Virtue in Two Acts

Review: The Problem of Political Philosophy, by Leo Strauss

Is modern society uniquely blind? When it comes to questions of individual differences, social class, or men and women, there is a special kind of ignorance in our time. This special ignorance is called “the Cave beneath Plato’s Cave” by philosopher Leo Strauss.

As

Michael Millerman

(guest of the podcast) describes:

Leo Strauss’s extension of the cave image may help us to answer this question. Strauss provocatively suggested that modern society is in a cave beneath ‘the cave.’ If the cave in Plato’s allegory symbolizes, as Socrates says it does, our nature with respect to its education or lack of education, our natural ignorance and the possibility of overcoming it, then the cave beneath the cave refers to the situation where we have left the natural condition through technical procedures and historical beliefs. These are procedures and beliefs that, for Strauss, do not bring us closer to knowledge of what is, but rather they remove us further from it, exacerbating our slavish condition. If the old solution to the problem of our natural ignorance was to ascend by philosophizing, the modern solution has been to dig our way out through a kind of subterranean inverted ascent, i.e. a descent, perhaps towards the bright light of the earth’s magma core.

What are the technological procedures and historical beliefs that have led us to such a state of ignorance? In an age where natural inequality is more easily measured and experienced, is there a religious-type denial of natural inequality?

Strauss’ answer is that the fine-grained subdivision of measurement obfuscates knowledge of the whole. While each scientist may stake a claim to a narrow human inequality, they are each excluded from commenting beyond their narrow research. 

Originally political philosophy was identical with political science, and it was the all-embracing study of human affairs. Today, we find it cut into pieces which behave as if they were parts of a worm.

The result is that the only acceptable comments on the whole picture are ignorant, presentist assertions. Political philosophy becomes unacceptable.

The rejection of political philosophy as unscientific is characteristic of present-day positivism. Positivism is no longer what it desired to be when Auguste Comte originated it. It still agrees with Comte by maintaining that modern science is the highest form of knowledge, precisely because it aims no longer, as theology and metaphysics did, at absolute knowledge of the Why, but only at relative knowledge of the How. But after having been modified by utilitarianism, evolutionism, and neo-Kantianism, it has abandoned completely Comte’s hope that a social science modeled on modem natural science would be able to overcome the intellectual anarchy of modern society. In about the last decade of the nineteenth century, social science positivism reached its final form by realizing, or decreeing that there is a fundamental difference between facts and values, and that only factual judgments are within the competence of science: scientific social science is incompetent to pronounce value judgments, and must avoid value judgments altogether.

Social science without value judgments seems quaint compared to the downright propagandistic egalitarian value judgments of modern social sciences. What else could we expect to fill the vacuum other than petty, unreflective envy? This suggests a form of philosophical traditionalism.

In all later epochs, the philosophers’ study of political things was mediated by a tradition of political philosophy which acted like a screen between the philosopher and political things, regardless of whether the individual philosopher cherished or rejected that tradition. From this it follows that the classical philosophers saw the political things with a freshness and directness which has never been equaled. They look at political things in the perspective of the enlightened citizen or statesman. They see things clearly which the enlightened citizens or statesmen do not see clearly, or do not see at all. There is no other reason for this than the fact that they look further afield in the same direction as the enlightened citizens or statesmen.

And some choice words for certain slow, boring authors. I of course mean Max Weber (who else?):

The greatest representative of social science positivism, Max Weber, has postulated the insolubility of all value conflicts, because his soul craved a universe, in which failure, that bastard of forceful sinning accompanied by still more forceful faith, instead of felicity and serenity, was to be the mark of human nobility. The belief that value judgments are not subject, in the last analysis, to rational control, encourages the inclination to make irresponsible assertions regarding right and wrong or good and bad. One evades serious discussion of serious issues by the simple device of passing them off as value problems. One even creates the impression that all important human conflicts are value conflicts, whereas, to say the least, many of these conflicts arise out of men’s very agreement regarding values.

