Straussianism and Philsophers

Studying with Prof. Paul, a Straussian, was very different from studying with Prof. Irving, but understanding and articulating the differences makes for an interesting exercise, which I'll undertake initially through the fact / value distinction. Often in graduate school, we would discuss the distinction between "positive and normative," that is, "the way things are rather than the way things should be." This continuum manifests itself a tension between facts and values, with facts being inarguable and values, in contrast, being open to distinction. Both are unarguably part of the human experience, but the key difference comes in reconciling this tension, a process that is as old as philosophy itself. However I view the fact-value distinction as a tension between complexity and simplicity, which from an engineering perspective is obvious, but that perspective is not quite as universally understood as it might seem to an engineer. That is, reality is complex, while the human mind can only comprehend a small portion of that reality, which in turn drives the philosophical dynamic. 

 There are a number of examples of this tension between simplicity and reality, between clarity and complexity. One of the earliest and most clear is that between Plato's Republic and Laws. The Republic was written early in Plato's career and is clear, straightforward, and direct. He makes sharp distinctions between topics, which makes his arguments easy to understand and remember. However Plato's Laws was written later in his career and was probably more true but less clear. Plato said, "Sometimes it's this way, but other times it's that way..." yawn. In contrast to Plato was his student, Aristotle, who was more a natural scientist than his teacher. Even though Aristotle is remembered for all he got incorrect, it was his perspective on and interest in the natural world of cosmos that is of particular interest for this author. Most significant is his acknowledgement of the complexity of the natural world, which is reflected in the political in terms of excellence or virtue. The world does not present people with well structured, closed-form solutions. The world is more complex and thus different.

This division between the human and natural, between the simple and complex, between values and facts manifests itself as a tension throughout the history of political philosophy. Modern philosophers feature an exemplary pair in Kant and Hegel. Although it's been a few years since I read either, the key difference is between the simplicity, values, and rationality of Kant and the complexity, facts, and empiricism of Hegel. Kant performed thought experiments, wrote much, and seldom strayed from his university. Hegel, in contrast, tried to explain the complexity of the world he saw around him. His most famous attempt to do this is the dialectic composed of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Of course the communists took Hegel's ideas and perverted them as communists tend to do, but I argue that Hegel was getting at something fundamental about the complexity of the real world. His work on historicity and categorization structure support this conclusion. The real insight is that Hegel did his best with the tools, concepts, and ideas that were available to him. Computer-based tools provide undreamt of capabilities today, so it seems that we should at least try to apply them to these important philosophical and policy questions. 

These tensions manifest themselves in the present day as well. John Rawls of Harvard wrote A Theory of Justice, in which there's an "original position" in which you don't know if you're rich or poor. This rational, thought-based style is called what makes Rawls a "neo-Kantian." In contrast to Rawls I offer Leo Strauss who places more emphasis on facts, history, and tradition, making him more of an Aristotelian -- that is, he recognizes that his writings will not capture the great complexity of reality, and such efforts will come up short, but it's worthwhile and beneficial to try. 

Extending from the 20th to the 21st century, the great cognitive prosthetic power of the modern computer can be applied to philosophical and policy questions as a way to manage the complexity inherent in them. However, doing so requires bridging the cultural gap between philosophers and engineers, between social scientists and computer scientists. As an engineer and computer scientist moving into the worlds of philosophers and social scientists I expected the divide would not be that large, but I was wrong. 

Straussianism and Conservatism

I decided not to get too worked up about Prof. Irving. This wasn't so much a choice as a realization  that a masters student fighting a professor with tenure a SEU was a no-win proposition. Better to spend one's efforts elsewhere, which is a trick I learned from the board game go: if you are in a bad position on the board, stop playing there and come back to it later when the situation may have improved. Another variation on this theme is, "If you're in a hole, stop digging." I decided to focus instead on the upcoming spring semester's classes. They call this "shopping for classes," and as I was doing so I ran into a colleague. Cathy was from Eastern Europe, an ardent socialist, and a PhD student who was on scholarship and could have gone to another elite PhD program. As a baby masters student with a couple of engineering degrees, I looked up to her. Cathy was a little too serious, self-important, and argumentative, but this was graduate school, and she certainly wasn't the only one.

