Remora


Policy Review, a true blue, conservative journal, features a review by a Steven Menashi, of Mark Lilla�s new book.


The Lure of Syracuse, the last chapter in Lilla's book, was published in the NYRB in the black month of September. Limited Inc didn't have the heart, at the time, to make with the commentary. Lilla uses the story of Plato's supposed attraction to the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus, to make a point. Or a couple of points. One is the point that the story should be about Plato's ultimate resistance to tyranny. The other is that twentieth century thinkers have been attracted to the philosopher slash murder king. The second point is the important one for Lilla.

On the one hand, Lilla�s point is true. A large part of the intelligentsia in every decade has embraced the most obnoxious governors, a crew of murderous and venal men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao. So, for that matter, have carpenters and farmers. The problem with Lilla�s story is that it is based on a falsely foreshortened sense of atrocity.

History is read through a special filter for Lilla -- and for that whole tradition arising out of the fifties merger of liberalism and cold war anti-communism. The murder of a Russian writer, in 1940, counts as a murder for this group. The murder of, say, a Sioux in 1870, or the starving to death of some Congolese family in 1900 doesn't count as an atrocity. In fact, it doesn't count at all. A philosophical overview of history that begins in mourning is fine, it is appropriate, lay on the organ tones and let�s all die; but Lilla�s group ends up mourning very selectively.

The NYRB site has segregated Lilla's essay into the for pay part of the site. But it is still up at this site. Let's start with the first false analogy in Lilla's piece.



"Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceau�sescu and Milosevic�one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food-tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived."



Well, the rhetorical flourish is nice. But Dionysis is not our contemporary, or at least he isn't our contemporary in the same way Hitler and Mussolini are. In fact, the collective gesture -- one that puts Hitler and Khomeini in the same set - is infantile, betraying no sense of historical circumstances. The nineteenth century optimism, by which one presumes Lilla means Mill and Comte (although he could mean Goethe and Marx -- the phrase is empty), still had to account for the Napoleons, tyrants of a type much closer to Dionysus than any in Lilla's first list. And of course there is the notion that the nations outside Europe "modernize." Is this a joke? If it isn�t, and we fear it isn�t, then it is more evidence that when the blind lead the blind through world history, they end up like the blind in Brueghel�s painting, headlong in the ditch.. Lilla's evident ignorance of what modernization entails cries out for correction. Before you play the shame game in the NYRB, do some research. Start with, say, the history of coffee growing. As I mentioned before, last week I read Mark Prendergast�s nice, exhaustive look at the coffee industry. Well, why not start there for the quick course in Europe�s heart of darkness complex? Lilla seems to be under the illusion that 19th century intellectuals were either unaware or uninvolved with what happened on the margins: those Iindians of the Yucatan, Guatamala, El Salvador, etc; those Brazilian slaves; those Chinese resisting Britain�s Opium trade. If he wants to find the roots of Hitlerism, it won't do to go to Syracuse -- go, instead, to Hitler's admiration for that eminent nineteenth century institution, the Indian Reservation. America's gift to the world. Or look at the penal practices of the French. The Communards were cast into Dachaus spaced at some distance from the Hexagon: Devil�s Island, French Guyana.

Lilla might claim that this is merely the blame game, death toll politics. But it isn't � it is looking at the context in which intellectuals might or might not have sympathy with forces that would overthrow �liberal democracy.� To mount a philosophical polemic based on a history and have no real comprehension of history is, well, typical of philosophical polemicists.

Still, even putting aside Lilla�s ignorance of the 19th century, his inability to understand how World War I effected the West reaches into the cases he wants to talk about. In fact, here, as elsewhere, the majority of the intelligentsia went along: most were not, like Bertrand Russell, willing to go to jail to oppose the senseless slaughter on both fronts. Not that Lilla is the type to honor Russell � in fact, whenever intellectuals are being knocked by other intellectuals in forums like the NYRB, you can be sure the political sympathies of the knockers is such that they would have favored locking up the Bertrand Russells and throwing away the key.

Still, context is not an excuse. The 20th century is full of philosophers who have favored tyranny of one sort or another. The list is well known, and the model case is Heidegger. But the Stalinism of Aragon, or the sympathy of the New Critics (Allen Tate, for example) for racism is well known. So if Lilla had the integrity to confront this problem in the spirit of real inquiry � why did it happen? Is there a pattern? Who opposed Stalinism, or apartheid, or Naziism, and why? If Lilla was proceeding along this path, I�d have more sympathy with him.

However, Limited Inc�s lack of sympathy is not shared by the Policy reviewer.

�Mark Lilla offers his latest book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, as �a modest companion� to Milosz�s work. But The Reckless Mind turns out to be not so modest at all, for Lilla takes as his subject a question even more vexing than Milosz�s. We may understand why intellectuals living under tyranny, jaded by the degradations of war and intimidated by a totalitarian state, would submit to regnant orthodoxy. But what accounts for tyranny�s apologists in free societies? Why would an intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial regimes �or, as was more common,� Lilla writes, �to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?� Lilla seeks to answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series of profiles of modern intellectual.�

Menashi makes a curious move in his review to Strauss. Usually Straussians start going cross-eyed, in that Closing of the American Mind way, when they deal with such as Kojeve, but Menashi is actually thoughtful. A nice piece. Here�s the final graf:

�As it happens, during his lifetime Strauss produced studies of only three living thinkers: Heidegger, Schmitt, and Koj�ve � three theorists who had put their formidable talents in the service of tyrants, the first two to Hitler and the last to Stalin. In contrast to their zealotry, Strauss appears (contrary to his popular reputation) resolutely anti-dogmatic. �Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth,� according to Strauss; he exhorts impulsive thinkers not to philosophical certainty, but to the philosopher�s moderate self-control. Against the religious dogmatism of these intellectuals, he juxtaposed the uncertain wisdom of Socrates: The true philosopher knows that he knows nothing.�

The last is a phrase is one philosophers like to use when they are getting sentimental, but like some old cheer intoned by the graduates of the class of 38 on the Yale lawn, they are going through the motions from nostalgia, not because they mean it.