Leftist Fragility, Part 2

What we can learn about the search for truth from an old argument—and a recent one.

Lately I have been reading through the correspondence from 1940s through the mid-1960s between Leo Strauss and the famous French Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve (d. 1968). Kojeve is rightly regarded as perhaps the greatest modern interpreter of Hegel, and he and Strauss had an epic intellectual clash in their extended debate about how to understand tyranny (which is not to be confused with mere dictatorship or other kinds of authoritarian rule), based on a clash over the meaning of Xenophon’s short dialogue, the Hiero. Beneath these proximate issues was the broader question of whether philosophic inquiry—and therefore human freedom itself—is possible. Kojeve denied it, throwing in with Hegelian historicism instead. (You can find this clash and the correspondence in the revised and expanded edition of On Tyranny.)

Harry Jaffa thought that the Strauss-Kojeve debate “may very well be the greatest intellectual confrontation of the last century,” but it is difficult to make an adequate short summary of this rich and dense debate contained in On Tyranny, and as such I don’t recommend the book to casual readers. Some other time perhaps I’ll try to delineate what their argument was about, and why it gets at the heart of the political crisis of our time better than most other approaches. But I invoke the form of it here as a long prologue to this second installment of my “Leftist Fragility” series because of this observation of Jaffa’s:

Kojeve was a partisan of Stalin—or at least of Stalinism—as much as Heidegger was of Hitler and of National Socialism. Strauss and Kojeve shared a deep personal affinity and friendship, notwithstanding their differences. Nevertheless, Strauss was convinced that Kojeve’s Hegelianism, culminating in the acceptance, if not the advocacy, of the universal homogenous state, pointed toward a consummation of evil in this world, quite as much as the victory of Hitler would have done.

[Emphasis added. Incidentally, for a simple example of what “universal homogenous state” means in this context, think of the European Union, not the Soviet Union.]

How could someone like Strauss have a “personal affinity and friendship” with someone whose thought pointed toward “a consummation of evil in this world”? (Strauss also had a cordial relationship with the very problematic Carl Schmitt, because he saw in Schmitt a serious critique of liberal democracy that deserved recognition.) In simple terms, this mutual respect and engagement between Strauss and Kojeve arose from the fact that Strauss saw Kojeve as the most sophisticated and serious representative of the core of modern thought that he (Strauss) thought was catastrophically wrong, and Kojeve reciprocated, seeing Strauss as the most serious representative of the fundamental opposing view, rooted in restoring the vitality of classical natural right as discovered by Plato, Aristotle, and their successors.

The editors of the revised edition of On Tyranny, Michael Roth and Victor Gourevitch, note: “Each regarded the other’s position as perhaps the only significant philosophical alternative to his own, and each regarded the other as the most intransigent spokesman for that alternative.”

Their correspondence over the course of two decades demonstrates this mutual respect, and the intense desire to argue out their differences in print, even though both knew neither would persuade the other. This led to their collaboration for On Tyranny, featuring an extended back-and-forth debate conducted at the highest level. Long letters with detailed arguments about Plato’s dialogues and other classic authors, and even number theory, followed, as well as scintillating digressions about Heidegger and fashionable French intellectuals, whom they both mostly held in contempt (especially John-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty).

And thus their letters have numerous passages like this one from a 1949 letter from Strauss to Kojeves: “I am glad to see, once again, that we agree about what the genuine problems are, problems which are nowadays on all sides either denied or trivialized.”  Kojeve gave his own one-sentence summary of their dialogue in a1953 letter: “The task of philosophy is to resolve the fundamental question regarding ‘human nature.’”

But they could also be very blunt and direct with each other. Such as Kojeve to Strauss in the 1960s: “I disagree with your procedure. . . your entire interpretation of Plato is false. . . You will disagree with my final conclusion. . .”  Strauss’s reply: “My general reaction to your statements is that we are poles apart. The root of the question is I suppose the same as it always was, that you are convinced of the truth of Hegel (Marx) and I am not. . . [And] you misinterpret completely” Plato’s Critias.

The point here is the contrast between Strauss and Kojeve and leftist academia and the ideological intellectual climate today. Strauss and Kojeve could conduct their long-running argument because they dedicated to finding the truth, and open to all challenges—in fact they welcomed serious challenges.

The contrast with the intellectual/academic left today is obvious. As is well known, it is now impossible to publish any article, even with solid empirical data, in health or psychological journals that controvert the ideology of “gender-fluidity.” Journals that let something slip through often give in to demands for dissident articles to be retracted. Portland State political scientist Bruce Gilley had his academic article defending colonialism retracted after a furious mob made death threats to Gilley and intimidated the editors of the journal where Gilley published. There’s the example of climate scientist Patrick Brown, who admitted crafting an article on climate-related fire risk with alarmist language because he knew that was the only way it would get published:

Dr. Brown confessed in a Free Press article that he had framed his research not just to reflect the truth, but to fit within what he described as the climate alarmist storyline preferred by prestigious journals in the United States. He did this, he says, by intentionally focusing only on climate as a factor in wildfires, and not on the myriad other causes that contribute to the blazes consuming ever more land across the country.