I am somewhat hesitant to commit so wholeheartedly to the view of the Ancients as so greatly enlightened. I think there are tradeoffs involved. But this is well out of scope of this article. Speaking of tradeoffs, 

The Role of the Technologist

A peculiar yet common phenomenon is The Catturd to Silicon Valley Billionaire Pipeline, as

Richard Hanania

puts it. Technologists have the genuine ability and knowledge to see through our egalitarian propaganda. They understand statistics, biology, and technology. Yet they tend to immediately latch on to unfit alternatives.

Most intelligent conservatives I know don’t believe the craziest stuff about topics like anti-vaxx, stolen elections, and conspiracies to get Trump. But their circles are so inundated with false information on these issues that they start to think that where there’s smoke, there must be fire. And because they’re too distrusting of the media, they don’t take its debunkings seriously enough. Sure, maybe Sidney Powell was out of her mind when talking about Hugo Chavez controlling the voting machines, but who knows what’s going on in these urban areas? Covid vaccines aren’t causing millions to drop dead, but surely if it’s even a question then the benefit of getting boosted can’t be worth it? And so on.

The answer is autism. More specifically, there is a fine-grained process among mathematical thinkers that makes thinking about cultural or political emergence difficult. Then, if something happens, it has to be a conspiracy, or at least an op. Strauss points to this dualism in human thought:

The knowledge which we possess is characterized by a fundamental dualism which has never been overcome. At one pole we find knowledge of homogeneity: above all in arithmetic, but also in the other branches of mathematics, and derivatively in all productive arts or crafts. At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity, and in particular of heterogeneous ends; the highest form of this kind of knowledge is the art of the statesman and of the educator.

By entering the political world, I experienced something similar. I stumbled into a role advocating for informed AI optimism, the idea that the underlying evidence from technical and historical precedent weighed vastly in favor of AI benefits than harms. My theory of change is that even a brief explanation of the factors of production which contributed to AI algorithmic or hardware improvement would tell you that. But I quickly discovered that bringing up those statistics would make people’s eyes glaze over. They wanted drama, political relevance, and grand narratives. I learned that no one believes in AI doom because of definite factors of production. They all believe in AI doom because of stories and hypotheticals. That made my theory of change mostly irrelevant. The only people who actually cared about evidence didn’t believe in AI doom in the first place. Sure, I could alert some regulators and staffers that there was an enemy fundamentally driven to stop AI research, but ultimately the band of people who care about the underlying technicals in DC is narrow. To broaden our reach, we needed to return to political principles— speaking about AI as a political issue in addition to a technical issue. Only then, did evidence become important to them.

All of this is to say that the scientism of the current age is particularly deranging to those with an actual interest in science. Perhaps everyone but the autists understand that science is selectively wielded as a weapon for egalitarian propaganda. Still, when technologists dig themselves out of the cave under the cave, the exhilaration of returning to mere debunking leads us to take joy in what Strauss calls ‘natural ignorance’. Once the ‘big lie’ of egalitarianism is dealt with, once the wall to Plato’s second cave is burst open, technologists are often happy to remain in Plato’s first cave. Natural human passions, in all their deranging glory, are enough. Here Strauss continues:

The latter kind of knowledge is superior to the former for this reason. As knowledge of the ends of human life, it is knowledge of what makes human life complete or whole; it is therefore knowledge of a whole. Knowledge of the ends of man implies knowledge of the human soul; and the human soul is the only part of the whole which is open to the whole and therefore more akin to the whole than anything else is. But this knowledge-the political art in the highest sense-is not knowledge of the whole. It seems that knowledge of the whole would have to combine somehow political knowledge in the highest sense with knowledge of homogeneity. And this combination is not at our disposal. Men are therefore constantly tempted to force the issue by imposing unity on the phenomena, by absolutizing either knowledge of homogeneity or knowledge of ends. Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

What alternative is there? We return to the titular question of Strauss’ essay, “What is Political Philosophy?” Here is his answer:

The meaning of political philosophy and its meaningful character are as evident today as they have been since the time when political philosophy first made its appearance in Athens. All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change to the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is, then, guided by some thought of better or worse. But thought of better or worse implies thought of the good. The awareness of the good which guides all our actions, has the character of opinion: it is no longer questioned but, on reflection, it proves to be questionable. The very fact that we can question it, directs us towards such a thought of the good as is no longer questionable – towards a thought which is no longer opinion but knowledge.