Leo Strauss, Esoteric Writing, and "The Most Terrible Truth" of Evolution

                                  Leo Strauss with Persecution and the Art of Writing

At the Claremont Institute's American Mind website, Glenn Ellmers and J. Eric Wise have replied to my recent post on "Strauss, Darwin, and the Pursuit of Comprehensive Natural Science," which was a response to an earlier essay of theirs.  The fundamental question in this discussion is why the scholars in the tradition of Leo Strauss have failed to take seriously modern natural science in the pursuit of a comprehensive science of the whole.

The answer to this question, I suggest, is that Strauss and his followers believe that science--particularly, Lucretian atomism and Darwinian evolution--teaches "the most terrible truth," and that those few philosophers or scientists who can bear this terrible truth must hide this truth from the great multitude of human beings who would be harmed by it.

According to Strauss, the premodern philosophers believed that "the gulf separating 'the wise' and 'the vulgar' was a basic fact of human nature," and that "public communication of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times" ("Persecution and the Art of Writing," 34).  That's why premodern philosophers wrote esoterically to protect the vulgar from those harmful truths discovered by the philosophic few.

When a writer has a deeply disturbing message that he wants to transmit to his philosophic readers while hiding it from his vulgar readers, Strauss suggested, there are various techniques available to him.  One is to hide his most unpopular views by putting them at the center of his text, because readers tend to pay more attention to the beginning and ending of what they read than to the middle.

In Strauss's Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), the central chapter--and the longest chapter--is a commentary on Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.  The exact center of the book is page 135, where Strauss concludes his study of Lucretius by explaining "the most terrible truth."  Strauss saw Lucretius as the exponent of "liberalism ancient and modern," because Lucretius was the one premodern thinker who came closest to modern liberal thought, particularly as based on modern natural science.  The central insight of Lucretius's argument is that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (LAM, viii).  Lucretius proves the mortality of the world as a product of emergent evolution from atoms in motion: "the world is one of the many arrangements of atoms which in a very long time came about through the furious clashes of the blind atoms without the intervention of an ordering mind or a peaceful agreement between the atoms; and once it has come about, it preserves itself for a long time" (123).  Since the world is not the product of an ordering mind, the world is not teleological, although it contains intelligent species--particularly, human beings--that have evolved to be teleological in their natural striving to satisfy their natural desires (125-26).  Since the world is not intelligently designed by a divinely providential mind, the world is indifferent to human beings and thus provides no cosmic support for human purposes.  Moreover, while the world is enduring, it is not eternal.  The world and everything in it--including the human species and all other species of life--will eventually collapse into the ceaseless motion of atoms that will then produce another world.  This is, Strauss believed, "the most terrible truth."

Notice that this terrible truth assumes atheism--the universe is not ordered by a providential Creator.  In his published writing, Strauss always said that reason could not refute revelation.  That was his exoteric teaching.  But in writing that was not published until after his death--particularly, his lecture on "Reason and Revelation" at Hartford Theological Seminary--he stated his esoteric teaching that reason had actually refuted revelation.  In that same lecture, he referred to the truth of Darwin's science of evolution as part of reason's refutation of the Bible.

Atheism is a terrible truth for most human beings because they are terrified by the thought that the universe is not permanently or eternally hospitable to human life--that the cosmic conditions for the possibility of human life arise only for a brief moment.  Think about photosynthesis, for example.  As is true for the history of all life, the history of human life depends on the photosynthetic flow of energy from the Sun through the biosphere of the Earth.  Photosynthesis was impossible until about 2.4 billion years ago, when photosynthetic cyanobacteria began to raise the level of oxygen.  All complex life as we know it depends on this atmospheric oxygen, and also on the right levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  When these conditions disappear--perhaps a billion years in the future--life on Earth will be impossible.

Farther off into the future, the Sun will burn out.  And then, even farther off, the Universe will continue to expand until it becomes a dark, cold place filled only with black holes and stray subatomic particles.

Most of us need esoteric writing to protect us from this "most terrible truth" that everything we care about must die in a lifeless universe that does not care about or for us.

Ellmers and Wise seem to deny this in affirming cosmic teleology.  "We can see," they write, "the reasonableness of an order for which intelligence is immanent and which thus tends, permanently, to produce a creature that thinks as it does.  Cosmic teleology has thus in a way not been denied by modern science, but it has, unwittingly, been affirmed."  "Permanently"?

Some Straussians--like Arthur Melzer in his book on esoteric writing--have suggested that esotericism is no longer necessary or desirable, because the success of liberalism and the scientific enlightenment in achieving open societies allows us to see now that scientific or philosophic truth is no threat to social order or human happiness.  Liberal social order can be based on the scientific truth of moral anthropology without any need for the noble lie of a moral cosmology that prevailed in traditional societies of the past. Now we can see that the "most terrible truth" is not so terrible after all.

But if this is so--that liberalism's success denies the need for esoteric writing--then this would deny Strauss's central claim that the philosophic life and the vulgar life must always be in deep conflict, so that the public communication of philosophic or scientific truth can never be possible or desirable.

Some of my posts on Strauss and the "most terrible truth" of science are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Some of my posts on Strauss's atheism and esoteric writing are here, here, here. and here.

One of my posts on the esoteric atheism of the American Founders can be found here.

Strauss's Secret: "The Most Terrible Truth"

This semester, I am teaching a graduate seminar on Leo Strauss and the debate over Strauss and his legacy.  One of the crucial issues in that debate is whether Strauss was a secret writer.  

One of Strauss's most famous claims is that many of the classic writers of political philosophy have practiced an art of secret writing, by which they could convey an esoteric teaching that is unpopular or heterodox to a few careful readers who are philosophic, while conveying an exoteric teaching that is more popular or orthodox to the many careless readers who are unphilosophic.  This claim--elaborated in Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)--suggests the question of whether Strauss himself was a secret writer with a secret teaching.  If he was, then what's the big secret that would be so disturbing to most readers that it needs to be hidden from their view?

Some of Strauss's critics insist that his secret teaching was his promotion of fascist or Nazi ideas as an alternative to modern liberal democracy.  One piece of evidence for this is in a letter to Karl Lowith in May of 1933, in which he endorses "the principles of the right . . . fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles," and declares that "there is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of Roman thought."  Another piece of evidence is Strauss's interest in Carl Schmitt, who became a leading Nazi theoretician.  In his "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," Strauss seemed to endorse Schmitt's argument that liberalism had failed and that the bourgeois values of liberalism were decadent.  Strauss sought "a radical critique of liberalism" and a "horizon beyond liberalism," although he thought Schmitt had not gone far enough beyond liberalism.  When the students of Strauss speak about the "problem of the bourgeois," they seem to be following Schmitt in his scorn for bourgeois liberalism. 

In Strauss's lecture on "German Nihilism" in 1941, he traced this disdain for bourgeois life to Nietzsche as a formative influence on the "young nihilists" of Germany, and Strauss suggested his partial agreement with their "heroic nihilism": "I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected, was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable."  The Straussian allure of "heroic nihilism" is manifested in Harvey Mansfield's account of the "manly nihilism" of Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt, and in Mansfield's praise of George W. Bush's "one-man rule" in advancing the imperial power of the United States.

These and other lines of evidence have led people like William Altman (in The German Stranger) to charge that Strauss was a Jewish Nazi.  I am not yet convinced that there is enough evidence to support such an inflammatory accusation.

If Strauss had a big secret, I think, it's to be found elsewhere--in what he identified as "the most terrible truth."  When a writer has a deeply disturbing message that he wants to transmit to his philosophic readers while hiding it from his vulgar readers, Strauss suggested, there are various techniques available to him.  A writer can convey his own views through writing interpretive commentaries on the texts of other writers, so that only careful readers will notice his implicit endorsement of ideas attributed to others.  A writer can also hide his most unpopular views by putting them at the center of his text, because careless readers tend to pay more attention to the beginning and ending of what they read than to the middle.  In Strauss's Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), the central chapter--and the longest chapter--is a commentary on Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.  The exact center of the book is page 135, where Strauss concludes his study of Lucretius by explaining "the most terrible truth."

