The True Crisis of the American University
by Anonymous
[Editor’s note: the following text has been submitted to us by an eminent professor at an American university, who out of fear of repercussion from his colleagues, many of whom have allegiances to tendencies he here criticizes, implored us to withhold his name. We have agreed to do so, as his warning of the corrosive influence on American culture of relativistic ideas of German origin seems to us a timely and relevant one, and his text worth reproducing here in full, even if certain of his claims—for example, those relating to the Iraq War—seem to us questionable, and while we do not share what can fairly be called his reactionary cultural attitude.]
From such a height have we fallen! As recently as a handful of decades ago, the American university was still dedicated to that most lofty and noble of pursuits, the search for wisdom, which it had inherited from its remotest ancestors, Xenophon and Aristophanes (the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece).
Reformed to suit modernity but still true to its native American spirit, the university in this country took in students whose thirst for truth was still unslaked, unlike the already corrupted, intellectually and morally dissolute students who entered the universities of Europe already contemptuous of everything but the latest Paris fad. The average American university student until the disturbances of the middle of the twentieth century knew only the Bible and the Declaration of Independence — representing the two great sources of culture, Jerusalem and Athens, reason and revelation. They believed earnestly and deeply in the truth contained in these texts and beyond this they were complete ingenues, which made them ready to read the work of the great philosophers with joy and conviction, able to draw out and live by the truth held within these books.
They had the makings of a truly moral and (I take the liberty of putting it so) democratic aristocracy — regulated by the upright personal habits of the American people, educated in an austere and plain-faced virtue which all their reading could but affirm and deepen, animated by a faith buttressed and insured against by reason.
What could have scourged away these men and women — as the King James has it — from the face of the ground? What could have committed to the pages of history the happiness of a country presided over by such a virtuous class? It is bitter to admit that Lincoln’s famous words, that “all the armies of Europe and Asia could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio River, or set a track on the Blue Ridge,” have proved untrue.
We must classify only as a curious new twist the recent replacement of nihilistic relativism on the university campus with a hideous new faith, compounded of a childish pseudo-socialism refracted through a prism of American racial politics into a catechism — the shallowest observations about social surroundings repeated as if they were universal truths.
In fact, the demise of the American university, its hollow-souled surrender of wisdom to politics (in the coarsest sense of the word) has been apparent since the 1960s. Then, students burned down halls of learning and held their professors at gunpoint. Today the threat does not need to be made so overtly — the students need only say one of a handful of words, and the professors capitulate. They have long since proved unwilling to risk the fate of Socrates at the hands of the Athenian people, condemned to death for his search for wisdom. They were no more willing to resist political demands than their counterparts in the 1930s in Germany. But it was not the American people who were to blame. It was those very same Weimar Germans.
In apportioning blame for this act of civilizational murder, nothing can be regarded as guiltier than the corrosive influence of German thought. It was this German influence, systematically disseminated through the leading universities of the United States, filtering outwards through the assumption of positions of political power, cultural influence and economic control by the students who were imbued with it at these universities, which has caused such an undeniable loss of virtue, purpose and energy in every aspect of the life of this country.
A single writer is more to blame than any other: Leo Strauss. It was Strauss, German émigré to the United States and onetime associate of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who unleashed the poison of moral and intellectual corruption into the American body politic, beginning with its head. By incoherently applying methods of Biblical interpretation to Greek texts, and by his atheistic denial of divine revelation — that is, by making men into prophets, and prophets into men — Strauss sought to undermine both reason and revelation, to overthrow Athens with the support of Jerusalem and vice versa.
Strauss suggested that there was no intrinsic justification for philosophical activity, which he defined simply as the activity of a separate class of men, and further held that it was impossible to discover any permanent truth — that philosophy was simply a never-ending “search” for wisdom. This deeply relativistic sociologization (and therefore historicization) of the universal human instinct to seek and obtain wisdom — rendering it simply the whim of a certain subgroup — is often, though incorrectly, attributed to Max Weber. It is rightly associated with Strauss, who went still further, permitting total license to this “chosen” group, indeed encouraging them to lie to and cheat those outside the group whenever it seemed appropriate, to ignore the truth that lay within the Christian tradition, and to infiltrate the highest political circles and intrigue in accordance with their own whims.
