Aldo Leopold on Bush's JudeoRoman Metaphysics
by Dr. Gerry Lower

America has recently fallen under the right wing JudeoRoman dominion of the Bush administration. The result of that administration's self-righteousness and belligerence in the world, according to Walter Cronkite (Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 13, 2003), has been an across-the-board loss of America's "national prestige" in the eyes of the educated world. The Bush administration has led the people into an unjustified and unsustainable war in the Middle East, it has done its level best to destroy the Bill of Rights at home, and it has all but dismissed multilateralism (which threatens capitalistic dominion) and environmentalism (which threatens capitalistic dominion).

It is simply true that Bush's "compassionate" conservatism (one would think conservatives would be into conservation) is actually quite afraid of intellectual concepts like "the people" and "the land," because these loaded terms always get in the way of capitalistic "freedom" (i.e., license). It is instructive, therefore, to consider the world views of those people who have made America shine when it comes to caring for the people and the land. One such person is Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), considered the Father of Wildlife Ecology, a gifted teacher and philosopher at the University of Wisconsin, whose views reside beneath virtually every conservation movement in America and the educated world.

Aldo was born near Burlington, Iowa on the magnificent bluffs of the Mississippi River, where he developed a deep appreciation for the natural world, which seemed so capable of managing itself without human intervention, the result of a vast interconnectedness which Leopold ultimately became adept at identifying. As a result, he dedicated his life to defining the natural world and it's unity in diversity. Aldo was a man in love with the work of God, knowing that the better we comprehend the natural world, the better we know our God.

His most famous book, "A Sand Country Almanac" (Oxford University Press, NY, 1949), was in draft form when Aldo Leopold died in 1948, helping fight a fire. His son, Luna, saw this deeply thoughtful book through to publication in 1949. The book even touches on cultural influences, and its most insightful chapter is entitled, "The Land Ethic." In this chapter, Leopold sets forth a scientific ethics based on his empirical/logical grasp of the Land as an interconnected whole, as a dynamic, living entity on its own.

He begins by defining an ethic as "a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence." In this very definition, we find the reason why Leopold's ethics are ignored by those having made capitalism's grasp of freedom into an American religion. Defining "freedom" as doing pretty much as one pleases, capitalism honors a definition that has no empirical basis in reality. One does not have to live in the upper Mississippi Valley for very long to witness how the real world works, to witness the majestic bald eagle, symbol of American pride, literally chased out of a coulee by a snaggle of tiny sparrows, quite pissed off at the eagle's presence in their aerial turf. Even eagles have to have some respect for others, or they are simply "out of here."

In the mind of a man like Thomas Jefferson, of course, freedom has more to do with being afforded an opportunity to learn of God's work, the world and how it works, to think for oneself and to make one's own decisions in the interest of the whole. It has nothing whatsoever to do with license, which is (if you think about it) a remarkably adolescent notion of freedom, a definition which has no place in it for obligation and duty.

Dennis Callahan at the Hasting's Institute has long ago referred to this as "minimalist ethics," essentially an ethics which says you can do anything you want as long as you don't hurt anybody. The Bush administration, of course, has already broken the rules of even that inadequate ethic. Furthermore, as Callahan pointed out, this shallow ethos is only good as long "as the money is coming in." As soon as we get into fiscal trouble and need help, that ethic is "out the window."

Leopold goes on. "In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow members and also respect for the community as such." Here again we have an approach to ethics which is trampled every day by the Bush administration, in terms of it's relationships to the people and the land.

Leopold's deepest insights, and most ignored insights, however, dealt with cultural involvement in causing the loss and destruction of human life support systems, the fact that the western JudeoRoman mindset has traditionally had difficulty finding a land of "milk and honey" with which it was satisfied and content to call home.

"In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves." Sage advice, not so, for a Bush administration that has attempted to make covetness and the unprovoked conquest of other people and their land into a national way of life, in perpetuity?

"In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists. Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham's mouth. At the present moment, the assurance with which we regard this assumption is inverse to the degree of our education."

In other words, the less education one has, the more likely one is to abide if not support the JudeoRoman coveting, conquering mindset that has driven imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the mindset which literally characterizes the Bush administration. Leopold, of course, was speaking of a "higher" education, the type that ought come from universities and the type that can, if one thinks for oneself, come from actual experience in the natural world.

