When I was an undergraduate, if you’d told me that professor Leo Strauss would become the posthumous guru of the Washington policy-wonk set, I’d have asked what kind of cigarette you were smoking.
Half a century ago, he and I were denizens of the University of Chicago, which attracted faculty members and students precisely because of its heady insularity. Our mind’s eye could more easily picture ancient Athens or Renaissance Florence than the world north of 47th Street.
Should we chance to sit on Hyde Park’s rocky lakeshore, the same idea might occur to us as it once did to Columbus: “I’ll bet there’s land beyond all that water.” But we’d quickly rebury our noses and minds in a copy of Boethius’ “Consolation of Philosophy” or Spinoza’s “Ethics.”
Yet all these years later, the Straussians, as his disciples proudly style themselves, hold levers of power in the nation’s capital. Three decades after his death, Strauss is hot copy. The New York Times and the New Yorker magazine recently profiled key administration players loyal to Strauss’ political philosophy, among them Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, and Richard Perle, who until recently was chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
President Bush, not reflexively a metaphysician himself, doffed his hat to the Straussians in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “You are some of the best brains in our country,” Bush said, “and my government employs about 20 of you.”
Considering the nature of government work, that’s a remarkable statistic. Bureaucrats spend their days writing and reading memos about nitty-gritty issues, such as filling potholes in interstate highways and staffing agricultural extension offices.
But Strauss’ ideas were anything but down to earth. In a loving tribute written after the master’s death, George Anastaplo, Chicago’s intellectual gadfly, saw in Strauss “a kind of impracticality, a not-caring about the things of this world.”
Strauss taught that the great minds of the past had been philosophically in the closet, so to speak. Leery of setting their true thoughts down on paper, they encrypted them in their famed books. Fortunately for us, Strauss said, he had penetrated that smokescreen and would share the benefit of his achievement in the classroom.
At this late date, it could seem odd that even inhabitants of such a rarefied atmosphere as the U. of C. in the 1950s would buy into such a strange argument. But in defense of my campus generation, let me recall the historical setting.
We were children of what Woody Allen dubbed “Radio Days.” We’d cut our intellectual teeth on soap operas like “Captain Midnight.” If you sent in a couple of labels from the sponsor’s product, it would send you an Ovaltine Decoder. At the end of the show, the announcer would read a series of digits–“22, 14, 12 . . . “–which you’d decode into the letters of a secret message.
So it only took a short leap of the imagination to credit Strauss with an Ovaltine Decoder mind.
Strauss was a short man with a large head. When he lectured, it bobbed back and forth. It looked to me as if his slender neck scarcely could support that massive cerebellum. He had a pair of soulmate buddies. One, a scholar of classical Greek art, was a hunched-over man with a spinal deformity who perpetually wore a beatific smile, sort of like Harpo Marx’s. His gaze was focused on the distant field, as if he could see to a more perfect world.
As for the other member of the gang, his first and last names were joined by the aristocratic “Von,” which hinted at landed estates and hereditary titles. He wrote about the exquisite proportions of the medieval cathedrals. One of his legs was several inches shorter than the other.
The three would lurch and bob across campus and, by following them at a respectful distance, you could pick up bits and pieces of their conversation. It seemed to take place entirely in capitalized words: “Beauty. . . . Truth. . . . Justice.”
It was a time and place in which even the practical-minded could produce wondrously impractical results.
Strauss’ faction in the politics department was rivaled by the social-scientist types. They were trying to take the guesswork out of international relations through something called “game theory,” a borrowing from mathematics. Their hope was to reduce questions of war and peace to an algorithm.
To find it, they and their graduate students would symbolically refight World War I. Nations would be credited according to their resources. Germany got chips for its industrial might, England for having a formidable navy.
The only problem was that the game theorists couldn’t quite fine-tune their equations to reality.
Bulgaria kept winning.
Had he even deigned to take notice, Strauss might have said: “I told you so.” But according to the rules of the academic game, the way to show disdain for a rival school of thought was to withhold even de facto recognition. And for Strauss, the social sciences were symptoms of what ailed modern society.
Bean-counting couldn’t be the route to true knowledge. It could only come to pass, as the ancients had thought, through philosophical inquiry. Now, it is not easy to specify Strauss’ own philosophy. He tended to express it in dense sentences, like this one:
“This atheism, the heir and the judge of the belief in revelation, of the secular struggle between belief and unbelief, and finally of the short-lived but by no means therefore inconsequential romantic longing for the lost belief, confronting orthodoxy in complex sophistication formed out of gratitude, rebellion, longing, and indifference, and in simple probity, is according to its claim as capable of an original understanding of the human roots of the belief in God as no earlier, no less complex-simple philosophy ever was.”
I try to imagine Wolfowitz burning the midnight oil parsing that passage, desperately looking for inspiration after his boss, Don Rumsfeld, has said: “Paul, I want that memo on my desk tomorrow morning, without fail!”
Yet some parts of Strauss’ thought do seem more directly applicable to policymaking, contemporary style–especially that bit about encrypted messages from the past.
Strauss noted that the Athenians had rewarded Socrates’ insights with a death sentence, from which he concluded that there is a natural antipathy, sometimes violently expressed, between ordinary folks and philosophers. “Persecution,” he argued, “gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.”
Ergo, true thinkers must learn to read between the lines. There’s a philosophical method for all seasons along the Potomac. Somewhere between the lines of Hobbes or St. Thomas, you’ve got to be able to find a latent message saying: “Tax cuts for the big shots.” Or, “When it comes to national security, the best defense is an offense.”
Strauss realized that only a minority could learn his reading method. As for those others incapable of grasping Truth, they might be dealt with by what Strauss called “lying nobly.” Now there’s a philosophy tailor-made for spinmeisters of all political persuasions.
Yet I hate to think of that as the final resting place of Strauss’ ideas.
Ultimately, Washington is no place for a philosopher, dead or alive. A college campus is. Even now when I chance to walk across the U. of C.’s quadrangles, in the last light of evening I seem to see the Three Musketeers of the life of the mind making another assault upon the eternal verities. The wind will come up, bending tree boughs and in the rustle of their leaves I can still hear Leo Strauss decoding for us one more philosophical message:
“Truth. . . . Beauty. . . . Justice.”
