[MD] Quality decline

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting craigerb at comcast.net:

> [Jos]> I can't see anything online from which you could have derived such an
> [positive]> opinion [of Strauss]?
> Leo Strauss 101 EDWARD FESER An enormous amount of nonsense has been written about
> Leo Strauss over the last several years.

Thanks Craig. An fine antidote to the nonsense about Strauss written in this
forum.

Platt

(Craig's post cont'd)

> Liberal journalists who appear never to
> have read a word of the long-dead philosopher’s work assure us that the war in
> Iraq is a practical application of his ideas. Tim Robbins’s anti-war play Embedded
> portrays Strauss as a sinister ideologue who promoted deception of the masses as a
> means of fostering a militant nationalism. Nor has the nonsense all come from the
> political left. Conservative writer Daniel Flynn suggests, in his book
> Intellectual Morons, that Straussian methods of textual analysis may have led the
> Defense Department into a faulty reading of pre-war intelligence vis-à-vis
> Saddam’s purported WMD stockpiles. Yale professor Steven Smith’s book is intended,
> in part, to dispel such myths, and provides a sober and lucid overview of
> Strauss’s thinking about matters of philosophy, politics, and religion, albeit
> from Smith’s interpretive point of view. 
> His emphasis is on Strauss’s defense of liberal democracy as a solution to what he
> called the “theologico-political problem”; in Smith’s telling, Strauss’s defense
> rests on a kind of philosophical skepticism. Smith is clearly sympathetic to
> Strauss’s views as he understands them; he succeeds in his attempt to show that
> those views bear little resemblance to the caricatures now in circulation, and are
> worthy of the serious consideration of liberals and conservatives alike.
> Unfortunately, in his desire to distance Strauss from Bush-administration policy
> in particular and neoconservatism in general, he sometimes overstates his case.
> More significantly, he fails to consider some potential difficulties facing the
> Straussian worldview as he has interpreted it. Still, his take on Strauss is
> instructive, and if he doesn’t answer all the important questions he at least
> raises them. In this, Smith is very Straussian indeed. Strauss understood
> philosophy as concerned with the “permanent probl
> ems” — traditional questions about the nature and grounds of justice, the
> existence of God, and so forth — that are “permanent” because, it is alleged, no
> settled answers to these questions are possible. In Strauss’s view, the thinker
> who decisively chooses one set of answers over the others has ceased to be a
> philosopher and become a “sectarian.” But if philosophy is concerned with constant
> questioning and discussing, rather than with providing solutions or upholding
> hallowed dogmas, it poses a potential threat to traditional societies. Hence the
> “theologico-political problem,” the inevitable conflict between philosophy and
> divine revelation, reason and faith, “Athens and Jerusalem.” On Smith’s
> interpretation of Strauss, liberal democracy provides the best solution to this
> problem, or at least (as Churchill would have put it) the worst except for all the
> others. Its tendency to foster toleration and open-mindedness recommends it to the
> philosopher as the sort of regime most conduc
> ive to his way of life, and its allowance for private religious discrimination in
> exchange for neutrality between religions in the public sphere makes it possible
> for traditional believers to practice their ancient ways as they see fit without
> threatening the liberty of non-believers to choose to do otherwise. And yet
> liberal democracies have dogmas of their own, especially egalitarian ones. They
> also tend to cater to the lowest tastes and impulses, so that while they value
> science and technology for the consumer goods they provide, democracies make high
> culture and higher moral sensibilities difficult to maintain. This in turn
> threatens the stability and longevity of the democratic regime itself. For these
> reasons Strauss believed that a true friend of democracy ought never to be its
> “flatterer.” The philosopher ought, in his view, to uphold the older ideal of
> democracy as a “universal aristocracy,” in the face of the vulgar “mass democracy”
> that has displaced it. This requires de
> fending and practicing liberal education as a means of inculcating an
> understanding and respect for the permanent problems, and thereby producing an
> elite fit to govern on the basis of wisdom and merit rather than birth. It also
> requires a certain degree of caution, since — given the inherently elitist
> character of liberal education — the philosopher is bound to find himself at odds
> to some extent even with a democratic regime. Here is where critics of Strauss and
> his followers often accuse them of advocating a resort to the “noble lie,” and in
> particular of a false populism that cynically caters in public to fundamentalist