Cathy was going to take a class from a Straussian philosophy professor, Prof. Pauls. I said yes for one and only one reason, because I knew Prof. Irving hated Prof. Pauls with a white hot passion, so that was good enough for me: whatever he was selling, I was buying; whatever he was laying down, I was picking up. There was only one problem: I didn't really know what a Straussian was. As with most subject in philosophy, and here we're talking about political philosophy, there are multiple levels to uncover and examine. First, Straussians are people who follow in the footsteps of Leo Strauss, a professor at the University of Chicago, one of the key super-elite universities in the world. He wrote the book Natural Right and History, which I must have read as a graduate student but I remember almost nothing about. There's also Cropsey and Strauss's History of Political Philosophy, which we called "the purple Bible" and provides synopses of the west's great philosophers. But it's not what Strauss wrote so much as the way he read. You'll often hear the phrase, "close-reading Straussians," which highlights the perspective of a reader trying to understand what the writer was trying to say at that point in history rather than what the reader's modern interpretation might be. As an engineer, I interpreted Strauss as acknowledging an objective truth and trying to understand it however difficult rather than holding that the material world is up for debate, interpretation, and innovation. Straussians are often associated with Aristotle, who as an ancient tried to understand the natural world and got almost everything wrong, but it was his perspective and seriousness that left it's mark. But unlike an engineer, these Straussians tried to understand the world with words rather than numbers, an attitude that I appreciated and a method that left its mark on me. My engineering degree taught me math, my computer science degree logic, and my time in political philosophy, English. 

But the real question is this: What is the relationship between Straussianism and conservatism? Conservatism is something beyond just "close reading," but it's that Christian perspective captured by the Gloria Patri doxology, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end," which gets at the universality and reality of physics and engineering. If reality is that which persists after one stops believing in it, then physics and engineering capture that Straussian, conservative perspective: that reality is something to be learned, understood, and shaped within limits rather than something to be battled, dictated to, and shaped according to the desires of people. This is a working definition of the relationship among Straussianism, conservatism, and realism as embodied by physics and engineering. It's a topic that will be addressed again. 

On Nationalism

The new, spring semester was ripe with new possibilities, which I decided to focus on rather than that super-negative Prof. Irving. The class I most remember though is Prof. Block, who taught alternative theories, and there were many of them. I recall reading the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, and then another week reading the secondary literature on the book -- which is to say people who had written about and commented on Thucydides. I also recall the paper I wrote that week referenced the book's naval battles, which I called "navel" battles and which isn't correct because the Spartans and Athenians didn't fight each other with their belly buttons.

However, the alternative theory that left the biggest impression was Anthony D. Smith's theories of nationalism, which to me just seemed correct. Nationalism was something productive and natural, not something to be overcome but embraced, understood, and shaped into a productive force. There's this long line of universal, utopian, one-world government, new world order, and globalization that is a constant through the 20th century that, in retrospect, is more than a little problematic. There's the League of Nations and United Nations that were both supposed to make war illegal or impossible though collective action. After the horrors of the two World Wars, the sentiment is understandable, but the solution is unworkable. Moreover, it may be the case that globalization over the long-term will unleash destructive forces even larger than nationalization, but let's leave that argument for another time.

While the motivations for globalization are well known, let's instead revisit nationalism and develop a vocabulary of its underpinnings so we can better understand it. Nationalism is rooted primarily in shared identity in the form of common history, feeling that we're all in this together. This can take a modern, civic form as well as an older ethnic form, with Smith calling these ethnic foundations, "ethnie." Recently I was watching Bridge of Spies where they got a bit preachy on this point, saying the only thing that made people Americans was a commitment to the Constitution. Tocqueville would argue against that as his analysis was based on the people being primarily Anglo-American, especially when he compared and contrasted the Anglo-American experience with the Spanish countries that went from anarchy to dictatorship and then from dictatorship back to anarchy. Tocqueville would agree with Smith that nations grow out of an ethnic core. Modern internationalist definitions of nationalism have been changed through modernity and economics, so they have more civic and legal underpinnings rather than ethnic.

