The collapse of sacred order in Europe during the World Wars left many of Europe’s surviving Jewish intellectuals to stake their theory and practice on the future of the United States and Israel. Communism, of course, opened its arms to secular Jews from the outset, but fascism tormented the Jews with the ultimate in gentile oppression: not even renouncing the Jewish faith could save them. So even Jewish intellectuals who flirted, or more, with communist ideology could recognize that secularism alone could not necessarily preserve social order. (Not incidentally, this is to assume that the Nazi regime was so radically transgressive, right down to its foundations, that it did not count as a social order. It had to be thought of as an anti-order.) It’s from this perspective that we can see why Jewish thinkers as a group wound up in an ambiguous position when it comes to understanding the relation between sacred order and social order. Where a Leon Kass came to admit that the supremely moral and bourgeois generation of his parents, in its merely secular grounding, was too weak to withstand the destabilizing questions posed by the counterculture and the destructive answers of the anticulture, an Irving Kristol, by contrast, sought to pile up the evidence and draw out the logic that would show even secular Jews (or gentiles) why their bourgeois morality could and should be defended against the radicalism and nihilism of the ’60s and ’70s.
Looming behind both Kass and Kristol are three titanic figures — Leo Strauss, Philip Rieff, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Strauss, a man whom Rieff would call an “ex-Jew,” remarked upon Tocqueville about as sparingly as did Rieff himself. But Jewish intellectuals driven to admit that the fate of America, not Europe, had to concern them most — and both Rieff and Strauss did this — had to make two momentous decisions about democracy in America. First, either Tocqueville’s insights and prophecies were still accurate in late 20th-century America, or they were not; second, if they were accurate, what was to be done to preserve the American order?
Straussians in basic agreement with Kristol answer yes to the first question. Though no great critics of Plato, pro-Tocquevillian Straussians must concede that Tocqueville’s vision of democratic despotism significantly qualifies or steps beyond Plato’s judgment that democracy must degenerate into tyranny because democratic souls are unable to save themselves from succumbing to the tyranny of desire. In short, Plato teaches that social order is ultimately untenable in democracies because too many democratic individuals slip too far into a love of transgression that comes to rule their souls. For Tocqueville, quite differently, only in aristocratic ages do individuals really allow debauchery and decadence to rule their lives. Democratic individuals are too busy, too equal, too distracted, too conflicted, and not wealthy enough by far to become de Sades. Not great transgression but great quietude will destroy democratic social order; rather than a fury of bad behavior, the democratic individual will slip into a fugue of comfort, surrounding himself in bourgeois self-satisfaction with handpicked friends and family. In Tocqueville’s dystopia, history will die whispering, not banging. Soft despotism will appear to perfect democratic social order; but it will sap the springs of true human greatness in such a way that democratic social order will fade or euthanize itself, to be replaced by something like the “oriental despotism” of China or Egypt, an anti-order of servitude, ignorance, forgetfulness, and anonymity. Our recognizably human character will be smudged away.
Rieff takes a different view. He is clear that Tocqueville — who showed clearly enough that America will forever be without the “officer class” required to authoritatively maintain sacred and social order — is wrong about the way we live today. Rather than enclosing ourselves in solipsistic and quietly gratifying boutique relationships, we create complex strategic distances between ourselves and our supposed intimates. Where Tocqueville’s American readily reposes in committed relationships, Rieff’s American hops from relationship to relationship, alternating between ‘therapies’ of commitment and decommitment that reveal all commitments to be at bottom merely temporarily useful performances. Where Tocqueville’s American is ever more gentle in his mores, Rieff’s American revels in the primacy of possibility unleashed by charismatic transgression. Instead of quietude, Rieff prophesies a new barbarism, truly barbaric because we will lose the ability even to recognize ourselves as barbarians. But Rieff goes on to note that even democratic barbarism pulls us downward into an equality of boredom. Where Nietzsche can’t quite accept the possibility that the aristocratic barbarism of the “blond beast” has been historically foreclosed, Rieff suggests that democratization spells the end of barbarism as a force for creative destruction. Barbaric democrats will bore themselves, and one another, to death. Perhaps Tocqueville’s and Rieff’s dystopias converge after all: but you’d only know it reading from Rieff to Tocqueville, and not the other way around. And Rieff pulls no punches in prophesizing the bloody lengths to which barbaric democrats will go in a final, fatal effort not to be bored.