Leopold obtained a degree in forestry at Yale University and, like his Wisconsin predecessor, John Muir, Leopold graduated into "the University of the wilderness," in maintaining the "Wisconsin tradition" in scientific ethics. That tradition was continued in 1970 with Van Potter's extension of Leopold's ethics into the medical realm as "Bioethics" (Bioethics - Bridge to the Future, Prentice-Hall, 1970).

George Bush, our environmental president, obtained degrees at both Yale and Harvard Universities, so one would think that America would be in especially safe and knowledgeable hands. Unfortunately, George was from a ruling, dynastic family of privilege, and he never found reason to apply himself to his university studies, knowing that he would graduate as privilege demands. George left Yale University for the wilderness of capitalism, ultimately to find, with Billy Graham's guidance, the traditional JudeoRoman approach to self-justification. After all, isn't a lot of money, privilege and power ample indication of God's favor? In return, Bush finds his purpose in life by doing his God's work, not caring if "the people" failed to elect him, because he was elected by divine intervention. As a result, he has little trepidation about making God's decisions.

It is rather amazing that this man, who strolled the halls of Yale and Harvard, could be so desperately shallow in historical and cultural knowledge, so as to take an entire nation back into the dark ages of self-righteous conquest. It would seem, by Leopold's standards, almost requisite to shut Yale and Harvard Universities down until they can figure out what is meant by a "higher" education.

Here we are witnessing, as always, a conflict of metaphysics, those unchallenged assumptions we inherit from our parents and prevailing cultural interpretations, those assumptions beneath the surface by which we define ourselves, at least until we learn to think for ourselves in the interest of growing up and making our own decisions. Bush and his JudeoRoman supporters see "the people" and "the land," not as the core components of life, but as inexhaustible and complacent resources, placed on this earth for the religious right wing elite to exploit as necessary in order to keep "the money coming in."

Leopold saw the people and the land as having intimate and necessary relationships that must be maintained in the interest of human survival. With metaphysics juxtaposed in this manner and, of course, fervently thinking for ourselves, a metaphysical choice is not particularly difficult, now is it? Its more like part of being human. -- 09.14.03

[Dr. Gerry Lower lives in Keystone, South Dakota. His primary concern is the development of a rigorously-definable global philosophy and ethics suitable for a global democracy. His new book, "Jefferson's Eyes • Deist Views of Bush World," can be explored at www.jeffersonseyes.com.]

John Muir on Bush's JudeoRoman Metaphysics
Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland in 1838 and immigrated to America at the age of ten with his father. From 1848 to 1860, John lived on a central Wisconsin farm on the Wisconsin River, a flat land of sandy loam, red and white oak savanna, prairie grasses and evergreen forests. On this piece of Wisconsin farmland, John would learn lessons that would morph him into one of America's most renouned naturalists, the father of several National Parks, and the icon of environmental preservation and the Sierra Club.

Earlier, in 1832, the Indian "problem" in Wisconsin had been quelled with the BlackHawk Massacre on the Mississippi River, and central Wisconsin had been made safe for eastern American and European immigrants to move in and open up new farmland to the plow and woodland to the saw. But there were still minor problems with some Indian tribes, e.g., the Potawatami, that had been peaceful and accepting of the white presence from the start and were allowed to roam more or less freely. Peaceful as they were, they sometimes found it to their advantage to steal corn from the large fields of European immigrant farmers, who typically chased them off with shotgun blasts into the air. On one of these occassions, John Muir learned a lesson about JudeoRoman religious attitudes and their influence on the way people think. His lesson is entirely relevant to comprehending and coping with Bush World.

"I well remember my father's discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr. George Mair, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the soil. Mr. Mair remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the unfortunate Indians, children of Nature, living on the natural products of the soil, hunting, fishing and even cultivating small corn fields on the most fertile spots, were now being pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livlihood.

"Father replied that surely it could never have been the intention of God to allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it forever in unproductive wilderness, while good Scotch and Irish and English farmers could put it to so much better use. Where an Indian required thousands of acres for his family, these acres in the hands of industrious, God-fearing farmers would support ten or a hundred times more people in a far more worthier manner, while at the same time helping to spread the gospel."

"Mr. Mair urged that such farming as our first immigrants were practicing was in many ways rude and full of mistakes of ignorance, yet, rude as it was, and ill-tilled as were most of our Wisconsin farms by unskilled, inexperienced settlers who had been merchants and mechanics and servants in the old countries, how should we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and farms, such as they were, making use of the same argument, that God could never have intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre as we did?"

