Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole

Is Bronze Age Pervert a “rogue disciple” of Allan Bloom?

Allan Bloom (1930 - 1992) in his Southside home, Chicago, Illinois, 1987. (Photo by Steve Kagan/Getty Images)

I offer my apologies in advance for what is going to be a post that’s pretty inside-baseball to the Straussian world—that is, to the world of ideas shaped by Leo Strauss’s teaching and writing.

In previous posts, I’ve laid out my distinctive reading of Strauss’ highly enigmatic work. My understanding of him parts ways from how he’s interpreted by most other American Straussians and the many scholars who now study his thought. I’ve also explored in other posts how certain students of Strauss’ work have ended up diverging from his characteristic political moderation and focus on the interpretation of philosophical texts for an alternative that involves an enthusiastic embrace of far-right (antiliberal) political engagement.

One of the people I highlighted in these latter posts—Costin Alamariu (also known as Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, the pseudonymous author of a widely read self-published fascist screed called Bronze Age Mindset)—was the subject of a recent article in The Daily Beast. And just last week, Tablet published a lengthy essay by Blake Smith with the following eyecatching title and subtitle: “Bronze Age Pervert’s Dissertation on Leo Strauss: Should Aristocrats of the Spirit Have Sex with Each Other or Seize Power in a Military Coup?”

This is a post about Smith’s essay. Its author, a Fulbright Scholar in North Macedonia, is obviously quite broadly educated and highly intelligent. But his essay covers far too much ground in 3,000 words: Alamariu, Strauss, the supposedly concealed homoerotic radicalism of Allan Bloom (the Straussian bestselling author of The Closing of the American Mind [1987]), Plato, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, the proper education for “aristocrats of the spirit” and whether they should overthrow America democracy, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, whether social media is wearing away the cultural preconditions for any Straussian “solution” to our problems, and so forth. The result is a stimulating and provocative essay, but also a confusing and confused one.

Above all, the essay contributes to the spread of numerous cartoonish distortions—most especially about Strauss, whose thought Smith describes, following Alamariu, as next of kin to totalitarianism. Not only will such distortions harm Strauss’ already quite controversial posthumous reputation. They also risk convincing borderline sociopathic wannabe fascists on the extreme right that the practice of philosophy in a Straussian mode entails the seizure of tyrannical power for themselves and other extra-moral supermen. That is not at all the case.

Secret Teachings

It’s become quite common among readers of Strauss to recognize that his mature writings (from roughly the early 1940s on) contain two teachings: a morally edifying surface message for public consumption and another, deeper, more subversive teaching fit only for his most careful and discerning readers. This is how Strauss claimed the greatest works in the history of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks on down to the late 19^th century were written, and it’s now widely assumed the often-elliptical formulations and unresolved paradoxes in his own books and essays point to the same strategy in his own work.

The challenge, as always, is deciphering the hidden, or “esoteric,” teaching and separating it out from the surface, or “exoteric,” message.

Smith, following Canadian author Shadia Drury and others, including Alamariu, suggests that Strauss’ esoteric teaching is, in most respects, indistinguishable from Nietzsche’s: radically inegalitarian, contemptuous toward democracy, thoroughly anti-Christian, and favoring a strict aristocratic hierarchy with Great Philosophers who break violently and gleefully from the restraints of ordinary morality, patriotism, and piety at the tippy-top.

Where Strauss apparently diverges from Nietzsche is in his public rhetoric. Whereas the latter liked to shock his readers with boldness, urging them to set sail “right over morality,” Strauss adopted a rhetoric of conservatism. Smith uses Bloom as evidence to support this claim about Strauss, since The Closing of the American Mind reads on the surface like a staunchly conservative contribution to the Reagan-era culture wars about higher education even though Bloom himself was gay and encouraged his students and readers (between the lines) to undertake a highly (homo)erotic form of philosophical study.

It is certainly true that Bloom was gay (he died of AIDS in 1992) and concealed this fact from his readers. (Though it’s also inaccurate to describe him as “closeted,” since his sexual proclivities were widely known among his friends and students.) There’s also no denying that one of Bloom’s closest friends, Saul Bellow, wrote a novel about him (Ravelstein) in which he is portrayed as speculating and gossiping about the sex lives of his students behind their backs. But is there any evidence that Bloom seduced his male students into bed as part of an education in philosophy?

I know many Straussian political theorists who passed through Bloom’s classrooms at Cornell, the University of Toronto, Michigan State, and the University of Chicago. One part of that education involved coming to recognize and understand the deep links between erotic longing for the beautiful and the desire for comprehensive knowledge of “the whole” of things. (This is an old Platonic theme.) But I have never heard anyone say or imply that Bloom literally seduced his students into his bed as a necessary component of their philosophic educations. To suggest otherwise is groundless speculation at best and an outright lie at worst.

Bloom’s “Rogue Disciple”

But the stakes in this dispute are far higher than how Bloom ends up being remembered. Smith suggests that Alamariu grasps the subversive and transgressive secret teaching contained under the surface of Bloom’s writing and implies that roughly the same teaching is there in Strauss’ work, too. That teaching is the Nietzschean immoralism that Alamariu personally endorses. Where Alamariu parts company from both Strauss and Bloom is in how he conceives of the proper relationship between this hidden teaching and the surface that conceals it.

