This newsletter will always be free — the best things in life are — but please do me the courtesy of telling me privately or publicly what you think of it and of sharing with those you care about. Thank you. I’ll write more often as I get more interest but my other obligations distract me. Please don’t cancel me.
This essay will attempt to address the question of what is and isn’t acceptable in the public discussion by looking at the recent controversy around Scott Alexander aka Scott Suskind in the New York Times. If you haven’t already read the New York Times profile in “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space” by Cade Metz I recommend it to your attention.
The Straussians: Forerunners for the Rationalists?
Once upon a time I hung out with the Straussians. I had become one of the last students of Harry Jaffa, a scholar of Lincoln and himself a student of the great Leo Strauss. Harry Jaffa’s close reading of the Lincoln Douglass debate had inspired me and John-Clark Levin delved deeply into Jaffa’s thoughts on everything and anything. Jaffa’s essay on higher education — “The Reichstag is Still Burning: The Failure of Higher Education and the Decline of the West” — is alarmingly prophetic. So, too, was Jaffa’s criticisms of the neoconservatives.
But to understand Jaffa we had to understand Leo Strauss and his project.
Leo Strauss, born in Germany, was a sort of mystic professor who closely read the Great Books to gleam from them fundamental insights into the human condition. He was particularly interested in the Classics, especially the ancient Greeks though Machiavelli. His students, divided though they were, wound up becoming some of the most influential professors of political philosophy. Their students ended up in the halls of power, especially during the Reagan and Bush administrations.
My old professor, Harry Jaffa, was of the West Coast Straussian bent which held that America was solid — and a light unto the nations — while the East Coast Straussians believe the USA to be a solid but low regime. Naturally, in my proto-#AmericaFirst days, I was thoroughly West Coast. How could I fail to be? I loved America, the land my family had helped to build from their Mayflower Days. I, having written a book about Calvin Coolidge whose own views and period uncannily resembles our own, engaged in my own kind of Straussian project by closely and carefully reading all of the Coolidge oeuvre before publishing the book, Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons From America’s Most Underrated President.
The East Coast Straussians had been corrupted by the trappings of Washington, or so said Adam Bellow, book publisher and son of Saul Bellow.
Bellow compared the fall to the dark side to the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov where one of the two sources of power in the universe was corrupted. Adam knows of what he speaks. His father was a sort of fellow traveler with the Straussians and the elder Bellow’s book, Ravelstein, is a very good roman à clef about Allan Bloom, who is among the more famous of the Straussian political philosophy professors. Bloom’s best known book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), was a bestseller and a sort of cause for a spell.
And yes, I, being a good student, read all these books.
I’m not sure how much I believe the Straussian view as expressed in Persecution and the Art of Writing — that there is a sort of esotericism that runs throughout the Great Books which enables the true great thinkers to communicate across time and space — but I do know that the Straussians made me a closer reader of text. I thought of it then as using the tool kit of deconstructionism — to borrow a phrase from academia — not to put ourselves in judgment of the past but to understand it by taking seriously and putting it in its proper place. Straussianism is an elite project, altogether uninterested in the hoi polloi, and at any supposed elite higher education environment you’ll find a Straussian or two keeping the flames of the high temples. That is, if they haven’t been forced into retirement or died of HIV/AIDs.
So it was at Claremont McKenna College, a place where Leo Strauss had once taught back when it was Claremont Men’s College, and I imbibed all the lessons that a good Straussian has to. I still take seriously Claremont’s motto: “Civilization prospers with commerce.”
I have made some great friends from my Straussian education. Indeed some of the most powerful people in the world seem to be closely aligned with the Straussian project. To wit I met Peter Thiel at a Straussian conference where we discussed Machiavelli and Strauss’s Natural Right and History. Great men are often inspired by great books.
How much of that close reading of text was thanks to the Straussians being largely Jewish, I can’t say. It bears considering, as we consider the Rationalists, that Strauss’s family were not strict adherents except to ritual. Strauss himself seemed to consider his Jewishness important, giving a lecture titled “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?” In it, he discusses the importance of ritual. This is important to stress: humans seem particularly drawn to ritual and some, especially the more neurotic, seem to delight in ritual more than others, perhaps because it helps get them out of their head. I sympathize.
I do agree with the Jewish chapter of George Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution and its central argument: that in forcing Jewish males to learn to read (Torah) and discuss its contents the Ashkenazim selected for traits — disputatiousness, literacy and abstract thinking — which carry forth to this day.
Or to put it another way, evolution selected for in Jews traits that both Rationalists and Straussians have in common. I don’t regard these traits as particularly good or bad, just traits, like eye or hair color. It is what it is. In many respect the bull sessions of Jewish friends in the ‘30s in New York City helped determine the modern world. You can get a glimpse of that way of life in the documentary, “Arguing the World” (1997). Indeed I agree with the thesis of Russian-born Jewish professor Yuri Slezkine The Jewish Century (2004) that the modern world is very much a Jewish project of transforming landed Apollonians into mercantile Mercurians and that the three ‘isms of the 20th century — Capitalism, Zionism, and Communism — were in a very real sense Jewish projects.
Is not Star Slate Codex simply another in a long list of Jewish projects which seeks to build its own rituals and argue the world?
And might the problem be that this very private, very passionate nerd community is itself being invaded and inspected by the New York Times — organ of diminishing power that it is?
Or is it that that the nerds who frequented and participated in the Rationalist community thought they were having a private conversation that nevertheless ended up public for all to see because the tech community itself has grown disproportionately powerful, relative to say, The New York Times?
How to think of all this?
It would seem to me that an increasing problem of the internet is that conversations from the past can and will be held against you in the court of public opinion and given that the hitherto gathering places — academia, journalism, coffee shops — all that conversation is migrating online and it is being archived, stored, and weaponized against the eccentrics who make human progress possible. And no, it isn’t the well adjusted who move the human race forward.
The rise of private messaging groups like Signal or Discord are a good start but the State does not want everyone having a private conversation so publicly. It needs eyes in the chatrooms so that nobody even thinks about sharing kiddie porn or, say, conspiring to overthrow the State. Think of this as a Johnson’s law: There will always be a back door to any online community, just as there will always be treasonous activity.
But in the future there will be semi-private communities where people organize themselves, perhaps on the basis of genetics even. Could you imagine a private community where people talked about carrying certain genes? Or having certain afflictions? And where they pooled their resources to actually change in the world?
What are my views on all of this? Well, I am a Christian. I do believe that Jesus died for our sins. I am a student of René Girard and I
I do not believe the worries expressed by Star Slate Codex and others about artificial intelligence. In fact I believe the concerns about it to be overwrought or less charitably, to be something of a marketing campaign.
In my view God has left sort of Easter eggs in the Simulation and that, if you are in a state of grace (or pay close attention or both), you may find them. More importantly He wants you to find them. He hides them in the darkest of places but if you’re willing to go there, He has them for you. He doesn’t want you to condemn any of His Creation; He demands you explore it.
It’s in this spirit that I engage with the Rationalists. They do not believe in God and indeed, many of their habits seem a sort of carbon copy of the “free love” of the hippies who preceded them in polyamory.
To be candid I always found Star Slate Codex to be more than a tad neurotic. No, that isn’t a code for them being Jewish. There were many Asian-American and Indian-American neurotics in their midst and not a few indeterminate. And lest anyone tell you differently I am a strong supporter of Holocaust education and far, far, far from an anti-Semite. The Jewish mind likes to ponder and wonder and I love that about my Jewish friends. But it is at times quite exhausting and so it required something seemingly as infinite as the universe.
I don’t have time for disputatious people, especially if they don’t build. Nor do I find the “Rationalists” to be all that rational. I don’t have a lot of space or time for any “ism.”
A theory that I’ve been toying with in recent years is that as we learn more about the human condition through genetics we might become more empathetic.