> religious believers whose faith Straussians privately reject, as a way of
> upholding public order and traditional morality. But, as Smith notes, this
> accusation is misconceived on two counts. First of all, while Strauss was not
> himself an orthodox believer, neither was he a convinced atheist. Since whether or
> not to accept a purported divine revelation is itself 
> one of the “permanent” questions, orthodoxy must always remain an option equally
> as defensible as unbelief. Second, what Strauss was in favor of was neither lying
> nor the active promotion of any particular doctrine, but rather mere tact,
> silence, or — at worst — obfuscation where one’s teaching might seem to threaten
> the unsophisticated but decent opinions of the people who make up the bulk of
> society. This alleged predilection for the “noble lie” is something Strauss is
> supposed to have inherited from Plato, and, in general, Strauss regarded his
> political philosophy as Platonic in character. Here another controversial aspect
> of Strauss’s work comes into play, namely his idiosyncratic interpretations of
> many of the great thinkers of the past. Plato is often regarded as having
> proposed, at least as an instructive ideal, a “utopian” society that can only be
> described as totalitarian, but, as Smith tells us, Strauss considered this merely
> an ironic warning against the dangers of utopi
> an thinking. Strauss also showed little interest in Plato’s famous “Theory of
> Forms,” the idea that there are timeless and objective essences of things,
> existing in a realm apart from either the human mind or the material world, and
> knowledge of which is the goal of philosophical inquiry. This view is typically
> regarded as the paradigm of a philosophy committed to the existence of objective
> truth, and it has had an enormous impact on the history of Western thought, and
> indeed Western civilization in general. Yet Strauss was dismissive of it,
> regarding it as a “fantastic” and “utterly incredible” doctrine. Plato’s real
> concern, in Strauss’s view, was similar to his own: not contemplation of the Forms
> but rather the activity of contemplation itself, the asking of the permanent
> questions rather than the answering of them. Strauss’s glib dismissal of the Forms
> was oddly reminiscent of the scientism or positivism whose stranglehold over
> modern intellectual life he was wont to criticize.
>  Furthermore, Strauss’s insistence that the genuine philosopher must be skeptical
> about the possibility of finding solutions to philosophical problems risks
> providing aid and comfort to the relativism he believed posed the greatest threat
> to modern liberal democracies. To be sure, to say that we cannot discover
> objective answers doesn’t entail that they don’t exist, but this is a distinction
> that is bound to be lost on the average non-philosopher, for whom the view that no
> answers are possible sounds little different from the view that every answer is as
> good as every other. These are issues Smith would have done well to explore. Smith
> is also unconvincing, and occasionally unfair, when attempting to divorce
> Strauss’s thought from recent neoconservative policy. He tells us that he does
> “not regard Strauss as a conservative (neo- or otherwise) but rather as a friend
> of liberal democracy” — as if being conservative (neo- or otherwise) excluded
> being in favor of liberal democracy, and
>  indeed, as if neoconservatives were not frequently accused of being too eager to
> spread liberal democracy around the globe! He informs us that Strauss was a
> staunch Zionist, resisted internationalism of the sort enshrined in the U.N., and
> was critical of liberalism’s lack of self-confidence in the face of Soviet
> Communism. Smith even finds echoes of this failure of self-confidence in the
> “self-doubt, if not self-contempt” evinced by many liberal intellectuals in
> response to the rise of Islamism. Yet after all this, he peremptorily asserts that
> Strauss’s writings imply a critique of the war in Iraq. Smith’s justification for
> this claim is that Strauss would have been skeptical of the utopianism inherent in
> pro-war rhetoric about bringing an “end to evil”; for evil, Strauss would have
> insisted, cannot be entirely eliminated in this life. But surely such political
> boilerplate must be distinguished from actual policy. To my knowledge, the Bush
> administration hasn’t proposed an invasio
> n of Hell. And its willingness to ally the United States with the likes of
> Pakistan and Saudi Arabia surely proves that the idealism, however heartfelt, has
> indeed been tempered by an understanding of geopolitical reality. One would think
> a student of Strauss, of all people, would know how to read between the lines, and
> understand that stirring rhetoric is part of the job description of the statesman.
> Mr. Feser’s most recent book is The Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction. 




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