In sum, Rieff teaches that the greatest danger to American social order is the democratization of transgression. Tocqueville teaches that the greatest danger is the triumph of quietude. We can’t fully understand neoconservatism unless it’s situated within the tension between Rieff’s and Tocqueville’s American dystopias. Rieff and the neocons both railed against America’s cultural decline in the late 20th century. But because the neocons are more Tocquevillian than Rieff, they feared cultural collapse because they thought it would lead to the kind of quietude that reconciles democratic individuals to despotism. And to the extent that neocons are students of Strauss, they recognize that despotism is the worst of regimes because despots seek to destroy the possibility of philosophy. (A global despotism, as Strauss warned in his exchange with Kojeve, would aspire to eliminate philosophy forever from the whole face of the Earth.) Suddenly the difference between Jewish philosophers who make the preservation of the Jewish faith central — like Rieff — and Jewish philosophers who don’t — like Strauss — becomes essential. Rieff sees the preservation of social order as a task which requires, but is fundamentally beyond the competence of, politics. So does Strauss — but Rieff turns to Moses while Strauss turns to Plato. America, of course, puts Rieff and Strauss in a compromised position: neither Hobbesian nor Platonic rule are viable in a natural-born democracy. In consequence, Rieff’s sociology of the sacred shifts away from politics in a way that Strauss’s philosophy does not. Rieff is unafraid to politicize the culture war — there being, in his judgment, no other way to resist the colonization of the law by the anticulture. But Straussians who turn to Tocqueville to try to understand the best way to preserve philosophy in democratic times conclude that the American people must be focused on productivity in economic life and political participation in significant long-term projects. Otherwise, they will slip into quietude, despotism will come to rule, and all will be lost.
Or so I would like to preface the remarks which touched off these thoughts — Dan McCarthy’s recent appraisal of Irving Kristol and his legacy:
Irving Kristol was an intelligent, reasonably decent man whose hysteria about the counterculture led him to champion policies that have crippled the dollar and given the country no-win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [...] Neoconservatism has become a set of attitudes that might be summed up as, “somewhere, shaggy kids might be having sex or smoking dope—so let’s cut interest rates and invade Iraq!”
October 29th, 2009 | 5:30 pm
Whew! I’ve never been brave enough to try and sum up Rieff, but my eyes about jump out of their sockets when I saw this photo in the NYT this week:
This echo of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cries out what Rieff wrote about a transgressionless culture where everything is just a matter of desire, and the new gulag is the hospital. Here’s Rieff from “Crisis of the Officer Class”:
The commissar has as his exact parallel, in the late liberal capitalist culture, the rock star. The uniform of the Maoist, the gray shabby high-buttoned tunic, is paralleled by the tight blue jeans and the form-revealing T-shirt of the rock star.
Finally, the erotic dream of dreams, the abolition of all interdicts, which is to mean the abolition of all transgressions in a nightmare world of which we have already had full sample in Auschwitz and the Gulag, not to mention the Soviet psychiatric prisons: the world of unlimited transgression. But the nightmare of the brave new world need not fear old-fashioned torture and gas chambers. The universal totalitarian institution will be the hospital, and the universal uniform of the new elite will be the white physician-therapist coat. The brave new world will be, as we have seen and said before, one vast hospital.
October 29th, 2009 | 5:35 pm
Hmmm. The HTML in my previous comment showing the NYT picture didn’t come through. And in case this link does not work, just paste this into your browser:
http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2009/10/26/a690c33ebd4cea8a7e8ed8d4d31dd22c.jpg
October 29th, 2009 | 7:23 pm
- -
First off, this:
(Not incidentally, this is to assume that the Nazi regime was so radically transgressive, right down to its foundations, that it did not count as a social order. It had to be thought of as an anti-order.)
is doubling down on dumb. At least insofar as you take all this anti- stuff to represent “the negation of” rather than “the negative of the current”, which I fear you do. The latter might be a useful analytic tool, though I’m not entirely sold, the former’s pure rhetoric. Just because Rieff thought a lot about the right things doesn’t mean he thought the right things about them.
Secondly:
Rather than enclosing ourselves in solipsistic and quietly gratifying boutique relationships, we create complex strategic distances between ourselves and our supposed intimates. Where Tocqueville’s American readily reposes in committed relationships, Rieff’s American hops from relationship to relationship, alternating between ‘therapies’ of commitment and decommitment that reveal all commitments to be at bottom merely temporarily useful performances.
