[MD] Neoconservatism

[david buchanan]

Matt and all:

Matt said:
I've noticed all the talk about Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss.  Richard Rorty 
went to school with Bloom and both were students of Strauss.  Rorty gave an 
interview in The Believer in 2003 which gives a slightly different take on 
the neocons and Bloom/Strauss.  The gist is that, no matter how theoretical 
some others may want to make them look, they're really just thugs.

dmb says:
Thanks for the interview. I gotta tell you though, Richard Rorty's responses 
went beyond frustrating and disappointing and into the realm of infuriating. 
The man is intellectually paralyzed and rhetorically inert. The guy is not 
helping here.

Matt, you've read Lila and must've realized that I was posting about the 
neocons because they so very well epitomize the neo-Victorian moral decline 
in Pirsig's diagnosis. I think Rorty's thoughts on this topic only serve to 
demonstrate how useless his pragmatism actually is.

Along the way to exploring this current in American intellectual history I 
had a hunch that an old book I'd picked up at a garage sale would be 
helpful; Richard Hofstadter's SOCIAL DARWINISM IN AMERICAN THOUGHT. This 
book basically covers the time between the publication of Darwin's famous 
book and the second world war, with the neo-conservative movement begining 
just after the war. Anyway, the interesting thing was the original social 
darwinists were the original Victorians in the conservative period following 
the civil war. The social darwinists were basically offering a secular 
version of properity theology in which rich people were rich becasue god 
loved them more than the "lazy, stupid masses". I think its interesting that 
the original victorian social darwinists were opposed by pragmatists like 
William James. In fact, says Hofstadter, pagmatisim was basically invented 
as liberal a response to them. William James said that he recieved almost 
all of his political education from THE NATION, which is still the best news 
weekly of the left. He wrote articles for them too. And James was more than 
happy that John Dewey continued this liberal response at the university of 
Chicago, where Struss, Bloom and Rorty all attended. So, having recently 
re-discovered the liberal intellectual roots of pragmatism, I was excited at 
the prospect that Rorty was aware of this lineage too and would be 
elaborating on it in a meaty way. And what did I find instead? A big fat 
zero.

Sorry, Matt. I know you're a big fan. But I just don't see the appeal. I 
don't even see how its useful.

I suppose you think Pirsig's complaints about the pragmatists inability to 
prevent political horrors like fascism is just some lame and irrelevant 
tangent. But I think Rorty himself, at least, has very little to say about 
what's happening right in front of his nose. I would have hoped that he 
would feel responsible to help make sense of it all, but instead is 
dimissive. He just shruggs it off and the same old, same old. Well, It'll 
sound like empty thunder, but I gotta say that this is exactly the attitude 
that allowed Hitler's rise to power. Oh, he's too much of a clown to be 
dangerous, they thought. We'll be able to control this useful idiot, they 
thought. They thought wrong, didn't they?

Anyway, I've been posting poop on the neocons to show how the MOQ's 
distinctions really can help us sort these things out. I think the idea is 
basically that the neoVictorians or neocons or whatever, they want to solve 
the problems of modernity by returning to pre-modern values. In the case of 
the Straussians, the return was to classical values. But others among them 
have other ideas about what sort of pre-modernity was best. Some saw the 
pre-civil war south as the best model. Some saw medieval Christendom as the 
model. There were combinations too, but the thing they all agreed upon was 
that modernity and especially the concept of natural rights was a disaster. 
They all argeed that "virtue" was the goal of civilzation and not "freedom". 
You know, God was a gentleman through and through. And, in all probability, 
Episcopal too.

By contrast, Pirsig is offering a pragmatism that can sort out this mess. 
Unlike the neoviccons, the MOQ is an attempt to throw out the intellectual 
bathwater (SOM) without destroying the advances of modernity, most 
especially the very rights that the conservatives are so suspicious of.

