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Daniel Defoe
Defoe’s The Storm, published in July, 1704, recorded first-hand accounts of the worst storm in British history. An extremely rare hurricane battered Wales and southern England, the worst of the apocalyptic rain and wind arriving overnight from November 26 and 27, 1703. More than 8,000 people died, including a fifth of the sailors in the sovereign fleet. Homes were destroyed, ships sunk, livestock drowned and everywhere massive trees were uprooted and flung about like matchsticks.

The majority of The Storm consists of written firsthand accounts sent to Defoe in response to the advertisements he published in the Daily Courant and the London Gazette. His stated purpose was to “preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest” as an exact and reliable record of events. In the Preface he writes, “If a Man tells a Lye in Print, he abuses Mankind, and imposes upon the whole World, he causes our Children to tell Les after us, and their Children after them, to the End of the World”. Fact-checkers of the world, take heed.

The thing about life in England in 1703 one learns from Defoe’s book is that chimneys were killers. Aside from the raging seas that drowned so many sailors, the most common cause of death in the storm was chimney-collapses caused by wind. Most of the accounts go something like that of poor Mr. Simpson's, a scrivener living on Threadneedle Street in London. “Fatally sleepy”, he ignored his family’s admonitions to leave his bed and subsequently was crushed where he lay by falling chimney bricks. This sort of story makes up the modicum of suspense contained in the gathered letters.

Defoe’s intention of scrupulously adhering to the truth results in a generally trustworthy account, but the various letters are shaped with anything but an eye for entertainment. Mostly they are lists of damaged property and unvarnished descriptions of terrified people. Stylistically the letters are almost indistinguishable from each other. They are larded with prefatory remarks and tiresome qualifications. “SIR, Having seen an Advertisement of a Design to perpetuate the Remembrance”, “I perceive by an Advertisement in the Gazette of last Monday”, “you, or your ingenious Undertakers are left at liberty to publish so much, or so little, of this Narrative as shall be thought fit for the Service of the Publick”, etc. Granted, the book is a product of the eighteenth century, but the question must be asked: was Defoe paid by the word?

Hints of adventure finally appear near the end of the book in the form of a few first-hand accounts written by sailors on ships caught in the storm. A certain J. Adams reported that his ship, blasted by the tempest and without anchor, was nearly sunk before having its gutted hulk blown to Norway. His letter is more in the mode of exciting naval romances. At one o’clock, in terrifying darkness, he witnesses a foundering ship, and “tho’ the Noise was very great with the Sea and Wind, yet we could distinguish plainly, in some short Intervals, the Cries of poor Souls in Extremities”. After this he describes his ship's narrow escape from a large Man of War “driving down upon us, all her Masts gone, and in a dreadful condition”.

The book resembles a letters page in a magazine, each dispatch set off in the text as a block of prose signed by the various authors. In his editorial comments Defoe likes to point out that he is collecting unembellished testimonies, as if openly acknowledging the sacrifice of excitement for veracity. He only emerges to speak in his own voice in the addendum called “The Lay-Man’s Sermon On The Late Storm” (“Not so much a jest as ‘tis thought to be”, the title page helpfully clarifies). Here Defoe takes the common belief about the storm, that it was God’s punishment on a wicked nation, and turns it into a rollicking jeremiad against his enemies in the church while championing moderation as a saving English virtue.

The difference in style and tone only gives the previous account of the storm that much more credence. Indeed, so stark is the contrast in tone between the main body of The Storm and its epilogues (the ‘Sermon’ and an ‘Essay’, a humorous, satirical poem written in the same spirit) that it’s tempting to look back with slightly more interest on the letters Defoe collected and published. In the largest, foremost part of the book he is almost totally absent in the interest of avoiding charges of embellishment. Clearly Defoe understood that to reach and convince the public one first has to disappear into the public.

