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June
2, 2003
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain
Plato, Leo Strauss
and Allan Bloom
By NORMAN MADARASZ
Much ink has been spilt of late on the role played
by philosopher Leo Strauss (d. 1973) on the education of a number
of prominent neoconservative ideologues who now occupy key intelligence
and advisory positions in the Bush administration. It is ironic
to see the mainstream press and culture be so willing to lodge
causal continuity and blame on a foreign intellectual
for homegrown extremism. The mainstream outlets are usually far
more expressive in the garb worn to downplay any direct influence
intellectuals might have on daily life. More typical is the trail
of recycling and simplification features from which the
American mainstream press no longer seems able to wean itself.
Intellectual influence may not be easy to understand, but when
the trace is blurred through sensationalism it merely dissipates
into irrelevance.
In the English-speaking world, Seymour
Hersh is credited with having ferreted out this distant connection
between the neo-cons and Strauss in a May 5 article on high-level
intelligence manufacturing, published in the New Yorker.
A day earlier the New York Times published an attack on
Strauss's philosophy as it took aim against some of his students,
such as Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense. The piece
makes only a distant reference to the work done by two French
journalists who had covered the subject for Le Monde.
In these days of cowardly journalism, it would be far too normal
to let credit not lie where it is due.
The fact remains that the most extensive
study of the background to the neoconservative Project, their
New American Century Project, was indeed published in France's
Le Monde on April 15, 2003. It has been pillaged with
scarce credit given to its original authors. More important is
what has been left out of its findings. The piece not only examines
the formative role of Leo Strauss on the Project, but also that
of the late Albert Wohlstetter, strategy guru at the RAND Corporation
and professor at the University of Chicago, and especially that
of Allan Bloom, the late author of The Closing of the American
Mind. Like Wolfowitz, Bloom had studied under Leo Strauss.
Among his own students was William Kristol. And the view Bloom
espoused in his massive best-seller has had a profound impact
on the way Americans now view the intellectual contributions
of other countries and cultures with the exception of Israel's.
That this key Le Monde article
was not entirely published in translated form by the New York
Times or the New Yorker raises perennial questions
regarding American arrogance towards the cultural and journalistic
productions of other countries. Academia is thirsting through
a translation drought of international social science research.
The publishing moguls have shifted the market away from political
economic criticism toward the child's fantasy world of Harry
Potter incorporated in which even adults are begging to enter.
Since postmodernism struck hard in the artistic realm, culturally
attuned English-speakers seem to have become obsessed with end-points
and limits, of the universe curving onto its own content as if
outside the English-language there is a desert from which only
the void is to be uttered. Angst with the mother tongue
has rung in concert with American expansionism.
Time and time again the question is raised
abroad as to why Americans show an ever decreasing mastery of
foreign languages. The matter here is not that the encroachment
of American English threatens the demise of many foreign local
cultures. Nor is it the troubling prospect that by the end of
this century the vast majority of the world's languages risks
disappearing. The scandal is that "native English-speakers
are becoming less competent at other languages: only nine students
graduated in Arabic from universities in the United States [in
2002], and the British are the most monoglot of all the peoples
in the EU," according to a study on the triumph of English
published in The Economist, December 22, 2001.
No one is fool enough to overlook how
this has everything to do with how world power is concentrated
in the USA (the foreign view) or that America is the "business
center" of the world (the domestic view). Both lead to the
conclusion that a general lack of interest on the part of Americans
lies behind this state of things. Its cultural variant is expressed
in the self-declared triumph of English.
The fact is that American corporate-controlled
media, and its arms extending deep within the university, promotes
general simplification of thought to the point of ignorance of
all things foreign. In recent months, we've seen that ignorance
shift quite naturally to fear, misunderstanding and contempt
for things foreign. This is a generalization, of course. But
consider this point: every weekend in countless foreign language
newspapers there is no end to translated articles from the foreign
and especially American press. Needless to say, the very of idea
of publishing translated articles in any of America's major dailies,
including the New York Times, is enough to trigger a scoff.
What we gain in return are confused sources,
fragmented paraphrasing and general ignorance on what the intelligent
folk of the world think of the USA in its most recent avatar.
Could it be so simple as to slot the whole lot of them into an
anti-American straightjacket? Let those be satisfied who zap
from Fox News to CNN (domestic or international), believing
that al-Jazeera is merely al-Quaeda's propaganda weapon.
Here then is a translation of "The
Strategist and the Philosopher" by Alain Franchon and Daniel
Vernet as it appeared in Le Monde. It's an insightful
study of those un-elected technocrats who have infiltrated Washington
DC to steer US policy according to an original plan slowly metabolized
over the decades and drafted well before September 11 ever
resounded with dial emergency. But for them dial it did, and
this group of a dozen or so intellectuals has profoundly affected
the American federal political structure in the most dubious
of ways.
What the legacy of Leo Strauss most pertinently
poses in terms of problems for American political life is his
conviction that democracy is only functional if it is a militant,
indeed military democracy. 'Tyranny' is what hovers close to
its institutions, literally a specter away, capable of seizing
its blood and duplicating its genetic structure imperceptibly.
