[MD] Intellectual activity

[david buchanan]

Alice, Arlo, Craig, Platt, Ian and y'all:

Alice asked:
So Strauss came before Kristol and Thatcher? Please tell me more so I can 
Google this guy,...

Arlo answered:
Leo Strauss, a professor from Chicago. You should be able to find him, maybe 
Khaled can help you if you can't.

dmb says:
Hey Arlo, have a great vacation. Make sure you get a good look at the stars 
while you're there. The night sky is a whole different deal when you're out 
in the middle of the Pacific.

Hi Alice. Welcome to the talkfest. I'd like to offer some thoughts on the 
neocons...

Just in case you missed it, Khaled discovered a BBC documentary called 
"Power if Nightmares". Arlo and I posted about it just a little in the 
"Manufacturing Nightmare" thread a week or so ago. The Nation wrote a review 
about this same documentary in their June 20, 2005 issue. Just ask Mr Google 
to find "Beware the Holy War" by Peter Bergen.

Also, I have an old school book titled "The Conservative Intellectual 
Movement in America Since 1945", by George Nash. It was written by a 
conservative, for conservatives and is all about the rise of 
neo-conservatism. In fact, this book was assigned to me at a conservative 
college, by a conservative history professor in a class on American 
conservative intellectual history. I mention all this because, for the most 
part, I'm not a conservative, but at least I learned about it from 
conservatives. I mention all this because the stars of this post-war 
movement describe themselves in terms that many would consider slanderous 
and outrageous. The founders of this movement were not shy asserting overtly 
anti-modern, anti-democratic, anti-secular and anti-liberal views. I 
recently re-vistied this old book and I'd like to share some with you and 
all the MOQers. But first, I have to say that there are a couple of key 
ideas about politics in Pirsig's second book. I think the fun part of having 
a political debate here in this forum is that Pirsig offers some 
metaphysical explantions of the conflicts of our time. From Lila...

"Phaedrus thought that no other historical or political analysis explains 
the enormity of these forces as clearly as does the Metaphysica of Quality. 
The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelmed his 
century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution. This conflict 
explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an insane search for power 
but as an all-consuming glorification of social authority and hatred of 
intellectualism."

He's not saying that it all boils down to a choice between socialism and 
fascism, of course. This is just a stark example of a larger conflict 
between two distinct levels of evolution, the social and intellectual 
levels. We see a milder version of this same basic conflict in the 
difference between liberalism and conservatism. Also from Lila...

"In the U.S. the economic and social upheavel was not so great as in Europe, 
but Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, nevertheless, became the center of 
a lesser storm between social and intellectual forces. The New Deal was many 
things, but at the center of it all was the belief that
intellectual planning by the government was necessary for society to regain 
its health. The New Deal was described as a program for farmers, laborers 
and poor people everywhere, but it was also a new deal for the intellectuals 
of America. Suddenly, for the first time, they were at the center of the 
planning process - these were people from a class that in the past could 
normally be hired for little more than laborers' wages. Now intellectuals 
were in a position to give orders to America's finest and oldest and 
wealthiest social groups. 'That man', as the old aristocrats sometimes 
called Roosevelt, was turning the whole USA over to foreign radicals, 
'eggheads', 'Commies' and the like. He was a 'traitor to his class'. 
Suddenly, before the old Victorians' eyes, a whole new social caste, a caste 
of intellectual Brahmins, was being created ABOVE their own military and 
economic castes."

The neo-conservative movement began after the New Deal and WW2 and today a 
version of it holds most of the power in this county. I think its well worth 
learning about this movement and I think its not too difficult to see where 
they land in the conflict between social and intellecual values. As Pirsig 
described it, the present period is actually one of moral decline. The 
"neo-victorians" are a movement back to social level values at the expence 
of intellectual progress. In this sense, Pirisg turns their idea of morality 
on its head. He points out that the puritanical values crowd is actually 
only pushing a limit and relatively less evolved morality. Again, from 
Lila...

