Ignoble liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the philosophy of mass deception

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work." Irving Kristol - Founder of American Neoconservatism

Leo Strauss and Our Current Political Condition

Tue Oct 4th, 2005 at 10:57:10 PDT

A friend lent me a copy of the film Embedded Live, Tim Robbins’ anti-war play. If you haven’t seen it, I couldn’t recommend it more. It really captures the essence of the manipulation of the media during the initial invasion of Iraq. What really caught my interest though were the scene’s in which characters representing Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Condi Rice conspired to set the stage for the war and manage public expectations for its outcome. Overshadowing their discussions was the influence of Leo Strauss; interspersed throughout the play were Straussian quotes. These quotes (at least for me) opened a door of understanding the actions of the Neocon cabal that was within or orbited the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. I had to learn more about Strauss, his philosophy, and the influence his works have had on our current political state.

Earl Shorris wrote Ignoble liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the philosophy of mass deception, published in Harper’s Magazine, June 2004. This is a very concise history of Strauss and a synopsis of his philosophical foundation.

Strauss Was An Elitist; His Philosophies Appeal to Elitists

Strauss was content to write books in obscurity and to convey the ideas in them to a few students here and there over the years. These students carried on the work, teaching Strauss to their students, creating a growing network until there are now Straussians on the faculty at many, if not most, American colleges and universities. Since Straussians revel in the difficulty of the master’s work, they attract very bright students, many of whom will remain in the academy, producing other Straussian scholars, writers, activists, and members of government at every level, a cadre that will soon begin to think of itself as a class, that class for which Plato could find no better name than gold.
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Strauss argued that the Guide contained a secret teaching, a metaphysics contrary in some respects to the literal teachings of the Bible, that must be concealed from the masses, who would be unable to comprehend why God, for example, must necessarily be devoid of attributes. Such knowledge might turn the masses away from religion; such knowledge was necessarily dangerous. Strauss took the example of Maimonides and applied it not to commentary about metaphors and other difficult passages in the Bible but to contemporary political philosophy.
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In 1959, Strauss wrote that "Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society+" In one sentence he had stated his elitism and his distaste for what he called the vulgarity of democratic society. Three years later he made the ruling elite permanent: "We must not expect that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and the privilege of a minority." Arrogance follows elitism, it leads to cruelty, the capability, perhaps even the desire, to use people, to make them into things. No follower of Strauss can agree with Kant’s description of human dignity: man is not a means but an end in himself. The Straussians assign dignity to the few, and those who are deprived of dignity cannot pursue happiness. The study of Strauss’s work does lead to thinking about the Founders: not how they would agree with the Straussians but how they would oppose them.

Bushco is Straussian in that the real reason for any of it’s policy objectives must be hidden from the masses. Some key constuencies can devine the meaning of certain policy acts or statements (dog whistle politics), but the "masses" must be, and are, sheilded from the reality. Thus, the evershifting rationale for the invasion of Iraq, legislation named Clear Skies that will result in more pollution, No Child Left Behind that aims to destroy public education. The list is endless.

Bushco is Straussian in that it serves the elite of the nation, and even the world. It provides tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously slashing programs that provide the most benefit for the non-elites. Underfunding of public education and the attack on social security are only two examples of this. The gutting of the federal infrastructure that would be used to respond to disasters like Katrina is another.

It is instructive to listen to Strauss: "It would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations; hence the rule of the wise must be absolute rule. it would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects." Strauss explains that this would result in the subjection of what is by nature higher to that which is lower. His reading of Plato comes down to this: true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs.

Can you say Ohio? How about Florida, 2000? And the Supreme Court must be packed with Straussians as well. How else could you explain the legal result of Bush v. Gore, a result that could never be applied to any other case and had the desired effect of destroying democracy?

Straussians Speak in Nonsense

For the uninitiated, "contradiction" is the key to the Straussian approach, and more than anything else it defines the Bush regime and its circle of influentials. The contradictory and absurd statements of George W. Bush need not be listed here. His collected solecisms have been published in multiple volumes and are scattered throughout the Internet. Donald Rumsfeld’s most inscrutable utterances have even been set in verse. Such deformations of the English language are no accident: they reflect the administration’s general pattern of communication.
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In the only book he wrote in anything close to plain English, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss advised his readers not to write in plain English. Strauss followed his own advice. Convoluted, contradictory, arcane, clubfooted writing was his game. He worked at it. He skulked in the dark corners of exposition, making it all but impossible for anyone to discern exactly what he thought. In all the history of the English language there had never been a man—not merely a man, a professor at a great university—who so publicly opposed clarity and so brilliantly demonstrated his talent for obfuscation. In his chosen field he was a giant.
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He ascribed his advocacy of bad writing, which he called "esoteric writing," to the possibility that "a writer could be persecuted for what he said. If the writer lives in danger of death or imprisonment because of speaking his ideas clearly, to write as if in a code addressed to a small coterie of followers is not unreasonable.

It’s only nonsense if you don’t know the code. When Bushco says we are turning the corner in Iraq or that the "insurgency is in its last throes" the contradiction inherent in those statements, the nonsense, is hiding something that, if revealed, would result in political death for the speaker. I think another result of speaking nonsense, speaking contradictions, is that those of us who are actually paying attention are driven crazy by our inability to reconcile the contradictions. If you know that they are intentionally speaking this way, then you can cease to try and make sense of their words and focus on their actions. Their words only provide context for the actions, no meaning beyond that.

Straussians Do Not Believe in History

Strauss, buffeted by history in his own life, railed against historicism, which holds that meaning can only arise from within a particular historical context. The Straussians contend that historicism leads to relativism and thus to nihilism, finally to the crisis that could bring about the destruction of the American liberal democracy—a crisis, as Strauss himself said, that comes of the loss of the American sense of superiority.

Bob Woodward’s interview with Bush, April 2004

How does the president think history will judge him for going to war in Iraq?

"After the second interview with him on Dec. 11, we got up and walked over to one of the doors. There are all of these doors in the Oval Office that lead outside. And he had his hands in his pocket, and I just asked, Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,'" says Woodward. "And he said,History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, `History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.’"

There’s so much more in Shorri’s writing, I couldn’t duplicate it here without violating copyright. But I wanted to bring this to the attention of the dKos community. Understanding, at least knowing a little about, Strauss and his teachings is vital to understanding what has happened in America under Bush, what is happening right now, and what could happen in the future.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/4/135710/974

Tim Robbins Pours His Anger into an Anti-War Play

Just Don’t Call It Political Theater

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1206-06.htm

Ignoble liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the philosophy of mass deception

http://www.lacosapizza.com/shorris.html

Leo Strauss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straussian

Also see

Irving Kristol

"A neoconservative is just a liberal who got mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol