Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (22 page)

The only real remedy was to recover the classical conception of natural law, which Thomas Aquinas had formulated definitively. In Aquinas, Aristotle’s view of the world was reproduced in a Christian context; the classical philosophy of nature was joined with Christian theology. Rightly, Strauss was always deeply sceptical about this synthesis. As he observed: ‘The ultimate consequence of the Thomistic view of natural law is that natural law is practically inseparable not only from a natural theology which is, in fact, based on biblical revelation – but even from revealed theology.’
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Here we reach a crucial feature of Strauss’s thought – his insistence on the unbridgeable gulf
between reason and revelation. The classical world-view that was reinstated by Aquinas rested on the assumption that reason and revelation could be made to point in the same direction. In rejecting this assumption, Strauss pointed to a breach in the western tradition. Like many after him Aquinas tried to show that faith and reason were complementary. Strauss understood that all such attempts are bound to fail: the rational cosmos of Greek philosophy and the biblical vision of divine creation – Athens and Jerusalem – are irreconcilable. Here Strauss joined hands with other early twentieth-century Jewish fideists – thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Lev Shestov – who accepted that first and last questions could be answered only by an act of faith. Strauss’s own religious beliefs cannot be known (it has been claimed he was in fact an atheist). What is evident is that he did not think reason could supply a remedy for nihilism.

The difficulty with Strauss’s belief that we can cure nihilism by returning to a classical view of things is that he never gives any ground – other than the need to escape nihilism – for accepting such a view. The classical view of the world is that it is a rational order, but Strauss was proposing that we accept this view by an act of will. It is a contradictory position, which only shows how difficult it is to overcome the ‘modern project’. However much he might have wished otherwise, Strauss was in the end himself a modern thinker who had more in common with Nietzsche than with any ancient or medieval thinker. Aristotle and Aquinas held to a teleological view of the world that modern science has rendered obsolete. Each viewed the cosmos as a system in which everything has a purpose. Since Darwin, this view of the natural world has ceased to be available. Nature is ruled by chance and necessity, and natural laws are regularities rather than prescriptions for the good life. If there is a realm of value beyond the physical world it cannot be reached by human reason.

What does Strauss’s view of the limits of reason mean for politics? He denied that liberal democracy could be detached from metaphysical beliefs – without a belief in a moral order not created by human will, modern politics was vulnerable to nihilism. But in denying that these beliefs are rationally defensible he left liberal democracy without any publicly accessible justification. Strauss’s solution to this difficulty
may be a modern variation of Plato’s noble lie: while philosophers may know the truth they also know that truth is deadly to the mass of humankind. It may be that Strauss himself suffered from nihilism while believing the masses could be protected from it by consoling myths – in contemporary America, Lockean myths of natural rights – but he does not explicitly advocate any of this. The idea that he supported deception can be maintained only by using his own, highly subjective technique of interpretation. If he writes in favour of the noble lie he does so cryptically, hiding his true meaning – as many philosophers did in the past, he believed. Notoriously, Strauss maintained that many of the greatest thinkers had a secret philosophy quite different from the one that is overtly presented in their writings. This view has led some critics of Strauss to attack him as a theorist whose teachings lie behind policies of disinformation implemented by neo-conservatives in the Bush administration.
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The idea that Strauss’s work sanctions deception is questionable. To say that great philosophers write in code is one thing, to maintain that deception is essential in politics another. Strauss always insisted there was a wide gap between philosophy and practice, writing ‘the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher when certainty of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of the solution.’
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In the spirit of this maxim he wrote very little about contemporary politics, and it is hard to envision him endorsing any modern political project. His forebodings about the future of liberal democracy cannot be squared with the neo-conservative programme of exporting democracy throughout the world, while the ardent neo-conservative faith in progress is at odds with his mistrust of Enlightenment hopes. While Strauss is celebrated as a defender of the current American regime, he could more accurately be described as one of its most merciless critics. Like Schmitt, Strauss was an anti-liberal. In the vernacular discourse of American politics, neo-conservatives are enemies of liberalism in all its forms. But neo-conservatism is itself a fundamentalist version of liberalism, and – as his account of Hobbes and Schmitt shows – Strauss viewed liberalism as a symptom of the failure of the ‘modern project’. His work does not support any very specific political stance and is consistent with a variety of political positions.
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Yet if there is one movement in contemporary politics this
profoundly sceptical thinker would have mistrusted and condemned it is neo-conservatism.

While Strauss cannot be held accountable for the behaviour of a political movement that claims his authority, that does not mean his thought had no influence on it. Strauss’s claim that philosophical writings often contain a hidden meaning, different from or opposed to their manifest sense, is a licence for undisciplined thinking. He failed to supply any method of interpretation whereby the claim to have identified a hidden meaning could be tested, and judged by accepted standards of scholarship some of his claims are highly implausible. For example, Strauss interprets Plato not as a utopian thinker but as a critic of utopianism who aimed to show that an ideal state is impossible. However, as classical scholars have demonstrated, this interpretation has no basis in the texts.
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The trouble with Strauss’s theory is that it allows virtually any interpretation to be advanced. There is a parallel here with the claim of the deconstructionist school that texts have no inherent meaning. In both cases rational inquiry is replaced by arbitrary judgement, and while he may have believed he was recovering a classical way of thinking, Strauss’s method has more in common with post-modern thought. In practice Strauss interpreted texts by appealing to subjective intuitions whose authority seemed to depend on a claim to possess some kind of special insight. It is a claim to privileged access to the truth that has led some of his followers into calamitous errors. As applied in government, it helped bring about the Iraq war.