He must have learned a great deal from the writing of the book. The Storm doesn’t introduce the idea of the importance of a trustworthy witness to narrative writing, but it does bring together narrative prose and truthful accounts in a manner that blurs the two with great subtlety. The ostensible fidelity to truth would serve him later in one of the first English novels, Robinson Crusoe. Fifteen years after The Storm, ‘Crusoe’ was published with a preface allegedly written by an “Editor [who] believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it”. The original title page even describes the contents of the book as “Witnessed by Himself”, meaning Crusoe.

‘Witnessed by himself’: centuries of lying made possible by Defoe’s careful stewardship of the truth. (James Frey in this light is part of a grand tradition.) In 1722 Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year, stated to be account of a “Citizen who continued all the while in London”, completing the muddle between fact and fiction. In twenty years, Defoe all but invented the novel, and in their early development we see that journalism and fiction were mixed at the inception of both. Not really a shock, but it’s important to remember that The Storm is supposedly a transparently truthful compilation of eyewitness accounts assembled by one of the first great liars in English literary history. The arrangement of the letters suggests that Defoe understood how vital a role is played in community news reporting by amateurism, repetition, and sameness.

In our present age of ubiquitous recording devices, now such an inextricable part our lives, there isn’t an “assembler” lurking behind a big curtain. The sophistication of our technology, and its ability to document our lives, guarantees the veracity of the eyewitness accounts even as it demands that they keep to a particular look and tone. Spotting fakes is a cinch. Everyone instantly knows the difference between a network television show or a studio film and a video blog on YouTube: costumes, lighting, recognizable actors, shaky camerawork, and most obviously of all the context of the content itself.

The assumption is that homemade footage looks the same because amateurism looks the same. But amateurism is rapidly becoming a standard of its own, lacking an author but no less subject to the same laws of verisimilitude. In the dawning age of public journalism truth must look the same, feel the same, and sound the same, or else it will not be truth. It is yet another way in which the sophistication of the public will be used against it. Though we can worry less about the threat of a single liar, or a small, concentrated conspiracy of liars, in their place will arise a condition where news is only accepted as such if collected by many eyewitness accounts, the identical amateurishness of which being a necessary condition of their credibility. In the wake of such an exchange the status of truth will no less imperiled.
Posted: 1/31/2009
J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
(i)

The Paradises of the Sun
You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
Say Goodbye To The Wind
Duel With A Crocodile
Danger In The Streets of the Sky
The Drained Lake
Motel Architecture
The Terrible City
The Psychopath As Saint
Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown
The Impresario of Rubbish
A Banquet of The Fathoms
The Subliminal Man
The Street of Darkest Night
Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan
The Depot of Dreams

(ii)

"A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed".

"Noon talk on millionth street:"

"Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool."

"Faulkner Was Slowly Going Insane."

"Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire."

"Ryan's dream of a cease-fire first came to him during the battle for the Beirut Hilton."

"Crossing frontiers is my profession."

"Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusal events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."

*In honor of J. G. Ballard, the greatest living novelist, who, sadly, it was revealed today, has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Of Ballard's many strange and wonderful charms, foremost was his uncanny knack for titles and first lines. This representative selection is a small but by no means trivial testament to his inimitable genius.
Posted: 1/22/2008
The Strange Smugness of The Press
Tom Toles, Washington Post
Now and then it's pleasant to be reminded that nothing slashes through nonsense like a good op-ed cartoon. Tom Toles' cartoon of August 28, 2007, marking the ignominious departure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, features one Washington beat writer telling another they should get independent confirmation of the most transparently truthful statement Gonzalez ever made. This would seem to be an easy but satisfying strike at the former Attorney General, a satirical target of barnlike proportions in whose facial features, slowly warming up to even the mildest job-related question, one could see a slow, almost zen-like dance of yin stupidity and yang mendacity. Ironically, though, Toles also inadvertently foregrounds a bracing example of the media's negligence in reporting on the White House since 2001. Independent confirmation? Objectively pursuing facts? Skepticism in the face of proven liars? Where has all this been? The simple professionalism displayed in the cartoon reporter's remark only makes more bewildering and unforgivable the sad failure of the real press corps, these last six years, to honor one of its most sacred commandments. But the smugness! One can only marvel at the carnival dexterity of these men and women who salute their noble profession with one hand and destroy it with the other.
Posted: 8/28/2007
Fallen Angels
O Captain, my Captain
The enthusiasm with which one analyzes Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli is bound to be dampened by the knowledge that much of what one takes from this crowded and difficult book is probably wrong. Strauss never openly announces that he himself is following in the line of esoteric authors whose works he is unpacking for his reader, but there are plenty of hints that, as Allan Bloom wrote, “The distance between the appearance of this book and the reality is amazing”. Measuring that distance, through careful reading, is nevertheless an important victory in itself.

