Abram Shulsky -- wise? Or a noble liar?
Nov. 13th, 2006 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phamosIt looks like I haven't posted anything about my thesis in months. Which is fitting, since I've barely WORKED on my thesis in months. I wrote a page or so right after seeing my advisor, and then I fell down some stairs and got distracted. I wrote a couple of pages last weekend, ramblings about Wolfowitz and Abrams and Ferdinand Marcos, and then Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and benevolent global hegemony. I thought this weekend I would work on fleshing that out, trying to get through the Clinton administration and the founding of PNAC.
But instead I got distracted last night watching an infamous documentary (The Power of Nightmares) that was actually much less inflammatory than I thought it was going to be. More poorly MADE than I thought it was going to be (the director apparently went to that stock footage film festival that Bart and Lisa went to and took everything that didn't involve trains going through tunnels and hot dogs coming off of conveyor belts), but not that conspiracy theory-y in the first installment, at least. The second two parts apparently have a lot more of that tone to them, but found myself nodding my head with a lot of the stuff in this part.
The weakest part of the film's thesis, unfortunately, is its insistence on Strauss as the glue that holds neocons together, this Machiavellian (ironic) cabalistic figurehead with an equivalent anti-modern jones as Qutb. I still don't completely buy this. That's not to say I don't think Strauss was anti-modern. He obviously was. I just don't see how Strauss's anti-modern stance can be used to legitimize a foreign policy based around "benevolent global hegemony". I'm not even taking issue with the benevolent part -- as far as I can tell, nothing Strauss said had anything to do with benefits of imperialism at all. I think Strauss's students (actually, more like students-of-students) who have ended up in Washington take from him much more of an academic mentality than any particular policy positions.
So, suddenly having Strauss on the brain again, I've been reading more Strauss stuff and writing a little bit -- I had to go read a little bit about Plato, since I've never actually READ The Republic and wanted to check and see if this "noble lie" business is sourceable or simply, as Googling it would indicate, a blog-meme like "Pearl-Harbor level event". It is real, but it's translated in a lot of different ways -- often as "myth", because the original instance in which Plato/Socrates used it was to describe a religious lie used to keep the masses in order. Reading articles by Shadia Drury weren't helping very much, since nothing was usefully footnoted, but I think I've gotten a better idea of how she relates Strauss's interpretation of Plato as an emphasis on elitism and societal stratification -- rule of the wise. So from that, I started writing about how Strauss's methods of textual interpretation led his followers to see themselves as more qualified than the masses to see hidden, esoteric truths, leading directly to the train-wreck that was the D.O.D.'s cherry-picked Iraq intelligence.
Yeah, so I skipped ahead a little bit. But what I have to do from THERE is show how this mentality (inherent wisdom of rulers over masses and the subsequent dishonesty of governments) is antithetical to a society with any regard for human rights, whether individual or group rights. The documentary focused on Strauss's anti-modernity as a reaction against an emphasis on individualism, but obviously the idea of third-gen "group" rights and any sort of cultural relativism would piss him off, too, so it really doesn't matter what school of HR you belong to -- Straussians think you're naive and ultimately destructive to a solid, functioning society.
But instead I got distracted last night watching an infamous documentary (The Power of Nightmares) that was actually much less inflammatory than I thought it was going to be. More poorly MADE than I thought it was going to be (the director apparently went to that stock footage film festival that Bart and Lisa went to and took everything that didn't involve trains going through tunnels and hot dogs coming off of conveyor belts), but not that conspiracy theory-y in the first installment, at least. The second two parts apparently have a lot more of that tone to them, but found myself nodding my head with a lot of the stuff in this part.
The weakest part of the film's thesis, unfortunately, is its insistence on Strauss as the glue that holds neocons together, this Machiavellian (ironic) cabalistic figurehead with an equivalent anti-modern jones as Qutb. I still don't completely buy this. That's not to say I don't think Strauss was anti-modern. He obviously was. I just don't see how Strauss's anti-modern stance can be used to legitimize a foreign policy based around "benevolent global hegemony". I'm not even taking issue with the benevolent part -- as far as I can tell, nothing Strauss said had anything to do with benefits of imperialism at all. I think Strauss's students (actually, more like students-of-students) who have ended up in Washington take from him much more of an academic mentality than any particular policy positions.
So, suddenly having Strauss on the brain again, I've been reading more Strauss stuff and writing a little bit -- I had to go read a little bit about Plato, since I've never actually READ The Republic and wanted to check and see if this "noble lie" business is sourceable or simply, as Googling it would indicate, a blog-meme like "Pearl-Harbor level event". It is real, but it's translated in a lot of different ways -- often as "myth", because the original instance in which Plato/Socrates used it was to describe a religious lie used to keep the masses in order. Reading articles by Shadia Drury weren't helping very much, since nothing was usefully footnoted, but I think I've gotten a better idea of how she relates Strauss's interpretation of Plato as an emphasis on elitism and societal stratification -- rule of the wise. So from that, I started writing about how Strauss's methods of textual interpretation led his followers to see themselves as more qualified than the masses to see hidden, esoteric truths, leading directly to the train-wreck that was the D.O.D.'s cherry-picked Iraq intelligence.
Yeah, so I skipped ahead a little bit. But what I have to do from THERE is show how this mentality (inherent wisdom of rulers over masses and the subsequent dishonesty of governments) is antithetical to a society with any regard for human rights, whether individual or group rights. The documentary focused on Strauss's anti-modernity as a reaction against an emphasis on individualism, but obviously the idea of third-gen "group" rights and any sort of cultural relativism would piss him off, too, so it really doesn't matter what school of HR you belong to -- Straussians think you're naive and ultimately destructive to a solid, functioning society.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-11-13 07:58 am (UTC)You've probably seen all this stuff but I find this article interesting.
The user icon is Renee Guenon, very much the anti-modernist :)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 07:20 am (UTC)I am in awe that you can write about these things, because I sure couldn't from an academic standpoint. I'm pretty sure "This sucks. This sucks and it is stupid." is not contributing to the field.
But I can talk about modern language features allowing for a deeper level of integration with a domain specific modeling language by the use of extensive metadata and reflect as a source of modeling information. So I made an okay call.
Hang in there!