Strauss, Bloom, and most other Straussians supposedly adopt a rhetoric of conservative moralism out of a desire to protect liberal democracy from the threat posed to it by philosophical immoralism (including its contempt for the masses, democracy, belief in equal rights, and other pieties). Most readers and students remain on the surface, becoming earnest defenders of liberal democratic politics and morals (Strauss called such types “gentlemen”), while only the few dive deep beneath the surface to achieve private philosophic liberation, setting out far beyond good and evil. This division of labor works well because (as Smith puts it) Straussians consider American liberal democracy to be “a decent enough regime within which free thinkers like themselves [can], sheltered by discretion, pursue their own way of life.”

Alamariu diverges from Strauss and Bloom in adopting a more fully Nietzschean surface rhetoric, thereby becoming the latter’s “rogue disciple.” Instead of lulling most readers to sleep with consoling moralistic lies, Alamariu updates Nietzsche’s rhetorical shock treatment for the age of internet memes and 280-character tweets. That’s why his self-published book is written in what Smith fittingly describes as “internet pidgin.” This mode of writing is designed to appeal to an

audience of young men who imagine themselves as future or would-be elites constrained by the suffocating norms and pieties of our still-too-Christian culture. It urges them to undo the errors of Plato and of modern academic Straussians and throw off their allegiance to religion, patriotism, and other collective myths that restrain their own will to power…. The modes of prudence that had characterized Strauss’ and Bloom’s writing—a stylistic caution that soothed the scruples of ordinary readers, a moral caution that seemed to affirm what most Americans believe, and a political caution that upheld our regime while quietly dissenting in private from its intellectual premises—must, he argues, be overthrown.

This rhetorical decision points to a second, more substantive disagreement with Strauss and Bloom: Rather than seeking to protect and even strengthen liberal democracy, Alamariu follows Nietzsche in wanting to tear it down. Would-be philosophers don’t just arise on their own from out of the sea of democratic mediocrity ready to be discovered by discerning teachers. They must be cultivated:

[S]uch people must be produced and perfected through an erotic education that aims at making young men more vigorous, physically perfect, and hostile to our supposedly feminized, egalitarian society…. Alamariu’s project involves a combination of erotic pedagogy, in the vein of the ancient Greeks and of Bloom, along with a program of eugenics, the outlines of which he only sketches but which resemble no less the ideal city of Plato’s Republic than the biopolitics of the Third Reich…. In his most decisive deviation from the Straussian approach to politics, Alamariu suggests that the philosopher should aim at seizing political power as a “tyrant.”

That is indeed a rather dramatic “deviation” from what’s found in Strauss, Bloom, or any other faction of the Straussian intellectual world (except for those Straussians at the Claremont Institute who have been influenced by Alamariu, Curtis Yarvin, and other gurus and charlatans of the far right). Yet Smith nonetheless maintains that Alamariu’s project ends up “forcing us” to confront “how little distance separates the teachings of Strauss—on which much of modern American conservative intellectual life is based—from outright totalitarianism.”

Everyman Callicles

It’s quite a challenge to defend an author who deliberately conceals key aspects of his thought. Yet I’m going to attempt it with Strauss, by way of contrasting Alamariu’s project (as Smith describes it) to the way I was inculcated into the world of Straussian ideas as a graduate student at Michigan State University in the mid-1990s—specifically in a seminar devoted to the close study of Plato’s Gorgias.

The choice to turn back to this class in particular is not arbitrary. Smith makes a point of invoking what he calls “one of the critical passages in Alamariu’s dissertation”—a passage where he takes up the memorable clash between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias. As Smith notes, Callicles (somewhat like the character of Thrasymachus in the Republic) defends views against Socrates that anticipate Alamariu’s Nietzschean position, including the “aggressive, virile pursuit of open political power in the name of philosophical superiority.” As one might expect, Alamariu thinks Callicles gets the better of the argument against Socrates. According to Smith, Alamariu even “performs some awkward hermeneutic wrangling” to show that Plato himself shared this judgment.   

This is, to say the least, not how our class read the dialogue—and not because our Straussian teacher concealed this Nietzschean truth from us in order to turn us into morally upright and uptight gentlemen eager to do the dutiful work of upholding the stultifying pieties of liberal democracy. We didn’t read the dialogue this way because the dialogue shows us something very different: that Callicles is a deeply confused, angry mess of a man who responds with furious vindictiveness and even threats of violence to the bracing challenge of Socrates’ philosophical questioning. The dialogue also shows how Socrates used rhetoric both to defend himself against this type of assault and to lead more promising conversation partners toward greater wisdom than someone like Callicles would ever be capable.   