At the end of his dizzyingly tortuous book, Strauss writes “a stupendous contraction of the horizon appears to Machiavelli and his successors as a wondrous enlargement of the horizon”. Machiavelli seems as deceived as his successors by this "contraction". In the Introduction, however, Strauss had given qualified praise of the “grandeur” of Machiavelli’s vision. It is possible, I suppose, to remark on the “grandeur” of a vision which is actually a contraction of the “larger” metaphysics of the ancients, but Strauss followed that line in the introduction with a key statement on his method: “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things”.

“The surface of things” in Strauss’s book is an exegesis of Machiavelli’s two major works, The Prince and The Discourses, which Strauss persuasively argues are complementary texts. Without going into the specifics of his analyses of these books, it becomes apparent by Chapter IV, “Machiavelli’s Teachings”, which is a mixture of summary and argument, that the moral space Strauss has opened up between himself and Machiavelli, to say the least, wavered. The early judgment that Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil” places Strauss at a distance from Machiavelli, yet that judgment fades from view by the book’s ending. In the simplest terms, Machiavelli’s writings are called “evil”, but three hundred pages later they haven’t been called “mistaken”.

A clue to how we might make sense of this fact is given, again, in the Introduction. Though Machiavelli is called a “devil”, Strauss reminds us that if this parallel holds, Machiavelli is not a devil simply. He is a fallen angel. Upon reading this one of course thinks of Milton’s Satan, and Strauss’s book, like Paradise Lost, emphasizes the seductiveness of Machiavelli’s teachings in an attempt to render the text a kind of temptation in itself, so that in the process of reading the book one is given a choice of whether or not to reject the evil. In this sense, a true understanding of Thoughts On Machiavelli requires a serious and dedicated effort on the reader’s part, which would suit Strauss’s design as an esoteric writer.

The “devil” comes up again much later, though, in a striking manner which presents another clue about the book’s true meaning. Machiavelli-as-captain seeks to recruit men for a war, Strauss writes, “a war of the Anti-Christ or the Devil”. His hope rests on the future, on the young, who might discern his real teachings from his fake conventionalities, and thereby overthrow the Church in particular and political philosophy, or philosophy itself, in general. Strauss believed that Machiavelli succeeded wildly, granting him as the source of all modern philosophy. Not exactly high praise when one considers that the ideal man of modern thought, as Strauss would have it, is a Man-Beast rather than a Man-God, but it pays the bills.

If Machiavelli succeeded in his war against God, it follows that he had his successor captains, men of “rare brain” who carried on the fight. Who might that successor, or successors, be? “They will live in an even temper without hope and without fear or trembling. They may have regrets but they will feel no need for repentance or redemption. ... Imitating nature, they will be filled with both gravity and levity but they will be free from fanaticism. They will not expect to find perfection or immortality anywhere except in works of art. They will regard as the virtue opposite to pride or arrogance, not humility, but humanity or generosity.” Strauss, glossing Machiavelli, carefully elucidates the qualities of the “excellent man” who combines all the highest qualities, and this man—a man, and only a man or a few men, not a multitude—resembles in certain important respects the ideal man another writer called “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul”.

The writer was Nietzsche, of course, and the ideal man was the ubermensch. Indeed, if Thoughts On Machiavelli is meant to be read as a map of philosophy from Machiavelli to the present day (1958, the year of the book’s publication), all roads must lead to Nietzsche (and then to Weber and Heidegger). The “Archimedean point” of Strauss’s text, the unnamed target beyond his pages, is really Nietzsche, the true heir of Machiavelli’s who surpassed his master in stripping away the divine in favor of the Beast-Man. And when one considers the difficulties of Strauss’s relationship to the subjects he is discussing—the “mixed body’ of his text, which commingles his voice with two of his purported enemies, Machiavelli and Nietzsche-— one begins to understand what Strauss meant by his stated ambition, both in this book and in other essays: his desire to recover “the permanent problems”.