This whole parallel structure seems to be implying conflict, but I see none here. If I rewrote it like this:
how would it be wrong?
Third, it’s a little hinky to go through this exercise without bringing up the Frankfurt School or the option of resolving the dilemma by sanctifying transgression and legitimizing whatever results as the new social order. After all, the French have figured out how to throw legitimating riots, ne? Or is this what your silly little workaround hack about the Nazis is there to do – establish that cultures that differ from or invert the cultures they supersede are somehow not real or valid? This strikes me as some patently ridiculous anti-dialecticism (negative, not negation of).
If anything’s at play here in terms of postwar Jewish intellectuals and social order, it’s an overextrapolation from the powerful but solitary data point of Nazi Germany to the extent that:
1) Any variation from the current culture will be in the direction of small-n-at-least nazis.
2) They’ll never be our nazis.
3) That would be bad.
3 is reasonable; 2 is a little weak – I mean, they have to be someone’s nazis; and 1 is an idiocy that – to beat a dead hobby horse – is only comprehensible in a world that’s forgotten d’Annunzio.
- -
October 30th, 2009 | 2:34 am
Yikes! After reading James talk about about Rieff here numerous times, I’m persuaded to read him more seriously. All I know is Triumph of the Therapeutic, I guess i’ll look in the later sacred order stuff.
BTW, that “Beatlesesque” picture is Houston, TX–the place where i live (or close enough in terms of the exurban transgressionless sprawl). And yes, this sprawl is becoming a hospital.
October 30th, 2009 | 6:59 am
“And to the extent that neocons are students of Strauss, they recognize that despotism is the worst of regimes because despots seek to destroy the possibility of philosophy.”
Despotism may be the worst of regimes however its ability to destroy philosophy is problematic in that man inherently participates in the search for the ground. Man, Aristotle said, acts as if he has an ultimate purpose.
“But Straussians who turn to Tocqueville to try to understand the best way to preserve philosophy in democratic times conclude that the American people must be focused on productivity in economic life and political participation in significant long-term projects. Otherwise, they will slip into quietude, despotism will come to rule, and all will be lost.”
The possibility here is the dislocation (Voegelin uses the term ‘misplacements’) of the transcendent Ground by making “productivity in economic life and political participation…”, in an agnostic sense, the location of a ground predicated on a immanent hierarchy of being.
The implication is that Neoconservatism is an ideology grounded in the rationalism of the Enlightenment project, that it has run its course, and is now the target of intellectual criticisms that are in the act of destroying its credibility. Whether or not it has been institutionalized remains to be seen.
Given that the nature of man is an openness to the transcendent Ground, we might ask the question, what do we do now?
October 30th, 2009 | 11:42 am
[...] Strauss and Toqueville. [...]
October 30th, 2009 | 11:59 am
James, it is amazing that a statement as stupid and as casually obnoxious as Dan McCarthy’s would have inspired anyone to profound thoughts.
BTW, who really cares, if we’re talking about giants like Strauss, Rieff, and Tocqueville, and about giant questions like democracy’s future and the still-unfolding legacy of the 60s counter-culture, about (yaawwnnn) “how to define/understand neoconservativism?” Why should all the inevitable crap that AmerCon writers and others like to bring into that question be allowed to confuse or frame such issues? You like to jump back and forth between contemporary ideological disputes and possible intellectual influences upon those disputes, but you ought to be more cautious about that. I really don’t think the future of “neo-conservatism,” whatever we’re defining it as in this decade, could possibly be decided by getting one’s theory of “trangression” correct or not, vis-a-vis S, T, and R. And you go so far as to make Rieff’s choice of Moses over Plato depend on his seeing beyond Tocqueville’s vision of soft despotism. Triple hmm…you’re the Rieff guy, but that would seem a pretty insufficient reason for choosing Moses.
You really do need to read my dissertation, someday-book. I know next to nothing about Rieff, but via the Plato of a close Strauss-influenced reading of books VIII-IX of the Republic, I was able to see fairly clearly how Tocqueville had overemphasized the “softening” aspects of democracy. I was also able to show that Plato’s theory of democratic character was open to the possibility of democratic society for some time regularizing trangression. That is, I didn’t need Rieff to see your main points here…(I think!). Moreover, subtler readings of Tocqueville (a la Lawler and Manent and yours truly) do not insist upon a singularly soft dystopian vision, but are aware of the strong pulls in his democratic society/character towards aggressive leveling, internalized restlessness, etc. I say this while absolutely agreeing with you that Toc did not adequately consider the importance of both the tyrannic/criminal, and the trangressive.
