11 Reader Responses

1. Jason Godesky Says:
   September 6th, 2006 at 3:35 pm

   With all due respect, it doesn’t sound like Zac knows much about neoconservatism or Strauss. They’re not looking for the fall of civilization at all, but for a hegemonic empire where the United States brings peace and prosperity to all by playing the role of Hobbes’ Leviathan.

2. zac Says:
   September 6th, 2006 at 5:12 pm

   well, i never actually said they explicitly wanted it, only that strauss allows for the neccessity of doing it to maintain hegemony. it’s more of a means rather than an end.

3. zac Says:
   September 6th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

   and here’s the refferemce. mostly in strauss’s own words, excerpted from a webster tarpley text here:

   LEO STRAUSS: BACK TO THE STONE AGE

   What will the nihilist revolution look like? Strauss writes: “Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process which led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated.” (Strauss 209, emphasis added) The primitive horde or primal horde refers to the human communities of the Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies, to the foragers and cave people of the Old Stone Age. Strauss is endorsing a nihilistic revolt that will have the effect of destroying as much as 10,000 years of progress in civilization, and in hurling humanity back to its wretched predicament in the Paleolithic. Here Strauss finds a momentary common ground with Rousseau, who also had a liking for the Paleolithic; here we are close to the ideas which animated the reign of terror in the French Revolution.

   Strauss comes as a Job’s comforter to those who have been thrown back into the Old Stone Age: “But would such a repetition of the process — a new lease on life for man and humanity — not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again?” (Strauss 209) Springtime for Leo Strauss has thus acquired the idiosyncratic meaning of a return to the horrors of the Old Stone Age.

4. Jason Godesky Says:
   September 6th, 2006 at 10:18 pm

   Interesting. I hadn’t realized I’d shared anything in common with Strauss, though I’d hardly say that a contingency constitutes a real goal. Perhaps even more distressingly, such melodramatic turns of phrase as our “wretched predicament” and “the horrors of the Old Stone Age” could not be further from the established archaeological and ethnographic reality of hunter-gatherer existence. Though we often repeat the Hobbesian line of “nasty, brutish and short,” that doesn’t make it true.

5. Tim Boucher Says:
   September 6th, 2006 at 11:44 pm

   it doesn’t sound like Zac knows much about neoconservatism or Strauss.

   I guess you’d have to talk to Zac directly about what he believes or knows, just like he’d have to talk to you about your views. Hence my goal of getting people talking about these issues in a combation that I haven’t seen any one group or individual cover fully yet.

   If you don’t altogether buy Zac’s Straussian connection, definitely investigate the Technocracy, Inc thread, as they are QUITE up front about the need for catastrophe to allow them to implement their post-capitalist system. Although, based on my interactions online with members of that group, their ideas about what and how things will happen at that time are very naive and poorly thought out!

   In any event, glad to have so many voices contributing to this conversation here!

6. Gnomely Says:
   September 7th, 2006 at 12:33 pm

   Deep down my political leanings are left wing- but since I am deeply superficial, my deep down is not very deep. There is nothing more in the world I dislike more than concentrated corporate power, eliminative materialism, Wal-Mart. They need to go.
   People should be concerned about practical measures to make life more just, bearable, livable, enjoyable, responsible. A liberal democratic state is worth holding on to- it is under a liberal democratic state which has seen the quality of life improve for many. So you know- f*ck the neo-cons for their stupid contribution to undermining the liberal state.
   It is for the common good to slash pentagon spending and see a humane distribution of wealth. The government should resist privatization schemes and build and invest in public infrastructure- roads, schools, hospitals, invest in communities, provide universal health care, and protect the environment from the immoral big business free market system. All of this will make society and communities more healthy. I have no time for technocrats who want to reduce people to cogs or people who completely reject civilization. If there is a post-capitalist system I hope it is on the lines of parecon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

   Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can’t tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.

   Noam Chomsky

7. jlhart7 Says:
   September 7th, 2006 at 9:19 pm

   I’m not sure I understand how the neocons causing the collapse of civilization is supposed to bring imperial hegemony. I read your Strauss quote, Zac, but I don’t think I get it. Is bringing us back to the beginning of the empire-rising cycle supposed to strengthen the empire? I didn’t think Paul Wolfowitz and them advocated tanning hides on abandoned freeways.

8. 7 of Swords, Futility Says:
   September 7th, 2006 at 9:50 pm

   Yeah, but when is the Peak Oil Rock-umentary coming out?

9. zac Says:
   September 7th, 2006 at 10:08 pm

   it’s better understood in context, but they have a deep philosophical terror at the prospect of liberism and relitavism wiping out conflict, politics and domination hierarchies. if it were neccisary to reduce humanity to stone age conditions in order to perpetuate their sick idea of normal power relations, then they believe that’s justifiable from a straussian perspective.

   it’s a good book. at least read the one chapter.