As I have indicated in some earlier posts, Strauss saw Lucretius as the exponent of "liberalism ancient and modern," because Lucretius was the one premodern thinker who came closest to modern liberal thought, particularly as based on modern natural science.  The central insight of Lucretius's argument is that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (LAM, viii).  Lucretius proves the mortality of the world as a product of emergent evolution from atoms in motion: "the world is one of the many arrangements of atoms which in a very long time came about through the furious clashes of the blind atoms without the intervention of an ordering mind or a peaceful agreement agreement between the atoms; and once it has come about, it preserves itself for a long time" (123).  Since the world is not the product of an ordering mind, the world is not teleological, although it contains intelligent species--particularly, human beings--that have evolved to be teleological in their natural striving to satisfy their natural desires (125-26).  Since the world is not intelligently designed by a divinely providential mind, the world is indifferent to human beings and thus provides no cosmic support for human purposes.  Moreover, while the world is enduring, it is not eternal.  The world and everything in it--including the human species and all other species of life--will eventually collapse into the ceaseless motion of atoms that will then produce another world.  This is, Strauss believes, "the most terrible truth."  He writes:

"Lucretius does not speak here [in Book 6], as he did in the section on the thunderbolt, of men's tracing the terrifying phenomenon to the wrath of the gods; he only alludes to men's believing that the gods in their kindness vouch for the sempiternity of the world (601-602); on the other hand, he says explicitly that men 'fear to believe' that the world will die a natural death (565-567). It is this fear for the world, that is, for this world, for everything that is a man's own or his nation's own, which gives rise to the belief in gods and therewith also to fear of the gods; the fear of gods is not the fundamental fear. The fundamental fear gives rise in the first place to fear of that very fear, to fear of the most terrible truth." (LAM, 135)

In his footnote to this passage, Strauss cites Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1050b22-24, and On the Heaven, 270b1-16. Aristotle indicates that "eternal movement, if there be such" depends on the eternity of the heavens, and he identifies the eternity and divinity of the outermost heaven as an ancestral belief based on faith or trust (pistis).

Strauss hints that he agrees with this teaching of Lucretius. "Lucretius' poetry makes bright and sweet the obscure and sad findings of the Greeks, that is, of the philosophers" (83). "One may therefore say that philosophy is productive of the deepest pain. Man has to choose between peace of mind deriving from a pleasing delusion and peace of mind deriving from the unpleasing truth. Philosophy which, anticipating the collapse of the walls of the world, breaks through the walls of the world, abandons the attachment to the world; this abandonment is most painful" (85). "Religion thus appears to be a human invention which serves the purpose of counteracting the indifference of the whole to man's moral and political needs, for not all men are or can be philosophers" (100). (See also 88, 91, 95-96, 106, 119.)

Although Strauss often seems to defend religious belief by arguing that revelation cannot be refuted by reason, some of his readers have suspected that his big secret is his atheism. But even if he was an atheist, his writing on Lucretius suggests that atheism is only part of a deeper truth--"the most terrible truth" of the perishability of the world that is hidden by religious belief in an eternal order of intelligent design that cares about and for human beings.

This "most terrible truth" also illuminates what Strauss in the Introduction to Natural Right and History identified as "the problem of natural right." There he said that this problem is that "natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe" that seems to have been refuted by modern natural science. He explained: "From the point of view of Aristotle--and who could dare to claim to be a better judge in this matter than Aristotle?--the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion is solved" (7-8). This emphasis on cosmic teleology is reinforced by Strauss's claim that "the primary object of philosophy" is "the heavens and the heavenly bodies" (PAW, 20; "Farabi's Plato," 364-65, 382-83, 390-91).

But if Strauss agreed with Lucretius that the universe is neither eternal nor purposeful, then natural right cannot be defended unless it is rooted in the immanent teleology of human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of a natural evolutionary process.

As Strauss indicates, Aristotle spoke of the cosmology of eternal order as based largely on mythic stories and traditional religious beliefs. By contrast, Aristotle spoke of the biological study of living beings as closer to human life and more open to direct study. While Platonic cosmological science (like that of Timaeus) looks for the eternally fixed order of Being, biological science looks to the temporal flux of becoming. Empirical biology manifests an immanent teleology of enduring but not eternal species that does not depend on any cosmic teleology of eternal order.

Strauss even pushed Plato in this direction by denying that Plato believed in the eternal order of the Ideas or the immortality of the soul (PAW, 13-15; "Farabi's Plato," 364, 371, 376), which meant pushing Plato in the direction of Lucretius.

The culmination of all of this could be Nietzsche's Darwinian argument in Human, All Too Human that "everything has evolved," and that therefore there are no eternal truths, although modern science can satisfy the free-spirited philosopher in the quest for the "humble truths" of nature, which include the moral and political truths of evolved human nature.

In an earlier book, Nietzsche had warned against Darwinian evolution as a "deadly truth"--the phrase echoed in Strauss's "most terrible truth"--but Human, All Too Human shows how a "gay science" of evolution can affirm the intrinsic purposefulness of mortal human life in a mortal universe where everything evolves.  Thus does a seemingly deadly truth become life-affirming.

This is what I have tried to do in defending "Darwinian natural right," in providing a scientific grounding in evolved human nature for natural right.  And yet most of the Straussians scorn such an enterprise. 

In fact, most of the Straussians are silent about substantive arguments for the natural ground of natural right.  Does this silence point to the real Straussian secret--that the Straussians don't really believe in the truth of natural right, because they are nihilists, even if manly nihilists?

Sometimes the Straussians suggest that the only clear standard of natural right is the natural ranking of the philosophic life as the only truly good life, which includes a denigration of moral and political life as lacking any natural justification.  But even here the Straussians never lay out the substantive arguments necessary to prove the natural supremacy of the philosophic life.  Does this mean that they are so radically nihilistic that they regard even the choice to live a philosophic life as an arbitrary choice with no grounding in nature?

Some posts on related points can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A Thousand Posts (4)

2012
In the spring semester, I taught a graduate seminar on Leo Strauss.  Consequently, I wrote many posts on Strauss from January to June.  Much of this writing was incorporated into my chapter on Strauss in Political Questions.

Although I never met Strauss, many of my teachers at the University of Dallas and the University of Chicago had been colleagues and students of Strauss.  Many of my colleagues and students in the political theory program at Northern Illinois University were deeply influenced by Straussian thinking.  I absorbed many of the Straussian ideas about the history of political philosophy that shaped much of my thinking, although I was never an orthodox Straussian. 

I was particularly interested in Strauss's understanding of "natural right."  And from Roger Masters, one of Strauss's students who specialized in the study of Rousseau, I picked up the idea that natural right might be rooted in Aristotelian biology in a way that could be supported by modern Darwinian biology.  This led to my argument for "Darwinian natural right."  The Straussians have been hostile to my argument, mostly because of their hostility to modern natural science generally, and to Darwinian biology in particular. 

In my posts, I pointed out Strauss's silence about how Aristotle's biology supports natural right, and also his silence about Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism in his middle writings (especially, Human, All Too Human).  Strauss and the Straussians tend to stress Nietzsche's early and late writings, where they can find a Nietzschean attack on Darwinian naturalism.  But they ignore Nietzsche's appeal to Darwinian science in his middle writings.

I also reflected on the similarities between what Strauss identified as the liberalism of Lucretius and Darwinian liberalism.  According to Strauss, the central insight of Lucretius's argument is that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable." Strauss calls this "the most terrible truth," because it denies that the cosmos is ordered to the human good.  Strauss and the Straussians are deeply disturbed by this "terrible truth" that there is no cosmic teleology.  Darwinian liberalism accepts this truth and is satisfied with grounding the human good in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature. 

Strauss's most famous claim is that many of the classic writers of political philosophy have practiced an art of secret writing, by which they could convey an esoteric teaching that is unpopular or heterodox to a few careful readers who are philosophic, while conveying an exoteric teaching that is more popular or orthodox to the many careless readers who are unphilosophic.  This claim--elaborated in Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952)--suggests the question of whether Strauss himself was a secret writer with a secret teaching.  If he was, then what's the big secret that would be so disturbing to most readers that it needs to be hidden from their view?

If Strauss had a big secret, I think, it's to be found in that "most terrible truth."  When a writer has a deeply disturbing message that he wants to transmit to his philosophic readers, while hiding it from his vulgar readers, Strauss suggested, there are various techniques available to him.  A writer can convey his own views through writing interpretive commentaries on the texts of other writers, so that only careful readers will notice his implicit endorsement of ideas attributed to others.  A writer can also hide his most unpopular views by putting them at the center of his text, because careless readers tend to pay more attention to the beginning and ending of what they read than to the middle.  In Strauss's Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), the central chapter--and the longest chapter--is a commentary on Lucretius's On the Nature of Things.  The exact center of the book is page 135, where Strauss concludes his study of Lucretius by explaining "the most terrible truth."  Strauss hints that he agrees with this teaching of Lucretius. "Lucretius' poetry makes bright and sweet the obscure and sad findings of the Greeks, that is, of the philosophers" (83).

Since the world is not the product of an ordering mind, the world is not teleological, although it contains intelligent species--particularly, human beings--that have evolved to be teleological in their natural striving to satisfy their natural desires.  Since the world is not intelligently designed by a divinely providential mind, the world is indifferent to human beings and thus provides no cosmic support for human purposes.  Moreover, while the world is enduring, it is not eternal.  The world and everything in it--including the human species and all other species of life--will eventually collapse into the ceaseless motion of atoms that will then produce another world.