Moreover, just to be clear. 1) Tocqueville does not seek to moderate democracy for the sake of philosophy or philosophers. So those Straussians who are all about defending philosophy can only “use him” to a certain degree. 2) Tocqueville’s theory of individualism does not rest at “committed relationships.” It pushes in a more radical direction. Philippe Beneton is strong on this in terms of family ties, and lo and behold, Bill Kristol is strong on this with respect to (in agreement with Manent) feminism and the American family. Plenty in Tocqueville that foresees our present culture war situation with respect to the family, and also, religion. 3) It isn’t all about America for Tocqueville.
None of this is to say that I don’t need to read Rieff, or that you haven’t whetted my appetite. But perhaps after the book…
October 30th, 2009 | 2:02 pm
It seems to me that we have the worst of all possible worlds: it turns out the possibilities for democratic decadence have a threshold of minimal wealth far below that imagined by M. De Toqueville, an altitude of transgressive imagination in the aristocratic elite that leaves Plato a tiny speck in the haze below, combined with an enabling leverage on wealth elevated beyond the imaginations of all the Caesars, combined. This, with a level of simultaneous democratic demand for and submission to despotic bureaucratism — unimagined by anyone — except perhaps the nominal despot, Nicholas II of Russia …
“I do not rule Russia — 10,000 clerks do.”
So many ironies in the fire of history.
October 30th, 2009 | 3:31 pm
Senescent – I recognize that daring to distinguish even in theory between counterculture and anti-culture calls forth some questions that require real intellectual courage to confront. And I say this not to compliment myself but to admit that your criticism – or the deep allegation behind it – cannot simply be waved away. One way of mustering the requisite courage is to ask ourselves what nihilism is. I intend on continuing to be convinced that nihilism can be recognized; you seem tempted to undermine our powers of recognition. Giving in to that temptation – even as a tactical feint in pursuit of broader or different strategic aims – may or may not itself be nihilistic, but it is problematic, in a way neither you nor d’Annunzio can simply wave away. I don’t know if this is a terribly satisfying answer, but as a matter of theory I’m not certain we can do better without a much longer conversation.
Carl – It is true that relative to Rieff Plato ‘got there first’, but Plato of course got there from Athens, not Jerusalem. That isn’t to say Rieff rejects the ancient Greeks – as he makes clear in The Crisis of the Officer Class, far from it. But the way to complete or counter the picture drawn by a Straussian-Tocquevillian neoconservative view requires, in my estimation, more Mosaic social and political thought than Platonic. Still, I mostly agree with everything you say here, although I’m going to hold to the point that we have to recognize neoconservatism as a response to the old liberal fear of an end of history in quietude, not a continuance of history with a dark bout of barbarism. There are theological matters at stake, here, no? Story for another day, but people concerned above all with the likelihood of our becoming like Morlocks instead of the likelihood of our becoming like Eloi would not, I think, promote neoconservative policies. Send me your opus!
October 31st, 2009 | 10:47 am
Well and good James, but let me go back down to the neo-cons for a moment. As far as I can tell, you are assuming that neoconservatism means “pursue national greatness, keep the military virtues alive, in America do this by seeking a national purpose in defending and even expanding liberty world-wide, SO THAT the alternative of softly-despotic Eloi-life developing in the U.S. is avoided.” The corollary would be that without such neo-con ideas gaining influence in Washington, a bold preemptive invasion like that George W. Bush conducted would never have even been considered. Something to that last corollary, if taken by itself and not as a corollary–i.e., neo-con for-policy ideas, from whatever premises they came from, did have an influence. But otherwise, if this is what you’re thinking, there are just too many unlikely or questionable links in the chain. There are plenty of other reasons to be a neo-con on foreign policy. There were plenty of other reasons to support invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, which is why many Democrats did. And you probably know I think the president made the right choice.