Besides dressing up as wisdom-seeking a justification for vicious behavior, the famed “esoteric–exoteric distinction,” a fundamental tenet of Straussian hermeneutics, contains within it what must rank among the most horrible and damaging calumnies of philosophy ever written. Strauss argued that not a single philosopher since Socrates had had the courage to seek truth when it would place them in opposition to a hostile regime or society. Instead — according to him — the philosophers wrote on two levels, telling lies to an ignorant public that would not hear the truth, while reserving the truth for the initiated. This diabolical gesture of Strauss’s accomplished a diabolical double goal: discrediting the philosophical life, while simultaneously claiming its tarnished mantle for himself and his rapacious clique. It was a betrayal of the highest order of reason itself, which always strives for the most complete and all-embracing universality, whose potential lies latent, indeed already active in every human soul — as is the premise both of the American republic and the Christian religion. Strauss, in a word, tried to obliterate philosophy by reducing it to Freemasonry.
What of the commentaries on the great texts of political philosophy produced by Strauss and his followers? By means of Jesuitical hermeneutics and numerological cant, these writers sought to make the great philosophers into puppets, twisting their words to match those of a Plato they had distorted beyond recognition. Those philosophers whose work defied such appropriation were openly vilified or else ignored. So Aristotle is made into a Plato, Xenophon is made into a Plato, but Plato — Plato, the great hero of universal reason! — is made into a Strauss: a manipulative coward who disguised venomous elitism with insincere appeals to a common morality he did not himself believe or share; who scorned political activity only to replace a public tyranny with a private one (while still currying favor with the real tyrants); and who equated philosophy, the highest calling of man, with the lies that served as inside jokes for himself and his circle.
Nor was this corruption simply done in writing; it was also done in action. Such is evident in the conduct Allan Bloom, an avowed student of Strauss whose popular book on the decline of the university, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), represented an elaborate effort to shift the blame for the decline he charted away from himself and his school — where it in fact lay — to the innocent and far more remote figures of Nietzsche and Max Weber. As even Bloom’s best friend, Saul Bellow, admitted in print, Bloom sought openly to cause his own acolytes — as a rule, morally upstanding Christian boys from the American heartland — to lose their faith, to sever ties with their own families, and even (in certain cases) to adopt the same proclivities for which Bloom himself was known.
Nor is it a surprise that the influence of the corrosive relativism of Strauss and his followers has led to a generalization of this behavior among the American elite. Initiated into a new faith of wokeness, young Americans are encouraged to cancel their family, abandon their religion and adopt corrupt habits to demonstrate their commitment to their new circle. Wokeness is Straussian: it makes truth sociological, and sociology truth. Initiates are encouraged — even required — to lie to outsiders about the meaning of their slogans, the injustice of their dogmas, the facts that militate against their theories, all of which they know quite well and discuss with each other in camera. Some things are simply too delicate for the ears of hoi polloi.
But the decline America has suffered at the hands of Straussianism is not confined to what we regard as the political left. So too have avowed Straussians infiltrated the highest levels of American government and connived in orgies of nihilistic jouissance to destroy the reputation of the American republic by manipulating its leaders into outrageous and destructive acts. Students of Strauss directly and indirectly masterminded the disastrous war in Iraq, and undertook it knowing it was undertaken on a false pretext and would fail in its more ambitious objectives — in the process outraging the moral sentiments of many Americans, disillusioning and dispiriting those of the rest, and wreaking similar damage in the country’s international reputation, inducing some of America’s allies to abandon her side and others to remain loyal, only to be gnawed later by regret and resentment at having been roped into the affair.
American democracy, whose simple faith in the force of a true principle offends the elitist, atheistic Straussians, must be destroyed, its example extinguished. To this same end did latter-day Straussians support the presidency of Donald Trump from a very early date, in league with Russian nihilist hackers to undermine the hated beacon of Kantian transcendent moral autonomy represented by the American republic.
It may indeed be too late to save American civilization from its Straussian menaces on left and right, in their twin forms of political correctness and right-wing imperialist nativism. But an antidote may yet be developed for this poison, and from the same source. One needs a good German to drive off the specter of a bad one, and there is indeed such a German who represents the opposite tendency. To save the republic, we must look to a philosopher who teaches of the eternal virtue which can be located within the spirit of religion, who looks for a way in which universal reason can be discovered at work in the apparatus of modern capitalism — who sees that faith is the motor of reason and its restless, universalizing work here on earth. From all who would fight against the tyranny of Straussian relativism, who would raise their fists to strike a blow for true philosophy and its potential, a cry can be heard to arise — invoking, with a single voice, the name of Max Weber.