All means necessary should be deployed to fight this fate. The
mystery of philosophy itself is shorn of its critical skin in
a not unfamiliar attempt, historically speaking, at claiming
how in the abstract world of thought opposites tend to meet.
Democracy becomes authoritarian, just like progressive philosophies
putatively turn into concrete terror...
For the record, and though the pages
of CounterPunch are perhaps not the most appropriate place
to lead a debate on philosophical texts, Professor Gary Leupp's
recent characterization of the neo-cons as "philosopher-kings"
throws in the towel far too easily to a Straussian send up of
an infamous concept (see Gary Leupp, "Philosopher Kings:
Leo Strauss and the Neo-Cons", May 24, 2003.) If Strauss's
thought can be legitimately rooted in Plato's philosophy, Leupp's
association by namesake amounts to surrendering on one of antiquity's
most profound thinkers and a cornerstone of Islamic, Judaic,
Christian and Atheist civilizations. Moreover, in pointing out
the tension between Socrates, as supposedly incarnating an individualist
freedom, and Plato as the contemptor of democracy, Leupp, in
the manner of John Ralston Saul, completely elides mentioning
the fact that the little we do actually know about Socrates largely
comes from Plato's writings and the mise-en-scene in which
his mentor is cast.
When they did not found scientific domains,
Plato's contributions touched on beauty, love, ontology, ethics,
mathematics, criticism of mythology and state religion, education,
transmigration of the soul, and the list goes on. Plato gave
philosophy one of its defining forms. It was at once instrumental
in ushering in monotheism while also providing all the tools
to undermine future dogma in any religion. And prior to becoming
the source of 'Western' philosophy, Plato was quite a part of
the East and of Islam, though to a lesser degree than was Aristotle.
Most papyrus manuscripts of Plato's vast work, including perhaps
the enigmatic 'esoteric' texts, would have already been damaged
or destroyed when Athens was sacked and Aristotle's library looted
by the Romans in 86 B.C. It is said to have been the greatest
library of its time in Greece.
One thing Plato was not is a historian.
Only a bare minimum of his texts, many of them formally reflecting
the dialectical method of philosophical debate, are philosophical
tracts. His early writings are a form of thought-theatre. Non-narrative
and non-dramatic, they point to an attempt at transmitting what,
in all aspects, seems to have been a very active intellectual
scene in Athens in the fifth century B.C. Once contemporary readers
free themselves from the hegemony of the OxBridge stranglehold
on translated classical texts, they will plunge into the banterng
world of political conceptual invention.
At the center of that world lives Socrates,
the man of night, the obsessive debater, the lover of thought.
Socrates may have been condemned to death for corrupting the
youth, among other things, but Plato embraced the man he barely
knew in an attack against the restored Athenian democracy that
forced him to drink hemlock. It was only in the twilight of Plato's
life, in The Laws, that he indirectly acknowledged the
danger of the Socratic social stimulant. Until then, Socrates
was the main actor on Plato's mind stage, whose role was to smash
tepid trials in political rhetoric and bind justice to political
organization.
As many scholars have pointed out, Athens
was a far cry from contemporary democracies. Let the stress be
placed on contemporary because it's only in the decades since
WWII, and mainly in the decade of the 1960s so despised by Allan
Bloom and his proto-neocon students, that full voting rights
were finally achieved in Western democracies. Athens was only
a semblance of democracy according to contemporary standards.
Still, historical knowledge assures us of its complexity. It
was a budding experiment: "it is true that we are called
a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many
and not of the few" notwithstanding the fact that
citizenship, even under Pericles's so-called reforms, granted
voting rights only to men, but by no means to all of them. These
fragmentary beginnings of democracy should not leave us resting
on our laurels in our own sense of superiority. After all, European
and American civilizations grew ever so slowly in their democratic
evolution given the historical knowledge its thinkers had already
acquired on freer political systems. Bringing democracy to the
state we now know it as came about through people's militias
not foreign invading armies.
Was Plato profoundly anti-democratic
or even totalitarian? A cursory reading of Karl Popper's extremely
influential The Open Society and its Enemies would certainly
suggest that. But one of the great failures of Anglo-American
scholarship has been the historical omissions involved in not
making sense of Plato's attention to the political collectivities
from which our individualist passions repel us as if from what
is most contrary to our essence. To put it bluntly, if Plato
diminished democracy as a valid form of government, he was rejecting
the failure of Athenian democracy as based on its real
history, and the irreparable damage it wrought on the city.
Recall that Athens, despite its political
experimentation, was an expansionist, imperialist city-state,
almost permanently at war. It had colonies along the modern-day
Turkish coast of the Aegean. It strove to gain hegemony over
the Greek city states. And it drove itself into economic collapse
through a fratricidal war against Sparta. Before its fall, pestilence
had filled the city to claim hundreds of lives, including that
of Pericles who was at once the spirit of greater democracy and
a relentless wager of war. The belligerent democracy then went
belly up with a coup d'etat led by oligarchic families. Democracy
did indeed lead to tyranny, but from its own internal undoing.