Moreover, even if we run with what I’m calling your implausible fear-of-democratic-quietude begets-aggressive-neoconservatism thesis, why would these “neo-cons” really change course with your correction? If they would now know that history does not end, would they cease worrying about your “bout” (how long a bout? whose grandchildren get to experience it?) of “barbarism?” Because, after all, I think you and I are agreed that GETTING AS CLOSE AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE TO SOFT DESPOTISM and the REGULARIZATION OF TRANGRESSION that would go with it, given that we see the need correct Toc w/ Plato and Rieff, are a large part of what would usher us into a bout of barbarism. And that means that all the trends, legal, structural, and cultural that are driving us toward something like soft despotism are the same ones that lead to the barbaric breakdown. So if your posited “neo-cons” are the agressive war-seeking bastards you sort of suggest they are due to a fear of these trends, your correction of their final dystopic vision would change nothing about their policy, right?
Or do you mean to suggest that regular episodes of overseas warfare, given a culturally degraded America (think “Doom”-like video games, and the photos from Abu Graighb) creates a dangerous breeding ground for barbaric/Morlockian instincts? Forgive me if I’m reading too much into what you’re saying.
October 31st, 2009 | 11:42 am
[...] Poulos and I think that his blog “Postmodern Conservative” has a meaningless title, but this post about the fate of America is thought provoking, with its discussion of Toqueville and Philip Rieff and Leo Strauss. I would [...]
October 31st, 2009 | 3:05 pm
I think this quote from Rieff is pertinent:
“There is no more feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously.”
Absent personal, supernatural Faith in Christ and commitment to the visible community embodying and enabling it, in our still Christ-haunted but now logically and ethically nihilistic culture, we become gods who don’t take our choices seriously, who can’t take them seriously, whether that is the choice to bomb another culture into oblivion or into our self-referential image, or bomb our souls into damnable oblivion with countless transgressions.
Both the nation-worshipping “rightist” neo-con, and the transgressive nihilist “leftist”, whether the conscious intellectual elite, mindless bureaucrat, or supine mass-man version of these, are symptomatic of a choice-less culture of ghost-gods.
But neither Rieff nor Strauss could fully intellectually understand or existentially experience what this “being-chosen” gift is all about, which is a gift that any real culture must cultivate and sustain, not knowing Jesus and His community, which is the ultimate “counter-culture” and “anti-culture” with respect to our godless and humanless imitations of culture because the fulfillment, creator, and model of all cultures. So their diagnosis, however profound and accurate in parts, is ultimately symptomatic of the counter-culture or anti-culture, take your pick, they attempted to transcend and to which they failed to posit a real alternative.
October 31st, 2009 | 9:39 pm
Why are you guys turning to either Strauss or Rieff on the question of “Fate of America”…. I am not that familiar with Rieff, but for Strauss the question about America is for him generally the question about the west… which means for him, the world of athen, where reason and law trump custom, tribe and rule by force/hegimonia. The current fate of America debate is less about this struggle of the kingdom of light vs the kingdom darkess, echoing Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic, rather the last lines of Eliot’s Ash Wednesday or the Kojevian end of man as the rise of the last man meme.
The fate of America is and should be tied up with the principle of America being a republic of self-governing people, here the people rule. That as long as the people are allowed to rule, and not be ruled by either judges or administrators.. who replace political rule with either administration or judical fiat that trumps political deliberations about the good or the beneifical by the people.
When I look at even the deliberation of the health care debate in the congress, I see how deliberation and the political is clearly alive in a way it is not in any European parliment. That as long as the people through their different levels of represenation can govern and do not lose this habit, character, then the fate of America is secure.
October 31st, 2009 | 9:43 pm
I always recommend people go read their Willmoore Kendall… esp the Conservative Affirmation… to understand what is Right about America.
November 1st, 2009 | 12:40 am
[...] –James Poulos [...]
November 1st, 2009 | 12:46 am
Clifford, More is said in the statement “as long as” than you admit. Strauss looks to Athens, but to Jerusalem as well, and it is the tension between the two that makes for what is called the West. If America is part of this civilization, then it too lives out this tension in its makeshift arrangements (including the constitution).
Kendall surely speaks of what is right about America, but is this even a world which one can point to today? It is untrue that contemporary America is a world of complacent last men, but it is also not some individualistic democratized Faustian culture. Still, these alternatives seem to be embedded tendencies–and one hears incessant rumors of their emergence. Still, one need not be an alarmist, and I suppose a dose of Kendall would be fitting. If one sticks to the particular, then one sees much that is worthwhile in the day to day lives of most Americans, but when I look at my particular place of work I must admit that the technocratic Faustians have in mind a docility for the rest of us that more than a few of us are willing to risk.