"And I remember thinking that Mr. Mair had the better side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, whatever the final outcome might be, it was at this stage of the fight only an example of the rule of might with but little or no thought for the right or welfare of the other fellow if he were weaker; that 'they should take who had the power, and they should keep who can,' as Wordsworth makes the marauding Scottish Highlanders say."

"Many of our neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themslves into their graves years before their natural dying days, in getting a living on a quarter-section of land and vaguely trying to get rich, while bread and raiment might have been serenely won on less than a fourth of this land, and time gained to get better acquainted with God."

John had that natural human tendency to think for himself (like most everyone else, until they get it beat out of them by traditional cultural "isms"). Otherwise, John's father might well have taught him a lesson not worth learning, and yet backed by the authority of his father's religion. Had John chosen to side with his father, he would have been a "saved" man, not from Biblical "evils" but from a life of naturalism, national contribution and a sure shot at human immortality.

John chose instead to side with their neighbor, Mr. Mair, in making a choice that many people never have set before them in such stark contrast. John chose empiricism over transcendentalism, human honesty over religious "faith," nascent Christianity over JudeoRoman religion, compassion over self-righteousness, and naturalness over supernaturalness. As a teenager, John was already on his way to greatness, for doing nothing more than thinking for himself, as the first Christian would have it. Like Thomas Jefferson, John Muir was a sect unto himself.

There is, of course, in the stance of John's father, a not-very-well-concealed religious self-righteousness (currently running rampant in Bush World) based on presumed superior knowledge and technique, presumed superior culture and cultural purpose. Afterall, European immigrants were "christian," the JudeoRoman defenders of compassion and brotherhood in the world, even if defending required offending.

Treading in the footsteps of America's fathers, Muir recognized that self-righteousness was built directly into JudeoRoman religion, because JudeoRomanism's adherents were so dog-damned sure that they, and only they, knew the truth of the world and how it works. Afterall, the Pope had declared in 1870, when John was 32, that Catholicism was infallible, that no one but the Roman Pope knew anything, just never you mind people like Jefferson, Darwin, Lincoln and Pasteur. John recognized that nascent (uncompromised, pre-Constantine) Christianity takes the mind far beyond religion and rigid adherence to law and ritual, far beyond vengeance and self-righteousness, and far beyond supernaturalism. Nascent Christianity accomplishes this by never departing the honest human world.

The lesson to be learned here has to do with our metaphysics, those assumptions implicitly held as convictions, convictions about the land and our relationships to it, and convictions about ourselves and our relationships to each other. These assumptions are typically held subconsciously, learned early on and unquestioned. Quite because these assumptions are conveyed in the name of religion, they oftentimes survive for a lifetime without ever being brought to the surface for a little interrogation. Were they to do so, expose themselves in the light of day as they did in John Muir's youthful experience, they would not long survive honest scrutiny. The sorry metaphysics of John' father certainly didn't survive long in John's youthful mind. All praise St. Socrates.

The metaphysics beneath JudeoRomanism are uniformly just that, assumptions, with no empirical basis and no human content. They range from being simply ludicrous to outrightly sociopathogenic. In John's case, his father's assumptions about the superior nature of western culture distills down to pure faith-based self-righteousness. The flip side to thinking of oneself as being superior, of course, is to think of others as being inferior. Here JudeoRomanism comes likewise to the fore with assumptions of "original sin," that some people (excepting those among the believers) are just born to be bad. Laws and prisons and punishments are necessary to make up for God's failures. Here, we have the core of "Straussian" political philosophy, which divides the entire world into despotic rulers and the despotically ruled, wolves and sheep.

For John's father, challenging one's acquired religious metaphysics was tantamount to challenging one's very being. Afterall, religion tells these people what they want to hear, that they are better people for being advocates of a compassionate Savior and believers in a vengeful, vindictive God. It follows that this "betterness" provides the right to control the less better people, their interpretations of reality and their behavior. John's dad took a stance based on this assumption. The Bush administration has abandoned multilateralism abroad and the notion of civil rights at home, and it has dispensed with morality in launching an unprovoked war - all based on this JudeoRoman assumption.