In one post in June, I have argued that the temporality of life is indicated by the dependence of life on photosynthesis as the evolved process by which the energy of the Sun is captured for sustaining life on Earth.  Once photosynthesis ceases, as it must in a billion years or so, there will be no life on Earth.  Many people worry about the degrading effects of teaching evolution to our school children.  Perhaps they should also worry about teaching them about photosynthesis, because this will teach them the "most terrible truth."

If the idea of natural right depends on the cosmic teleology of the universe, as Strauss says, then the "most terrible truth" that the cosmos is not teleologically ordered means that the idea of natural right is an illusion.  If Strauss agreed with Lucretius that the universe is neither eternal nor purposeful, then natural right cannot be defended, unless it is rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of a natural evolutionary process, which is my argument.

Shadia Drury has argued that Strauss's core teaching was the natural superiority of the philosophic life of the few human beings capable of such a life, as the only life that was good by nature, and thus the inferiority of the nonphilosophic life of the great multitude of human beings who were incapable of living this naturally good life.  She criticized this teaching as both false and dangerous.  It was false because this absolute separation of all of humanity into two groups--the philosophic few and the vulgar many--was a pure fantasy rather than an accurate account of what human beings are like.  It was dangerous because it promoted a tyranny of the philosophers, in which the moral, religious, and political life of the vulgar many was seen as governed by lies--even if noble lies supported by philosophers for the good of philosophy.  In my posts, I have suggested that Strauss's defenders have not properly answered Drury's criticisms

Similarly, Strauss's defenders have not answered William Altman's charge that Strauss's secret teaching was his promotion of a Heideggerian Nazi attack on liberalism.  I point to some weaknesses in Altman's reasoning.

Altman identifies Strauss's secret teaching as an affirmation of Darwinian evolution and his public teaching as an affirmation of Platonic eternity.  That public teaching of Strauss is what Altman embraces as true.  By contrast, I find the Platonic teaching of eternal cosmic standards implausible, and I embrace Darwinian natural right: even if the world that we care about is neither eternal nor purposeful, and even if the cosmos does not care for us, natural right can still be rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of a natural evolutionary process.

Other than Strauss, perhaps the single greatest influence on my thinking about Darwinian natural right has been Edward O. Wilson, particularly through his books Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998).  In May, I wrote about his new book The Social Conquest of Earth, and I saw seven major themes related to Darwinian natural right: (1) consilience, (2) emergence, (3) genetic plasticity, (4) the two peaks of social evolution, (5) the iron rule of moral evolution, (6) religion and science, and (7) the rejection of kin selection theory.

Wilson identifies two paths to the social conquest of the earth--the insect path and the human path.  The social insects rule the invertebrate land environment.  Humans rule the vertebrate land environment.  Like the social insects, humans are "eusocial" in the technical sense that multiple generations of individuals live together, caring for dependent offspring and cooperating in a social division of labor.  While the social insects organize their colonies largely through pure instinct, with the insect queen producing robotic offspring guided by instinct, humans must organize the cooperation of individuals through personal relationships based on social intelligence, which requires navigating through a tense social network balanced between the selfish interests of individuals and the social interests of groups.  Wilson explains this tense balance in human social life between selfishness and sociality as a product of the countervailing evolutionary forces of individual selection and group selection.

Some of my writing on Wilson's Social Conquest of Earth went into my review of the book in the Fall 2013 issue of The Claremont Review of Books.

A third person whose writings greatly influenced me was another Wilson at Harvard--James Q. Wilson. In March, I wrote a post on Jim Wilson the day after he died.  He was best known for his work in criminology.  As a young scholar, I admired his book Crime and Human Nature, which I used as a text in some of my classes as a classic of political science.  I detected in this book and some of his other writings an evolutionary view of human nature.  This was confirmed in 1993 by the publication of Wilson's The Moral Sense.  Wilson said that he was most proud of this book.  For me, his pride was warranted.  This book was crucial in shaping my thinking about the evolutionary roots of human nature, and particularly the evolutionary confirmation of the idea of the natural moral sense in Scottish moral philosophy (Hume and Smith).  In many ways, this book pointed me to my book Darwinian Natural Right.

Wilson surveyed the evidence for how the natural and cultural evolution of morality can explain human cooperation as rooted in kinship and reciprocity, or what some evolutionary theorists have called kin selection and reciprocal altruism.  Evolution favors helping those genetically related to us, because this spreads our genes into the future.  Evolution also favors cooperating with those who are not genetically related to us if there is some reciprocal exchange.  I will cooperate with you if you have been cooperative with me in the past (direct reciprocity), or if I know you have a reputation for being cooperative with others (indirect reciprocity).  So it's tit for tat. People are rewarded for their good reputation as trustworthy cooperators and punished for their bad reputation as untrustworthy cheaters.

But does this show genuine altruism or selfless concern for others?  We could see helping our close relatives as genetic selfishness, because we are acting to spread our genes.  And we could see reciprocal cooperation as merely enlightened self-interest, because we're cooperating only as long as we expect some reciprocal benefits for ourselves. 

And yet, some evolutionary theorists--particularly, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis--have argued that human beings also show genuine altruism--totally selfless service to others--through what they call strong reciprocity.  This is a propensity to cooperate and share with others, even strangers, and to punish those who don't cooperate and share with others, even when the cooperation, sharing, and punishment are personally costly to the strong reciprocator, and the strong reciprocity requires neither ties of kinship nor expectation of future reciprocation.  Moreover, Bowles and Gintis think that the research in experimental game theory confirms the reality of such strong reciprocity.  They also think this confirms what Adam Smith said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about those lovers of virtue for its own sake who desire to do what is praiseworthy even without the reward of actually being praised.

In a series of posts in June and July, I challenged the reasoning of Bowles and Gintis and suggested that what they see in experimental games as evidence for strong reciprocity is actually evidence of indirect reciprocity, in which people are generous because they expect (even if only unconsciously) to earn a reputation for generosity that will benefit them in the future.  Under conditions of total anonymity, people tend to express their purely selfish motivations.  Much of this writing went into the new chapter on Adam Smith in the 4th edition of Political Questions.

In September, I wrote some posts on how Jonathan Haidt's evolutionary moral psychology supports fusionist conservatism and Aristotelian liberalism.

In October, I wrote a long post on the evolutionary politics of minimal winning coalitions among both humans and chimpanzees.  Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have shown how the power of political leaders depends on their having the support of a minimal winning coalition.  No ruler can rule alone.  Even an absolute dictator needs a small coalition of powerful people who are loyal to him, and to win and maintain that loyalty, the dictator must buy them off with money and power.  A democratic leader differs from a dictator in that the democratic leader depends on a larger coalition of supporters.  Frans de Waal found this to be true for chimps as well: success in political competition among chimps depends on the exercise of strategic intelligence in which chimps must form coalitions that will support them as the alpha male in the group's hierarchy.  My writing here was incorporated into my chapter on Machiavelli in Political Questions.

One seemingly profound objection to the evolutionary science that I defend on this blog is that this evolutionary science of nature cannot explain the existence of nature itself.  Why does nature exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? And why are things as they are and not different?  When Bill Nye debated evolution with Ken Ham, Nye was asked, What was there before the Big Bang?  Nye's answer was: It's a mystery!  Ham's answer was: God.

Jim Holt has written a book on how philosophers and scientists have tried to answer this question--Why does the world exist?  In October, I wrote a post on this question.  I argued that Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question, because it rests on two false assumptions.

First, the question falsely assumes the possibility of absolute nothingness.  Since human beings have no experience of absolute nothingness, whereas all of our experience confirms the being of things, there is no empirical evidence for absolute nothingness.  Even the very idea of nothingness as a product of the theological imagination pondering the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is dubious, because in the absence of any empirical evidence, I doubt that people even understand what they are saying when they ask why the world arose out of nothingness.

The second false assumption in the question of why the universe exists is that the principle of sufficient reason can apply to the whole universe.  Our experience of finding reasons or causes to explain things applies to events in the universe as governed by natural laws.  But this makes no sense as applied to the universe as whole.

This question comes up in the chapters on Augustine and on Nietzsche in Political Questions. 

Finally, I shouldn't leave 2012 without noting my posts in March on "genopolitics," because this bears upon one of the most common criticisms of any biological study of politics--the charge of genetic reductionism.

Beginning in the 1970s, a small group of political scientists jointed an intellectual movement that they called "biopolitics" or "politics and the life sciences."  I was one of the early members of that movement.  Although some of these people hoped to turn the mainstream of the discipline of American political science towards a political science rooted in biological science, this did not happen.  By the turn of the century, around 2000, some of these people lamented that the movement had largely failed, because most political scientists still showed little or no interest in the biological study of politics.