Nonetheless, I’m not sure what Strauss has to do with any of this–other than a distaste for an overly bureaucratized world, and wariness for an unmitigated Nietzschean expression of will to power (even if democratic). But in this regard, Strauss’ rhetoric has to be taken into account, and most of his statements in this light were made his dialogue with Kojeve who had a propensity to speak in grandiose terms.
At the end of the day, the rest of us, I guess, are still Kendallian Americans “in our hips.”
November 1st, 2009 | 11:43 am
-Interesting comments since Carl entered the lists: thanks to James, et al. I’d arrange the participants and views somewhat as follows: Thaddeus is a theocon who wants divine rule ( — details to be worked out,), Cliff, an Aristotelian,who wants dignified human self-rule; James apparently has internalized a narrative of the Bush administration that both the Right and the Left espoused (or found useful for their different purposes), while Carl defends the Bush Administration but does so by poking holes in the Right-Left anti-Bush/anti-Neocon narrative. I’ll leave the James/Carl dispute for another time.
Thaddeus could appear to be a dichotomous Catholic thinker: you’re either self-consciously subject to God or you’re … well, something wrong and bad; Cliff (rightly) rejoinders: Aristotle didn’t think mankind was chosen by God but he took “choice” or choosing quite seriously; his boulesis is not “choice” in the contempoary liberal-progressive sense(s). And he thought human nature and dignity required the adventure and risks of human self-rule. Do we want to go the Luther route (in honor of Reformation Day, I bring him up) and simply and thoroughly damn & reject the Stagarite and the diffferent — higher — view of reason & nature & freedom — that he represents? I don’t. As it happens, I think the truth about man is a dialectically explored and ever renegotiated uneasy synthesis of the two anthropologies. Man as image and likeness of God & man as the political animal because the logos-animal seem to me both to be true, and neither is wholly subsumeable under the other. To be sure, there’s a Jewish or Hebrew Scripture articulation of divine Law & politics in terms of Israel, Torah, and the Land, and then there’s a NT articulation of the Church and the political (see the end of Matth. Gospel for one). They’re not the same, far from it.
The former Jewish one, of course, was enormously ‘complicated’ precisely during the course of Jewish history. Exile & diaspora occasioned and called for Jewish rethinking of the sense of Law, community, Temple, etc.. (This fact may complicated James’ Rieffian appeal to “Moses”.)
Strauss of course rejected in principle this uneasy, always imperfect synthesis of two “anthropologies,” but his revelation -reason dichotomy wasn’t Christian/Aristotelian, but … shall we say, Meccan-Platonic?
Once again, thanks to all the participants. Just wanted to occasion some further utterances from each and all. I agree with Cliff’s observation that American political life is relatively more healthy than European parliaments. I think that sort of broader perspective and judgment is necessary and helpful today. When I teach “Europe” or cotnemporary Europe I tend to use it as a “cautionary tale” for where American liberal progressivism will take us.
November 1st, 2009 | 12:50 pm
I know I’m dragging the discussion down to my level, and McCarthy is an easy target, but if the Iraq War was pushed in order to get “shaggy kids” to stop having sex and smoking weed, wouldn’t the Bush administration done everything in its power to expand the armed forces, rather than to limit their growth in the aftermath of 9/11? Wouldn’t the Bush administration have always tried to send the maximum rather than the minimum/light footprint number of forces into the theatre of battle – the better to impart some of the fighting virtues into the maximum number of shaggy kids?
November 1st, 2009 | 1:49 pm
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds here, especially since I’m not coming out with a full-throated attack or defense of THE NEOCONS and ALL THAT THEY STAND FOR. So (this is addressed mainly to Paul and Carl) let me take a step back and try a restatement. Dan McCarthy’s original zinger plainly made it sound as if neocon domestic and foreign policy were responses to transgression cooked up by moral scolds. I claimed that neocon policy is unintelligible as a response to transgression, not least because the primary neocon fear, following Strauss and Tocqueville, is that America will slip into the sort of solipsistic bourgeois quietude of the Last Man. My further claim is that this fear is Continental in a way that much more firmly indicts Europe than the US. (The implication is that ‘Old’ Europeans, more than we perpetually novel Americans, are in direr need of a neocon intervention.) It is true that not all neocons are in lockstep on this point; Irving Kristol, for instance, went to bat against the nihilism I associate (with Rieff) with anti-culture, but he did so in the context of a more general critique against the radicalism of the counter-culture. With Bloom we see the charge against both radicalism and nihilism boiling down to a flattening of souls.