It is always easier, and immensely dangerous, to stick with what others have told us, for a blind better or worse. It is always easier to deny our own experiences and our own eyes. It is always easier and safer to go with the cultural flow. It is in this way, by discouraging and denying individual thought, that grotesque old cultural ideas are able to rule the day. Nourishing faith instead of reason is absolutly essential to the Bush administration's despotic dominion. America ends up with educated and would-be decent citizens abiding a mindless religiosity, the sheep being lead to the slaughter by men of enormous greed and covetness, and wearing shepard's clothing. This is JudeoRoman Bushism.

So, it all comes down to metaphysics, does it not? Next time we are asked to support a right wing religious assault on our civil liberties as part of John Ashcroft's contribution to Bush World, we must pull out our metaphysical assumptions and interrogate them. Do we really believe that we ought shoot at the Indians in the corn field? Do we really believe that wealthy "compassionate" conservatives are superior and deserving to make our decisions? Do we really believe in original sin and inherent human "evil" that requires we need Bush's "Straussian" approaches of "fighting tyranny with tyranny?"

Or do we believe as John Muir believed, that we best be getting our metaphysics straightened out and start thinking for ourselves? Bush's JudeoRoman metaphysics hold the people apart from God and apart from the pagan Land and Nature. Bush' metaphysics hold the people apart from each other, the good and the bad, with the self-defined good having a heavenly right to control in the name of their goodness.

Muir's metaphysics hold the people as an integral part of God and the Land and Nature. Muir's metaphysics hold that the people have common origins, a common God, and intertwined destinies on earth. Juxtaposed in this fashion, the choice does not seem particularly difficult. But, first one must get a grasp of one's own metaphysics. This is accomplished with a little introspective attention, not to what one thinks and says, but to what one does. This pretty much leaves the Bush administration without hope.

To paraphrase Jefferson, it is less dangerous to think for oneself and be wrong than to think one needn't think for oneself at all, just because someone else claims to have it all figured out. In Jefferson's words, "he who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." It is America's reliance on minds filled with falsehoods and errors, and the resulting cultural mindlessness, that has gotten us to where we are, under the despotic dominion of Bush's JudeoRoman church-state.

"Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance." Thomas Jefferson, 1786 --09.05.03

The Inconveniences Of Liberty And Bush's Starussian Ideas

Dr. Gerry Lower, Keysone, South Dakota
Bush Watch, www.bushwatch.com

Even the national press has sounded the alarm about the "Straussians." The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, has been and is still heavily influenced by neoconservative "intellectuals" who are themselves under the influence of the teachings of Leo Strauss. These include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council.

Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, came to America in the late 1930s and was particularly interested in political philosophy and the study of tyranny. He taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War, when capitalism went on a global manic binge and liberalism died a silent death with its conversion to "liberal" capitalism (an oxymoran) and away from socialism (Death of the American Politic, BushWatch, August, 2003).

Much has been written recently about Strauss and his ideological influence on the Bush administration, and opinion varies from seeing Strauss as a loyal defender of Democracy to seeing him as a dangerous foe of Democracy. He is neither. He is a would-be philosopher whose Old World fears and prejudices took him, the political right wing and American democracy backward instead of forward. Strauss, like most conservative Americans, simply did not understand Jeffersonian democracy at all.

Even as the Bush administration takes refuge in Straussian ideas, it remains the Bush administration who is responsible for implementing any action based on those ideas. It seems more likely the case that the Bush administration is simply "using" Straussian ideas to promote it's own agenda, as it likewise "uses" Old Testament JudeoRoman attitudes and ideas for nothing but it's own ends.

The philosopher, Michael Polanyi ("The Study of Man, 1964), noted that it serves no good purpose to be judgemental of the thinkers of past worlds by the standards of our own world. So, for starters, we must be aware that Strauss was born and raised into a harshly tyrannical world quite different from the free world that most Americans knew in the 1960s. Strauss was from an Old World filled with grotesque notions to which 1960s Americans could not relate.

That Leo Strauss would occupy a conservative right wing stance during the 1960s is not surprising, but it says very little, in retrospect, about his grasp of political causation and course. The 1960s were simply replete with bright young Americans who were quite aware that the American sociopolitical "system" was corrupting itself, selling out on traditional family, community and national values at the expense of the the people. It was self-evident to most dissenting Americans that greed was ruining their homeland and compromising their rights, from whence their freedoms flow.

