Brains think: Plato for me, Machiavelli for thee

[elfs]

Quite possibly among my favorite articles this week is Jason Kuznicki's analysis of neoconservatism's roots, comparing three men the neocons all say they admire: Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, and Adam Smith.

I've dissed Kristol before, even on the day he died, because he is the author of our modern misery. Kristol was infamous in my circles for injecting himself into the question of evolutionary biology's validity with this response:

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.

Kuzniki points out that Kristol derived from Strauss these philosophical points:

• There is an unbridgeable chasm between the wise few and the vulgar many.
• Man and society have come unhinged from the natural order and from the religious faith necessary to sustain moral and political unity.
• The political order should mirror the "hierarchic order of man's natural constitution" (i.e. that Thomas Jefferson was wrong and, indeed, "that the mass of mankind has been born with saddles on their backs, a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride, by the grace of God")
• Wise statesmen should not be hampered by conventional morality or the rule of law... wise statesmen must use "benevolent coercion" to make their citizens virtuous.
• Wise statesmen should ground the regime on pieties and myths. The cardinal virtue for the vulgar many is self-sacrifice.

Wow, if that doesn't mirror General William T. Sherman's letter that I posted from a few days ago, I don't know what does.

Kuznicki points out that the one classical virtue neither Strauss nor Kristol never mention "hubris" among the classical values. (Kristol's intellectual acumen apparently didn't devolve to his son, Bill, who is insane, immoral, and desperate for attention among the neocons.)

Kuznicki finishes, "I've been reading Leo Strauss this month as well, and I'm struck at how blatant so much of his supposedly esoteric doctrine really is. Strauss repeats ad nauseam those terrible, terrible secrets that cannot be told to the common man."

Kuznicki is addressing Kristol's base assumption about "noble lies," especially the assumption that without Fear of Hell™, the "vulgar masses" will not fall into line. Kuznicki quotes Adam Smith:

History bears out the opinion that mankind can perfectly well do without the belief in a heaven. The Greeks had anything but a tempting idea of a future state. Their Elysian fields held out very little attraction to their feelings and imagination. Achilles in the Odyssey expressed a very natural, and no doubt a very common sentiment, when he said that he would rather be on earth the serf of a needy master than reign over the whole kingdom of the dead. Yet we neither find that the Greeks enjoyed life less, nor feared death more, than other people.

Really, these people ought to read more Smith and Oakeshott, and even Burke, and stop reading Kristol, Kirk and Strauss.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

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.

UGH! There may be different layers (or "amount of detail" if you prefer) but "different truths" is the cry of people that the power of leading those that don't agree with them.


(An example would be gravity. Basic truth "Things fall down" more detailed "They fall at an accelerating rate." You can add more detail of orbits, terminal vs. maximum velocity, friction, etc. but that doesn't invalidate the core truths, it adds detail to them.)