10. Sonny Moonie Says:
    September 8th, 2006 at 2:06 am

    I wonder if there are artists who would like to erase all paintings and drawings so they can start over fresh and maintain the role that artists have in developing forms of depiction, creating art history, and being rewarded and respected for that. The amount of recorded music seems to be an obstacle to musicians having the role of creating new styles to be the music of their times that is heard everywhere. There might be some filmmakers who would imagine a tremendous cultural opportunity in losing the canon of historical and influential films, which were made with old technologies and in irretreviable past settings, an opportunity to create a new set of cinematic references that speak for their times and can be used in their times. Certainly anyone aspiring to be a recognized composer of harmonious written music realizes the disadvantage of not living in the 18th to 19th centuries when the canon for harmonious music for the piano and strings was being built up.

    Maybe it’s already happened. The first emperor of the Qin dynasty, Qin Shi Huangdi, lately in the news for the terra-cotta army in his mausoleum, is said to have burned almost all books and even banned the discussion of history. Some have speculated that ancient India had a civilization with flying machines and destroyed its cities with nuclear weapons, ruins of cities that appear abandoned in a day, and some claim to have found evidence of that in radioactivity.

    The classical Greeks’ way of having a culture full of world class geniuses to be known to history was to claim that foreigners were barbarians, ignoring anything not written originally in Greek, and to claim that all Greek culture before their own times was oral, such as Homer. Thus when philosophers like Plato speculated about subjects of interest without much evidence, like what the benefits and disadvantages of writing versus memorization were, just the sort of subject some bloggers write about casually nowadays, they became geniuses who are still quoted. There are some books that are claimed to be older than Greek books: the Hebrew scriptures, which anyone who has read will easily recognize contain a description of a culture that was continually burning artifacts of its past and making them taboo subjects, (then finding books that had been hidden.)

    Suppose you think that such a destruction of culture is coming, and you try to prepare for it, learning to read music for when you won’t be able to play electronically recorded music because all electronics might be wiped out by one electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and made obsolete, learning to hand-copy books, learning to make your own paper and ink from scratch. Does that make you complicit in the destruction of previous culture? If learning complete independence from mass media is the best you can do to prepare for the future, or if it’s what you enjoy doing in the present, who is anyone else to blame you for not helping to save a culture that isn’t working for you anyway?

    (There’s meant to be an analogy implied there to defending sites like Anthropik and Aftermath where they just want to get on with learning how to live like hunter gatherers.)

    Re the “terror at prospect of liberalism and relativism”: A lot has been written about this, including important novels and films. Many serious bloggers would start from the angle: How did the triumph of liberalism and relativism turn out in the Soviet Union? It was the greatest mass murder and terror and prison system and dark night of humanity ever, if you believe critics like Solzhenitsyn. He won the Nobel prize for literature, so I should remember to take it with a grain of salt. There was also China’s cultural revolution, Cambodia, and Germany when it was socialist. Iraq was pretty bad under socialism, but it’s worse under democratic rule. Imagine there’s no limit to this sort of progress: a total state, total war, as Orwell wrote, “If you want to see the future, picture a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

    That’s way too bleak, so I do feel it would be irresponsible to end on that note. The way I would like to approach explaining “terror at the prospect of liberalism and relativism wiping out conflict” is this: Think of the prediction of the Singularity. Suppose you’re an electrical engineer or computer programmer. When artificial intelligence can design and program itself, there’s no need for your work. The way you test your skill in a struggle with the universe, and show that the human species is indeed advanced and capable of transcendence, is obsolete. At the moment the Singularity is about to be achieved, the worldwide network already having shown unmistakable signs of intelligence, proof of concept of the Singularity achieved, a philosophically enlightened engineer would flip a switch and fry the whole system, sending civilization back to another few generations of Moore’s law to rebuild.

    Similarly, if everyone in the world were raised in a machine that provides every need and pacifies every desire, an ossified “liberal democracy” where your vote doesn’t really matter because it can never change the system, if it’s really “the end of history,” then however good or bad that system is from a Utilitarian perspective, anyone who has another philosophical perspective would choose to overthrow it if possible. An anarchist would do it, obviously. A true liberal would do it, for freedom for individuals or social development. A true conservative would do it, for traditional culture. A religious conservative would do it, either because it’s not the end of history that is expected or because it’s not the way of life that conservative religion prescribes. It’s only those whose religion or philosophy is undiluted Utilitarianism or fatalism who wouldn’t take the opportunity to throw a wrench into the gears of the ultimate machine to rule mankind.

    The Neoconservatives are not that wrench. Some may support the Neocons, thinking they are a way to jump out of the sinkhole of modern progress, but they are another instance of the way the system perpetuates itself and grows, carefully year by year. If they’re so bad, why only September 11 for the US? Why no attack on Iran yet? They have enough members in enough positions of power, they could have put together a global nuclear war or plague by now, if that’s what they wanted.

11. Tim Boucher Says:
    September 8th, 2006 at 6:08 pm

    Sonny that was an amazing comment, so full of rich and deep thoughts. I really appreciate it.