Neo-conservatism is a stance in American policy-making as well as a body of ideas. Its origins as a political movement are in the conflicts surrounding American defence policies in the 1970s and 1980s. The neo-conservative network that had such a deep influence on George
W. Bush is a by-product of the Cold War. Many of its errors come from applying habits of thought acquired during that time to the different conditions prevailing today.

The first beginnings of neo-conservatism may be glimpsed in the alarm felt by figures such as Patrick Moynihan and Norman Podhoretz during the Vietnam War. Worried by the lack of patriotism they believed was exhibited by protestors against the war, they objected to the idea that the US was in any sense evil. Flawed, no doubt – but still the best society that had ever existed. The idea that America is the best – perhaps the only truly legitimate – regime in history remains a mainstay of neo-conservative thinking. But neo-conservatism as an identifiable political force emerged later, in an attempt to alter US defence policies.

The key figure in this project was Albert Wohlstetter, like Leo Strauss a professor at the University of Chicago – and far more important in the genesis of neo-conservatism than Strauss. A mathematician who had worked as a defence analyst at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter spearheaded a powerful challenge to the policies of arms control and détente that were pursued during the Nixon administration. He identified the importance of the precision weapons that were becoming feasible with new technologies, criticized accepted theories of deterrence and actively supported the defence build-up that gathered speed during the Reagan era.

Wohlstetter was pivotal in the neo-conservative network that developed from the 1970s onwards. Among his protégés are Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle (who dedicated a book he co-authored,
An End to Evil
, to Wohlstetter). Wohlstetter introduced Perle to Senator ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a strongly anti-communist Democrat, who in 1974 co-sponsored legislation that denied normal trade relations with countries that restricted freedom of emigration (as the Soviet Union did in relation to Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel). Assisted by Perle, Jackson also lobbied vigorously against the SALT II arms control treaty. In the mid-seventies Wohlstetter put one of his students, Zalmay Khalilzad, in a think tank he had formed to advise the US government, and assisted by Wohlstetter, Khalilzad soon made useful connections in Washington.
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By 1984 he was working for Paul Wolfowitz at the State Department, and by the early nineties he was
a senior Defense Department official working with Donald Rumsfeld. Khalilzad had long argued that if the US assisted the mujahadeen, Soviet forces could be defeated in Afghanistan, and in the wake of Soviet withdrawal he was among those policy-makers who viewed the Taliban regime as being friendly to American interests. He altered this view after the 9/11 attacks when he was appointed US ambassador to the country, and went on to be US ambassador in Iraq. In 1985 Wohlstetter introduced Perle (then under-secretary for international security in the Reagan administration) to Ahmed Chalabi, a secular Iraqi Shi’ite from a wealthy banking family and a fellow-mathematician who had studied under Wohlstetter at Chicago. Chalabi was a major player in the run-up to the Iraq war as head of the American-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), touted by neo-conservatives as a potential leader of post-Saddam Iraq and used as a source of intelligence assessments that conflicted with those being produced by the CIA and other American intelligence agencies.

The network that sprang up around Wohlstetter continues to the present day. Many of its members were signatories of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think tank established in 1997 to promote the belief that America must act to retain its global primacy. With chairman William Kristol, son of Irving Kristol and editor of the Murdoch-owned
Weekly Standard
, and chief executive Gary Schmitt, a Chicago graduate who had worked as aide to Patrick Moynihan, PNAC advocated large increases in US defence spending to maintain unchallengeable American military pre-eminence. Several members of PNAC served in the Bush administration including Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby (Cheney’s former chief of staff who in March 2007 was convicted on a number of charges arising from the illegal outing of a covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame, whose husband had criticized the Bush administration). The central thesis of PNAC as presented in its report on
Rebuilding America’s Defenses
, published in 2000, was not new. The idea that America must maintain its global supremacy was present in earlier documents, including papers published by the then defence secretary Dick Cheney in the early nineties, and continued ideas about American national security developed by Wohlstetter in the early seventies.

The cardinal fact about the defence intellectuals who composed the neo-conservative policy network from the 1970s onwards is that they were opposed to the military doctrines of the time. If there was a figure that embodied everything they rejected in American foreign policy it was Henry Kissinger, whose brand of
realpolitik
they abhorred. Kissinger argued that despite its ideological origins, the Soviet Union had become something like a normal state with interests that need not be always opposed to those of the United States. Against this, the neo-conservatives insisted that because of its totalitarian structure the USSR would always be hostile.

In the view of neo-conservatives, Kissinger’s belief that the US could work with the Soviets was wishful thinking, and it was not only Kissinger who suffered from this failing. According to Wohlstetter the CIA had a chronic tendency to misread the Soviet regime. In an article published in 1974 Wohlstetter accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile capabilities, thereby allowing the USSR to achieve military superiority.
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Wohlstetter’s article triggered a concerted rightwing attack on the CIA, which in 1976 resulted in the establishment of what came to be known as the B Team. Set up as a rival source of intelligence for the US government (the CIA was Team A), the B Team operated through the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and was organized into three sections, dealing with Soviet low-altitude air defence capabilities, Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and Soviet strategy. The formation of the B Team was resisted by William Colby, director of the CIA, but when George Bush Snr became CIA chief in 1976 the team was launched with president Gerald Ford’s backing. The B Team was composed of hard-line opponents of détente and arms control. Key members were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian of Russia, and Edward Teller, a nuclear physicist sometimes called ‘the father of the H-bomb’ because of his involvement in the Manhattan Project in which the first nuclear weapons were developed, who was later a powerful advocate of the ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defence Initiative (and upon whom the film character of Dr Strangelove is believed to have been based).