Today, of course, the utter corruption ("Enronization") of corporate America and the emergence of "influence-for-a-fee" government and despotic right wing Republican dominion stand as tangible proof that the dissenters of the 1960s were remarkably insightful. Strauss passed away in 1973 and has been spared this awkward outcome of "conservative" political philosophy. Strauss has not had to witness the production of the largest gap between the rich and the poor in human history, all in the name of conservative, right wing notions of "fairness." There is something of a minor tragedy in not living to see the fruits of one's labor.

Strauss, in other words, did not deal with "here and now" reality (where all good philosophy begins). He did not deal with the self-evident socioeconomic shortcomings of the greed-driven capitalism of his day. He claimed to love Democracy but he unfortunately assumed, even following two decades of post WWII capitalization and commercialization, that the 1960s dissenters were wrong. Strauss assumed that America still represented the democracy that Jefferson and Franklin had in mind. This was an error common to the entire conservative right wing.

Doing philosophy, of course, is an ordered and integrated process. First comes the development of a rigorously-defineable world view, a conceptualization embracing the world, how it works and why it works. Political philosophy is then derived from that larger conceptual world view and no where else. The political philosophy emergent in Jefferson's Declaration, for example, was derived largely from the dialectic values of science and nascent Christianity and the knowledge of science, no religion in sight. In Jefferson's world, there was no external authority, our problems on this earth were our own. Strauss, on the other hand, proceeded on the assumption that one can legitimately derive new political philosophy by re-interpreting old political philosophy.

In this regard, Strauss never made the grade to philosopher, being typical of post WWII academic thinkers in America. He did not do philosophy. He simply read and reinterpreted the work of previous philosophers who have influenced the evolution of political thought. Had he known about Deism and natural philosophy, and given his love of democracy, Strauss would have begun at the evolutionary cutting ege of the art, with the ideas of Spinoza, Locke, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. But, no. Strauss, with his Old World background, began with philosophers of the distant past to create a political philosophy so full of ideas rejected by America's fathers and so full of inconsistencies, it literally required abandoning the common sense logic of the EuroAmerican Enlightenment and Jefferson's Declaration.

Strauss was just one of several influential American "philosophers" who failed utterly to recognize that Jefferson's democracy is the political philosophy of science and nascent Christianity (no relationship to religion whatsoever), who failed utterly to comprehend the dialectic middle human ground values upon which Jefferson and our Deist fathers built democracy, and who failed utterly to recognize that American democracy actually came, right out of the box, with its own theology, based on the rejection of "external authority" (supernatural gods) and "absolutism" (religious self-righteousness) in order to achieve a society in which the people could think for themselves and approach the control of their own destinies.

Philosophy, of course, is entirely conceptual and built from contemporary human (scientific) knowledge assembled into views embracing the world as a whole. The very fact that the bulk of human knowledge has been generated during the latter half of the 20th century pretty much relegates Strauss' views to the evolutionary waste basket. Natural philosophy, for example, can no longer be considered without the incorporation of contemporary molecular biologic knowledge. With the mapping of the human genome, it is clear that all people on this planet have common origins, that all people are interrelated, that the concept of race is a good deal of superficial nonsense. It is this kind of emergent knowledge, so integral to human self-concept, that properly drives the continuous renewal of political philosophy. In Jefferson's eyes, for example, the people were not children of God but the embodiment of God.

Now more relevant than ever (and unaddressed by Strauss), Jefferson's theology was bottom-lined in the concept that Deity was located on the human inside, in the "head and heart" of every person, that the highest authority is the "will of the people, substantially declared." From this concept of Deity and from nascent (dialectic) Christian values comes the concept of universal human rights (Christian Values and Human Rights, BushWatch, July, 2003). These are the theological first precepts of Jeffersonian democracy. Strauss had little option but to miss them in his studies, because they are so entirely at odds with and they properly replace JudeoRoman notions of "theology" in a democracy under Jefferson's Deist God.

Strauss saw JudeoRoman religion (which Jefferson ousted from the American political arena for very well-defined reasons) as a necessary opiate for those being controlled (the people) in the interest of those rightfully in control. Strauss, in other words, did not see government "of, by and for the people," he saw a JudeoRoman two-tiered world of the powerful and the powerless. In this, he missed the rather obvious, that JudeoRomanism also provides the justification for self-righteous, despotic dominion. The Straussian world was created entirely outside the boundaries of Jefferson's democracy, as if Jefferson and Franklin couldn't possibly have known anything about theology.