The more I read Strauss, the more I become convinced that his project, the recovery of “the permanent problems”, does not entail a direct and total refutation of either Machiavelli or Nietzsche, or for that matter nihilism taken as an idea outside political philosophy. Two important points seem clear to me: one, Strauss is probably as much a dissembler as his critics claim he is; and two, his critics have not engaged him as fully as they should have and hence do not understand the purpose and necessity of his dissembling. The “permanent problems” may be many things, but to risk a tautology, what they are chiefly is problems, a fact not sufficiently understood by contemporary thinkers and artists who have made the mistake of transmitting it to populations who recognize them only in the crudest terms.

As such, Strauss’s project begins to seem more and more like an attempt to protect philosophy from the masses. His judgments against historicism and relativism carry the impact of total condemnation, but upon further reflection this condemnation appears intentionally superficial, perfunctory in the same way that Machiavelli showed due respect to the accepted opinions of his day. Thoughts On Machiavelli is really a primer on how to read a philosophical text—how to read itself, in fact. Writing of this book, Bloom says “one learns what it means to live with books; one is forced to make them a apart of one’s experience and life”. In other words, one is forced to become a philosopher. The “edifying” value of Strauss’s book has less to do with his “hidden meanings” than in its subtle impenetrability. He stresses the process by which Machiavelli instructs his readers in order to make us aware that he, Strauss, is also leading us through a process of thinking and reading which is just as primary as the teachings revealed to us if we have the stamina, will, and “rare brain” to follow complete this process. The “permanent problems” are this process—they are philosophy itself.

Many conclusions can be drawn from Strauss’s dissembling. First and foremost, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that Strauss could well have believed, as his fiercest attackers claim, that the wise man must secretly counsel the powerful on the right courses of action, and that lying to the people is merely one of several acceptable tools for maintaining a republic. Strauss is Machiavellian functionally but against Machiavelli publicly, which is exactly what the ancient thinkers were, for Strauss remarks that Machiavelli’s didn’t create power politics, he merely signed his name to what ancient men were too prudent to avow in their own names. The Florentine's true “innovation”, if it must be broken down into a simple phrase, was to replace philosophy’s “Ought” with the historian’s “Is”. Crucially, Strauss illuminates this sleight-of-hand without explicitly resolving, in philosophical terms, why the question of the “Ought” should be restored. Instead he indicates why it must be restored in a classic Machiavellian formula: religion must be used to return the Man-God to liberal democracy or else the modern Man-Beast will destroy, or allow the destruction, of the state.

In a limited sense this explains the intellectual side of conservatism's rise in America in the last thirty or forty years, and helps indicate the true intentions of Strauss and his students. Their objection to Nietzsche and his heirs is not that they were wrong, but that their teachings are not salutary to liberal democracy. Truth is the highest aim of the philosopher, but not the highest aim of the state. Self-preservation is the aim of the state. The objection has incredible force in light of the Germany’s tragic collapse into Nazism in the 1920’s and 30’s, and even more so in the many eerie parallels between the Weimer Republic and modern-day America. The popularization of higher philosophical “truths” is a Promethean fire men cannot control. Strauss wanted to keep the fire in the hands of the true keepers of the flame, the philosophers. Everyone else is fit for manipulation.

However, Strauss’s alleged crime—advocating the necessary manipulation of the masses by the powerful as a way of ministering an antidote to Nietzsche’s poison—is a gross simplification and therefore exactly the error that Strauss so strongly and painstakingly cautioned his followers not to make. Over and over again, Strauss lays enormous emphasis on the difficulty of philosophy and the necessarily problematic nature of its use in governance. Machiavelli’s excellent man, or Nietzsche’s ubermensch, amount to the same thing: the highest human, the man with the most wisdom, prudence, and virtue; that is, the true philosopher. The teachings of Strauss, like the teachings of all great men, are instantly and perhaps fatally compromised when they are used by those who lack the philosopher’s virtue.