Smith provides multiple examples that these shared notions of identity and history are often idealized and not strictly true, which opens up several opportunities for political manipulation. First, political entrepreneurs can claim to be part of nationalities simply by repeating key national myths. Second, new myths can be created, especially in era dominated by omnipresent and convincing media. Third, attacks on nations can be undertaken simply by questioning the veracity of national myths. This is perhaps the most insidious type of attack, because it is undertaken with supposedly rational and scientific motivations, which are really designed to undermine national myths. Notice how corresponding narratives behind anti-nationalist movements are rarely examined with corresponding levels of depth and rigor, and if such studies are undertaken, then they are deemed "out of bounds" through political correctness.

Finally, these feelings of shared identity and common history serve to connect elites and non-elites. Smith spends considerable time contrasting and comparing elites and non-elites within a national context. Within a nationalist context, the elites travel and meet with other elites, but non-elites live behind borders and do not mix with other populations. And the church helps to unite and bind the population, both elites and non-elites. In the modern, economic era, the power of nation-states and churches has waned. The elites have become bureaucrats, what is called a "new class," quite separate from the non-elites. This is a communist and increasingly globalist term. The World Economic Forum, which meets at Davos every year, represents in my mind the apogee of this newly formed communist and globalist perspective. However, the point is that this globalist worldview is very different from those held by the non-elites in the western world. In fact, it would be fair to say that the nationalist bonds between elites and non-elites have been broken with the elites viewing the non-elites as benighted who exist only to be taxed, which is a common historical dynamic called 'tyranny'. 

The goal of this piece was to create a vocabulary for nationalism, which took three parts. First, there are ethnic and civic conceptualizations of nationalism, which the history always being ethnic that transforms into civic through modern conceptions of the state. Second, nationalism takes the form of  shared identity and common history, which underpin a range of modern political dynamics in a global media age. Third, nationalism help to connect elites and non-elites, and when nationalism fades, so too do these bonds, which weakens the supports of the nation-state. Modern conceptions are tied to the rise of technology and economy, which weaken nationalism and the Church. While this is a simplified analysis that merits much more detailed analysis, this at least gives a vocabulary of the key notions of nationalism as a way to understand the stakes of globalization and argue against globalism (for more see here).

The Affect Effect

I took four classes my first semester studying political science at SEU and earned A's in three of them. I was actually getting a small reputation as a wunderkind, the engineer who was doing unexpectedly well in political science. The fourth class was with Prof. Irving on rationality, and he requested that I go to his office to receive my grade. This was my first term paper, and I had written on Irving's extreme democracy book in which he argued that all important policy questions should be put to a vote. Based on my experience living in California, I didn't that would work because I felt like I was voting on important subjects about which I knew very little. But more importantly, it seemed to me that Irving's book was really about reformulating a workable socialism, which means that it is still subject to the Hayek's critique. Hayek argued that rationality, the brain's ability to process information, is inherently limited, which impacts the ability of socialist central committees to plan and run an economy. My paper argued similarly that there would be no way to convey enough information to voters in an extreme democracy to make informed decision.

On my way to Irving's office on that cold December day, I was hoping for an A but realized that probably wasn't going to happen. My gut told me the odds of my receiving an A were not good, but I'd been wrong before. Irving had been a little, reticent shall we say, but the collective noun for graduate student is an, "anxiety." I figured that even though I had disagreed with Irving, that's what people do, and he would be flattered that I had focused on his book. I settle into Irving's office, and he tells me he's giving me an F. The paper was so terrible that he checked my grades from my other classes to see what I had received. The fact that I had received 3 A's meant nothing to him. How could I write such a paper? What was I thinking? The paper was so awful in his opinion that I couldn't even rewrite it. However he was going to do me a favor by giving me an incomplete rather than the F I had earned. So total was his rejection that I tried to make some weak protests, but it was obvious they weren't going to help and could hurt. The only thing to do was leave.

On my way home, my brain felt like it was on fire. I tried to remain logical though, and there was no way to fight Irving's criticism directly. Instead I chose to focus on short-term goals, absorb the criticism, figure out what I did wrong, and then work to correct my error. I started by working through the logic of the paper, and I was pretty sure I was correct. In Irving's defense, I had studied engineering and computer science before studying political science, so while the mathematical and logical foundations of my argument were strong, I was weak on the literature. The paper was probably more than a little odd. Also this was also my first 20 page term paper. The analogy I had in mind at the time was a music student having become expert at piano and violin but who also wanted to study guitar. The first guitar lesson will probably be poor, but if you were good at piano and violin, then you'll probably be pretty good at guitar if you apply yourself, right?

