| |
SPEAKING FREELY
A question of
identity
By Eric Garrett
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
Spengler's article (The neo-cons' Islamist conspiracy,
June 5), has merit - by indicating, for our benefit, the
sad return of religious thinking to buttress politics in
the West. But I disagree with his major point that one
cannot find something of Leo Strauss in the attitudes,
strategies and goals of the so-called neo-conservatives
driving American politics, most predominantly in the
George W Bush administration and the major media that
tolerate or promote this farce.
I am no expert
on Strauss, but I am very close to the philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom Strauss was enamored for
nearly a decade. His eventual rejection of Nietzsche in
favor of a Socratic/Platonic view of a rational, orderly
world to be replicated in human affairs is also
something I have contemplated - and rejected. There is
much at stake in understanding the Straussian influence
on contemporary political thought, not to be found in
cabals or esoterica, as Spengler rightly points out; and
I would appreciate it if the author focused on helping
us to understand Strauss's role in the lineage of
Western thought as a whole rather than trying to put us
off the scent of his influence - which I see as
catastrophic for the world.
It was said of
Nietzsche that with him "history is broken in two".
Indeed, his writings radicalized Western thought to the
bone, influencing politics, philosophy, literature,
psychology, philology, science and the whole range of
Western intellectual products. To some extent, this type
of secular movement might constitute the
Counter-Reformation that Spengler is looking for,
eventually to materialize in a combination of a
neo-classical Western identity and a capitalist outlook,
the latter of which ironically received its own spurs
from Protestantism through the mechanization of time in
the monastic orders and an emphasis on "deeds" alongside
faith, which practical people mistook for the work
ethic. Anything relevant to the religion and example of
Jesus was thus buried in preference for progress, which
now stands as our dominant religion.
The
substance of Greco-Roman culture, preserved and
developed by Islam, was "rescued" and reintroduced to
the West by Jewish intellectuals and made possible a
European Renaissance and period of "enlightenment".
Nietzsche, to my knowledge, was virtually alone among
Europeans to point dramatically to this fact, and he
thus credited the Jews for rescuing the West from
barbarism and irrationalism. He saw Jewish culture also
as the potential fount for saving Europe from the
catastrophes of the upcoming century, to transcend the
growing tensions that militant nationalism was
producing, strident German nationalism rejected this
plea, and the consequences for Jews there and elsewhere
are well known. It is therefore unfortunate to simply
restate that the Nazis idolized Nietzsche, as Spengler
does, without also noting that, most importantly, they
in fact rejected nearly all of his most important
positions and discoveries.
I can imagine Strauss
- and any number of thoughtful Jewish intellectuals -
trying to cope with this dissonance between Nietzsche's
understanding and the crude apostles of power who
shamefully misappropriated him for causes he despised,
both nationalism and anti-Semitism. Where are they to
go, now that their champion, in fact, has been used
against them? I too am confused, for there is much
scholarly work to be done to describe this period in
Jewish intellectual life, which puts them in a central
position in current Western thought as a whole, having
conveyed classical philosophy into modern times, which
was then poured into and through Nietzsche, to be taken
up often times once again by Jewish intellectuals in
radically different ways, such as by Ayn Rand, the
mother of neo-liberal romanticism and Karl Marx, her
nemesis.
As a neo-classicist, Strauss has
perhaps a different role to play in rounding out the
territory between the above two poles of Western
economic theory, to give us a fuller portrait of Western
civilization and sensibilities. As a Jewish atheist,
like Marx and Rand, perhaps Strauss found his salvation
in reason, and perhaps an extreme rationalization of
life. It is therefore no surprise to find him returning
to Athens - the birthplace of reason as the highest
value - for insight into how to run the world. What he
found was a Platonic model of "democracy" and a variety
of metaphysical presumptions that he should have earlier
learned to reject concretely.
This reason, as
Albert Camus illustrated in The Rebel, and as was
more forcefully demonstrated by Joseph Stalin and Adolf
Hitler, is an easy tool for the justification of the
most massive crimes. The democratic alternative, as
described by Plato and taken up again by Strauss and
some of his followers, is equally well reasoned, to
include the characterization of types of citizens, only
some of whom are fit to rule, and the rest of which are
fit to be ruled. In this respect, the democracy that
neo-conservatives prefer - and this is one area where we
want to question Strauss's influence - includes the
proposition that popular democracy is a danger to be
suppressed, and to a great extent by careful and
vigilant manipulations of information and public
opinion. Does this constitute a conspiracy? To answer
that, one must look closely at the mechanics and
managers of information for consumption by a mass
audience in the US.
What is more at stake is
understanding the consequences of such rationalizations
as Strauss helped to impart to his students - how they
have taken them up and applied them, and for what
objectives and goals. The modern American empire is
built on such rationalizations as Strauss propounded as
an alternative to the breakdown of Western values, so
that the implosion of European civilization in the first
half of the 20th Century led not to an abandonment of
colonial and imperial aggression, but an extension of it
by means of American power. The global scope of that
power has enabled the furtherance, into our own time, of
the unrelenting assault of Western culture upon a world
of human and natural diversity, and to this we can
accredit, to a great extent, the appalling chaos in
front of us now.
There is much that needs to be
taken into account when assessing the whole spectrum of
reactionary attitudes on display across the earth today,
including what we lump together as terrorism. Does
Spengler know, for instance, that in the last century
2,000 distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct, the
human correlative to the assault on species diversity,
ecosystems and environmental health as a whole. To state
that "Strauss [has] no relevance whatever to the problem
which American foreign policy now proposes to address,
namely, how to respond to the hundreds of millions of
Muslims who want no part of the modern world", is to
either ignore or marginalize the underlying
relationships between Strauss's neo-classical
conceptualizations of an "orderly" world, the degree to
which this has informed the neo-liberal/neo-conservative
agenda (hence, the neo-imperial agenda) and the enormous
cultural and environmental wreckage that follows in the
wake of the imposition of Western standards on a world
of necessary differences. How people organize their
resistance might be one question; that they should
resist is another (see The secret that
Leo Strauss never revealed, May 13).
If the Western "tradition" of democracy and law
has been retrieved to ward off totalitarianism or
anarchy, it might be through the agency of intellectuals
like Strauss, but there is little that is conservative
about it. The natural world is diverse, as we know, but
what many do not grasp or even think about is that human
diversity is an indispensable complement to nature,
either of which if destroyed or ignored will continue to
lead to the grinding down of the earth to a degree that
makes it unusable for our own sustenance. Not only
Muslims are aware of the protracted, systematic effort
to assimilate them into the abstract sterility or frenzy
of a Western perspective: thousands of peoples have
already perished.
There is no one template for
human existence, and the key to preserving ourselves is
to unmask and overcome the ideas that suggest otherwise.
Eric Garrett is a member of the
Collaborative Management Working Group of the Commission
on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP) of
the IUCN-World Conservation Union. The views expressed
above does not necessarily reflect the position of the
IUCN. Email Eric Garrett at garrette400@yahoo.com
(Copyright 2003 Eric Garrett)
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
