Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 21:39:10 -0500 (EST)
From: Gregory Polly <gpolly-AT-husc.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: Neech right & left




On Wed, 18 Jan 1995, Russell A. Potter wrote:

> 
> The five smells clog your nose, says Lao Tzu -- maybe you should trust
> it a little less.  The right wing that seems to be on the move in the
> U.S. today is about as non-Nietzschean as they come, and would probably
> list _The Genealogy of Morals_ as the beginning of a long slide into
> hopeless "moral relativism."  

How warm and consoling this is for the lefty: the right-winger as
braindead curmudgeon, even if he's got the gun we can still console
ourselves that he's the baby. The person who taught me my Nietzsche had
had Allan Bloom as a dissertation advisor, so I have a bead on what is really
behind the "moral relativism" panics of the Right. Like paranoids who
think they hear voices in their fillings, Straussians imagine that they
are the "free spirits" that Nietzsche is talking to, the virile new
legislators without illusion, beyond good and evil, whose main task is to
make new myths for the unfortunately democratic "herd": hard truths, the
restoration of "rank," but slow and careful, politically prudent, cultural
warfare rather than military.  The invention of myths for the herd.
Neither Bloom nor any of the other Nietzschean-Straussians really
*believe* any of this crap. They delight in Germanophobic handwaving about
"moral relativism," but they laugh all the way home;  they know the
universe is morally relativistic and they think the death of God is a
bore. It's the HERD who can't take this belief, and who shouldn't be
allowed to be hear it. It saps a virile culture, "detumescence," as Bloom
warns. The job of the philosophers is to invent the noble lies. The phrase
Straussians love to quote from BG&E is "a philosophy that does not believe
in itself." 

Consequently Straussian discourse is "esoteric," double-tongued:, 
the weak hear only their tribal beliefs affirmed (but SHAPED!)...but to the 
smarter and tougher students is (secretly and winkingly) revealed a 
virile amorality to be enjoyed by the powerful and by the Epicureans who 
free themselves from the disaster of Christianity. There is no 
contradiction whatever between this position and enjoining Christianity 
and the law upon the herd. In fact, as Nietzsche never tires of 
arguing, the masters and herd should under no circumstances be given the 
same set of rules. And if history gives you a decadent and democratic 
State to work with, you don't whine about it and wring your hands, you 
just laugh and make what you can of it. If that involves 
hetzing people up with demonic images of Moral Decay and playing on their 
misery to engineer a vicious politics, so? That's what the herd are for. 
What, are you going to recommend that we pity them?

Only a few marginal kooks? Nearly every figure in the boneheaded
right-wing campaign against the U.S. academic left has acknowledged a tie to
the Straussian machine--from William Bennett to Allan Bloom to Dinesh
d'Souza to Francis Fukuyama blah blah blah, major academics at big
universities who publish nothing (lefties sniff, "oh, they're not serious
scholars") but who could care less about academic debate since their goals
are to educate the young and create policymakers. "Stephen Toulmin is
reported to have been worried that [Reagan's] state department policy
planning staff know more about Leo Strauss than the realities of the day"
(Shadia Drury, *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss*, 211: she tells the
truth, I can vouch). 

Needless to say, "cultural studies" and the "critiques of power" that
Russell enjoins on me have not thought it worth their while to do any
analysis of this particular state apparatus. They could have had a whole
cottage industry on the "esoteric" hermeneutic alone, and they would have
been prepared with savvy answers when the press started gnashing their
teeth. "Hey, you wanna talk academic conspiracies?" Everybody I know who
knew about the Straussians could see what was being engineered in the
mid-80s when Bloom's book became a bestseller, but lefties predictably
fell back on these tired self-protective, eyerolling postures, none moreso
than the hero-Nietzscheans, who deal with every attempt complicate (not
dismiss) the difficult destiny of his text with the most simplistic vision
of a pure, true reading which can only be grasped by the manly saving
remnant, versus the "debased" readings which have nothing to do with the
"real" Nietzsche. As if the meaning of a text is separate from the
assemblages it courts and mixes with. As if an ironic smirk is enough to
grapple with why Nietzschean discourse, from Ayn Rand to Camille Paglia,
has become so thoroughly absorbed into the State apparatus, why Nietzsche
*became* Oedipus a long time ago for everyone but a small handful of
academics. This response is a refusal of sociology, genealogy, the
insertion of texts into the real world. And it's one of the reasons that
the left doesn't even know who its enemies are, and why they get the
bejeesus kicked out of them all the time. Look, I'm not suggesting that we
burn Nietzsche, or that something positive can't be extracted from him, just 
that this ridiculous piety has to stop and extractions have to be seen AS 
EXTRACTIONS. Otherwise there are dangerous blinders. 


I love you all but no in thunder!

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