Darwinism Debate
By Denise Best | Related entries in Blogging, In The NewsIntriguing discussion and questions put worth, some years back, regarding the respective merits and shortfalls of Darwinism that’s useful to revisit today.
At the heart of the neoconservative attack on Darwinism lies the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Strauss was a German political philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1938 and began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1949. In an intellectual revolt against modernity, Strauss focused his work on interpreting such classics as Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that `the truth will make men free.’”
Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”
So, what of this notion that the “truth will make men free?”
Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
Interesting, and somewhat controversial, viewpoint that there are different truths for different kinds of people.
So can we, collectively, handle the “truth?”
This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 5th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Hi Denise,
Much of Strauss’ critique of the tension between the love of wisdom and the needs of the political order stems from a particular reading of Plato’s _Republic_ which places special emphasis on the role of imagemakers, especially poets, in the formation of a civil mythos– a Noble Lie that forms the scaffolding for the body politic.
Strauss’ students seem to see echoes of the Noble Lie doctrine nearly everywhere in political thought–from Plato (of course) in the Allegory of the Cave and the Myth of Er in the _Republic_, to Machivelli’s emphasis on the necessity of balancing appearances vs. the effective truth in the _Prince_ and the _Discourses on Livy_, , and from the modern Social Contract Theory of Locke and Jefferson to Nietzsche’s Horizons of Meaning, a foil against the ‘true but deadly doctrine’ of the incomprehensible quality of a perspective in toto from the _Use and Abuse of History for Life_.
What is disturbing to many is the apparent efforts of those who call themselves Straussians (as opposed to students of Leo Strauss–I am using Anne Norton’s distinction from her _Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire_) to use this tension to aggrandize political power.
One could assert that those who use this tension thus would be equivalent to the men who were dragged out the Cave but who found their way back in _before_ they came to full knowledge in the light of the sun from Plato’s Allegory in Book VII. If this be so, and if Plato is to be taken at his word, then such men are dangerous, for without the love of wisdom they can be naught but tyrants.
December 7th, 2005 at 5:22 am
So are you saying that people are too stupid to learn Evolution and ID is only a transition point?
August 7th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Good job.
August 8th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
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