Plus, the class had concentrated on rational choice theory, which didn't strike me as correct. It seemed to feature overly structured problems that lent themselves to closed-form, "correct" answers. There was a quality to the arguments that featured purportedly intelligent people making radical -- and by "radical," I mean large, significant, and fundamental -- changes to political-economic systems. This didn't seem supportable because the reason one undertakes changing political-economic systems is to improve them. But I had written over 10,000 lines of computer code for my master's thesis, and I treated this code base fundamentally differently than the political economy. When I changed that code, I had NO IDEA what would happen. That's not quite correct: I had a theory about what would happen, but I was often wrong. Consequently I only made a few changes to my code at a time and ensured I could back them out if necessary. Additionally I reasoned that my code, while complex, was far less complex than the political economy. Also, I new far more about my code, which I had created, than these people knew about the political economy. In fact, I knew more about that code base than anybody on the planet, so if I didn't know how changes would impact it, then how could these political scientists predict the consequences of a much, much more complex system? This seemed to me pretty reasonable logic that should be accepted at SEU.

I got my arguments all organized, made an appointment with Irving, and went to talk things over with him. I started by saying, "What I was trying to do with the paper was-"

Irving shouted me down, "Your paper meant nothing -- NOTHING!"

This outburst left quite an impression as I'm not used to being shouted down. And this was after I gave Irving a couple of weeks to calm down! It wasn't polite; it wasn't even professional. Being yelled at in such a manner is actually quite unusual in my academic experience. Our meeting went downhill from there, and I left Irving's office without a better understanding of my paper's shortcomings, which was the whole point of the meeting. However, Irving's reaction in a strange way made me feel better. Why was he so worked up? Why was he so angry and emotional? Why was he exhibiting so much affect? Why couldn't he even talk about my paper? His reaction started to feel to me more like an overreaction. But what did it mean? There had to be a reason behind his behavior, and perhaps the reason was there was more to the paper than he wanted to admit? There was no way to figure this out quickly as there was another semester's worth of classes coming up for which I needed to prepare. I was stuck with three A's and an F -- no wait -- make that an incomplete. There was also no way that I, as a first year graduate student, was going to win an argument with Irving, a tenured SEU professor who had a stellar academic pedigree with undergraduate and graduate degrees from schools every bit as prestigious as SEU. I put the matter away because I couldn't make progress on it in the short term. But an inkling of a question had been established that would not soon go away.

SEU vs. VGU

In thinking about the 2016 American presidential election, let's look at a little history. Once upon a time, a young student, your faithful political correspondent, went to a Super Elite University (SEU) to study political science. There he studied rationality with a political philosopher, Professor Irving. Irving had published a book on democracy, which your correspondent thought contained some specious logic and unsupportable conclusions. Specifically, Irving argued that a truly democratic society should vote on all important decisions, and he took this argument to its logical an in my opinion unworkable extreme. So extreme democracy is all well and good, but it presents a number of problems. I structure them as Irving's position being: (1) deceptive, (2) derivative, and (3) deeply flawed. Let's examine each criticism in turn.

First, Irving's argument is deceptive because he isn't really interested in democracy at all. He's really interested in furthering socialism. The left never stops furthering its worldview, and here Irving uses the stalking horse of democracy to further the left's ideological agenda. Let's be clear about what what your correspondent means by socialism:

"From each according to their ability; to each according to their need." 

Note that this dictum is a slight variation on a slogan first used by Louis Blanc in 1851 and then used by Karl Marx in 1875 as your correspondent modernizes the phrase by changing the word 'he' to 'each'. The history of socialism reveals frequent changes to its verbal explanations the same way a flu virus changes its properties to avoid defenses and infect new and healthy hosts. The many "-isms" used to describe socialism — leftism, communism, progressivism, liberalism, Fabianism, etc. — provide empirical evidence of this dynamics. So don't listen to what socialist leftists say because what they say is inherently deceptive. Instead pay attention to what socialists do because what they do is always driven by, "From each according to their ability; to each according to their need."