In effect, Strauss wants the withdrawal of philosophy, not its permeation of government. Philosophers are rare, and in whatever numbers they do exist, they can and perhaps should influence the powerful—but always with judiciousness and prudence, with high virtue. Strauss implies that Machiavelli’s worst vice was his immodesty. His wickedness was not fancying himself a “captain” of a future army, but his desire to recruit an army at all. To the extent that Strauss’s teachings have influenced the current administration, we are horrified witnesses to the tragic misapplication of his philosophy by his lieutenants, as it were. They must be questioned before the master is indicted, for they have clearly failed as students.

They have failed, these soldiers trained by Machiavelli-Strauss, by conjuring up the “American Imperium” without taking into consideration niggling little details like “the facts on the ground”. Directing the rogue’s gallery currently in Washington to conduct a war that was enmeshed in an almost infinite web of conflicting interests before the first bomb was dropped does not look like prudence. It looks like foolishness. Machiavelli’s worldview holds that men are malleable, but also—this is the vital point—that only men of great virtue can mold them. The coarseness and stupidity of the America polity we owe to the ham-fisted idiots who tried and failed to shape it, and not Strauss himself. To emerge from this bloody morass, we might start by following his one exoteric teaching, the one the deliberate difficulties in Thoughts On Machiavelli hammer home. Enough with the solutions. Let’s get back to the problems.
Posted: 6/11/2006
The Modesty of Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss
One of the most intriguing aspects of the war in Iraq is the idea that much, if not all of the neocon strategy is derived from the philosophical teachings of Leo Strauss, who until the war was an obscure political science professor at the University of Chicago. No conscientious opponent of the war can examine the Project for the New American Century, for instance, without eventually finding some evidence of "Straussian" thought. Typically the Left accuses Strauss and his acolytes, neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, as having effected a Machiavellian cabal (with roots in the Republic) to dishonestly shape U.S. policy, and with imposing on a wide scale the "clash of civilizations" view of Islam which rests on rabidly xenophobic dreams of American Empire. Bush may be a dupe and a cretin, the thinking is, but he is more than a dupe of the Straussians, he is their ideal Prince. He is merely the symptom of a deeper, and therefore far more concerning, philosophical shift in American politics.

In one important sense, the story of Leo Strauss and his obscure but intimate involvement in the Bush Administration is a Leftist paranoiac's wet dream. At last they have found a conspiracy theory which is basically self-evident. A group of men who openly advocate the Pax Americana which holds that power must rest in the hands of a small elite. Furthermore, among the many tools available to that elite is Plato's Noble Lie, the infamous passage from the Republic which allows that sometimes it may justifiable to spin official myths to get the populace to fall in line with their wise masters. Ironically, those who have "unearthed" this open-air secret are committing the error Strauss balefully ascribed to them again and again. They do not know how to read. They do not know how to listen. If they did, they would discover that there is a second dimension of Strauss's thought, and another conduit of his teachings-- Allan Bloom-- which not only predicted and warned us against the Bush Administration but also offered a chillingly accurate diagnosis of the utter failure of the liberal counterattack against radical conservatism.

My use of the word diagnosis is intentional. If American, or Western civilization, may be thought of as a patient, upon which academia and the intellectual elite work various remedies, the patient is clearly sick and has been for some time. Rejecting conservatism's noxious brew of selfishness, superstition, and blind nationalism is an honorable fight, but the fighting these days-- and I think I'm putting it mildly-- has taken on the appearance of a child shooting spitballs at a tank. Any honest appraisal of the Left, undertaken by the Left, must yield significant dissatisfaction with the state of liberalism, if not open revolt against the philosophic tradition which has led to such a sickly, death-bed form of progressivism. Though the doctor may appear to be a quack, or possibly working against our interest, it can no longer be denied that Strauss and many of his students have so far made the only compelling diagnosis, and offered the only sane treatment, of our malady. They are the only ones who have recognized the disease and named it. Perhaps they are witch doctors, and to listen to them we must ignore the advice of platoons of trained doctors. Perhaps the opposite is true. Either way, a change is needed, because every time the face of our Caesar, President Bush, appears on television, it ought to be clear that the opposition has lost and lost big.