But then, sometime around 2004, there seemed to be a growing interest in biological explanations of political behavior.  Two articles were especially prominent.  In 2005, the American Political Science Review published "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?" by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing.  Through the methodology of behavior genetics, using the study of twins, they concluded that about 50% of the variance in propensities to "conservative" or "liberal" ideology is explained by genes.  This article gained widespread publicity.  This was followed by more articles advancing what was called "genopolitics."  One article by James Fowler and Christopher Dawes, published in 2008 in the Journal of Politics, claimed in its title that "Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout."  This was the first time that researchers had identified particular genes as linked to some political behavior.

I and others in the biopolitics movement were suspicious about these genetic explanations of political ideology and behavior.  They were too simplistic in thinking that political thought and action could be explained through genetics.  We knew that behavior genetics had a bad record of making strong claims about the genetics of behavior that could not be replicated.  So when Evan Charney began criticizing this research, I agreed with him and wrote posts explaining why he was right to say that the simplistic model of genopolitics cannot capture the emergent complexity of political behavior as the product of many interacting causes and levels of analysis.

In May of 2013, the American Political Science Review published three articles on the debate over genopolitics, which provided empirical confirmation for Charney's critique.  Fowler and Dawes were forced to suggest that their 2008 article should never have been published, because they and others had failed to replicate their results in that article.  They admitted that their simple genetic models cannot fully explain the complexity of what they are studying.

By contrast, the explanatory models for political life proposed by proponents of biopolitics are far more complex than the simple models of genopolitics: genes are there in the biopolitical models, but the genes have no effect on their own, because they interact with other factors at many different levels of analysis.

My post for September 13, 2015, surveys this debate and includes links to my many other posts on this.

Leo Strauss and Darwinian Science: Is Photosynthesis the "Most Terrible Truth"?

Straussians will see the second "Earth Summit"--meeting in Rio de Janeiro next week--as a reminder of what Leo Strauss called "the most terrible truth": "that nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable."  This "terrible truth" that Strauss saw in Lucretius' De rerum natura has been deepened by modern science and particularly Darwinian science, and it is the fundamental thought implicit in the idea of "sustainability."  Even as we debate the best path to sustainable development, we might remind ourselves that modern science teaches us that no matter what we do, ultimately human life--and, indeed, all life on earth--is unsustainable. 

If we're lucky, we can hope to prolong the life of our species and other species for a few more centuries or millenia.  But we cannot hope to prolong life forever, because we live in a evolving universe that does not care about us or for us, and the evolutionary conditions sustaining human life and all living beings are enduring but not eternal.  Eventually, everything we love and everything that lives will die, and the Earth will become just another dead planet.

That's what Strauss identified as "the most terrible truth," and what Straussians like Tom Pangle have called "the elemental terror."  According to the Straussians, the few human beings who are philosophers can find pleasure in knowing that terrible truth, because they find their supreme pleasure in knowing the truth, and for them no truth is terrible.  But all other human beings cannot live, or live well, with such a terrible truth, and they need the pleasing delusion that the universe has been created by an intelligent designer who cares for them eternally, who therefore will sustain human life forever.  That's why Strauss and the Straussians scorn modern science and Darwinian science in particular, because this science teaches that human life has evolved through natural conditions that are not eternally sustainable.  (Similarly, conservative existentialists like Peter Lawler complain that Darwinian science cannot satisfy the transcendent longing of human beings for eternal meaning, which can only be satisfied by the heroic delusion of religious belief.)

It all comes down to photosynthesis. 

One of the greatest achievements of modern science over the past two centuries has been the discovery and the understanding of photosynthesis as the process by which the flow of energy from the Sun is harnessed to sustain life on Earth.  A wonderfully written account of this is Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (Harper Collins, 2008).

Contrary to so much of the rhetoric of environmentalism that assumes a static "balance of nature" in the biosphere that has been disturbed by human activity, the history of the Earth is a history of dynamic change, in which the whole biosphere has arisen as a contingent product of photosynthesis.  The meaning of photosynthesis is that light makes life.  Sunlight provides the energy that is captured by plants and channelled in ways that sustain the living processes of all plants and animals.  Plants use photons of sunlight to power the process by which carbon is taken from the air and "fixed" into living tissues, a process that requires water and chlorophyll, and which gives off oxygen. 

Large multicellular creatures cannot survive without the energy levels provided by oxygen coming from the atmosphere.  But there was little oxygen in the atmosphere until about 2.4 billion years ago, when photosynthetic cyanobacteria began to raise the level of oxygen, and now oxygen is about twenty percent of the atmosphere.  All complex life as we know it depends on this atmospheric oxygen.  This "Great Oxidation Event" was the first great environmental catastrophe in the history of life on the Earth.  That's why some astrobiologists believe that the best sign of life on another planet would be evidence of oxygen in the atmosphere.

As is true for the history of all life, the history of human life depends on the photosynthetic flow of energy from the Sun through the biosphere.  The history of human civilization shows the emergence of ever more complex levels of order from structuring the flow of solar energy to sustain order against the entropic tendency of the second law of thermodynamics.  Within that cosmic pattern, human history's three eras can be seen as three levels of ever more complex order that require ever more complex means for extracting energy to sustain ever larger human populations.  Through most of human evolutionary history, foragers extracted energy through hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants.  Then, about 12,000 years ago, because of the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the end of the last ice age, farmers began to extract energy through harvesting domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals.  In the modern era, beginning around 1750, human beings have come to rely ever more on fossil fuels as sources of solar energy stored away in the Earth.  The ultimate source of all this energy in plants, animals, and fossil fuels is sunlight.  And thus it is that life on Earth draws cosmic support from the fires of the Sun.

If there were not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, photosynthesis would shut down.  Right now, that doesn't seem to be a problem because human activity has been raising the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past two centuries.  But scientists project that over the longer term--somewhere between a hundred million and a billion years into the future--this carbon dioxide will disappear, photosynthesis will then stop, and all life on the planet will die.

Unless one believes that the cosmos is intelligently designed or divinely created for the eternal good of the human species, we must face up to the future extinction of all human life, and even all life generally.  That's the ultimate message of Darwinian science as conveyed through the scientific understanding of photosynthesis as the evolved natural ground of all life.  Many people worry about the degrading effects of teaching evolution to our school children.  Perhaps they should also worry about teaching them about photosynthesis.

Strauss and the Straussians share this worry about the enervating effects on most human beings of this "most terrible truth" of Darwinian science.  The Straussians also suggest that any scientific denial of cosmic teleology and the eternity of human nature denies the ground of natural right.

My response to this is to argue that even if the world that we care about is neither eternal nor purposeful, and even if the cosmos does not care for us, natural right can still be rooted in the immanent teleology of human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of a natural evolutionary process.

We need not be terrified by the truth that the cosmos does not care for us, because by nature we care for ourselves, and that immanent teleology of our nature is enough to sustain natural right.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Evolutionary Lucretian Liberalism of Spontaneous Order: A Liberty Fund Conference

The Liberty Fund conference in Tucson last week on "Lucretius, Evolutionary Morality, and Spontaneous Order" helped me to think through the idea of evolutionary Lucretian liberalism.

The question for this conference was whether an evolutionary study of cosmic history--from the origin of the universe to the present and into the distant future--supports the claim of classical liberalism that order emerges best from the bottom up through spontaneous evolution rather than from the top down through intelligent design and planning.

The fundamental thought is conveyed in one passage of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things: "Nature is seen, free at once, and quit of her proud rulers, doing all things by herself spontaneously [per se sponte omnia], without control of gods" (2.1090-93).  Matt Ridley sees this Lucretian teaching as a general theory of evolution that applies the classical liberal principle of spontaneous order to everything in the universe: "the physical world, the living world, human society, and the morality by which we live all emerged as spontaneous phenomena, requiring no divine intervention nor a benign monarch or nanny state to explain them" (The Evolution of Everything, 8).  The French physiocrats expressed this thought in a motto: Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme! (Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!)  The alternative position is the Platonic teaching that all natural and social order requires intelligently designed planning from the top down.

With selected readings from Lucretius, Ridley, and Christian, Brown, and Benjamin's Big History, we talked about a wide range of topics over six sessions:

1. The Evolution of the Origin of the Universe
2. The Evolution of Life, Mind, and Culture
3. The Evolution of Morality
4. The Evolution of Religion
5. The Evolution of the Economy and Government
6. The Evolution of the Future

There were at least four kinds of criticism of the idea of Lucretian evolutionary liberalism.  The first criticism arose from the Straussian interpretation of Lucretius as an "ancient" philosopher, who therefore cannot rightly be identified as a "modern" liberal thinker.  I have responded to this criticism in my previous post.  After thinking more about this, I now believe that a crucial issue here is whether one can see Lucretius as drawing from an ancient Greek tradition of liberalism, as set forth by Eric Havelock in his Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, or whether Strauss was right in arguing that Havelock failed to identify any Greek thinker as a true liberal.  It seems to me that Havelock did identify in some of the pre-Socratic philosophers the evolutionary liberal idea of spontaneous order that was developed by Lucretius.