"That was entirely within one code - the social code. Phaedrus thought that 
code was good enough as far as it went, but it really didn't go  anywhere. 
It didn't know its origins and it didn't know its own destinations, and not 
knowing them it had to be exactly what it was: hopelessly static, hopelessly 
stupid, a form of evil in itself. Evil.  ..If he'd called it that 150 years 
ago he might have gotten himself  into some real trouble. People got mad 
back then when you challenged their social institutions, and they tended to 
take reprisals. He might have gotten himself ostracized as some kind of a 
social menace. But today it's hardly a risk. Its more of a cheap shot. 
Everybody thinks those Victorian moral codes are stupid and evil, or 
old-fashioned at least, except maybe a few religious fundamentalists and 
ultra-right-wingers and ignorant uneducated people like that. ...That's what 
this whole century's been about, this struggle between intellectual and 
social patterns. That's the theme song of the twentieth century. Is society 
going to dominate the intellect or is intellect going to dominate society? 
... That was the thing this evolutionary morality brought out clearer than 
anything else. Intellect is not an extension of society any more than 
society is an extension of biology. Intellect is going its own way, and in 
doing so is at war with society, seeking to subjugate society, to put 
society under lock and key. An evolutionary morality says it is moral for 
intellect to do so, but it also contains a warning: Just as a society that 
weakens its people's physical health endangers its own stability, so does an 
intellectual pattern that weakens and destroys the health of its social base 
also endanger its own stability. Better to say "has endangered." It's 
already happened. This has been a century of fantastic intellectual growth 
and fantastic social destruction. The only question is how long this process 
can keep on."

As Pirsig's analysis goes, the problem is the subject/object metaphysical 
assumptions that inform the Modern West. The problem is not with intellect, 
liberalism, science or secular society in general, but with "amoral 
scientific materialism". Pirsig solution, roughly, is to expand rationality 
and morality in a way that preserves intellectual progress without 
undermining society values. He replaces the metaphysical assumptions of the 
materialists so that social values don't have to be in conflict with 
intellectual values.

As you may have gathered by now, we're basically talking about the 
difference between tradition and Modernity, between myth and rationality, 
between religion and science, etc.. In fact, I think its not an accident, 
Alice, that the Struass reviewer, professor Thomas Woods, writes for a 
Catholic publication and the title of his book is "The Church Confronts 
Modernity". That pretty well sums up the conflict between social and 
intellectual values, even if it is a bit too simple. But you see this basic 
conflict in just about every concern the neo-cons ever had. Like Pirsig, 
they had serious problems with Modernity, science and materialism, but their 
solution basically amounted to a return to pre-Modern faith. They saw 
liberalism, especially individual rights as the cause of this disaster. They 
thought freedom should be exchanged for virtue.

All the following quotes are from Nash's book. Richard Weaver was at the 
University of Chicago with Struass. As he put it. "The denial of everything 
transcending experience means inevitably... the denial of truth. With the 
denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of 'man is 
the measure of all things'." (Page 40) But "objective truth" in this 
sentence is not the objectivity of positivisim. No, they were talking about 
God's truth. As another early neocon put it, a Episcopal clergyman by the 
name of Bernard Bell, "If there is no God ...free love is defensible, and 
politics based on force is inevitable." (Page 47) He hated John Dewy and the 
New Yorker. In 1948 C.E.M. Joad wrote a defense of Christianity and was 
quoted in Time Magazine saying, "I see now that evil is endemic in man, and 
that the Christian doctrine of original sin expresses a deep and essential 
insight into human nature."  (Page 59) William F. Buckley and many other 
early neocons agreed emphatically on this point. In 1951 he said, "I myself 
believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important 
in the world." (page 59) Another founder of the movement, Peter Viereck 
defined this conservatism as "the political secularizaton of the doctrine of 
original sin". (Page 66)

In more recent times I heard somebody define neo-conservatism saying 
something like "neo-conservatism is whatever Bill Kristol says it is". But 
his father, Irving Kristol, was a Struassian and is considered the godfather 
of the movement. He wrote "Reflections of a Neoconservative" in 1983 and 
"Neoconservatism; The Autobiography of an Idea" in 1995.

>From the transcript of the "Power of Nightmares":
IRVING KRISTOL , Founder of Neoconservative movement: "The notion that a 
purely secular society can cope with all of the terrible pathologies that 
now affect our society, I think has turned out to be false. And that has 
made me culturally conservative. I mean, I really think religion has a role 
now to play in redeeming the country. And liberalism is not prepared to give 
religion a role. Conservatism is, but it doesn’t know how to do it."

Arlo quoted from the transcript:
"VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people 
to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were 
led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the 
shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this,
Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring 
myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were 
necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of 
the nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique
destiny to battle the forces of evil throughout the world..."

How's that for starters?

dmb

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