It is difficult to speak comprehensively about Strauss' writings because they are hard-wired to frustrate easy analysis on the one hand and refer to a constellation of other authors' texts on the other. Strauss explained that he wrote the book I have just finished, "On Tyranny", in an attempt to draw attention to the ancient understanding of tyranny because modern political science-- rooted in historicism-- was woefully inadequate and could not identify Hitler in time to prevent the many Nazi atrocities. "On Tyranny", which is a close reading of Xenophon's dialogue Hiero, ought to be read en face with Machiavelli's The Prince in order for its significance to come to light (and probably his own Cyropaedia too). Both Hiero and The Prince are concerned with a wise man's attempt to educate a ruler, and because of this correspondence of theme Strauss calls these two works "the point of closest contact between premodern and modern philosophy". In Machiavelli's writing Strauss thought he had identified the key to the break between the ancients and moderns, an error in thought which he believes has led to our current crises. The break comes down to Machiavelli's deliberate removal of the distinction between the king and the tyrant, a distinction crucial to Xenophon and the ancients.

Machiavelli's innovation becomes striking when comparing his text with Xenophon's. For example, Chapter Three of Hiero begins with a Socratic discussion of friendship which accepts as a given the pleasures and usefulness of love and friendship. The tyrant Hiero states, "I myself judge being loved a good so great that I believe benefits actually come of themselves to the one who is loved, both from gods and men". In The Prince, of course, Machiavelli famously states that it is better for a ruler to be feared than loved. Throughout The Prince he stresses that the ruler should do what he can to be loved, but instead of encouraging the prince to win affection, he counsels that he avoid being hated. Love, like the other virtues in The Prince, is only useful as one of many politically expedient means of taking and holding power. Fear is the only way for the prince to be sure of his rule. "Men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince", Machiavelli writes. The important difference between Xenophon and Machiavelli, as represented in this passage, is that Hiero's dialogue reflects an awareness of the good life, measuring the anxiety Hiero claims to feel over the distance between the ideal life of Socratic contemplation and his political realities as a tyrant. In Machiavelli this anxiety is gone. He scoffs at "imagined republics" and says "how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin". The "ought" has been discarded; in effect Machiavelli removed moderation from the political equation.

Whether Strauss is correct or not in his larger conclusions about Machiavelli's founding of modern politics, I cannot say. A verdict would require full knowledge of the history of political philosophy, and on this subject I am at best a dilettante. What I can discern in "On Tyranny", and in the other writings of his I have read, is the characteristic of modesty-- "modesty" meaning something like the quiet, rational protection of virtue-- which Strauss values in the ancients and which he adopts in his own writings. This is often seen as an insidious attempt to write esoterically. Strauss wrote about esoteric writing in ancient and medieval texts, and practiced it himself. To our suspicious ears it sounds like he is speaking across the centuries with other scheming intellectuals, passing along arcane secrets to his followers which modern citizens-- we, the rubes-- couldn't hope to decipher. But this isn't fair. Certainly Strauss felt that philosophy was only understandable by the few. When he finished "On Tyranny", he wrote to his friend and fellow philosopher Kojeve that there were only three men in their profession who would understand what he was trying to do. Needless to say the general reader would have no chance, especially "the reader in our century who has been brought up on the brutal and sentimental literature of the last five generations". He goes on to say that the ideal reader of the ancients would have "a natural preference for Jane Austen rather than for Dostoevski". As Strauss says elsewhere, we must shun the "loudspeakers" and train ourselves to listen to the small, distant voices of the past if we are to make any sense of our present condition.