The second kind of criticism of evolutionary liberalism came from the traditionalist conservatives, who complained that this view of the world was morally, intellectually, and spiritually degrading--that it led to Nietzsche's "last man," who lives a comfortable life without any aspiration for anything high or noble.  The "Big History" of evolution that we were studying, one discussant observed, is actually a "small history" of small people in a soulless world with no transcendent longings.  This discussant also noted that in all of our reading nothing was said about the "regime"--Aristotle's politeia understood as the political community devoted to forming the human soul to achieve its highest virtues.

This is the conservatism of the Counter-Enlightenment with its scorn for the bourgeois liberalism and the scientific materialism that create a life of mediocrity without excellence.  In previous posts, I have responded to this Counter-Enlightenment attack on liberalism in my comments on Steven Smith (here), Roger Scruton (here), Patrick Deneen (here), and Benjamin Wiker (here).  I have also responded to the common appeal to Nietzsche's "last man" image by pointing out that the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human defends an Epicurean evolutionary liberalism that recognizes the moral dignity of the bourgeois virtues (here and here).  Moreover, I have argued that those who sneer at the mediocrity of the bourgeois life need to confront Deirdre McCloskey's argument for the bourgeois virtues as including all of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtues (here).

As I have indicated in some of these posts, this debate over the virtues and vices of evolutionary liberalism ultimately comes down to an empirical question about the facts of human history: Has life in the illiberal regimes been generally more or less civilized than life in the liberal regimes?  As summarized by Ridley (28-33), people like Steven Pinker and Norbert Elias have presented historical evidence that the move from the illiberal social orders of the European Middle Ages to the liberal social orders of modern Europe was a "civilizing process," in which the moral standards of life improved.  The conservative critics of classical liberalism would have to prove that the factual evidence of history does not support this claim.  They would also have to recommend illiberal alternatives to liberalism.

A third criticism coming from the traditionalist conservatives was that evolutionary liberalism seems to assume a naïve progressivism that is denied by the fact that the cosmic and cultural evolution of history does not show inevitable and linear progress.  The authors of Big History present the entire history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present as a movement from simplicity to complexity through eight thresholds of increasing complexity.  Although they never mention Herbert Spencer, he also argued for a cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity.  The authors of Big History rely on astronomer Eric Chaisson's claim that the cosmic history of increasing complexity can be studied through the measurable matrix of increasing flows of energy required to sustain more complicated structures against the entropy of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But eventually, according to the common view of many scientists, the universe must end in "heat death," because entropy will win.  Life on Earth will become impossible.  In 4 to 5 billion years, the Sun will die.  Over hundreds of billions of years, all the stars will fade out.  And with no stars, there will be no planets, and thus no biospheres to support life anywhere.  The universe will continue to expand forever into eternal darkness.  Entropy will have finally destroyed all structure and order.  For those scientists who believe our universe is part of a larger multiverse, other universes might continue to evolve.

Similarly, Lucretius offers four proofs that while the universe of atoms and the void--the "sum of sums" (summarum summa)--is eternal, our "world" (mundus) is mortal (5.235-415).  Our world as constituted by the Earth, all life on Earth, the Sun, the moon, and the stars will endure for a long time, but eventually it must all die.  New worlds can then arise out of atoms and the void.

Lucretius says that most human beings are afraid of this teaching that the world is mortal.  Earthquakes are especially fearful because they suggest the possibility that the Earth could be destroyed.  And "men fear to believe that a time of destruction and ruin awaits the nature of the great world, even when they see so great a mass of earth bowing to its fall" (6.565-68).

Leo Strauss quoted this as showing "fear of the most terrible truth"--the terrible truth that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (Liberalism Ancient and Modern, viii, 135).  Strauss believed that only the few human beings capable of living the philosophic life can calmly accept this most terrible truth; and so in any healthy social order, this terrible truth would have to be hidden from the great multitude of human beings who cannot bear it.

Since Big History was written as a textbook for high school and college students, the authors must disagree with Strauss's claim that most human beings cannot bear the truth about the mortality of the world.  The authors admit that their view of the remote future as the "eternal death" of the universe is a "bleak picture."  And yet they try to see this as a "quite satisfying" picture for human beings, because it indicates that humanity has been lucky enough to live in "the springtime of the universe," the brief time when the universe has had all of the conditions for producing the wondrous world in which life and human beings could exist (304).

But rather than worrying about cosmic history many billions of years into the future, most human beings are surely more inclined to worry about the near future--the next hundred years or so--because they might imagine what the world will be like for their children and grandchildren.  With this in mind, our discussion turned to a consideration of whether we should be hopeful or gloomy about how well human beings in the near future will handle environmental problems such as global warming and the scarcity of natural resources and the threats from destructive technologies such as nuclear and biological weapons.

The authors of Big History sketch two alternative scenarios for "ominous trends" and "hopeful trends."  For the "ominous trends," they rely on gloomy predictions about the "limits to growth" by people like Lester Brown.  This kind of thinking has led people like Naomi Klein to argue that the only solution to our environmental problems as created by unregulated capitalism is to have "managed degrowth" to drastically reduce global production and consumption and then to execute a global plan for spending at least 10% of our global economic output on building renewable sources of energy to replace all high-carbon sources.

Against this sort of thinking, Ridley is clearly on the side of the "hopeful trends" scenario, because he believes that as long as there are free market incentives for solving environmental problems, there are likely to be innovative technological changes that will protect human beings from catastrophe. (I have written a post on the debate between Klein and Ridley here.)  As always, the key for Ridley is to allow for spontaneous cultural evolution:  "It is a fair bet that the twenty-first century will be dominated mostly by shocks of bad news, but will experience mostly invisible progress of good things.  Incremental, inexorable, inevitable changes will bring us material and spiritual improvements that will make the lives of our grandchildren wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal--almost entirely as a serendipitous by-product of cultural evolution.  But the people with grand plans will cause pain and suffering along the way" (319-20).

Some of the discussants at the Liberty Fund conference agreed with this--thinking that as long as people were free to cooperate in spontaneously ordered groups, they could find imperfect solutions to their problems.  For example, one discussant spoke about Elinor Ostrom's studies of how neighbors cooperate to enforce social norms for managing common pool resources in ways that solve the "tragedy of the commons."

But at this point, some discussants brought up a fourth criticism of evolutionary liberalism--the fanaticism of Ridley's claim that everything good comes from bottom-up evolution, and everything bad comes from top-down planning.  Ridley declares: "bad news is man-made, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history.  Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves.  The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended. . . . Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history" (317-18).

While agreeing with Hayek about the importance of spontaneous order, Ridley ignores Hayek's claim that good order often does emerge top-down by design in deliberate organizations.  Families, firms, governments, military organizations--these are all deliberately designed forms of order.  And particularly in time of war, Hayek thought, a society might need to be centrally planned for warfare.

As I have indicated in a previous post (here), Ridley's version of evolutionary liberalism suffers from one fundamental flaw--an almost anarchistic scorn for government.  Unlike Hume, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek, Ridley fails to see that although governmental power is dangerous when it is unlimited and undivided, the spontaneous order of human civilization can arise only within a framework of general rules deliberately designed and enforced by government. 
Although Ridley has a short section on the evolution of marriage (85-90), he says nothing about the Hayekian account of the family as a deliberate organization rather than a spontaneous order.  I have written about that here and here.

Like Hayek, Ridley points to the evolution of the common law as an example of spontaneous order that shows how law can emerge without any need to be invented by lawmakers (33-36).  But Ridley is silent about Hayek's argument that the common law as "grown law" often needs correction by legislation as "made law" (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, 88-89).

I now regret that at this Liberty Fund conference we did not talk about the evolution of government, legislation, and the family as deliberate orders. We should have thought more about how the evolution of a free society requires both spontaneous order and deliberate order.

Some discussants suggested that good things can come either bottom-up or top-down.  One discussant pointed to Ridley's account of how Hong Kong became a place of free trade.  Sir Harry Pottinger, Hong Kong's first Governor in 1843, promoted free trade.  Then, in the 1960s, Sir John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, resumed this experiment in free trade (233-34).  So here we see how top-down administrators can create the open space for bottom-up emergence of order.

Despite these four lines of criticism, it seemed that most of the discussants at this Liberty Fund agreed that the evolutionary science of the cosmos, culture, and mind can support classical liberalism.