C'mon, Matt. I'm sure you have no sympathy for these thugs and I sure would 
like to see you on my side here. Our disagreements about mysticism don't 
effect this area of the pragmatic tradition in America, right? Can you, at 
least, promise not to vote republican. Maybe I'm way off here. Maybe you're 
registered as a Republican and joined a church. Maybe you love war and hate 
women. But I seriously doubt it.

dmb

>
>Matt
>
>---------------
>
>BLVR: You’ve written that one of the reasons philosophy has become marginal 
>to culture is that people are tired of the philosophical pendulum that 
>swings between Plato and the Romantics, and between Socrates and the 
>Pragmatists, that we don’t have the patience to listen to disagreements 
>between those who seek sweeping, synoptic universalistic grandeur and those 
>who seek ineffable and inexhaustible depth. It seems to me that those 
>arguments are still going on. There was an article in the Times in early 
>April about the roles of philosophers, political scientists and historians 
>in the current administration, and the writer traced the intellectual 
>genealogy of this group—people like Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill 
>Bennett, Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Bill Kristol—back to the 
>philosopher Leo Strauss [1899–1973], and his student Allan Bloom. Strauss 
>was the epitome of the modern Platonist. He had severe doubts about 
>democracy, because he thought that the lazy, stupid masses could never get 
>in touch with Truth, capital T, the way that the philosophers could. As a 
>Platonist, he thought that the Good was prior to the Right, that 
>philosophers should strive to answer the question “What is the good life 
>for man?” and set-up a political system accordingly, rather than allow for 
>a multiplicity of good lives. On the other hand, Todd Gitlin has written in 
>his recent book—Letters to a Young Activist—that the problem with the Green 
>Party is that they’re too hung up on authenticity and questions of 
>spiritual purity to make prudent compromises and thus get stuff done—the 
>Romantic side of the dialectic you’ve been describing. So how can you 
>square these debates with what you’ve said about our commonsensical 
>impatience with the swings of the philosophical pendulum?
>
>RR: I guess I don’t think there are any deep intellectual roots to either 
>the Bush Administration or the Greens. That is, I think of the Greens as 
>just expressing distaste for the two big parties. I mean, there may be a 
>lot of stuff about deep authenticity somewhere, but I think of most of the 
>three million votes that Nader got as just protest. Disastrous protest, as 
>it turns out. There are some Straussians in the Bush administration, but I 
>don’t think they have any particular importance, and a lot of the people 
>who get identified as Straussian intellectuals have nothing to do with 
>Strauss. Bennett doesn’t, for instance. I doubt he ever heard of Strauss 
>before he met young Kristol. So I think that it’s one thing to have doubts 
>about democracy—Posner has doubts about democracy, Schumpeter has doubts 
>about democracy, everybody has doubts about democracy. There are all kinds 
>of things wrong with it: it’s always in danger of populist fascism, 
>representative assemblies are always corruptible by bribes. Everybody knows 
>that. You don’t have to have a view about Plato and Truth to have doubts 
>about democracy. But, more importantly, I’m not at all sure Strauss would 
>have been interested in voting for Bush over Gore, because he thought that 
>American liberalism, including the welfare state, was a perfectly 
>reasonable arrangement. Because they’re both from the University of 
>Chicago, people connect Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss, but there isn’t 
>any particular connection. Strauss had nothing, so far as I know, against 
>the welfare state. Coming from Germany in the Twenties, he took the welfare 
>state for granted—they’d always had one.
>
>BLVR: But what about the rhetoric of this group of politically involved 
>Straussians? They put everything in terms of a moral crusade in the service 
>of Truth and Morality, and they take Plato’s ideas about the necessity of a 
>well-ordered, militarized, censoring polis as a call for a National 
>Security State. Those things seem like they’re in line with a 
>Straussian/Platonic political philosophy.
>
>RR: I don’t see that. Every government, left or right, always engages in 
>moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they 
>make war; any war has to be a moral crusade. There’s nothing in Plato or 
>Aristotle that suggests the virtues of a National Security State. Strauss 