Plato came from one of the stakeholding
families in the dictatorship that ensued. There is no evidence
he ever legitimized the short rule of the Council of Thirty.
From his letters, scholars have been able to speculate that his
rejection of democracy in The Republic on the grounds
that it only leads to tyranny is precisely a reaction to the
belligerence and unending warfare that characterized the short
existence of Athen's first democratic experiment in the Classical
Age. The construction of the ideal state, governed by the so-called
philosopher-kings along an aristocratic model, i.e. rule by the
"best" as the Greek word echoes, is a dismantling of
the failures of both types of regimes.
The world had not yet known the possibilities
of 19th century democracy. Yet we still swim so very far
as the current national security state proves from the
shores of a fuller, non-belligerent version of 'rule of the people
by the people'. Despite the rights gained by all citizens to
vote, many democracies, including that of the US, are faltering.
Is it therefore legitimate to keep the term sacrosanct merely
for want of having to accept ordinary language philosopher John
Austin's verdict that "democracy for instance [is among]
a few notorious words the uses of which are always liable to
leave us in real doubt about what is meant"?
What the neo-cons are not are philosopher-kings.
Had they learnt anything from Plato and ancient Greece it would
have been that waging an unending string of wars was a paranoid
compulsion whose end is only to destroy democracy. Moreover,
prior to the pre-emptive strike doctrine they espouse, many neo-cons
were active in establishing dictatorships to crush the 'Marxist-inspired'
popular uprisings during the 1970s a legacy well described
in various articles published by CounterPunch, and whose
'defensive' character is highly contestable to say the least.
So before dumping one of our greatest
political teachers, Plato, we should realize that it is as important
as ever to read his work, and read it in the historical context
established by French thinkers such as Paul Veyne, Francois Chatelet
and Jacques Ranciere.
It should also be recalled that Allan
Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind put special
blame for the shift in American ways toward radical popular and
democratic civic demands upon an entire generation of German
Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany to finally find their
abode at the New School for Social Research and Princeton, among
other universities.
These Jews were clearly brought up in
reading Kant, Weber, Freud and especially Marx. Many of them
were Marxists, or, like Adorno and Marcuse, would soon be redrawing
the entire landscape of Marxist thought and radical political
philosophy. The crisis depicted by Bloom can of course be seen
as one pitting conservatives against Marxists. But given the
backdrop of Israeli expansionist policies, the context of a settling
of scores within the American Jewish community itself should
not be ruled out. The vehemence of Bloom's attack on Arendt and
Marcuse is peculiar only to a deep desire to cleanse. He stamps
them as foreign to the American way which in reality was
only a more recent form to what his ancestors had embraced as
immigrants.
The German Jewish intellectuals were
only the latest stream of émigrés to arrive in
North America, but few such streams have had as explosive an
effect on political and cultural life. The youth Bloom was educating
consisted of the young Jewish lions ready to undo the teachings
of their forefathers, though not to distance themselves from
their explosive method. Whereas grandfather Strauss was their
perfect guide, parting a space in thought as intellectuals are
prone to do, it appears as though Wolfowitz long ago decided
to transfigure him through power politics.
Neoconservatism is the final conquest
of the Republican Party movement begun with Barry Goldwater uttering
in 1964: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense
of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation
in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" He was the leading
light of the Protestant Fundamentalist movement being ushered
into political adolescence whose self-righteous ambitions felt
no need for euphemisms. They resound like distant thunder when
faced with today's newspeak.
Conversely, neoconservatism spells victory
against Jewish intellectuals who were instrumental in the movement
that shaped the policies of Itzak Rabin and the Oslo peace accord.
Since Rabin's assassination, the neo-cons have sealed their dominance
over progressive forces in Israel, those inclined to stop and
reverse the illegal settling of the Occupied Territories and
give Palestinians the right to an independent homeland.
It has not been repeated enough how important
a role the neo-cons have played in the Israeli rightwing. Their
battle against Palestinian self-determination has aimed specifically
at Jewish progressives, and Bloom's book performed the archeological
re-writing of the importance the German Jewish émigrés
had for the greatest period in American art and intellectual
culture perhaps since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Due in large part to their contributions, that period was infinitely
freer because infinitely more egalitarian than the USA of today.
It was a time in which people strove for more democracy and greater
equality. Under fictitious pretexts, we are now living the opposite
under the same names. The so-called freedom and democracy Bush's
neo-cons are pumping is something that both America and the world
can live without.
These are some of the reasons why the
Strauss/Bloom background has to be spread about some more both
within the university walls and from without. Large parts of
the American population have been spruced by religion to listen
to the neo-con message in order to soothe their impending nightmares.
That its power is a perverted outgrowth from social science theory
is given an outstanding portrayal in the following article. Giving
proper credit is but a pittance in exchange for deeper knowledge
of the advancing plan to redesign the Middle East and reinforce
Israeli extremism, as Iraq slides further into confusion.
Norman Madarasz
teaches and writes on philosophy and international relations
in Rio de Janeiro. He welcomes comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.
Today's
Features
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
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Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
America: Pay More to Die Sooner
Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
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Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
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