The Straussian Moment
By Peter Thiel
The Twilight of Liberalism
Thiel opens with the following claim: The events of September 11th, 2001 set in motion a collapse of the philosophical foundations of the West. These foundations are found in enlightenment liberalism, especially in Adam Smith and Locke. The economic philosophy of Adam Smith relies on the assertion that humanity could be understood as primarily rational economic actors. This simplification becomes much less helpful if people are willing to fly themselves into buildings and others are willing to finance this at great financial costs.
Locke, after years of religious war in Europe, helped to put aside the question of human nature. He wrote that we could not directly encounter our soul or essence but only see its effects in the material world. Because of this inaccessibility, Locke concluded we must allow people maximum freedom to act out whatever they feel is their essence or true nature. This idea underlies inalienable human rights.
Locke wrote that those who insisted on focusing on questions of human nature would not be productive enough to earn wealth and contribute to society, and their debates would fall into the backdrop. Theil notes this is largely true, with an important exception: Oil. As a natural resource, oil requires very little productivity outside of extracting natural resources. Of course, bin Laden’s family are oil billionaires who then funded an economically irrational action. This is the edge case that calls Locke’s assumption into question. Theil concludes, “Of course, in the long run, it may well be that power and prosperity go to those who follow Locke’s rules… but none of this will matter if we are all dead in the short run.”
The Concept of the Political
Thiel then turns to Carl Schmitt, a major political philosopher underlying the ideological foundations of Nazi Germany. Schmitt claims that Locke tried to hide the essential questions. He agrees that there will never be any absolute agreement on these issues (religion, virtue, human nature), but they should not be hidden. Schmitt argues it is in our nature to take sides on these questions. The political, according to Schmitt, is the battlefield where different conceptions of religion, virtue, and human nature take place. Locke hid Schmitt’s politics for a while, but bin Laden forced it back up.
Liberalism requires freedom of religion. So, if a liberal regime is forced to confront a primarily religious antagonist, it must, in some way, concede its claim for the necessity of religious freedom. The United States tried to sidestep this philosophical issue in many ways. Namely, by treating bin Laden as a criminal threat rather than a religious or philosophical one. We referred to the battle as a “War on Terror” rather than a war on radical Islam or even a war on al Qaeda. Still, the issue remained.
If the United States fought a war against al Qaeda, it would thereby acknowledge it must fight religious wars: It would have to acknowledge Carl Schmitt’s politics and directly contradict its own underlying principles. The collapse of enlightenment liberalism would then be set in motion.
The liberal argument against Schmitt is obvious: considering the Political leads to mass violence. The great tragedies of the twentieth century have made that clear. Therefore we must deny its existence. Yet, this denial comes at too high a cost of self-stultification. It requires artificial unity, an outcome resembling many dystopian novels favored in high school English classes. This artificial unity, be it provided by world government or virtual reality goggles, requires a seemingly, but not truly, all-powerful entity to provide it. If true unity is found in Christ, artificial unity is offered by Antichrist.
Thiel wrote, “The world where everything seems to administer itself is the world of science fiction, of Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or of The Matrix for those who chose not to take their red pills. But no representation of reality ever is the same as reality, and one must never lose sight of the larger framework within which the representation exists. The price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high because the decisions that are avoided are always too important. By making people forget that they have souls, the Antichrist will succeed in swindling people out of them.”
The Taste of Xenophon
Schmitt leaves us with two seemingly unacceptable options: to live in a meaningless, comfortable, non-violent world or an immensely meaningful violent one. Rejecting these choices, Thiel turns to Leo Strauss. The political philosopher argued that the error of Schmitt was not in that he chose to seek answers to the great questions of humanity (religion, virtue, human nature) but that he did so conspicuously. As a result, he allowed these questions to fall into the hands of the wrong people—the Nazi party, in particular—where they were inevitably misinterpreted.