This is key to understanding the purpose of "On Tyranny", and in Strauss's location of the fatal and decisive break between ancient and modern political philosophy. In a sense, all of Strauss' philosophy is colored by his insistence on the "small" voices of "modesty": authors who, like Austen, could write with astonishing command of subtle and ironical prose strategies. Modesty, however guileful, is seen as a necessary quality of wisdom, the abandonment of which is a grievous error. So while it is true that Strauss believed his teachings could only be understood by the few, and that the wise can only influence the state obliquely-- in other words, in ways that often appear to be secretive or conspiratorial-- it is also true that Strauss at all times insists on the ancient ideal of moderation, pointedly expressed in the detachment from the state to which philosophers must adhere. Inevitably, he writes, because "subjective certainty" (a term he ridicules) is impossible, philosophers must leave their coterie of followers and "seek the marketplace", occasioning contact with politics. Philosophers are neither detached nor fully invested in the politics of the city. They exist in what can be called a state of permanent tension. Strauss wanted his readers to confront, and respect, the ambiguities of this tension.

"On Tyranny", both the work itself and his reading of it, reflects Strauss's method. Ancient political philosophy, as isolated in Xenophon's Hiero, understood the ambiguous nature of the tyrant. As I wrote above, the tyrant, in search of the good life, naturally wants honors as well as love, but the only way for the tyrant to win these from his subjects is to rule benevolently. As Strauss shows, Xenophon cleverly hints that while this would indeed be the preferred method of government, it is basically impossible. Only in a state which is ruled by law, in which the ruler-- the king, not the tyrant-- is legitimate, will love and honor. He also shows that Xenophon contrasts the good life, the life of the wise man, with the life of the tyrant. The end result is not that tyranny is "bad" and law-based democracy "good", but a laying bare of the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the political sphere. The ancients saw these imperfections as preferable to the unvirtuous ruler (later conceived of by Machiavelli). In a similar fashion, Strauss (and Bloom) explain Socrates' ironical advocacy of aristocracy as the best regime in the Republic-- in fact, Socrates hints that democracy is the best regime because only in that regime is a wise man possible. The rich irony of the ancients boils down to Socrates' understanding that Sparta was the ideal city, and, equally, that Socrates himself would not have been allowed to survive in that city. Politics are imperfect; the best regime is therefore not perfect, but simply the one which is least problematic.

Strauss's respect of this "permanent tension" is precisely the saving grace of his philosophy, and which gives the lie to the notion that Strauss would offer unqualified support to the war in Iraq and to the means by which the neocons brought it about (and by extension unlawful surveillance of civilians, excessive executive powers, torture, etc). Strauss does not conceive of his philosophy as, in his own words, "simply wisdom". His project is not to offer solutions but to emphasize problems which modern philosophy claims to have solved out of existence.

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of problems, i.e. of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only the quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the "subjective certainty" of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.
The sect was of concern to Strauss, and one of the greatest and least accessible strains of thought in his writing. Clearly, as I have indicated, he understood that philosophers do not exist in a vaccuum. Though he distinguishes the sect from the mass party, abhorring the latter, he knows that wise men must, to some extent, mingle with affairs of state and with society as a whole. Moreover, it is plainly obvious, looking at Strauss's general intention of saving liberal democracy from tyranny (fascism or collectivism) and "The Last Man", that in his philosophical statement of these problems he was "inclined toward a solution": to restore the ancient idea of good and evil which Nietzsche and his followers had-- in effect-- led twentieth century thinkers to reject, culminating in Hitler and Stalin. To prevent further catastrophe, splitting into factions is perhaps salutary and in any case inevitable for all but the rarest thinkers.

Still, it is essential to mark that the real power of Strauss' writing is his caution and modesty, in this case his concern about sects. He cannot be confronted for his supposed hostility to true democracy because even a casual reading of his work is enough to demonstrate that his thought exists entirely within the tensions he brought to light in the writings of other philosophers. He is not an idealogue. His philosophy is one of self-critique; like the ancients, his mission is to counsel rulers, to check their power, not facilitate its free and unbridled use. His method is one of careful, precise, and transparent obfuscation: he lucidly articulates ambiguities. Strauss muddies the waters of our political thought precisely because we have been too quick to assume we have discovered the clear springs of truth. And these ambiguities are expressed in ways designed to frustrate the unphilosophical-- and to enrage breathless half-wits who follow fashionable ideologies. Put simply, his style is a trap. His writing becomes an impassable conundrum for his prejudiced enemies. Pitchfork-wielding villagers on the hunt for the Grand Inquisitor will be sorely disappointed.