The Straussian Denial of Evolutionary Lucretian Liberalism: Comments on John Colman's Book

I will soon be leaving for Tucson, Arizona, where I will be directing a Liberty Fund conference on "Lucretius, Evolutionary Morality, and Spontaneous Order."  We will be staying at the beautiful Loews Ventana Canyon Resort.  Our six discussion sessions will center on readings selected from three books--Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, Matt Ridley's The Evolution of Everything, and David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin's Big History: Between Nothing and Everything.

Going to a Liberty Fund conference is one of the great joys of my life. I get to sit around a table with 14 very smart people talking about texts that raise deep questions about the historical, philosophic, scientific, theological, and psychological implications of human liberty.

In this case, we will talk about how Lucretius's atomist science of nature might support a natural history of the evolution of everything, and of how human morality, politics, religion, and mind might fit within that Big History.

In particular, I am interested in the possibility of understanding Lucretius as a premodern forerunner of modern evolutionary liberalism.  I have written many posts on various aspects of this thought--some of them can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I foresee that many (maybe most) of the participants will disagree with me.  In particular, I know that John Colman-the author of Lucretius as the Theorist of Political Life--disagrees with me, because his book advances a Straussian interpretation of Lucretius as an ancient political philosopher who was mistakenly appropriated by modern political philosophers to serve their modern project for progress through political enlightenment and technological science.

Prior to Machiavelli, the Straussians assume, the ancient political philosophers saw the philosophic life as the only naturally good life, and they saw that contemplative life of the few people devoted to the truth as opposed to the social life of the many based on common moral, political, and religious opinions that cannot survive rational questioning.  But beginning with Machiavelli, modern political philosophers have sought to close the gap between philosophy and the city by promoting a modern liberal social order in which there is freedom of thought and religious toleration, and philosophy is turned towards natural science and technology that gives human beings a mastery of nature that is popular because it makes the life of the multitude more secure and prosperous than it has ever been.

If one accepts this stark Straussian separation between ancients and moderns, then one must be surprised that so many modern philosophers have been deeply influenced by Lucretius, which has been confirmed by much of the recent scholarship on the history of Lucretius's influence.  Colman admits that the long list of modern philosophers influenced by Lucretius includes Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bayle, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, D'Holbach, and Helvetius; and he also admits that these were true philosophers living the contemplative life.  But still Colman argues that Lucretius was not a modern thinker at all, and therefore the modern philosophers influenced by Lucretius were mistaken in that they did not understand Lucretius's true teaching.

Colman says nothing about the most obvious objection to his reasoning--the implausibility of his assumptions that Lucretius was unable to write his book so as to convey his true teaching to his philosophic readers, that all of his early modern philosophic readers were unable to correctly identify his teaching, and that for the first time in history some Straussian scholars have recently uncovered the true teaching that Lucretius failed to convey to his earlier philosophic readers.

Moreover, Colman says nothing about the fact that even Leo Strauss suggested some disagreement with these assumptions.  In Strauss's book Liberalism: Ancient & Modern, the central chapter and the longest chapter is his "Notes on Lucretius," thus implying that the Epicureanism of Lucretius anticipates modern liberalism.  In the Preface of the book, Strauss noted the modernity of ancient Epicureanism:

"The most extensive discussion is devoted to Lucretius' poem.  In that poem, not to say in Epicureanism generally, premodern thought seems to come closer to modern thought than anywhere else.  No premodern writer seems to have been as deeply moved as Lucretius was by the thought that nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable.  Apart from this, it may suffice here to refer to Kant's presentation of Epicureanism as identical with the spirit of modern natural science prior to the subjection of that science to the critique of pure reason" (viii).

And yet, Strauss worried about the sadness of this Epicurean teaching--that the world that we love is not eternal, because every world is mortal within the eternal universe of atoms in motion.  He identified this as "the most terrible truth" (85, 100, 135).  He thought that philosophers can live with this truth with a tranquil mind.  But most human beings cannot.  And consequently most human beings can find peace of mind only through the pleasing delusion of a religious belief that the world of human concern is supported by a loving intelligent designer.

Although Colman refers repeatedly to Strauss's study of Lucretius, he never refers to this remark about the modernity of ancient Epicureanism.  What Colman does say implies that Strauss was just wrong in seeing Epicurus and Lucretius as coming close to modern thought.

For example, Colman argues that while Francis Bacon seemed to be influenced by Lucretius, Bacon was mistaken in his reading of Lucretius, and he failed to see how his teaching contradicted the teaching of Lucretius.   According to Colman, Bacon rejected Lucretius's teaching that the philosophic life was the highest life: "Bacon's judgment about the fruitlessness of classical philosophy precluded him from praising the delight in knowledge for its own sake" (141).  Unlike Lucretius, Colman  claims, Bacon promoted the advancement of technological knowledge that could lead to the human mastery of nature for the relief of the human estate.  Bacon sought to overcome the limits of nature through technological power.  By contrast, Lucretius taught "the impossibility of overcoming natural necessity and chance through political and technological means" (141).

There are three problems with Colman's reasoning here.  The first problem is that far from rejecting the Lucretian claim that philosophic knowledge is the highest life, Bacon repeatedly affirmed that a life of pursuing and contemplating truth is "the sovereign good of human nature" (2002, 342).  He argued for a union of contemplation and action, so that neither is subordinated to the other (2002, 148-150, 155, 167, 222, 439).

The second problem is that contrary to Colman's claim that Bacon saw human technological power as unlimited by nature, Bacon was clear that human creation is always limited by nature.  Only God can create ex nihilo or destroy in nihilo (2002, 190-91).  Human beings command Nature only by obeying her.  "All that man can do to achieve results is to bring natural bodies together and take them apart; Nature does the rest internally" (2000, 33).

The third problem is that Lucretius agrees with Bacon in seeing the importance of technological progress in human evolutionary history, which is most fully set out in Book 5 of On the Nature of Things (5.925-1455), where he recounts the history of discoveries and inventions such as the use of fire, language, and farming.  Colman recognizes this (104-113).  But then he asserts: "According to Lucretius, man's technological and artistic productions are no match for the power of nature.  Thus the account of the development of the arts that concluded Book V is corrected by the finale of Book VI, which speaks of natural cataclysms and plague" (139).  Here Colman is referring to the account of the horrible suffering caused by the plague in Athens, which is how Lucretius ends his book.

Colman doesn't explain how Lucretius's account of the plague "corrects" his account of technological progress in Book 5.  Presumably, Colman's suggestion is that the suffering of the Athenians in the plague "corrects" any belief that human beings can ever have such absolute power over nature as to be protected from all the natural causes of suffering.  But neither Lucretius nor Bacon ever claim that human beings can have such absolute power over nature.  Rather, their claim is that improvements in the human knowledge of natural causes can increase human power for the relief of the human estate, but without ever achieving absolute power, which would require absolute knowledge.

Colman notes that following Thucydides' account of the plague, Lucretius observes that medical doctors were of no use because they were ignorant of the natural causes of the disease.  But Colman is silent about Lucretius's explanation of diseases such as plagues as caused by germs (or "seeds") that are invisible to ordinary human vision (6.30, 665, 1090-1131).  Thus, Lucretius was the first philosopher to suggest the germ theory of diseases.  And by suggesting this just before his account of the plague, he suggests to his careful readers the thought that once scientists identify the germs that cause plagues, human beings can increase their power to protect themselves against such diseases.  This is exactly what Bacon had in mind.  And as I have indicated in a previous post (here), the medical science of how microscopic bacteria and viruses cause diseases like the plague have helped to improve human health, and this has become one of the great benefits of the modern Liberal Enlightenment.

So can the Straussian scholars recognize that in this and other ways the Liberal Enlightenment has succeeded?  It's not clear.  Generally, Strauss and his followers insist that liberalism must fail because it denies the natural fact of the contradiction between social order and philosophic truth, so that every social order must be closed to any philosophic or scientific enlightenment.  A crucial consequence of this natural fact is the necessity and desirability of esoteric writing: philosophers or scientists seeking the truth about nature must write and speak in such a way as to hide their true teaching from the multitude of people who would be harmed by this teaching.

But recently some Straussian scholars have conceded that the Liberal Enlightenment has become so successful that esoteric writing is no longer necessary or desirable.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), Arthur Melzer has shown that Strauss was right about the importance of esoteric writing up to about two hundred years ago.  But Melzer has also indicated that esoteric writing began to disappear around 1800, and today most of us in the modern liberal open societies regard esoteric writing as neither necessary nor desirable, because Liberal Enlightenment has succeeded.  If this is so, then Strauss was wrong about the necessary failure of the modern project.

