The Politics of Heaven

A book review by Tim Rutten
LA Times, August 15, 2007

Edited and illustrated by Andy Ross

The Politics of Heaven
America in Fearful Times
By Earl Shorris
Norton, 372 pages

Reduced to its essence, Shorris' thesis is that a fear-based alliance of neoconservatives and religious believers have dangerously undermined the natural optimism that underpins American democracy.

The strongest section in The Politics of Heaven is Shorris' extended explication of the philosophers who have influenced the religious right's neoconservative allies. This is familiar territory for the author, whose 2004 Harper's essay on Leo Strauss made a couple of extremely shrewd and helpful points concerning the neoconservatives' intellectual godfather.

Leo Strauss as a young man

Strauss fled the rise of Nazism, and Shorris made a telling point in locating the conservative philosopher's all-encompassing pessimism in the disillusion he suffered when the philosopher he idolized, Martin Heidegger, embraced national socialism in 1932.

"Doch das Sein - was ist das Sein? Es ist Es selbst.
Dies zu erfahren und zu sagen, muss das künftige Denken lernen."
Martin Heidegger

Similarly, Shorris made a provocative point in arguing that the origins of Strauss' deliberately obscure literary style could be found in his reading of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed. That medieval classic was deliberately composed on two levels: a deliberately transparent one, written so as not to upset "simple" believers, and a hidden, more sophisticated level intended only for the philosophical elite.

The dude in the turban is Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, or the Rambam

Both Strauss and Shorris, as atheists and fundamentally secular thinkers, are hard up against the question of evil, which is what anyone seriously considering 1930s Germany must confront. The persistence of evil, like the miracle of altruistic goodness, is essentially a religious question.

Though he never makes it explicit, Shorris' point seems to be that the neoconservatives, bearers of all that Straussian pessimism, and religious conservatives, whom he seems to conceive almost entirely as evangelical Protestants freighted with a fear of death and the imminence of the Apocalypse, are allies in fearful disillusion.

Shorris' notion that American society has undergone a resurgence of religiosity because of the dawn of the Nuclear Age, reinforced by Sept. 11, and produced a pervasive culture of fear won't gain enough currency to wear itself out. It's a vulgar idea that utterly neglects the vigor and varieties of American religious experience.

Shorris has painfully little to say that's of any real use on his chosen topic.

Strauss' great philosophical antagonist was Isaiah Berlin, the great exponent of pluralism.

"Liberty for wolves is death for sheep," Berlin said. "I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said. That is relativism."

Pluralism, by contrast, "is the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other, as we derive it from reading Plato or the novels of medieval Japan."

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In 1916 his family moved to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution, and in 1921 he emigrated to England. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was later appointed Professor of Social and Political Theory. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy. He died in 1997.

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204), also known as Rambam or Maimonides, was the first person to write a systematic code of all Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah; he produced one of the great philosophic statements of Judaism, The Guide to the Perplexed; published a commentary on the entire Mishna; served as physician to the sultan of Egypt; wrote numerous books on medicine; and served as leader of Cairo's Jewish community.

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a German-born Jewish-American political philosopher who specialized in the study of classical political philosophy. He spent most of his career as a Political Science Professor at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books. Since his death, he and his students have become an intellectual source of neoconservatism in the United States.

Defending Strauss

By Julie Englander
Chicago Reader, August 24, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

Writing in the New Yorker in May 2003, Seymour Hersh claimed that “the Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush Administration,” most notably Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, and Abram Shulsky, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

A Jew born in 1899 in Hessen, Germany, Leo Strauss earned his doctorate by studying with, among others, Martin Heidegger, who later joined the Nazi party. Strauss might have become a victim of the Nazis, but in the 1930s he was working abroad.

In 1938, Strauss became an American citizen and began a professorship in New York. In 1949, he moved to Hyde Park to teach political philosophy at the University of Chicago. He labored to redress what he saw as the failings of the popular social theory that through science and enlightenment a perfect society was possible.

Strauss was the subject of controversy that centered on his doctrine of esoteric writing. The greatest thinkers, Strauss maintained, wrote in such a way as to provide not one but two meanings to their readers: “a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines.”

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss touched on his idea of the noble lie. Philosophers “believed that the gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar’ was a basic fact of human nature,” Strauss told readers, and the vulgar were generally suspicious of philosophers. So philosophers had to employ subversive means.

In his 2003 New Yorker article, Seymour Hersh traced Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky’s delusions of grandeur and own “noble lies” to Strauss and the University of Chicago, where both men “received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972.” In fact, Strauss had left the U. of C. four years earlier.

About the same time that Seymour Hersh was writing in the New Yorker, James Atlas had an article in the New York Times. “According to one school of thought, our most recent military adventure turns out to have been nothing less than a defense of Western civilization—as interpreted by the late classicist and political philosopher Leo Strauss,” he wrote.

Nathan Tarcov grew up in New York City, but when he took a political philosophy class at Cornell with Allan Bloom, he was turned on to the idea that there was something universal to learn from classical and ancient philosophy. Tarcov enrolled at Claremont Graduate School in California in 1968 and took classes with Strauss.

In 1978, not long after Tarcov began teaching at the University of Chicago, he phoned Paul Wolfowitz for advice about jobs in politics. Wolfowitz had been working in the State Department under President Carter and brought Tarcov on board as a speechwriter.

Yale’s Steven Smith concedes in the preface to Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism that Strauss “has always been something of an exotic plant” and is undoubtedly “an acquired taste.” But he was “a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had.”

While putting together the book, Smith recalled a paper he’d come across a decade earlier in the Strauss archives. It was the typescript of a talk Strauss gave at the New School in 1942, “What Can We Learn From Political Theory?” In 2005 he suggested the paper to Tarcov.

The 1942 paper answers its own question with a surprising “not much.” Strauss told his audience we can’t rely on philosophy to tell us what to do. The best approach to political action, Strauss said, was the one Winston Churchill advocated to H.G. Wells during World War II. Churchill called his policy KMT—Keep Muddling Through.

Tarcov was amazed. Here was the most explicit statement by Strauss on the relationship between philosophy and practical politics that he had ever seen. Tarcov knew of no other clues to Strauss’s take on contemporary political questions.

Strauss’s executor, friend, and editor, Joseph Cropsey, had made a list of unarchived Strauss material. One title on the list was “The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,” a talk given at the New School in 1943. When Tarcov got his hands on the five-page manuscript, he found it as intriguing and surprising as “What Can We Learn?”

“I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted.
 

AR  Looking back on this page in September 2008, I sense a lack of the distance I have now put between me and the self who had not yet fully appreciated how deeply Strauss had imbibed Platonism.