Anton has a long essay over at American Mind, trying to formulate a new Straussian political doctrine & starting a war over the American regime in the process. This is ideal for the weekend reader! I’m not sure it is all of patriotism, but it’s hard to see how one could show more devotion to a teacher. Like every other admirer of Anton, I’ve gotten used to his habit of declaring war: I take the core of his teaching & the summary of his guiding passion to be the admirable sentiment, better dead than a slave, which leads us to expect he’ll be starting a political organization soonest, as we all should do. Wars of words, after all, lead to war without words. Anton gives an overview of Machiavelli’s political intention, his attack on medieval politics & Christianity, & his political theory, or his worrying over why people get themselves in such messes—this is timely, inasmuch as we’re all agreed we’re in a terrible mess. For a political writer, Anton writes like a lecturer trying to get his students to see what’s up in Machiavelli’s writing, but there’s nothing academic about his purpose—he wants to put an end to Progress before it puts an end to us.
Anton advances an argument in favor of modernity in three parts to support his preferred politics. First, Christianity had it coming, it was making a mockery of human nature, probably endangering everything we rightly hold dear. Secondly, Machiavelli inaugurated an age of greatness, the last fruit of which was the American regime, & that’s plenty evidence that the power of the mind discovered by the Greek philosophers was at work: Renaissance is the best name for modernity. Thirdly, sure, we’ve ended up with something like planetary nihilism—globalization—but we at least have a fighting spirit, as proved by Strauss’s impressive work revivifying Socratic philosophy.—You should read his entire essay, because it’s very clever & he has a winning attitude which I confess I lack. But you should then notice, he’s saying we ended up in a worse version of the mess we were in before Machiavelli decided to save humanity. Globalization is still giving us grief, & that’s after a century of world wars & nuclear threats. So if you look at the 500 years since the most honest Florentine arose to claim immortality, the more we speak up for Machiavelli’s daring, the less is there any reason to hope it adds up—but the more we speak up for his intelligence, the less hope we will have that philosophy even matters in politics.
Anton seems to be aware of this problem, although he doesn’t say whether he thinks it’s fundamental or not—perhaps that’s why he tells us we need to rethink our Enlightenment independence from God. Atheism seems to be a powerful motive for elites to attack ordinary people, not only their beliefs, but also the way of life that issues from those beliefs—this is not a theoretical problem. Fighting atheism, however, doesn’t seem to be animating anyone, least of all him. In practical terms, that means that even if we had a Catholic-Protestant alliance against wokies, that would not even be close to a majority coalition built around going to church. What other principle of community then is likely to bring people together & stop the rise of planetary nihilism? Here, he is remarkably silent.
The Dialectic Of Modernity
Maybe we can get at the problem of a principle of justice that people would fight for & defend indirectly. Machiavelli was displeased with the medieval situation, Christendom, & for good reason. We remember the great philosopher Hegel explained the catastrophe of medieval Christianity as follows. With respect to women, Christianity persuaded them that poverty is a good thing, indeed, the road to God, & so they gave their property to the Church. In a way, that’s good, not just because people are apt to waste their lives spending money or worrying over it, but because it can bring a community together, inasmuch as a church can be said to belong to a community. But it also brings on catastrophe, because the people who are loudest about the piety of poverty go around getting richer & richer, more ostentatious the more they are demanding, & faith eventually turns into luxury, with all the natural temptations. With respect to men, Christianity persuaded them that honor only makes sense in service to Christ, everything else is death. Again, this is in a way good, inasmuch as it can get some to act when they would otherwise hesitate & it can restrain others from the violence with which they guard against any sleight or annoyance, which makes for the hatred that perpetually threatens politics. But it brings on the catastrophe of the various crusades—Christianity claims it can save everyone’s soul, but most people never have been Christians & indeed Christians had a mortal enemy in the Arab & Turkish Muslims who invaded both Eastern & Western Europe, so war became inevitable: Holy war, since the survival of the Church is at stake. This is how poverty & humility turn into wealth & arrogance. From Hegel’s point of view, this leads to good things inasmuch as it discredits the authority of Christianity, indeed of aristocracy as such, leading to modernity. Machiavelli may not share all these ideas, but he does share this criticism of a strangely apolitical aristocracy, which is no less cruel for being soft.
