THE PROLOGUESo writes Christopher Marlowe in The Jew of Malta. Marlowe is perhaps the greatest English playwright that too few know, a true Renaissance man deeply involved in the great issues of his day:Enter Machiavell.
MACHIAVELL. Albeit the world think Machiavel is dead,
Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps;
And, now the Guise is dead, is come from France,
To view this land, and frolic with his friends.
To some perhaps my name is odious;
But such as love me guard me from their tongues,
And let them know that I am Machiavel,
And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words.
Admired I am of those that hate me most ....
I count religion but a childish toy
And hold there is no sin but ignorance ....
Many will talk of title to a crown.
What right had Caesar to the empire?
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.
In May 1593, the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe is killed in a pub brawl in Deptford. Although the cause seems to be a dispute about a bill, some people think he may have been disposed of because he knows too much – he once worked as a spy for the government, and has been charged with atheism.If Marlowe's death is the result of a plot, no one would be surprised. Tudor England is thick with conspiracies. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1570s and 1580s, runs a network of spies who are constantly on the look out for plots and treason. Sometimes, they even fabricate the evidence.
At the root of most plots is a mixture of discontent with religion and fear of economic change ....
Some issues seem to be perennial.
It's fitting to note the figure of Machiavelli, for much of the criticism of Leo Strauss (and of the neoconservative movement he is said to inspire) is the same criticism levied against the author of The Prince. Is there a neocon movement plotting in the shadows of America today? What sorts of people belong to it -- is there, as was feared in Marlowe's day, a plot of the Jews? And is St. John's College, where I took my undergraduate degree, a nest of neocons? (and of racists, to boot?)
At first I thought I might start this post by telling you about Richard Weigel, longtime president of the chronically underfunded school in the earlier days of the New Program. Weigel was a scholar of Chinese literature and history, although he set aside his interests to tirelessly raise funding and support for this odd place where, one state legislator complained, "all the students do is sit around and read books". For 4 years I ate my meals and read the great books of the Western tradition under the watchful eye of two larger-than-life portraits in silk of a Ming emperor and empress, valuable antiques Dr. Weigel donated to the school.
Or maybe I should mention the diversity of that tiny student body (425 students at the Annapolis campus, fewer in Santa Fe) when I attended ... the Black grad who prepped at Phillips Exeter and made Time Magazine's (or was it Newsweek's?) list of "10 Angry Young Black Men". Or the gifted Black jazz musician who teaches world music in New Zealand now with a Maori partner? Or the Japanese-American student who taught me several valuable lessons, including that it's a losing proposition to gamble at cards with someone who has deeper pockets and a photographic memory.
Heh.
Or perhaps a more linear narrative. I could start with the two official founders of the Program: first Stringfellow Barr (a noted classical historian, whose popular works The Will of Zeus and The Mask of Jove are still the best introduction to the way in which the Greeks and Romans differed, not only among themselves, but from us as well). And then Scott Buchanan, about whom I know less, and about their connections to Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins - and how the academic world resisted any hint of the reforms they urged.
Instead, I think I'll tell you about my conversations with Herman Kahn, reportedly one of the two inspirations (along with Henry Kissinger) for Dr. Strangelove. (Michael Moore is a mere arriviste as a propogandist in film.)
Herman who, you say? Herman Kahn - nuclear physicist, futurist and one of the most influential figures in defense policy after WWII:Herman Kahn, the most celebrated and controversial nuclear strategist of his day, later to be known also as a futurist, political scientist, geo-strategist and founder and director of the Hudson Institute "think tank,” began his career in the late 1940s with the Rand Corporation as a physicist and mathematician. His co-directorship of the Strategic Air Force Project while being at Rand inspired him to write On Thermonuclear War, the book that elevated him to national and international preeminence. On Thermonuclear War was the first book to systematically analyze the possible effects of nuclear war and the possible strategic options under various circumstances. The book was followed by a sequence of similar studies having a profound impact on the US nuclear and military strategy and on strategic thinking in general (Thinking about the Unthinkable, Crises and Arms Control, On Escalation).In 1961 Kahn resigned the Rand Corporation and established the Hudson Institute, an organization that developed into a pioneer and model for the new emerging forms of public policy and interdisciplinary research institutions. Kahn became the first director of the Institute, which was set up to do inter-disciplinary freelance research into what he termed "important issues, not just urgent ones."
