; he wrote more about natural science than anyone, and unlike most of the others, we have many of his works).
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al made almost no appreciable advance in the natural sciences over the pre-Socratics (math is another story). Hence studying all these doctrines—the four elements, the spheres, etc.—is of only historical interest. In the case of the pre-Socratics, since that’s their primary focus, there is pretty much no other reason to study them. Whereas Plato and Aristotle have much of value to say on topics that transcend natural science, which is why they are still worth reading beyond mere historical value (who thought what, when).Replies: @Anonymouse
All their theories were wrong with one exception: Democritus/Leucippus and Lucretius in Roman times. The atomic theory which turned out to be the best theory according to modern science was an eery intuition on their part.