Second, Irving's argument is derivative because because he follows in that rich tradition of revising and reformulating socialism to come up with a workable form. There is a rich tradition of socialist reformulations with  recent attempts being Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001) and Piketty's Capital In The Twenty-First Century (2014) just to name a couple. University departments are filled with leftists reformulating socialism — especially the elite department's like SEU's — so inevitably, some attempts will be better than other and become popular. So Irving's democracy work, in this correspondent's humble opinion, seemed derivative because he simply took this workable socialist work, replaced the word 'socialism' with 'democracy' on the correct assumption that benighted Americans wouldn't accept socialism but would accept democracy, and then got his PhD from one SEU and took a teaching position another.

Third, Irving's argument is deeply flawed because his socialist reformulation doesn't address the fundamental shortcoming, which was identified by Friedrich von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1945). That is, socialism was originally conceived as public ownership of the means of production, which failed because central planning and the committees that operated and controlled the means of production couldn't adequately process the information associated with running a modern economy. So there were always mismatches between what information was required and what was available. Committees just couldn't make those decisions and predictions, so having people vote on key issues also fails because of the limited information available to voters and their limited ability to process that information. 

And there are at least two examples of this. First, the California proposition process is inherently problematic because there are so many important issues on the ballots. The issues are confusing, and the available information may be inaccurate, so voters would end up at the ballot box making important decisions with insufficient information to make those decisions. And television advertising greatly influences voters, which in effect slightly changed the central committee problem. Instead of directly impacting the political-economy, they influence the voters who then  directly impact the political-economy. This slight variation on the socialist theme however does not address Hayek's information processing shortcoming.

I was caught somewhat by surprise by the next example, Great Britain. Irving's ideas on extreme democracy had struck me as so eminently impractical that they were only of theoretical and philosophical interest. However Tony Blair's Labour Party actually implemented such a scheme. They advertised no explicit agenda but sought to respond to the wants and desire of their constituency. The problem is that a constituency can only have so many ideas, which tend to change like the weather. So something like railway bridge maintenance may be ignored for a good long while, which results in Labour not maintain the bridges because the electorate isn't interested in them. Of course the public becomes very concerned after there is a major accident due to deferred maintenance, at which  point it becomes a priority again. A major modern economy like Britain's though has hundreds if not thousands of complex and interrelated systems that need to maintained by knowledgeable professionals, not manipulated for votes by ambitious political entrepreneurs, but that sort of logic is at the core of the leftist, socialist enterprise. 

My rationality term paper for professor Irving concentrated on the final, deeply flawed aspect of this critique. I didn't mean for the paper to be controversial, but I honestly could not as an engineer understand how such a system could possibly work, especially given the well-known critique of Hayek, who had received an Economics Nobel in 1974. I figured Irving must have thought through these issues and that I would learn something through our subsequent discussion about them. Those discussions did reveal something important, but not what I initially thought. Eventually, I had to leave SEU and received my terminal degree at a Very Good University (VGU) instead. More about that process later, but as Donald Trump understands better by the day, elites do not tolerate being challenged. And when you're correct about the issue, that only makes them madder.

White Guilt

I remember being a student at an elite private university discussing white guilt. Some guy at a reception was talking to me about it and I wasn't picking up what he was laying down.

In exasperation, he said, "You must feel SOME white guilt?"

I replied, "You would be very surprised at how little white guilt I feel, which is none."

Needless to say I received my last degree from a good public university. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have been so direct and confrontational, but I was fired up.

But let's delve a little deeper. Guilt is an empowering emotion. One feels guilty because one could have done more, one could have solved the problem is only one had done more. A Princeton theologian talked about this emotion if a child dies of cancer. Parents will feel guilty thinking that they could or should have done more, when in fact the cancer was incurable and they did all they could.

That's the situation here. Wealth and other disparities are part of nature, part of the natural order, part of the plan. Trying to work against and mitigate them might actually make things worse over the long term. Disparity, which is related to the leftist talisman diversity, is something for us to try and understand, not remove unthinkingly as leftists do because history shows that doing so leads to a destroyed society of crime, poverty, as death.