>would have loathed the idea of the military-industrial complex.
>
>BLVR: In other words, the neoconservatives around the White House—Cheney 
>and Wolfowitz and the neocon Project for a New American Century—may trace 
>themselves back to a Straussian political philosophy and a Platonic love of 
>Truth, but that’s just a pretentious philosophical gloss on an 
>unphilosophical set of policies?
>
>RR: Yeah, exactly.
>
>BLVR: But even if it’s just rhetoric, it seems to me to be fairly powerful 
>rhetoric, and calling it rhetoric doesn’t explain away the problem of their 
>policies. In a response to the review you wrote of Allan Bloom’s The 
>Closing of the American Mind [in a 1991 issue of The New Republic], the 
>Straussian Harvey Mansfield wrote that “Nietzsche said that man would 
>rather will nothingness than will nothing. Strauss often quoted this 
>farseeing remark… [and suggested that] communism, in its desire to put an 
>end to class conflict, is essentially for wimps.” Democratic socialism gets 
>construed as a cowardly alternative to the bold, meritocratic fray. In 
>Letters to a Young Activist, Gitlin makes exactly this point: the 
>neoconservative movement has been so successful exactly because of its 
>Platonic rhetoric about toughness, and the disciplined moral pursuit of the 
>Truth at all costs. You’ve written that “the appeal to something 
>overarching and invulnerable, and the appeal to something ineffable and 
>deep, are both just advertising slogans—ways of gaining our attention.” 
>That may be true, but it seems unhelpful to dismiss the rhetoric as mere 
>sloganeering when it seems to be working.
>
>RR: Who is it supposed to be working on? How do you convince the public 
>that wanting social justice, the welfare state, trade unions, maybe not a 
>communist revolution, but a social democratic state, is wimpish? I don’t 
>see that anything in Greek philosophy or Strauss would help convince you of 
>that. You get convinced that the welfare state is philosophically wimpish 
>if you’re a selfish greedhead to begin with. Philosophy isn’t going to turn 
>you into one if you weren’t already. I think that people like William 
>Bennett are just pandering to evangelical Christians. If there’s an 
>intellectual influence on the Bush Administration, it comes out of the 
>Southern Baptist Convention, and those are the people who buy Bennett’s 
>books. They wouldn’t know Plato from a hole in the ground. Strauss would 
>have found it unbelievable to be linked with the Southern Baptist 
>Convention, standing for morality.
>
>BLVR: Let me try putting this another way. You claim that these 
>philosophical debates between Plato and Nietzsche, between the 
>universalists and Romantics, are really just a matter of discussion in 
>philosophy departments. But it seems like those debates might have a more 
>central political importance when it comes to arguing against these 
>neoconservatives we’ve been discussing, even if it’s just fluff, since 
>they’ve decided to frame the discussion in those terms. If someone like 
>you, someone with a pragmatic bent, came down hard against the Straussian 
>Platonism they brandish, don’t you think it would undermine their 
>influence?
>
>RR: I can’t see it that way. Michael Lind had a piece [in the New 
>Statesman] about the gang around Richard Perle and Wolfowitz, saying that 
>this is a very small, very special group of weirdos. They’re not the tip of 
>any iceberg. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time. 
>Cheney happened to get them all into the government at once, because he was 
>in charge of the transition, and that’s why we have this stuff going on in 
>the Middle East. But stranger things have happened in the history of 
>countries. Cabals do assume power in governments, and they carry all before 
>them. If Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t had the influence he did, we probably 
>wouldn’t have Puerto Rico, or occupied the Philippines. It wasn’t that 
>there was a vast swell of opinion behind Theodore Roosevelt.
>
>BLVR: So you have no interest in meeting any of those people on 
>philosophical terms, on the philosophical level upon which they want to be 
>taken seriously.
>
>RR: I just don’t believe that they do. I’d be very surprised if anybody 
>except the people who actually took the courses from Bloom, like Kristol or 
>maybe Wolfowitz, could even talk about this stuff, or would want to. Well, 
>actually, I wouldn’t mind having a discussion with them, because I’d like 
>to see them make the connection between Strauss and the present 
>administration. I don’t think they could do it for a minute.
>
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