A certain version of democracy emerges as a natural alternative—this seems to be what Machiavelli was looking for. His reasoning seems to be that people are essentially of a kind, that there is an obvious explanation for the differences between the different parts of a community—different people go about acquiring wealth differently, but the priests are as greedy as anyone. This leads to a very modern notion that money might be the measure of everyone, since every success is tied up with money, nobody is too good for money, especially not the people who talk about God. Differences between people can be managed as sameness in relation to money; the connection between democracy & money, of course, is that in both cases numbers count, & this further will connect both to science.
Further, since Christianity has not come up with good rulers, however large its institutions, modernity is preferable & easier to install, since it doesn’t depend on a hereafter when finally people stop sinning. Christendom was self-destructive, is the claim here, but it did contain certain very important teachings, above all that it’s a very stupid idea to die for your country. Dying for God was itself only a consequence of dying for one’s country, inasmuch as persecutions were a major political problem—killing off one’s own people, destroying property, is not a money-making proposition, nor is it democratic. Christianity taught people not to be patriots, which takes evidence even or especially in the willingness of the crusaders to die for the Holy Land, which was not their land. Altogether, people are left with what they did, not with why they did it. All the dead heroes leave the world more reasonable, if filled with cowards; all the charity & donations create new institutions of wealth & a focus on money in those who can deal with it. Machiavelli made it his job to leave behind the disappointed hopes & instead make the most of the achievements, in the process excusing the petty, which is again very democratic, since everyone can put himself first & care about his life, especially if it’s in danger or meager.
Finally, the claim on which Machiavelli bases the new democracy seems to be a funny version of what we call survival of the fittest. Christendom was animated by great purposes, by discipleship & by asceticism, by a hope that overcame all human limits. But then it collapsed in failure. That’s what people get for serving a cause—the people who survive the collapse of Christian fanaticism are likely to settle for more modest lives, they will no longer have animating purposes. A much lower view of human possibilities is necessary, if people are supposed to prefer success to failure, if they are to look to the future rather than the past. Machiavelli assures us that the abandonment of the ancestral is accordingly a condition of achieving what everyone wants anyway. People who were previously slaves to God are made by Machiavelli into slaves to necessity, which is preferable inasmuch as it only asks of them things they can pay. The strangest consequence of this intellectual transformation is that a teaching that starts from a criticism of the great, concealed vices of Christendom ends up attacking, in a concealed way, its virtues, too, or rather getting rid of justice altogether. The notion that crime pays, Machiavelli’s most famous teaching, is not intended to encourage people to be criminal, but primarily to get them to stop worrying about morality & secondarily to encourage them to believe that we can easily have what we want, which is almost entirely sinful. Machiavelli proves that there is great confidence to be had in figuring out how things work, but it is premised on the abandonment of the most cherished part of our humanity, our unique ability to act to a purpose, as in the story of Christ’s teaching, Passion, & Resurrection in the Gospels, or the secular work of building a cathedral. This is the sense in which Christendom was a Dark Age & Modernity is Enlightenment.
The Teaching Concerning Being
Compared to the incessant talk about soul, angels, & God’s heaven, Machiavelli seems a vulgar materialist. That seems to be true about his philosophy, but the issue is very involved—his emphatically political willingness to engage in propaganda goes together with his confidence that he, like Jesus Christ & Julius Caesar, could change the world from beyond the grave. Whatever we may about Christian spirituality, the ferocity with which dogma was established & the civil wars fought over questions of faith prove that Christendom depended on a rigidity that fits with materialism much better than with spirituality. The laws of God should be as obvious as the laws of nature—that water will wet us, that fire will burn. You may say that propaganda is the halfway house, turning speeches into reading, or giving the evidence of the eyes to words that speak of things which the eyes cannot see. Machiavelli, on the other hand, is far more willing to equivocate, to conceal himself in speech, to deceive his readers, so long as it achieves a certain purpose. Perhaps his philosophic ideas about the nature of man lead necessarily to his embrace of infamy—he’s a natural teacher of evil, not to say the prince of lies. This is Machiavelli’s most disturbing similarity to Socrates, also famously accused of corrupting the youth & irreligion. It would seem, further, that Machiavelli was superior inasmuch as he didn’t get himself killed; Socrates may say death is nothing much to fear in accepting his death, but then he avoided death for his Biblical three-score-&-ten… Our preference for life over death is of course natural, but its consequence is the insistence on conditions rather than causes, a reorientation of thought perhaps more disturbing than any other. Look around, you will always recognize a modern thinker by an incessant talk about the conditions, the incentives—materialism, everywhere, exalting in every case what can be done to man, criticizing most of the time what men can do. This leaves us with a question that’s hard even to formulate adequately: Is our democratic sameness or equality based on our universal helplessness, or on our equal freedom to escape our conditions? In one case, modernity leads us from a failure to save our souls to absolute conformism; in the other, from a fear of our mortal predicament to a situation in which we are as mysterious as God.—Machiavelli seems to lead to this drama, & who is confident that he can find a comic solution?