It wasn’t that he was hiding anything, or that the research was wrong. It was just that the paper was deliberately focused in one narrow direction – the direction most likely, he claimed, to capture the attention of journal editors.

The formula for getting published, he wrote, “is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society.” And when it comes to climate science, he alleged, that preapproved narrative is that “climate change impacts are pervasive and catastrophic.”

Or think of how the highly-credentialled Jay Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas of Stanford were hounded and their views (subsequently vindicated) actively suppressed because they dissented from the party line of what I call the “Branch Covidians.”

I’ve previously argued that many leftist academics are intellectually and professionally insecure, which comes from being lightweights, and their self-knowledge of this fuels their bullying and ideological conformity. The cost of this mob mentality is that the search for truth is impeded.

There’s an interesting new example of this just recently. A few weeks ago Nature magazine reported on new findings about Easter Island—the famous south sea island (known as Rapa Nui in its indigenous language) with the large stone statues whose population and culture somehow collapsed and largely disappeared by the time European explorers first encountered the island in the 18^th century. It has long been supposed that the disappearance of the Easter Island culture was the result of an ecological collapse, such as deforestation and resource depletion. As such this “ecocide” is suggested as a cautionary environmental take for our time, most prominently by the pop-anthropologist Jared Diamond, in his very bad 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. (Some of my critical comments about Diamond’s book, including my allegation of fabrication on Diamond’s part, can be found here and here.) The collapse of Easter Island’s shrunken population was further accelerated by European explorers, because of course it was—colonialism being the twin evil alongside racism.

Nature’s headline tells the story of the debunking of this popular narrative: “Ancient DNA debunks Rapa Nui ‘ecological suicide’ theory.” It turns out that indigenous Peruvian slavers raided Easter Island before Europeans found the island, which is no fun at all if you’re a leftist. Nature’s podcast about the article contains this useful admission:

Geoff Marsh 

There was a well-documented collapse of the people of Rapa Nui in the 19th century when Peruvian slave raiders decimated the population to around 100 people. So how is it that it was the Rapanuis careless ecological suicide narrative that took hold so firmly and for so long?

Víctor Moreno

Many of these narratives, in many cases, like the narrative of the collapse or the narrative that Polynesians couldn't have made that amazing status because it had to be made by Native Americans and so on, they are usually put together as some kind of colonial narrative, right. With different purposes in mind, from getting access to the land to other even more obscure and darker things. And here we have an example of how science can help debunk those narratives and put them to rest and hopefully re-vindicate other cultures. So, yeah.

Kathrin Nägele

Everyone also happily accepted this narrative and perpetuated it, right. And so I think it also tells us something about, you know, maybe sometimes we have to– to check, especially when there's so much evidence speaking against it. And this paper, while I hope that it's the last nail in the coffin it was not the first one, right. There are so many other lines of evidence that for the last decades have shown that this narrative is wrong, but still, this update has not made it through to the general public and also into common knowledge.

This last statement is important because the refutation of the Easter Island ecocide hypothesis was made at least 15 years ago, by two young anthropologists, Terry Hunt (University of Oregon) and Carl Lupo (Binghamton University). Hunt and Lupo solved one of the oldest riddles about Easter Island: how did the islanders move and place those large stone statues at locations far away from the rock quarries where they were dug and carved? Their book, The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, explained how the natives moved the statues by an ingenious method of complicated ropes that “walked” the statues to their final site. (You can see a short video of the technique they recreated here.)

But Hunt and Lupo had a great deal of difficulty getting their work published. . . because Jared Diamond got wind of it and brought pressure on academic journals and National Geographic to impede Hunt and Lupo. The abstract one of their papers reveals that they had the same story as Nature reported last month way back in 2013:

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has become widely known as a case study of human-induced environmental catastrophe resulting in cultural collapse. The island's alleged "ecocide" is offered as a cautionary tale of our own environmental recklessness. The actual archaeological and historical record for the island reveals that while biodiversity loss unfolded, the ancient Polynesians persisted and succeeded. Demographic "collapse" came with epidemics of Old World diseases introduced by European visitors. In this paper, we outline the process of prehistoric landscape transformation that took place on Rapa Nui. This process includes the role of humans using fire to remove forest and convert to land for agricultural use as well as the impact of introduced rats (Rattus exulans) as agents that depressed recruitment of native vegetation and contributed to the island's deforestation. For humans, the transformation of the landscape improved productivity. Burning of palms and other trees provided a short-term addition of nutrients to poor soils. Rock mulch and agricultural enclosures solved problems of cultivation and mitigated risk in an uncertain environment. The environmental transformation of Rapa Nui, while a tragedy in terms of biodiversity, was a success for a sustainable Polynesian subsistence economy.

This paper had to be published as a working paper rather than journal article, though it is consistent with other published articles as far back as 2002 that contested the Diamond-“ecocide” narrative.

To repeat a pervious argument here, when the left attacks conservatives for so-called “epistemic closure,” it is a pure case of projection, as it is overwhelming the fragile leftists who cannot bear to have their ideological narratives challenged, or their bureaucratic power curtailed, as we saw with Covid. Their instinct and consistent practice is to suppress all debate.

More to come in the next installments. . .