Can We Handle The Truth?
On Leo Strauss and Transparency
Leo Strauss—about whom I just wrote a mega twitter thread—was concerned that the masses can’t handle the truth.
Scholars disagree about what the secret is that Strauss thought was so worth hiding. What’s so scary about the truth?
I’m inclined to think the great Straussian secret is that philosophy can’t refute nihilism and relativism, that the pillars of liberalism are so weak as to be incapable of giving way to totalitarianism. Reason and the Enlightenment won’t save us from Nazism—but at least the ancients and medievals knew how to hide this fact and to tether reason to other things like religion and tradition.
But let’s say Strauss is correct—and philosophy can’t save us—what’s the big deal? Is it really so bad if we realize that the things that keep us from committing horrible atrocities have, at basis, no philosophical justification?
If anything—why not admit openly that philosophy and philosophers risk nihilism—and then add that this is reason to value other things besides philosophy and philosophers?
Strauss’s worry works mainly if you think that people have placed such high expectations on philosophy to begin with. Why not lower the expectations and see what happens?
Is the myth of reason’s power to fend off nihilism really something we need to believe in en masse? Why not admit the weakness of reason and then double-down on the institutions and stories that can tether us, regardless of their philosophical rigor and defensibleness?
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Double down, or maybe even call the bluff. The difficulty is that philosophy is both unavoidable because there are contrasting views on how we should act and what we should strive for and just really hard because it is difficult to come to a firm conclusion on how we should act that isn’t just provisional. The difficulty with freedom is that the masses are not capable of philosophy (and I should quickly add that I include the elite in the masses as well) because it requires training and such training requires time (and leisure has material preconditions, and that itself is subject to critique because leisure depends often on inequality). When the masses are liberated from traditional belief they don’t become authentic but fly back to forms of mass belief or bizarre superstitions or the wisdom of the crowd. The best of what we can hope for a culture that has good instructions and a strong cultural spirit, perhaps set up in part by philosophers but not necessarily so, or in other words, healthy ideologies. I take for example a rights regime to be one of the forms of a heathy ideology, which does in some way have a philosophic background adopted en masse. If I had my drothers I’d teach traditionalism first and foremost, and to the extra curious who had gone through the traditional path I’d give philosophy, but only quietly, and after assurance of their character.