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SPENGLER
Neo-cons in a religious bind
 Investigative
journalists of the left are sniffing up the wrong tree. They are pursuing a
phantom, a mythical freemasonry of Straussians (The
secret that Leo Strauss never revealed, May 13). Hidden in plain sight,
meanwhile, is a conspiracy so monstrous in its design and so perverse in its
intent that it beggars the imagination. Like Edgar Allan Poe's purloined
letter, it is hidden in plain view.
The neo-conservatives are a front for Islamism. Outrageous as this claim may
sound, I will prove it with citations from publicly available sources. Before
doing so, however, it is important to make clear which sources are important
and which are not. Leo Strauss, a German Jewish political philosopher, is
irrelevant to what neo-conservatives call World War IV because it is a
civilizational war, that is to say, a religious war. The atheist Strauss
devoted his life to reviving what he called classical political rationalism,
namely the political ideas of the ancient Greeks. His concern lay in the
governance of the West, not in conflicts between the West and its rivals.
To identify the hidden levers of power in Washington one must expose the
neo-conservatives' thoughts about religion. Much has been made of the
prominence of Jews in the ranks of the neo-conservatives. That, too, is a cover
story.
Religion must be the starting point for political analysis because the decisive
trends in the 21st-century world long since have moved beyond Western
rationalism. Never before in the history of mankind have peaceful and
prosperous nations chosen voluntary demographic extinction (Why
Europe chooses extinction, April 8). Yet that is what we observe in
Western Europe and Japan, which will lose a fifth of their population by
mid-century due to falling fertility. On the other hand, prominent clerics and
political leaders in the Islamic world praise suicide warriors as the height of
piety. The Islamic world preaches mass suicide and Europe puts it into
practice.
What good are Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Leo Strauss under
these circumstances? "Unlike animals, human beings require more than progeny:
they require progeny who remember them," I wrote on August 31, 2001, just
before the suicide attacks on New York and Washington. "Frequently, ethnic
groups will die rather than abandon their way of life. Native Americans often
chose to fight to the point of their own extinction rather than accept
assimilation, because assimilation implied abandoning both their past and their
future. Historic tragedy occurs on the grand scale when economic or strategic
circumstances undercut the material conditions of life of a people, which
nonetheless cannot accept assimilation into another culture. That is when
entire peoples fight to the death."
One must assume that the neo-conservatives know that religious war stands at
the center of world concerns, which leads me to suspect that the emphasis on
Leo Strauss has a Straussian "exoteric" character. Strauss, as myriad left-wing
commentators observe, distinguished between the "esoteric" teaching designed
for the elite and the "exoteric" version for the unanointed.
In fact, the most influential neo-conservative of them all is not now and never
has been a Straussian. I speak of Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary
magazine, and the author of the only serious work on religion by any of the
Jewish neo-conservatives. Titled The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are,
it was published late last year. I have obtained a copy autographed by the
author, so as to remove any doubt regarding authenticity.
Podhoretz' monograph, I contend, contains both an "exoteric" and "esoteric"
message. On the surface, The Prophets is a routine summation of standard
scholarship on the Jewish preachers whose work is included in the Hebrew Bible
because later editors thought them divinely inspired. Podhoretz chews on
long-gnawed bones. For example, he refutes at great length the erroneous
Christian claim that the prophet Isaiah had foreseen the birth of Jesus to a
virgin. Christian translators confused the Hebrew word for "young woman" with
the word for "virgin", a fact first corrected in print by Michael Servetus in
1541 and universally known to scholars.
There is nothing wrong with repeating what is well known to scholars, of
course, but something about the reception of this work arouses suspicion.
National Review, the premier US conservative journal, rhapsodized on the merits
of Podhoretz' treatise, citing in particular the tired old story of the
mistranslated virgin birth. Even more dubious is the praise accorded to The
Prophets in the leading religious journal of neo-conservatism by Father
Richard John Neuhaus, the arbiter of Catholic neo-conservative opinion. "The
Prophets is a notable achievement that can be read, also by Christians,
with great benefit and enjoyment. I do not remember a telling of the story that
so gripped my attention since as a young seminarian I read John Bright's A
History of Israel," wrote Neuhaus.
Why so much praise for a pedestrian summary of existing literature? Another odd
thing about the book is that the author monotonously insists that the prophets'
mission was a "war on idolatry". The monotheistic Hebrews, to be sure, opposed
idolatry, but one would expect that a book on their prophets would have
something to say about what the prophets were for, as opposed to what they were
against. What sort of religious leader persuades his followers that their piety
can give meaning to life beyond the limits of their years? A hundred
generations have read the Hebrew prophets for that sort of meaning, and a vast
literature expounds upon it, yet Podhoretz dismisses it out of hand in favor of
a dry negativism. Everything boils down to the war against idolatry.
If the job of religion is to battle idolatry, the best religion is that which
best fights idolatry. Podhoretz drums in this idea over 350 pages, in order to
arrive at the astonishing statement that Islam "is, if anything, even more
strictly monotheistic in its theology than Judaism, and even more hardline in
its prohibition of idolatry".
There we have the "esoteric" teaching, a throwaway line dropped apparently in
passing, but one that stops the careful reader dead in his tracks - just the
sort of literary playfulness that Leo Strauss recommended. It turns out that
Judaism is not strictly monotheistic, while Islam is. Judaism lacks a hard line
in its prohibition of idolatry, but Islam offers such a hard line. What could
the Islamists say more? Is that not prima facie evidence that Islamism lurks at
the heart of the neo-conservative cabal in Washington? Am I demanding too great
a stretch of the imagination from the reader? My reasoning is no less
circuitous than that of the commentators who claim to have discovered a
Straussian conspiracy. If the Straussians can be said to have taken over
Washington, why not the Islamists? Besides, the claim of a Straussian plot came
from serious writers, while this is a humor column.
Dismiss all the foregoing as a jest, and what conclusion remains? Perhaps the
neo-conservatives in particular and conservative Washington in general have no
criteria by which to distinguish among Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and
this at the outset of a religious war. Theologians directed the religious wars
of the 16th century, most successfully by Cardinal Richelieu, who combined
ecclesiastical and secular power (The
sacred heart of darkness, February 11). Perhaps there is nothing more
to conclude than the lines from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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