In addition to writing a final paper, our class on the Gorgias culminated in the drawing of a “map” of Callicles’ soul as it is revealed through his testy conversation with Socrates. Sometimes Callicles thinks a good man is someone who crushes the masses—and that it is natural justice to do so. But at other times, he admits he thinks such deeds are unjust and that, instead, a good man should care for the many—though the reasons he adduces for this alternative course of action vary wildly: at one point, he indicates the good man should care for the many in order to get the good things that are his just reward; at another, the good man is motivated by the desire to protect himself from the many; at still others, the good man is said to act without concern for his own reward or safety. In some passages, Callicles thinks a good man is the greatest hedonist and that acting unjustly is a means to achieving the most intense pleasures. At various points in the conversation, Callicles also expresses the desire to hurt both the just and the unjust, and to strike philosophers like Socrates—and he gives contradictory (moral and immoral) reasons to justify each act of imagined violence.

At the core of this tangled bundle of incoherent opinions lies what might be the motor behind them all: Callicles’ intense longing for justice, wisdom, and courage to lead to success, happiness, and pleasure—and his tendency to succumb to furious indignation when they fail to do so reliably.   

Upon completing the dialogue, some in our class were inclined to conclude that Plato intended Callicles to serve as an example of an outlier—someone with an unusually mutilated soul. But our teacher responded by encouraging us to recognize Calliclean tendencies in ourselves. Didn’t all of us long for virtue to be rewarded? And didn’t we sometimes respond with anger to evidence that it often isn’t? And wasn’t this anger partially a product of suspecting that those who act immorally end up benefitting from it, a fact that makes the moral man appear to be a sucker who loses out on the good things enjoyed by those who strive less fervently to do the right thing?

And in response to this apparent evidence that the immoral man benefits from his immorality, weren’t we sometimes tempted to lurch to the other extreme, denying that moral deeds are choiceworthy and suspecting instead that a life devoted to getting ahead at the expense of others is preferable? But in entertaining the possibility of a life lived in defiance of virtue, didn’t we also catch ourselves hoping our cleverness and guile in pursuing selfish goods would guarantee the achievement of such goods? Didn’t we end up hoping, in other words, that we deserved good things as a reward for our rejection of the belief that virtue is rewarded? And wasn’t there a tiny part of us that felt a twinge of humiliation and anger toward the teacher who forced us to confront this painful contradiction running like an unstable fault line through our souls?

Maybe, on second thought, we weren’t in much better shape than Callicles after all.

The Socratic Alternative

But that flash of self-recognition didn’t at all imply we should follow Callicles’ example. Far from it. The lesson of the Gorgias is not, as Alamariu would have it, that the “aggressive, virile pursuit of open political power in the name of philosophical superiority” is the best life. On the contrary, the lesson of the Gorgias (or one of them anyway) is that the angry rejection of certain ordinary moral opinions is very often (nearly always?) driven by an attachment to other, half-concealed moral convictions that have not yet been subjected to philosophical-dialectical scrutiny.

In contrast to Callicles, Socrates suggests another path—one whose direction can be glimpsed when we notice that the philosopher so often presents himself in Plato’s dialogues as a semi-ironic defender of moral absolutes in all circumstances. The title character of the Gorgias is a well-respected sophist (a teacher of rhetoric) who observers Socrates’ rancorous exchanges with Callicles in the second half of the dialogue, and our class also came to see over the course of the semester how much Gorgias learned from those interactions about Socrates’ own rhetorical choices.

He learned, among other things, that given the extraordinary depth of our moral attachments it is important that philosophical inquiry take them with utmost seriousness—beginning from them, and continually returning to them. In practice, this means affirming the principles we claim to believe in, testing them against other opinions we hold, and figuring out, when they contradict each other, which one has a stronger hold on our own souls, and then refining each of them in light of this newly acquired self-knowledge.

Does this make the rhetorical moralism of Straussian rhetoric and pedagogy so much nonsense—a kind of intentional philosophical gaslighting—that barely conceals a secret teaching of Calliclean (and Nietzschean) immoralism? No, it does not. The rhetorical moralism points toward a philosophical end—one in which the myriad contradictions in our moral, political, and religious opinions are revealed one by one and then rigorously subjected to dialectical examination that clarifies, refines, and ultimately allows us to overcome them at the level of thought, if not always in our everyday lives. (Fully living up to Socrates’ example has certainly far surpassed my abilities.)

This is what Strauss was up to in his mature writing and teaching, and the same can be said for Bloom, along with the best Straussians I encountered in my education and have continued to engage with throughout my subsequent career. The aim is to follow Socrates in using reason to figure out how to live by determining what is truly good, noble, and just—and from the resulting position of clear-sightedness to contemplate a wider range of political, epistemological, religious, metaphysical, and ontological questions.   

There’s nothing shameful in setting aside that quest in its fullness for other pursuits, including overtly political ones. (Most of us need to earn a living, and our natural talents aren’t always suited to a lifetime engaged in philosophical reflection, or to the demands and requirements of an academic career in the modern university.)

But opting, like Bronze Age Pervert, to use half-understood philosophical arguments and rhetorical nonsense to flatter and encourage the tyrannical ambitions of people who understand even less about the world and themselves? That’s the mark of someone who hasn’t grasped the first thing about the quiet grandeur and enduring delight that accompanies the Socratic education Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and their best students have helped to revive in our time.