Letters to the Editor
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America needs less GREEK influence
A picture is worth a thousand words. Here's a portrait of the would-be (worst-sort-of) Greek, Leo Strauss, by the great Jewish draughtsman, David Levine.
http://www.nybooks.com/gallery/871
And here are several hundred words about Leo Strauss embracing the worst parts of Greek heritage.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp
Noble lies and perpetual war
Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie......Strauss rarely spoke in his own name. He wrote as a commentator on the classical texts of political theory. But he was an extremely opinionated and dualistic commentator. The fundamental distinction that pervades and informs all of his work is that between the ancients and the moderns. Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients.
In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato’s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.
Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.
A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.
The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law (p. 70).
Now, the ancients were determined to keep this tyrannical teaching secret because the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination; indeed, they may very well turn their resentment against the superior few. Lies are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.
The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise.
Strauss justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie. But in truth, Strauss has a very impoverished conception of Plato’s noble lie. Plato thought that the noble lie is a story whose details are fictitious; but at the heart of it is a profound truth.
In the myth of metals, for example, some people have golden souls – meaning that they are more capable of resisting the temptations of power. And these morally trustworthy types are the ones who are most fit to rule. The details are fictitious, but the moral of the story is that not all human beings are morally equal.
In contrast to this reading of Plato, Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History, p. 151). For many commentators who (like Karl Popper) have read Plato as a totalitarian, the logical consequence is to doubt that philosophers can be trusted with political power. Those who read him this way invariably reject him. Strauss is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him.
-- Shadia DruryI know some people will call me a typical anti-Greek leftist bigot, but really, I love Tzatziki and Kalamata olives, I'm just allergic to Feta cheese, and to fascism.
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From shooter242
As opposed to what exactly? Precipitating regional war by pulling out? Anyone on board for that? Tsk.
As opposed to the regional sectarian war already underway, said regional war precipitated by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now four year-old US-led occupation of the same?
I never realized US lives meant so little to you, shooter242. Non-US lives, yes, but your fellow countrymen?
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My thanks to Svensker at 12:52:09, before I leave the cool 'ole wild-west Salon.
Don't let your children go into supporting this imperial reign, okay.
I remember a old lady in Yien Vien, a village outside of Hanoi in 1900... I had an interpreter with me. We spent the afternoon visiting her loved ones graves. Burnt incense, etc. The elderly peasant had a dirt floor, plus a typical, well manicured, garden. She had her survival duck (eggs) etc., and a ration of rice and green tea.
She asked me, "Why do American parents allow their children to come 10,000 miles away from home to kill us and die in our Father/Motherland?" Why?
The same People's Republic Committee assigned an interpreter was also assigned to the Hotel Hilton till the war ended, lost. I remember much. He was a gentlemen. We spent two-months learning his honest counsel and with his guidance, going from Hanoi to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), he taught HOSPITALITY.
He told me a baby, with no head, was brought to the Friendship Heath Clinic that 12-veterans were gesturing to help build. We saw them make scaffold, paint-brushes, etc., You need something, They knew how to make and improvise. The Nixon neocon gang bombed, mercilessly, the populated North Vietnam sectors pre-and in the exit of 1972. They remember the flight from the American embassy in the last days, too. During the Christmas season, they knew they were losing the war. So, bomb? That's what these nocon's do. Why?
Thanks, Svensker, and all others' even if the memory is pain.
No support this maladministration. Do not send your sons/daughter's into this fiasco, please.
PS. The peepers are peeping.