I’ll allow Strauss to speak for himself. Here are the relevant sections from his essay titled The Spirit of Sparta or the Taste of Xenophon:
In the time of Xenophon, impiety constituted a criminal offense. Thus philosophy, which is essentially incompatible with acceptance of the gods of the city, was as such subject to persecution. Philosophers had therefore to conceal if not the fact that they were philosophers, at least the fact that they were unbelievers. On the other hand, they desired to communicate their view to small number of people who were able and willing to accept these views; and since they could not possibly talk to the larger part of that small number because the larger part was not yet born, they had no choice but to write books and publish them. The difficulty implied in the contradiction between the necessarily secret character of the philosophic teaching and the necessarily public character of publications was overcome of a very simple discovery. If a man tells a charming story, most people will enjoy the story—the imitated actions or events, the imitated landscape, the imitated speeches of the characters, and even the imitation itself—but only a minority of readers will recover from the charm, reflect upon the story and discover the teaching which it silently conveys. Silent or secret teaching is then certainly possible. That it is an actual fact of the past is shown, above all, by the stories and histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato. One may add that this kind of literature disappeared only at a rather recent date: its disappearance was simultaneous with the disappearance of persecution, just as its reappearance is simultaneous with the reappearance of persecution.
It would, however, betray too low a view of the philosophical writers of the past if one assumed that they concealed their thoughts merely for fear of persecution or of violent death. They concealed the truth from the vulgar also because they considered the vulgar to be unfit to digest the truth: the large majority of men, the philosophers of the past thought, would be deprived of the very basis of their morality if they were to lose their beliefs. They considered it then not only a matter of fear and safety but also a matter of duty to hide the truth almost as inaccessible as it was before it had been discovered, they prevented—to call a vulgar thing by a vulgar name—the cheap sale of formulations of the truth: nobody should even know the formulations of the truth who had not rediscovered the truth by his own exertions, if aided by subtle suggestions from a superior teacher. It is in this way that the classical authors became the most efficient teachers of independent thinking.
It is precisely this practice of concealing “the truth from the vulgar because they considered the vulgar to be unfit to digest the truth” that Strauss believed Schmitt to have transgressed. So, we must search for the ultimate truths. But we must do so carefully. Only this combination will guide us safely between Scylla and Charybdis.
Things Hidden
I’ve written about Girard before and will withhold from describing mimetic rivalry again. Within the scope of The Straussian Moment, it is most important to note that, unlike Strauss, Thiel does not believe in the ability to conceal secrets for eternity. As I pointed out in the introduction, it is because of his Christianity that he considers Straussianism to be having a moment, not an eternity. He takes revelation seriously and considers its consequences.
Ultimately, he directs his attention to Christian Statesmen, who presumably would share this belief. He wrote:
“The Christian statesman or stateswoman must diverge from the teachings of Strauss in one decisive respect. Unlike Strauss, the Christian statesman or stateswoman knows that the modern age will not be permanent and ultimately will give way to something very different. One must never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account.
And so, in determining the correct mixture of violence and peace, the Christian statesman or stateswoman would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace. There is no formula to answer the critical question of what constitutes a “close case”; that must be decided in every specific instance. It may very well be that the cumulative decisions made in all those close instances will determine the destiny of the postmodern world. For that world could differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better—the limitless violence of runaway mimesis or the peace of the kingdom of God.”
It’s hard to know which aspects of this warning are meant metaphorically and which are meant literally. The phrase “one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account” is quite striking, and I assume is meant metaphysically, in the traditional Christian manner. If so, the advice is moot for non-believers, whom, I imagine, will also be making diplomatic decisions.
Conclusion
This essay is ultimately about the death of liberalism and its consequences. In the ideology’s wake, old problems reemerge. Namely, humanity is forced again to wrestle with questions of its own nature—an issue that has sent the world into flames many times over. Theil presents a few outlooks, or strategies, for dealing with this dilemma. He first rejects the “dark musings” of Carl Schmitt, who advocates for the confrontation of these issues on the battlefield of politics, which leads to a violent end that humanity knows all too well. Next, Thiel considers the advice of Leo Strauss, who claims that the answers to great questions of humanity can be sought and found. But the “cheap sale” of these secrets—to those who have not earned them, and therefore cannot withhold them—leads to destruction. So, the philosopher must communicate esoterically, ensuring that his secrets do not fall into the wrong hands.
Finally, Thiel turns toward René Girard, who focuses on a single, specific secret, one that is becoming less and less well-kept: the falseness of scapegoating. Girard considers the revelation of this falseness inevitable and the consequences of this disclosure to be nothing short of apocalyptic. He considers the scapegoating mechanism to be the primary tool humanity uses to quell violence. Without it, mass violence seems inevitable. Esoteric communication can be a temporary solution, but Girard—and Thiel, for that matter—take the Christian prediction of revelation seriously. Thiel wrote, "One must never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account." It is precisely this inevitability that Thiel depicts a Straussian moment, not an eternity.