Strauss suffered from the European delusion that philosophy never crossed the Atlantic ocean. Liberal Democracy was wonderful but due to its own "liberalism" (e.g., the 1950s and 1960s), America had lost its way, to threaten not only itself but also the pillars upon which western culture had been built.

The pillars of western culture, according to Strauss, are represented by the great cities of Athens and Jerusalem, icons of the forces of reason and revelation. Modern culture, in his conservative mind, was certainly going to destroy these pillars of western culture. The "relativism" of American society in his time was seen as a "moral disorder" that could stop America from identifying its real enemies. This "crisis of the West" required the impossible, a reaffirmation of both science and religion, two mutually-exclusive approaches to comprehension from the start.

Strauss was seemingly unaware of the millennial conflict between science and religion and seemingly ignorant of what America's fathers had rejected in the interest of defining and implementing American democracy. Strauss was unseeing and unquestioning of religion's dark side and capitalism's greed, and he essentially recommended that conservative America preserve itself by fighting tyranny with tyranny. This is classic Old Testament self-righteous morality, being willing to leave Jefferson's Christian morality behind and drop to the same moral level as that occuppied by one's enemies.

In truth, the pillars of western democracy are Athens and Bethlehem, not as icons of reason and revelation, but as icons of reason and compassion. Again, Strauss missed the Enlightenment distinction between Old Testament vengeance-based moralities and New Testament compassion-based moralities. Nascent Christianity is a rejection of Judaism and Romanism. These were the voices, afterall, that silenced Christian compassion.

In this, Strauss presented his conservative ignorance of history and causation in the cultural realm. The failures of Democracy were ascribed by the right wing to America's departure from the religious morality of the past, when in truth those failures were due to the inherent unfairness and injustice of post-World War II greed-driven capitalism. It was also due to the fact that teaching Jeffersonian democracy had been largely eliminated from public education, as lamented by Saul Padover, a Jefferson historian ("Thomas Jefferson on Democracy") in 1939. Rather than start where Jefferson left off, Strauss attempted to rewrite American democracy within the context of the JudeoRoman world view rejected by America's Fathers. Go figure.

Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," 1974) has noted that there is a world of difference between philosophy and rhetoric, the former an approach to comprehension and control, the latter an approach to manipulation. All political philosophy derived from nothing more than previous political philosophy has nothing new to offer and is necessarily geared to manipulation. Leo Strauss held an untrue world view of interest to the right wing and, in their hands, his contributions have become pure rhetoric, riddled with inconsistencies, which is to say there is no logic required.

It was not so much a matter of Strauss telling the right wing what they wanted to hear, but of the right wing listening only to what they wanted to hear, and they heard justifications for their political agenda. While not out to destroy Jefferson's democracy, Strauss certainly contributed nothing to its advancement. Carol Burnett's television show was more richly steeped in American philosophy than anything Strauss ever contributed.

The right wing adherents of Strauss, however, have proceeded to destroy Jefferson's democracy and discredit the dialectic values which gave it birth. Were Jefferson religious, like these people, they would all burn in Jefferson's hell. Fortunately, Jefferson was a Christian "in the only way ever intended." He knew that the principles of democracy (and nascent Christianity) cannot be imposed, least of all with despotic approaches, upon dull, closed minds. These values must be accepted, as Franklin pointed out, by free acceptance of the thoughtful and caring mind.

That someone would synthesize Old World JudeoRoman political philosophies into a view that would ultimately justify and nourish an American takeover by the religious right wing was inevitable, given the people's neglected education and capitalism's thirst for dominion. Straussian views are important only in the cultural evolutionary sense, only insofar as they have nourished religious crony capitalism in its quest for global dominion, only insofar as this quest ultimately leads to discrediting vengeance-based religion and crony capitalism from the global political arena. Would this not open the doors, once again, to democracy, this time on a global basis?

With this glorious and necessary outcome, we will not know whether to bless or blame Leo Strauss. Strauss was both inevitable and necessary for this evolutionary outcome to unfold. But, of course, Strauss was wrong, and wrong about most everything, because he failed to define and think within the frameworks of the Enlightenment's Deist Democracy. Democracy will be revitalized in America and the world only after that becomes recognized and America returns to the theology from whence it emerged.

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas Jefferson, 1791. 08.25.03

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