Re: Government...and the promotion of virtue.
Boy, am I behind in this discussion!
princesspupule wrote:blatham wrote:Ought government to be in the job of promoting 'virtue' in its citizenry?
A fundamental notion of the Straussian neoconservatives, now a powerful influence on this White House, is that government indeed ought to involve itself in raising the level of virtue of citizens. It's an interesting question and not a simple one, I think. I recently put the question to two friends, both thoughtful, well-educated and liberal of persuasion. The first, an education administrator replied, without pause, "Definitely not." The second, a writer and parole officer replied, again no delay, "Yes".
I'm not sure Straussian neoconserviatives
believe government ought to promote virtue. Here is a quote from Leo Strauss' famous work,
Natural Right and History. "The best regime is that in which the best men habitually rule, or aristocracy. Goodness is, if not identical with wisdom, at any rate dependent on wisdom: the best regime would seem to be the rule of the wise, In fact, wisdom appeared to the classics as that title to rule which is highest according to nature. It would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations; hence the rule of the wise must be absolute rule, It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects. To make the rule of the wise dependent on election by the unwise or consent of the unwise would mean to subject what is by nature higher to control by what is by nature lower, i.e., to act against nature." He seems to be promoting tyrrany, Blatham, not virtue.
I believe they do pay lip service to virtue, but only so far as it keeps the masses controllable. Think about the effect 9/11 had on the masses: it united a nation. It united most of the world in righteous indignation. Think about the messages we got fromour gov't
after 9/11. "You are either with us, or with the terrorists." Most people saw the U.S. as representing the side of virtue. After all, we didn't turn airplanes into missiles,
they did. All the
good citizens of this nation waited to be told what to do by our president. Think about his messages about the
rightness of this cause, we had to fight against the axis of evil... By doing what they've done, using the rhetoric they've chosen, they've already inflated the level of virtue in our citizens. Subtle, don't you think? Or scary?
That's a revealing, and typical, quote from Strauss. Pretty pure Platonism, isn't it? Those ideas sit in direct opposition to to the values which underlie democracy and representative government. They are, in other words, deeply and profoundly anti-American. Toss in the Straussian notion of 'the noble lie'...the notion that it is salutory and beneficient to lie through your teeth to those masses who elected you because they are really quite low and unworthy and unbright and don't have the time or inclination, what with their knuckle-walking natures, to get important things right.
I'm sorry, I wish I had my books with me here. I'll recommend once again "The Gang of Five" by Nina Easton for a good peek into how Bill Kristol and Bill Bennet (and all the other Straussians populating the modern Republican machine) feel about the populace's potential for acting virtuously without beneficent help from the elevated few (it's kind of a back-slapping har har response).
