[lbo-talk] Strauss, turd in punch bowl

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Mon Oct 27 17:01:11 PST 2003


``..I've never seen pointed out are the odd similarities in the appeal of Strauss and Ayn Rand. Both appeal to those who see themselves as being smarter than others, and offer what seems to be an easy means to gaining power over those unfit, miserable clods-- and it's a method that satisfies certain kinds of resentment over _not_ having power. With Rand, it's being a clever capitalist. With Strauss, it's the swaying of the public mind with well-crafted lies...'' Brian Siano

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The similarity in appeal between Rand and Strauss is interesting. Michael Pollak mentioned the connection off list. I would have said something about it, if I had read Rand. But I haven't read Rand. I tried once, just out of high school, but put it down as boring and stupid.

I think the difference is that you could pretend to have important and interesting opinions as a high school student (which some of my friiends did back then) by reading Rand, but you probably wouldn't understand Strauss.

On the other hand, if you were exposed to Strauss in a political science course, he might appeal to you (if you were reactionary pig scum) as an alternative to the predominately liberal enlightenment arguments used to explain, justify, and interpret representative government and modern national states. The most important use of this line of reading and thought is in forming the conceptual background for what the US government is supposed to be, what the directed lines its laws are supposed to follow, how US society is supposed to function, and what being a citizen in this state is supposed to embrace. In other words, it is the iceberg under the tip of the Declaration of Independence. It is this iceberg that Strauss turns into froze toxic sewage---a turd in the punch bowl.

At this point, I would be really suspicious of any professor who included Strauss in a political science course. What makes Strauss pernicious is his interpretive readings of a background syllabus for modern political science. You have to have already read some selections of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche in order to see what's wrong with Strauss. Reading Strauss as an introduction to such a list creates a deforming lens---a particularly nasty and reactionary lens at that.

It just so happened that I had read enough selections of these works that by the time I got to Strauss (last month), that he just looked like toxic bullshit.

The biggest problem is that most college students are not exposed to any of this background reading, except through sketchy introductory and interpretive texts that summarize the works. So, it looks to me like Strauss provided his own interpretations and summaries to his students and created a kind of sloppy reactionary syllabus to go along with a whole reactionary school of political thinking.

Check this out:

fhss.byu.edu/polsci/courses/summer03/300-001Su03.htm

It's a PoliSci course using Strauss and Bloom. Now it could be a great class or another of those quasi-liberal sounding things that is anti-liberal and that turns out to be some twistoid reactionary shit. Given it's Brigham Young University, well my money's on the latter.

For a critical discussion of Strauss that is sympathetic try:

http://www.mun.ca/animus/1998vol3/robert3.htm

A nice read, but I don't buy it. Strauss's fear ridden, anti-democratic, paternalistic, toxic moral blather has got to go, period.

The quickest and easiest antidote to this noxious offal is to pick up Hannah Arendt in place of Strauss, and carry on the same historical and classical selected readings.

Strauss mirrored Arendt, as if following in her footsteps like some evil little troll who turned everything she wrote inside out. In any event, the very convenient thing about using Arendt is you can easily back her up with historical scholarship, political histories, political philosophy, and most modern (post-WWII) social science research. She doesn't need interpretation, arcane, and serpentine arguments, skepticism, doubt, dubious motivations, or obscurantist readings to understand. In a intellectual sense, Arendt became an American and Strauss never did.

Thus, Strauss forms the reactionary interlocutor, a Grand Inquisitor to all enlightenment modernity and its post-modern critics. You can see this development in Bloom who moans and groans in a popularized English major way about the destructive influence of black radicals, feminism, multi-culturalism and their attacks on the holy works of the great white fathers.

All of this is sickeningly stupid shit on some level and pretty much comes down to who do you trust to run government. Do you trust the people in a catch as catch process or a bunch of carefully groomed, arrogant, and ideologically superior professionals. Strauss and crew weigh in for the latter and seem to think that the people are irretrievably lost and stupid and not fit to govern and make decisions for themselves.

Dwayne Monroe noted, ``This hermetically sealed worldview [of Strauss], in which they believe themselves to be the vanguard of the human species, ironically makes them uniquely stupid as hegemonists go.'' Precisely. Witness the Iraq debacle.

What is amazing to me is that I always assumed that it was a matter of `American' faith that the people are prefectly fit to govern themselves, and in fact should and must do so. It is this core US political faith that is actually under attack in Strauss.

It is this, what I would call truly anti-American core of Strauss that reveals his linkage not to the US and US history, but to Europe and Germany in particular during Weimar. These pro and con democracy arguments are of the sort that were being conducted among the academic elite in Germany's history to constitute itself as a unified national state under a parliamentary democracy.

So, it is worth remembering that the US was already founded, however well or badly, and we already had a long history of debate with its own home grown questions in relation to slavery, to the status of women, the dangers of wealth, the relative status of regions, ethnic and religious minorities, and their relation to the federal system. This crap about the dangers of a relativity of values, historicism, and the crisis of modernity is all a bunch of literary and philosophical bullshit.

We have already lived more than two centuries in a shifting relativity of values, histories, languages, regions, and peoples. The whole intended idealism behind the structure of US government and laws (bill of rights) was to balance out these differences and make them livable, inhabitable, and as equitable as possible for all.

Chuck Grimes (sounding just a bit too patriotic for my own taste)



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