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Shadia Drury's Straussian puzzles#2: Allan Bloom

As I've mentioned before the Australian reception of Shadia Drury's Leo Straus and the American Right basically accepts her critique of Strauss's conservative politics, the noble lie and the Washington neocons.A good example is Mark Bahnisch's post at Troppo Armadillo late last year. What continues to be sidestepped is any account of the Straussian philosophical critique of modernity. There is no probing of the Drury's understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the Nietzsche, Heidegger, Strauss coupling

We can see this evasion by picking up on where we left off yesterday. After dealing with Jaffa in the 'American Applications of Straussian Philosophy,' chapter of her book, Leo Strauss and the American Right Shadia Drury turns to Allen Bloom's very popular The Closing of the American Mind as the exponent of the reaction of despair.

This view accepts that America is the embodiment of modernity and that this spells the death knell of classical wisdom. On this view, the principles on which America is founded are hopelessly modern and tragically flawed.Hence the reaction is understandably filled with despair and foreboding.

Let's accept that America is a liberal society grounded on Enlightenment values and so the embodiement of liberal modernity.

Drury says:

"Bloom portrays America as a polity grounded in the ill-conceived ideas of modernity, ideas that are engulfing the globe and shattering the glorious heritage of Western civilization.

According to Bloom, America's Founding Fathers were the heirs of early modern philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. These moderns were not privy to the sublime insights of the classics or their recent heirs--Rousseau and Nietzsche. Instead, they looked at man in his brutishness: untamed, uncultivated, and self-centered. And, incredible as it may seem, the early moderns set out to create a society made up of these selfish creatures. The result was a society of individuals whose natural tendencies for self-seeking and self-satisfaction were not suppressed by culture, but simply rechanneled into commerce. In this way, man's natural egoism assumed a form that was not altogether destructive of social life. The result was a bourgeois society that is paradigmatic of American life."

Bloom portrays American society as a collection of solitary individuals with nothing to live or die for. American society is a vehicle for individual self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and the pursuit of wealth. America is little more than a collection of isolated, alienated, and disoriented individuals lost in a morass of cultural relativism and meaninglessness.

What has disappeared is the unified culture provided by myths and religion. So America is little more than an animal farm. So we have a critique of America society coupled to a critique of liberalism.

What does Drury make of this? She says that:

"One of the pervasive problems with Bloom's critique of American liberalism is that it confuses liberal reality with liberal ideals. In criticizing American liberal society, Bloom is under the mistaken impression that he is also criticizing liberal theories, ideas, and ideals. This confusion has its source in the assumption that American liberal society is the actualization of liberal ideals, or the logical and inescapable consequence of these ideas."

Drury defends American liberalism. She argues that liberalism is not itself nihilistic or relativistic in order to show the futility of the Straussian critique of American liberalism. It cannot provide America with a meaningful critique of her liberal tradition.

Bloom gives a onesided reading of US society. Is not the US after 9/11 a most religious nation in which religion is intermingled with nationalism, patriotism and the sacrifice of an eternal war against terror. I interpret this as a onsided response to cultural relativism and meaninglessness of liberalism; a response that arises from within American traditions. So what we have with Bloom is a critique of liberalism in terms of it giving rise to the kind of society that Bloom describes. So the flaw with Bloom's account is that America is not wholly modern. It is deeply conservative and deeply pre-modern.

It is Drury's claim that Straussian school cannot provide America with a meaningful critique of her liberal tradition that is debatable. The Straussian position is basically a Heideggerian one: modernity's nihilism & technological mastery is a lethal combination and it gives rise to the dark night of modernity. This account of modernity is never confronted, for she guns for the anti-democratic response of the Platonic philosopher kings. So how much purchase has the Heideggerian account of modernity? Should it be taken seriously?

Though Drury rejects the conservative response to nihilism of Nietzsche, Heidegger & Strauss she does not say how liberalism can deal with the process nihilism that hollows out liberal vlaues.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 7, 2005 05:14 PM | TrackBack