This is both Strauss's charm and his worst quality: his subtle voice is an antidote to the bluster and screams of the modern marketplace, which has shamelessly commodified political discourse, yet his intentionally difficult writing is at times annoyingly smug. While Strauss is correct in demanding that-- horror of horrors-- we put in the effort of reading closely and thinking through difficult ideas which require us to walk slippery terrain, there is something gleefully punitive in his aloofness, his thorny withholding of truth. Like the lawyer Utterson in Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Strauss seems to incline to "Cain's heresy": "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way". But although liberals who traffic in radical historicism and logical positivism are perhaps to be scorned, they are not the only kinds of liberals. Instead of contributing to the overall success of the democratic project, Strauss exacerbates the already contentious intellectual atmosphere surrounding the various projects undertaken by the Left to actualize the "universal and homogenous state". Love of truth, and battling on its behalf, is not served by demonizing honest opponents.

His writings were published during the Cold War, and the breaking point between philosophers of the old and new orders was the Soviet Union. Strauss had the pleasure of being right just at the historical moment when Western liberals were slowly awakening to Stalin's perversion of the Marxist ideal. The effect was chastening, to say the least. This is clear in the work of many different writers, from critics such as Lionel Trilling to contemporaries like the neocons-- many of whom come from the Left-- and popular pundits like Christopher Hitchens, an ex-Trotskyite. The discovery that the U.S.S.R. was not only not the best regime, but was perhaps the worst, the bloodiest, the least successful of all regimes, marginalized the men who still, against all evidence, supported communism and saddled conscientious, honest liberals with a bad conscience, rendering them intellectually impotent. At the same time, on the Right, the writing of men like Strauss took a strident, acid tone. Watching as the power of the Left receded, they would not allow anyone in the intellectual elite, especially in academia, to forget, let alone repeat, their failures. "Liberal self-respect" gradually, often comically, became an oxymoron. With Reagan's ascension came the thundering polemicism of Allan Bloom, and after the fall of the U.S.S.R., the final nail in the coffin, the victors of the Cold War infected popular discourse with the crude mashing together of all liberal ideas into the most lunatic pipe dreams of the last century: among average Americans there is no more common, or indeed more vitriolic epithet applied to liberals off all stripes, than "communist".

But here it is worth remembering Strauss' remark, made just after the publication of "On Tyranny", that only three people in his profession would understand it. Strauss was always writing for those in his profession, and even then only for those who were philosophers, like Kojeve, and not merely intellectuals. The rarefied air of his writing, so off-putting at first, is perhaps why Strauss is ultimately worth studying. To repeat his methodology, we should return to the sources of modern thought with an open mind, granting the first texts their full measure of self-conscious ambiguity. We must start by understanding the breadth and scope of our problems. Doing so would allow Strauss's books to disclose whatever wisdom they have for us-- and they have much-- and would also, I strongly believe, offer a critique of the current political crisis that would be indispensable to anyone concerned with checking the abuse of power by the Bush Administration. For Strauss's writing not only points out where the Left went wrong, but rips away the foundation upon which the Republican Party has constructed its new model American government, one which is now approaching Strauss' definition of tyranny: an illegitimate ruler, like Xenophon's Hiero, who rules by fiat and not in accordance with the laws. A still greater lesson to be learned from the problem of Leo Strauss is that philosophy is always damaged when it is used as an instrument for any end. Philosophers cease to be philosophers when they enter the compromised space inhabited by the rest of us, citizens who are not wise and must begin their struggle for universal freedom, as Strauss counsels, with the sober understanding that the establishment of universal freedom for all of mankind as a problem without a solution.
Posted: 4/24/2006
 
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