The War On Progress
Anton’s proclamation that spiritual warfare is possible & teachable makes it seem as though we can use the impressive powers of mind unleashed by Machiavelli, which have inspired so many important thinkers, including the American founders, & nevertheless not worry much about the consequences, certainly not now, caught as we are in the urgency of events, which dictate to us rather than inviting us to dictate to them. Perhaps he is speaking to those who are either very excited to learn about the secrets of politics, surely a very new topic to Americans & a possible avenue for the restless ambitions among us, or those very afraid of the woke turn in our liberalism, & who therefore aren’t likely to think twice before embarking on a path of spiritual warfare.
Anton, further, inasmuch as he reassures us that Machiavelli learned about propaganda from Christianity, may even make it seem the Christian thing to do! But one of the strangest things about our times is how little Christians seem interested in defending themselves from Progress, which doesn’t just involve public humiliations, but also legal challenges of various kinds that have made it a crime in America to publicly state Christian doctrines of long standing. So for the sake of their self-respect, we have to hope that his fighting spirit & his conviction that the time is ripe for action are shared widely, or at least that they are contagious, so that people can continue in their ancient faith. But it’s precisely in those cases where Christians will stand up for themselves that it’s unlikely they will want to do so in a Machiavellian way, even if they can be assured that they’d be wielding Machiavellian means for Christian ends. Perhaps he will say that Christians are after all men first, or Americans first, & they will not be eager to suffer their beatings thinking of the rewards this will earn them in the hereafter. People, once cornered, will have to fight—but that’s merely a condition, not a cause; to fight, they would need to know what’s to come to them should they win or should they lose. This would seem to be more the province of God than Anton.
Anton discovers great hope in knowing the weaknesses of the enemy, in looking at the woke as failed & failing Machiavellians, who are not worthy of the great man’s humanism & his many complicated schemes. The more the woke are anti-Enlightenment, the more certain we can be that they will suffer from the predictable problems we call decadence. Inasmuch as this attack on the American regime is recent, it can also be treated as a problem to be fixed rather than one to be suffered. It’s easier to get rid of the new than of the old & enduring. Justice would seem to mean largely restoring the constitutional order of America as it is still known to the oldest among us, or within living memory, at least, even if most Americans don’t really care about it. But Progress might be much more dangerous than the recent affronts of the wokies. I already mentioned Hegel’s happy modernity—but after him came Nietzsche & Heidegger, the most spiritual philosophers, the ones most concerned with religion & the catastrophe of nihilism, or globalization, the terrible end of modernity, & of man. They attempted the kind of propaganda Anton has in mind, or at any rate, a propaganda that would counter nihilism, & the signs of their success are much less obvious or impressive than the evidence of their political madness. Anton on several occasions argues that Nietzsche was already there in Machiavelli, but that’s hardly reassuring politically, as opposed to intellectually. Really, he has to rely on Leo Strauss, the least likely culture warrior there ever was, because he alone put together a radical attack on Progress with political wisdom. He seems to lean in this direction, with his Averroist expression, “God & the good,” the one for ordinary people who are not involved in the politics of esotericism, the other for intellectuals, or the ambitious. Indeed, this recalls Nietzsche’s political formula, which Anton uses: Caesar with the soul of Christ. But it is just as easy to argue that Strauss was the other way around, concerned first & last with Socratic philosophy, largely uninterested in a just war, even if it should be a spiritual war. Anton, I think, proves by his argument as much as by his example that the philosophers have a remarkable influence on our minds & our politics both—he is only one part of a larger philosophical conspiracy. Unlike Strauss, the Straussian Anton doesn’t seem to think moderation has any connection to political wisdom, which is perhaps why he doesn’t worry about finding a principle of justice that a majority will embrace as much as he does about propaganda.
What part of Hegel contains the material on what Xty does to woman, and then to man?
Love the very last sentence, and also this: "Fighting atheism, however, doesn’t seem to be animating anyone, least of all him. In practical terms, that means that even if we had a Catholic-Protestant alliance against wokies, that would not even be close to a majority coalition built around going to church. What other principle of community then is likely to bring people together & stop the rise of planetary nihilism? Here, he is remarkably silent."