Now, as I conceded, there isn’t a bright line between anti- and counter-culture, nor between quietude as Tocqueville envisioned it and the banalization of transgression as Plato or Rieff envisioned it. But striking the contrast is important because people who criticize neocons in the manner Dan does in the quote I pulled from his piece fundamentally misunderstand the thrust of neocon policy. It’s not moral scolding of the American/puritan variety. It’s something we might better call political scolding. The primary concern is not moral goodness but human greatness. These are related valences of human dignity, but they are distinct.
Critics of neoconservatism who miss this are led not to take neocon worries about human greatness at face value, instead reading in some kind of greed-based or morality-based semi-secret plot. After all, a good Straussian neocon would hold that human greatness is itself a mere means to the ultimate or transcendent human greatness of philosophy. The aim is to preserve a world in which philosophy is practicable; if that requires a world in which religious authority must be bolstered in some way, so be it, but if there are other ways, like bolstering economic dynamism and patriotic nationalism — and, of course, there are — the neocon will grab hold of those as goals open to political practice in a way deepening moral authority is simply not. But their concern with human greatness tends to draw strong neocons away from the harsh lessons about the limits of human greatness we draw from the Mosaic tradition. The soundness of the neocon policy vision writ large is undermined in the details by an inattention to the problem of transgression as opposed to the problem of quietude — NOT because neocons fail to “do enough about” transgression, but because the void created by their basic disbelief that the nature of man is fallen leads them to worry too much that the history of man is flattening. The way Strauss allows Moses to sit between the chairs of Athens and Mecca worsens this problem, perhaps because it is, at least in part, its cause.
All this is complicated hugely by America’s character as a natural-born democracy. The neocon attempt to enlist popular evangelicals in the national quest for greatness (Bush, Palin) may have made a lot of sense on paper, but in practice it has raised more questions than it has answered about possible good ways forward for America. The biggest complicating factor of all, however, is certainly the lack of any additional or independent Western pole of great power in the world today. Neoconservatism may be a noble and brilliant but ultimately hugely costly and deeply flawed political effort to make the best of an otherwise fairly untenable situation. It is hard to imagine how this situation will change unless Europe becomes more neoconservative. I worry about how often neocons make the case for their policies on the basis of raw necessity, because if they are right, we need to try even harder to extricate ourselves successfully from the present world predicament.
Time for a breather…and to change a diaper.
November 1st, 2009 | 2:40 pm
Yes, the old theocon canard. I guess Leo XIII is a theocon too, then, as well as Benedict XVI. I guess Vatican II was also taken over by theocons, since even DH states: “Therefore it [the Church’s teaching on religious liberty] leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”
Well, while I am at it, here are some more theocon, fanatic, foolish, furious, fantastical, fascistic, fulminations from some personages I would not have supposed to be in the theo-con camp!
David Schindler: “A nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either “freedom from” or “freedom for”—both of these priorities implying a theology.”
David Gallagher: “It would be better, all things considered, to have unanimity among the body politic on the ultimate questions, and if there were such agreement, a number of matters consequent upon the shared comprehensive doctrine could enter political life. Public life would be richer, would produce more good for its citizens, if it included aspects of the transcendent. . . . The point here is that when we accept the unity of reason, then it seems a mistake to take the liberal approach to political life as in principle the best or the only adequate one. It may be the best here and now, but only because we are in a defective situation, that of widespread error concerning ultimate questions.”
MacIntyre: “Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.”
MacIntyre: “My claims have been that Thomistic Aristotelianism is the philosophical expression of the rational politics of local community and that the politics of local community is not only very different from, but antagonistic to the politics of the modern state. Yet this puts me at odds with the vast majority of Thomists, past and present. For Thomist political philosophers have in the overwhelming majority understood their own philosophy as one that was capable of informing and guiding the politics of the modern state. Thomism has very rarely appeared as an enemy of the modern state as such.”