In his best-selling book on Lucretius as the creator of modernity (The Swerve), Stephen Greenblatt proclaimed: "We are all Epicureans now."  One evident manifestation of this is that Lucretius's teaching of the atomist science of the cosmos as a spontaneous natural order unguided by any divine design has become the popular cosmology for our societies today, and in the open societies today there is no attempt to suppress this teaching as subversive to social and religious order.

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."

In 1980, that was the first line spoken by Carl Sagan beginning his thirteen-part television series Cosmos, which became one of the most-watched series around the world for the Public Broadcasting System.  The book Cosmos became one of the most popular science books ever written.  It was a comprehensive presentation of how modern scientists understand the natural history of the universe over 14 billion years.  Sagan was clear in his rejection of any conception of the universe as requiring divinely intelligent design.  In the 2013 edition of Cosmos, Ann Druyan (Sagan's wife) pointed to the significance of the opening line: "Some religious fundamentalists found that first line offensive.  To them it was a shot across the bow that Carl was out to steal their thunder.  They were on to something."

In 1996, Sagan wrote another best-selling book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  One of his epigrams in the book was from Lucretius: "As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror."

In 2014, Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, hosted the television successor to Sagan's Cosmos, which was entitled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.  The book tied to the television series--Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution--has only one epigram, which is a quotation from Lucretius: "The world has persisted many a long year, having once been set going in the appropriate motions.  From these everything else follows."  Tyson used the same epigram for his 2017 book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.  He has become one of the most widely-read authors of popular science books.

So why aren't these Lucretian scientist-philosophers like Sagan and Tyson being persecuted?  Or why hasn't the fear of persecution forced them to write esoterically?  Isn't the answer clear--the success of the Liberal Enlightenment allows for the popular promulgation of Lucretian natural philosophy without any fear that this will subvert the social order?

Modern liberalism has created more public freedom of speech for teaching Lucretian science than ever before in history.  And yet even in the ancient polytheistic world of Greece and Rome, Epicurus and Lucretius were remarkably free in openly teaching what they thought.  Epicureanism became one of the most popular philosophical movements in the ancient world, even though it was widely identified as atheistic, and the Epicureans were boldly provocative in their public teaching.

In fact they were so bold in their teaching that we might doubt that they were esoteric writers.  Even Colman concedes: "The early modern philosophers were attracted to Lucretius also because they saw in him an unwillingness to make the kind of concessions that the Platonic Socrates or Aristotle had made to the religious opinions of the city.  This may explain why Lucretius does not mention either Plato or Aristotle when discussing his philosophic forbearers and limits himself to a few pre-Socratics" (133).

It was not until the Christian Church took political and cultural power over the world that Epicureanism was suppressed, and the books of Epicurus and Lucretius were banned.  The Church could accommodate the teachings of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, which were absorbed into Christian theology and philosophy.  But the Church could not tolerate Epicureanism in any form.  It was not until a copy of Lucretius's book was found hidden away in a German monastery in 1417 that modern readers finally had access to Lucretius after a thousand years of suppression.  The book was placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

This suggests that there was more freedom of speech for philosophers in the ancient world--at least for Epicurean philosophers--than Strauss was willing to admit.  In a previous post, I have argued that there was far more freedom of thought for philosophers in Athens than the Straussian scholars have recognized.

REFERENCES

Bacon, Francis. 2000. The New Organon. Eds. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bacon, Francis. 2002. The Major Works. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Colman, John. 2012. Lucretius as Theorist of Political Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sagan, Carl. 1996. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  New York: Ballantine Books.

Sagan, Carl. 2013. Cosmos. New York: Ballantine Books.

Strauss, Leo. 1968. Liberalism Ancient & Modern.  New York: Basic Books.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse, and Donald Goldsmith. 2004. Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution. New York: Norton.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse. 2017. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. New York: Norton.

Strauss, Melzer, and Esoteric Writing: "There Are No Gods But the Philosophers"

Arthur Melzer's new book--Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (University of Chicago Press, 2014)--provides massive evidence and argumentation in defense of Leo Strauss's claim that political philosophers have written esoterically for thousands of years, although in the past two centuries, this has been largely forgotten. 

And yet, Melzer's book also suggests that modern liberalism's success over the past two centuries shows that esoteric writing is not necessary or desirable in a liberal open society, which appears to refute Strauss's core teaching that the philosophic life of the few as the only naturally good life must be in conflict with the miserable life of the many that depends on moral, religious, and political delusions.

Except for Strauss's short essay on "Persecution and the Art of Writing," most of the writing by Strauss and his students on esoteric writing has been interpretations of particular philosophers as esoteric writers.  Melzer's book is the first book to offer a synoptic view of the history of esoteric writing and its philosophic implications.

His book is divided into three parts.  In the first part, he lays out the general evidence and argument for the reality of philosophical esotericism.  In the second part, he explains the four forms of philosophical esotericism: defensive esotericism, protective esotericism, pedagogical esotericism, and political esotericism.  In the last part, he explains the consequences of the recovery of esotericism by offering a guide to esoteric reading and by showing how recognizing esotericism was important for Strauss in defending reason against historicism.

In the first part, he surveys the testimonial evidence for esotericism; he explains the theoretical basis for philosophical esotericism; and he takes up the objections and resistance to esotericism.  The extent of the testimonial evidence is stunning.  In fact, it is so extensive that he offers only a sample of it in the book and refers the reader to an online appendix with 110 pages of quotations beginning with Homer and ending with Wittgenstein.

The theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism is what Melzer calls the "problem of theory and praxis."  This is the core teaching of Strauss that there must always be an irresolvable conflict between the theoretical or philosophic human being and the practical or moral human being.  These are fundamentally different types of human beings.  The very few people who can live a truly philosophic life live the only naturally good and happy kind of life, which is devoted to the quest for truth.  Most people live moral, religious, and political lives based on opinion rather than truth, and thus based on illusory goods that bring misery rather than true happiness. 

This makes esoteric writing natural, necessary, and desirable.  Those few who live philosophic lives must write esoterically to defend themselves from persecution by the many (defensive esotericism), to protect the many from being harmed by the terrible truths that philosophy discovers (protective esotericism), and to teach the secret truths of philosophy to those very few young people capable of becoming philosophers (pedagogical esotericism).

The ancient and medieval philosophers saw that this conflict between these two kinds of life--the contemplative life and the active life--was so natural, necessary, and desirable that it could never be overcome.  And therefore the premodern philosophers never attempted to establish a rational society in which all of society would be open to the truths of philosophy or science.

But the modern philosophers thought such a rational society was possible and desirable, and so they initiated the modern Enlightenment project to destroy traditional or closed societies based on opinion and to establish modern or open societies based on truth.  They saw, however, that this battle against traditional opinion would have to be fought over centuries before the triumph of the new Enlightened society.  And during this period of intellectual warfare, the philosophers would have to use a new kind of esoteric writing (political esotericism) to temporarily hide their political project of Enlightenment.  They had to employ esotericism for the sake of eventually eliminating the need for esotericism.  They would have to lie so that someday lying would be unnecessary.

Indeed, by about 1800, according to Melzer, this modern liberal project was so successful that modern philosophers no longer saw any need to hide their teachings.  Consequently, the reality of esoteric writing prior to 1800 was forgotten; and so when Strauss tried to revive the understanding of esoteric writing, most scholars dismissed this with scorn, irritation, and ridicule.  Of course, for many of Strauss's students, this teaching of esoteric writing and esoteric reading was what made Strauss so seductively attractive, with the promise of being initiated into the secret teachings of philosophy that could be safely revealed only to the naturally superior few.

Melzer also shows how important Strauss's teaching about esotericism was for his defense of reason against historicism.  The forgetting of esotericism after 1800 supported historicism, because it allowed readers to assume that the surface teaching of the philosophers that endorsed the prevailing opinions of their time showed that philosophers were always historically determined in their thinking, and thus the human mind could not transcend history in the pursuit of truth.  By contrast, Strauss and his students could argue that the appearance of conformity to popular opinions was illusory, and that reading the philosophers esoterically could uncover secret teachings that showed the philosophers seeking transcendent truths beyond historically determined opinions.

Was Strauss right about all of this?  Melzer's answer is ambiguous.  He never clearly and explicitly denies any of Strauss's claims.  But he does give his readers intimations that Strauss might have been at least partially wrong.

Melzer repeatedly states that the issue for his book is not whether we today approve of or practice esoteric writing, but whether philosophers of the past approved of and practiced esoteric writing (98, 101-102, 115, 163, 206-207, 228, 283).  About that issue, Melzer is clear in agreeing with Strauss:  the evidence that philosophers generally practiced esoteric writing prior to 1800 is persuasive.

