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Delivis

High Warlord

0. Neocon thoughts on social order vs truth » Mon Feb 01, 2010 9:56 am

Fascinating little exerpt from an explanation of some conservative opposition to the teaching of evolution from Ronald Bailey.

" The end of the Cold War may also be a factor. Marx fell with the Soviet Union; Freud has been discredited by modern psychology and neuroscience. The last standing member of the 19th century’s unholy materialist trinity is Darwin. Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial, makes the connection clear: “Darwinism is the most important of the materialist ideologies—Marxism, Freudianism, and behaviorism are others—which have done so much damage to science and society in the 20th century.” Kristol agrees. “All I want to do,” he told his AEI audience, “is break the bonds of Darwinian materialism which at the moment restrict our imagination. For the moment that’s enough.”

But something deeper seems to be going on, and the key to it can be found in Bork’s assertion in his book that religious “belief is probably essential to a civilized future.” These otherwise largely secular intellectuals may well have turned on Darwin because they have concluded that his theory of evolution undermines religious faith in society at large.

[.....]

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.”

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.”""

Nazgrim

High Warlord

1. Re: Neocon thoughts on social order vs truth » Mon Feb 01, 2010 1:02 pm

I think this is a post-hoc explanation for a very simple political reality that has nothing to do with the now dead and buried neoconservative agenda.

In the late 1970s, in the wake of the American culture wars, our withdrawal from Vietnam, and Roe v Wade, the Christian Right was emerging as dynamic and potentially very powerful force in American politics. Perhaps more importantly, the Christian Right was stepping on to the political stage during a time of declining cohesiveness in the Democratic party. Simultaneously, neoconserativism was entering its second generation, with people like Bill Kristol just beginning to enter government and academia. The neoconservatives realized that if they could hitch their political wagon to the Christian Right, they could ride the Christian Right's growing clout to power. In order to secure electoral alignment with the Christian Right, they internalized high profile social conservative issues as ancillary values for their own platform. Yet, a cursory reading of any neocon political writings (which are voluminous, I assure you) will reveal no particular interest in religion, abortion, Darwinism, gay marriage or any other of the many stars in the social conservative political constellation. In other words, it was all a song and dance to curry favor with a powerful voting block.

Out of curiosity, which Kristol is this guy referring to? There are two, Irving and his son Bill. They're both neocons, but they're kind of different.

Delivis

High Warlord

2. Re: Neocon thoughts on social order vs truth » Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:02 pm

Admittedly i know very little about the history of neoconservativism in the US. The reason i found that quote interesting is because a lot of the anti-evolution and anti-science arguments that are used now are often seen by their proponents as part of a larger agenda against "materialistic science" which they believe unfairly stacks the deck against metaphysical and religious propositions. Whether or not that thinking has any kind of history within a particular political movement in the US, i have no idea.

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