Kolnai: “The author [Maritain], then, aims at a compromise, not between the Christian religious position and this or that extra-religious, worldly, though naturally justifiable point of view, (for example, biological welfare, patriotism, or any reasonable demand of political expediency), but between the Christian religious position proper, which he espouses whole-heartedly and is eager to make valid, and another position “religious in nature”: that of “temporal” Christendom, Christianity made into the quasi-religion of progressive democracy, Christianity inverted and secularized into the humanistic self-worship of the “person” and the “body politic” (which he over emphatically distinguishes from the mere “state.”) What he really has in mind is not an agreement, adjusted to what is attainable according to time and place, between Christ and Caesar, but a synthesis, suffused with all the religious afflatus of the soul, between Christ and the idol of the modernity: between Christ and His modern caricature; between the true Christ of the faith and the substitute Christ of humanism; between Christ and Anti-Christ.”
D. Stephen Long: ““Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church, theology alone can give due order to other social formations—family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not in abstract speculation, but in a life oriented toward God that creates particular practices that require the privileging of certain social institutions above others. The goodness of God can be discovered only when the church is the social institution rendering intelligible our lives. . . . For a Christian account of this good, the church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not know their own true nature.”
Maritain: “There is, therefore, only one science of human conduct which is authentic, complete, and capable of existing as such in gradu scientiae practicae: it is that one which takes into account at once the essence and the state, the order of nature and the order of grace. All the great ethical systems which are ignorant of the ways of grace, however rich in partial truths they may be, are bound to be deficient.”
Maritain: “Man is not in a state of pure nature, he is fallen and redeemed. Consequently, ethics, in the widest sense of the word, that is, in so far as it bears on all practical matters of human action, politics and economics, practical psychology, collective psychology, sociology, as well as individual morality,—ethics in so far as it takes man in his concrete state, in his existential being, is not a purely philosophic discipline. Of itself it has to do with theology, either to become integrated with or at least subalternated to theology. . . . Here is a philosophy which must of necessity be a superelevated philosophy, a philosophy subalternated to theology, if it is not to misrepresent and scientifically distort its object.”
Maritain: “Integral political science . . . is superior in kind to philosophy; to be truly complete it must have a reference to the domain of theology, and it is precisely as a theologian that St. Thomas wrote De regimine principum . . . the knowledge of human actions and of the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to the ultimate end of the human being. . . the rule of conduct governing individual and social life cannot therefore leave the supernatural order out of account.”
William Ward: “The Church professes to be infallible in her teaching of morals no less than of faith. If, then, Catholicism be true, and if Catholics have the fullest ground for knowing it to be true, the one healthy, desirable, and legitimate state of civil society is that the Church’s doctrines, principles, and laws should be recognized without question as its one basis of legislation and administration; to the Church’s authority.”
November 2nd, 2009 | 12:53 pm
James, thank you. And God bless your child and care-giving. (I forget, son or daughter?)
It’s good to see the gulf between what you’re trying to do and what McCarthy and others think about neo-cons spelled out. I do not have quite the full theory of neo-cons that you do, and you can see I think there is much suspect, or at least highly problematic, about the enterprise of constructing such a theory in which a “core” neo-con doctrine and its development is set forth. You may have the right theory, but we can at least agree that if so it’s going to apply to limited set of those branded neo-cons.
Yes, for a certain set of those branded neo-cons, it seems absolutely correct and well-put to say, ” the void created by their basic disbelief that the nature of man is fallen leads them to worry too much that the history of man is flattening.”
However, I’m not so sure this asserted “way Strauss allows Moses to sit between the chairs of Athens and Mecca” is the correct or even the neocon understanding of Strauss, and I’m darn sure I do not understand what it means to say “this worsens this problem, perhaps because it is, at least in part, its cause.” Oh well. The usual riches and shortcomings(for slower-wits like me, at least) of your inimitable prose.
But finally, you do assert what bothers Pete and I, and what we seek (as paul says) to find factual holes in, that this concern about quietude created a greater openness (for these neo-cons) to aggressive foreign policy, particularly when it would serve to define enobling national purpose and keep the martial virtues alive. That sounds correct enough, if qualified to apply to some neo-cons. But what bothers me is that you do present it as obviously being a (if not THE) “core” neo-con doctrines.
I think your distinction b/t these two sorts of worries (progressively worse quietude v. perpetual-yet-now -spiking trangression) is very worthwhile, and agree that it might help the likes of McCarthy adjust their thinking, but it is perhaps more relevant to the social conservatism of the neo-cons, such as it is, than to their for. policy. And as you’ve articulated your idea here so far, it just feels like a case of a key theoretical distinction being pressed too hard, or too quickly, to map an actual ideological segment of our politics.
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