I am about half way through Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, and have finished three essays and a book review by Leo Strauss. I am trying to figure out the elite rightwing. I realize this is not a stunning conclusion, but I think these people are completely crazy.
Here is an excerpt from a film review of Rashomon by James Berardinelli that illustrates by analogy:
``...Many people watch Rashomon with the intent of piecing together a picture of what really occurred. However, the accounts are so divergent that such an approach seems doomed to futility. Rashomon isn't about determining a chronology of what happened in the woods. It's not about culpability or innocence. Instead, it focuses on something far more profound and thought-provoking: the inability of any one man to know the truth, no matter how clearly he thinks he sees things. Perspective distorts reality and makes the absolute truth unknowable.
All of the narrators in Rashomon tell compelling and believable stories, but, for a variety of reasons, each of them must be deemed unreliable. It's impossible to determine to what degree their versions are fabrications, and how many discrepancies are the result of legitimate differences in points-of-view. It's said that four witnesses to an accident will all offer different accounts of the same event, but there are things in Rashomon (namely, that each of the three participants names himself or herself as the murderer) that cannot be explained away on this basis. And the impressions of the `impartial' observer further muddy the waters, because, despite his protestations that he doesn't lie, we trust his tale the least.
In the end, we are left recognizing only one thing: that there is no such thing as an objective truth. It is a grail to be sought after, but which will never be found, only approximated. Kurosawa's most brilliant move in Rashomon is never to reveal what really happened. We are left to make our own deductions. Every time I watch the film, I come away with a slightly different opinion of what transpired in the woods. But not knowing remains a source of fascination, not one of frustration, and therein lies Kurosawa's greatest achievement...''
When I was reading Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom's rendition of philosophy, history, and their analysis of current society I felt like I was in Rashomon, listening to a story with the same characters re-arranged in an un-recognizable plot. The Strauss and Bloom story ultimately bares no fidelity to my version.
This impression goes against Shadia Drury's theory that Strauss and probably Bloom were creating noble lies. I suspect they were trying to see their world through the history of ideas, for much similar reasons that I do. But their own understandings of society and humanity were so vastly different than mine, that they literally couldn't read history the same way as I do. Hence the conclusion I am living in Rashomon.
Chuck Grimes