Melzer also seems to agree with Strauss's account of the difference between the premodern philosophers and the modern philosophers--that the ancient and medieval philosophers were "conflictualists" who denied that the conflict between philosophy and politics could ever be overcome, and that the modern philosophers were "harmonists" who thought the conflict could be resolved with the establishment of a rational society.

Melzer also seems to agree with Strauss about the disagreement within modern philosophy between the Enlightenment thinkers and the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers.  All think that reason and politics can be made harmonious.  But they disagree on how exactly this is achieved.  The Enlightenment thinkers see the harmony as achieved by the subordination of politics to the rule of reason.  The Counter-Enlightenment thinkers see the harmony as achieved by the subordination of reason to the rule of politics.

But was Strauss right in endorsing the position of the premodern philosophers--that it was impossible to overcome the conflict between philosophy as the only naturally good human life and the moral, religious, or political life as a miserable life of delusion, and therefore that esoteric writing will always be natural, necessary, and desirable?

Melzer implies that he disagrees with Strauss about this.  Consider this statement by Melzer:

"My friends and colleagues all regard it as curious that I should be the one to write this book.  There are people who have a real love for esoteric interpretation and a real gift for it.  I am not one of them.  My natural taste is for writers who say exactly what they mean and mean exactly what they say.  I can barely tolerate subtlety.  If I could have my wish, the whole phenomenon of esoteric writing would simply disappear." (xvii)

If Melzer rejects esoteric writing, if he thinks it is unnecessary and undesirable, then he must think that Strauss and the premodern philosophers were wrong in believing that esoteric writing was necessary and desirable because the conflict between the philosophic life and the practical life could never be overcome.

In various places in his book, Melzer does say that the modern liberal goal of harmony between reason and society has been achieved or at least approached in modern open societies to the point that esotericism is no longer necessary or desirable (see, for example, 5, 92, 98, 101, 105, 115, 119, 121, 129, 134-43, 153, 159, 163, 168-73, 196-98, 200-203, 206-207, 234, 236, 246, 249, 366, 383-84).  That the philosophic life as based on truth must threaten the social life based on opinion is perhaps true for the traditional societies that have dominated most of human history, but it is not true for the modern liberal societies that have emerged in many parts of the world over the past two centuries. 

Melzer declares: "the idea of subversive truth has little plausibility today.  We citizens of the enlightened, secular, liberal, pluralist, multicultural society have dared to open our doors to every idea and doctrine and have discovered, at length, that all the supposed dangers of doing so were greatly exaggerated.  So we are inclined to ask with some skepticism, not to say condescension: exactly how is it that truth or philosophy is a threat to society?" (168-69).

For example, Melzer indicates, one manifestation of the conflict between reason and politics in traditional society is that slavery was necessary in civilized societies, and philosophers like Aristotle had to write exoterically in support of slavery as natural, while writing esoterically to teach that slavery was unnatural and thus unjust.  But the triumph of liberalism allowed for the abolition of slavery, so that Aristotle's esoteric truth could be publicly embraced (196, 323).  And while the historicist will say that Aristotle's endorsement of slavery shows that he was held captive by the opinions of his time, the practice of esoteric reading can show that he understood the truth about slavery that could not be publicly recognized in his society.

According to Strauss, the premodern philosophers believed that "the gulf separating 'the wise' and 'the vulgar' was a basic fact of human nature," and that "public communication of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times" ("Persecution and the Art of Writing," 34). 

If Strauss agreed with this, then that would mean that he thought that liberalism must be a dangerous delusion, and that he must write esoterically to hide his opposition to liberalism.  As Strauss wrote, "if I know that the principles of liberal democracy are not intrinsically superior to the principles of communism or fascism, I am incapable of whole-hearted commitment to liberal democracy" (What Is Political Philosophy?, 222).  We would then have to wonder what kind of alternative he had in mind--what kind of illiberal closed society he would prefer. 

Melzer is completely silent about Will Altman's argument that Strauss did engage in esoteric writing in promoting an illiberal alternative to liberal democracy.  He is also silent about Strauss's professed devotion to "fascistic, authoritarian, imperial principles" and his refusal to crawl to the cross of liberalism (in a letter to Lowith in 1933).

In the last paragraph of Melzer's book, he asserts that while Strauss believed he needed to practice esoteric reading, he did not believe that he needed to practice esoteric writing, because he saw no need to overturn the Enlightenment (366).  If that is true, then Strauss must have thought that the premodern philosophers were wrong in believing in the irresolvable conflict between philosophy and politics.  If that is true, then Strauss did not believe in the premodern conception of the philosophic life as a transcendent life, as the only naturally good life.  I am not persuaded by Melzer that this was Strauss's position.  And it's remarkable that Melzer offers no reference to any of Strauss's writing that would support the assertion in this last paragraph.

Strauss was an atheist who believed that reason can refute revelation.  But this was his esoteric teaching that he kept hidden (see "Reason and Revelation," which was not published during his lifetime).  His exoteric teaching was that reason could not refute revelation, and that this failure of reason was the refutation of reason by revelation (Natural Right and History, 75).  This was his attempt to overturn the Enlightenment by restoring the authority of revealed religion.  He was so successful in this that even some of his students believed that he really thought that philosophy was too weak to refute revelation.  We might doubt the wisdom of Strauss's strategy, particularly when we see the modern revival of fanatical religious fundamentalism in its assault on philosophy and science.

Melzer seems to reject the premodern conception of the philosophic life.  He says that he is not a philosopher in this sense, and that he has never met anyone who is.  Moreover, he doubts that such a life is even possible (380, note 1).  Or, perhaps, he's agreeing with Strauss that true philosophers are so "extremely rare" that "it is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one's time" (LAM, 3).  Strauss said he himself was not a true philosopher, but "only a scholar" (RCPR, 29).

Oddly, Melzer does not point out that in doubting the reality of this Straussian ideal of the philosophic life as the only naturally good life, he is in agreement with Shadia Drury, who identified this as Strauss's core teaching, and who criticized it as both false and dangerous.  Melzer cites Drury only once in a footnote (383, n. 18).

As Melzer indicates, the classical ideal of the philosophic life as showing "the transcendence of ordinary life" stands to the nonphilosophic life as the divine stands to the human (71-72).  Here Melzer could have quoted Strauss's remark that "if we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers" ("Reason and Revelation," 163).  The serpent in the Garden of Eden told the truth when he told Adam and Eve that on the day they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would become like gods (ibid., 169).  By contrast with the divine life of the philosopher, all other human lives are "forms of human misery, however splendid," because they are based on "despair disguised by delusion" (ibid., 146-47).  If Strauss is endorsing this as true--philosophy as divine transcendence of merely human life--then he must have believed that it would be impossible for liberalism to overcome the conflict between the philosophic life and the practical life.

Surprisingly, however, Strauss never clearly offered any proof that the philosophic life was the only naturally good life.  He did occasionally point to Aristotle's arguments for the supremacy of the philosophic life in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics.  Melzer also does this (72, 75, 176).  But neither Strauss nor Melzer reflect on how dubious those arguments are, particularly when considered in the context of the Nicomachean Ethics as a whole; and they never reflect on how Books 8-9 (on friendship) offered a different conception of philosophy--not as the dominant end of life, but as one of the inclusive ends of life.  They never consider the possibility that the teaching in Book 10 is Aristotle's exoteric teaching, which appears to endorse the Platonic ideal of the philosopher, while subtly undermining that ideal by making weak arguments in its favor. They don't notice how Aristotle's arguments here mimic Plato's in the Timaeus (90c) about the divinity and immortality of the philosopher.  Nor do they reflect on how Aristotle's account of philosophic friendship in a pluralist society resembles what liberals like Adam Smith and David Hume said about philosophic friendship in a commercial society.

If modern liberalism is to succeed in achieving a largely open society with freedom of thought and speech in which the philosophic life and the practical life are in harmony, then liberalism would have to show that there are no deadly truths that are harmful to nonphilosophers.  Strauss and Melzer identify the "most terrible truth" as the truth taught by Lucretius--that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (Melzer, 195-96; Strauss, "Notes on Lucretius," 85, 100, 135). 

Lucretius taught this as part of his evolutionary teaching--that everything has evolved, including human beings, so that the human species is enduring but not eternal.  Those who believe that the human good must be grounded in some cosmically eternal good that has not evolved--a Cosmic Nature, or Cosmic Reason, or Cosmic God--will see this teaching as the "most terrible truth" of nihilism.  But those who accept Darwinian natural right will be satisfied with grounding the evolved human good in human nature, human culture, and human judgment. 

Liberal social order can be based on the scientific truth of moral anthropology without any need for the noble lie of a moral cosmology that prevailed in traditional societies.  If so, then what Strauss and Melzer regard as the "most terrible truth" is not so terrible after all.

I have elaborated some of these points in previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.