The West According to Leo Strauss: Philosophical Schism and the Failure of Education

Commentary

The late Leo Strauss was a German-born political philosopher who moved to the United States in 1937. He went on to become an intellectual legend for American conservatives.

Writing in the December 2022 edition of First Things Magazine, American scholar Matthew Rose brought readers back to the early 1940s when Strauss delivered a famous lecture titled “German Nihilism” at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Rose fully examines Strauss’s lecture in his First Things essay, but several of his observations are worth considering at a more cursory level.

Open and Closed Societies

While Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union and the United States was still months away from entering World War II, Strauss turned his attention to assessing the differences between what he called “open” and “closed” societies.

The open, or liberal society, orders life mostly around the foundational principles of the Enlightenment and Western democracy. But, progressively inclined liberals also embrace modernity as a final escape from what they consider to be a flawed traditional worldview—one that places moral or religious obligations in opposition to their utilitarian devotion to pure reason.

Liberals welcome release from the exacting codes of faith and tradition in favor of the less-demanding norms of modern life. As Rose put it, “Heroic ideals, attainable only by the exceptional few, were defined down for the ordinary many; ideals that promoted spiritual or intellectual excellence were balanced by those promoting health and prosperity; ideals that imposed self-denial were replaced by those that indulged self-expression.”

The closed, or conservative society, is less intent on shaking off the constraints of history. Conservatives accept the need for loyalty to a particular nation, respect for cultural traditions, adherence to a faith, admiration for heroic leadership, inequalities of achievement, reverence for traditional authority, and personal transcendence through self-­sacrifice.

Strauss regarded such qualities as “permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-­minded,” according to Rose. He defended foundational Enlightenment values, but contended that the virtues required for the survival of liberty are often protected by the moral traditions that are most opposed to liberalism. An open society needs to be fortified by the ideals that are formed in closed societies.

A Lesson About Liberalism From Weimar Germany

“Strauss’s theme was education, and the place of liberal education in societies engaged in an existential struggle to preserve their way of life,” writes Rose.

Rose explained that “Strauss’s lecture addressed the long-standing question of how liberal ­societies might protect the virtues they need but struggle to cultivate, and sometimes actively undermine.” Strauss argued that those who controlled education between the wars had been trained in progressive methods of pedagogy, which deprived them of the wisdom necessary to deal with the defects of modern life.

Strauss suggested that mid-20th century progressive teachers neither understood, nor properly shaped, the character of their generation. They dismissed all conservative philosophical adversaries as pathological. They couldn’t recognize the power of a moral or religious appeal, which competed with their liberal intellectual zeitgeist.

Blending faith and nationhood worked in the West from Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire to the bloody battles of the Great War. But, confidence in Christianity was critically wounded in the mud of Flanders and the Somme. During the chaotic demise of Weimar Germany, the liberal imperative to break with the past and deny any merit in national conservative culture opened a door for the perverse and savage revolts against Western civilization that were forthcoming. Over the following eight decades, the role of education as a counterforce to the pressures of a leveling mass culture all but disappeared.

Continuing Opposition to Western Tradition

The open society seeks to order life through the exercise of reason and the arts of civility. The closed society values the inheritance of a cultural tradition.

Strauss didn’t see these two visions as incompatible. Rose pointed out that, while war raged in Europe, Strauss tried to imagine a civilization that could learn from its mistakes. In so doing, Strauss proposed a very different kind of education. He believed that the pursuit of truth and higher forms of human excellence required liberation from the present, not the past.

Strauss recognized that attacks on liberalism could become excuses for political evil; but he argued that good teachers shouldn’t reject the appeal of a conservative society. Instead, they should help students understand it. They should allow young people to experience the power of moral obligations and feel challenged by the possibility of human excellence.

Strauss didn’t wish his students to become enemies of liberalism. He wanted them to become virtuous defenders of democracy. But, to become genuine patrons of the open society, they needed qualities that could only be developed through an appreciation of traditional society.

As a philosopher, Strauss objected to modern liberal teachers who encouraged the “corrosion and destruction of the heritage of Western civilization.” He correctly recognized that the most serious threats to human freedom come from unattainable utopian ideals that exercise a twisted form of tyranny in open societies.

Today, in North American schools and universities, even the usual complaints about academic underperformance have been eclipsed by concerns over critical race theory, gender reordering therapy, self-regarding activism, and other forms of radical indoctrination.

Liberal-progressive educators have set aside scholarship and academic freedom in favor of Woke diversity, equity, and inclusion. The recent allure of drag queen performances and the hyper-sexualization of children has left many citizens wondering if educators have become completely at odds with traditional Western life and culture.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.