Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
May 19, 2003
What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your
intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get
the job done - people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary,
the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the
imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers
could not detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests
Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective
Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special
Plans (OSP) - an agency created specifically to find the evidence of
WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the
case for the invasion of Iraq.
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish
political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United
States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities,
including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of
Chicago, before his death in 1973.
Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of
his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the
administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol;
his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement,
Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence,
Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard
Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the
influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is
chaired by Kristol the Younger.
Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset
adopted by these men - as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled
"Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean
Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of
rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author
Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to
appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its
susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability
to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea
of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life
may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception
is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the
expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is
the exception."
Rule One: Deception
It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an
administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to
matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about
using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While
professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that
societies should be hierarchical - divided between an elite who should
lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists
like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these
leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the
University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to
rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only
one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the
inferior."
This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and
the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst
says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While
the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth,
Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence
of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy,
according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right'
(St. Martin's 1999).
Second Principle: Power of Religion
According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular
democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the
irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other
neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater
role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the
Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by
insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because
Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose
moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.
At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone;
the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they
were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As
Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out,
"Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not
be believers."
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury
says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism,
precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could
dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats.
Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of
religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular
Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative
journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even
taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.
Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism
Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive
nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful
nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has
to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be
established, however, when men are united - and they can only be
united against other people."
Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was
distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can
be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in
her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external
threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."
"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in,"
says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an
"aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been
advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars - not to mention
Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world
order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative
students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny"
- as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 - that goes far beyond
the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."
As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was
best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his - and student
Allen Bloom's - many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's
words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city,
including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from
catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a
show of disrespect."
The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United
States' relationship with the rest of the world - as well as the
relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the
masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but
they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy,"
Drury says.
Jim Lobe writes on foreign policy for Alternet. His work has also
appeared on Foreign Policy In Focus and TomPaine.com.
© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.