While he maintained his interest in strategic and military matters, Kahn began to turn his attentions to economics, politics and especially to public policy issues. He became one of the founding fathers of the Futures Studies (futurology) movement contributing to the highest degree to its methodological and theoretical foundations: he developed the scenario method, the application of systems analysis and of mathematical and scientific tools to forecasting, and the organizational bases of interdisciplinary and future-oriented research.
He had a critical and very visible participation in the public debates of his day on topics related to economic development, global trends and the impact of technology. He challenged the neo-Malthusianism and doomsday scenarios and rhetoric popular in the 1970’ and with a series of path breaking studies he contributed decisively to the emergence of a more realistic and pragmatic approach to global problems (The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next 33 Years, World Economic Development, The Next 200 Years and The Coming Boom: Economic, Political and Social).
During his lifetime he was considered: “one of the world's great intellects”, “a mental mutation” possessing “an incredibly high, stratospheric I.Q.“, a “mesmerizing presence”, “spectacular”, “a provocateur in the sedate world of ideas”, “a reformer”, "a technological optimist" or “a futurist who attempted to cope with history before it happens.” Kahn described himself as a "free-thinking intellectual (…) largely determined by a desire to do policy-oriented studies with practical applications (…) pragmatic, eclectic, and synthetic in thinking”. "I'm against ignorance," Kahn once told, "I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment".
As a measure of his impact, go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble.com and see how many of his books are still in print.
So what can I tell you about him? I met him because his daughter attended St. John's while I was there and he and his wife were kind enough to make it possible for me (a blue-collar kid attending an expensive private school on a bunch of scholarships, loans and 2 student aid jobs) to visit in their home several times and attend a few talks at the Hudson Institute. Herman grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. He met his wife Jane when she was a mathematician working on defense projects during WWII. A Mayflower descendent, Jane converted to Judaism and devoted her considerable energy and intellect to Herman thereafter ... and boy did he need it. The first time I visited their home, the dining room table was buried under books and casually stuffed to one side on the table was a several-hundred-year old Samaurai sword, the gift of a grateful Japanese government after he had consulted to them on economic policy. (See: The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response (1971))
When Herman travelled, it was not unusual for Jane to pin his itinerary and the purpose for his visit on a card inside his suit coat (and to put another copy in any other coats he took). He once left the only copy of the manuscript for an upcoming book in the bottom drawer of a dresser in a French hotel, causing substantial negotiation until it was retrieved.
He taught himself the basics of several languages by listening to Love Story on audiotape in one language, while reading it in another -- neither of them English. When i asked if he really liked that syrupy novel, he pointed out that the soppiness ("Love means never having to say you're sorry") meant translations of it were great ways to get a feel for popular sentiment and language in other places.
At one point during the Vietnam war, while he was testifying to Congress, a senator demanded that Kahn specify ways to cut the cost of the war. Kahn responded (more or less)"Well, you could stop paying the troops .... of course, armies that aren't paid have a tendency to revolt and overthrow their governments, but it's an option."
On the other hand, he also identified a small but disastrous decision that had been made, which was getting troops killed in the southeast asian jungle. For many years, infantry boot soles had V-shaped treads, which cause mud and stones to drop off the bottom of the boot as the soldier shifts his weight from heel to toe. Someone, in the name of cost savings, had allowed the purchase of cheaper boots with straight treads ... and our soldiers ended up collecting pounds of mud on their feet every day.
Kahn was a large man and his doctors told him he really needed to exercise or he would drop dead of a heart attack. So the family added an indoor pool to their home in Chappaqua, NY. I'm told that when the BBC tv crew came to interview him, they found all 400+ lbs of him swimming laps there -- nude.
Herman Kahn saw decades ahead. In 1973 he noticed I had started to teach myself a little Arabic. He immediately offered to hire me as an assistant after I graduated if I learned the language. Awed and intimidated, I never took him up on that offer, to my deep regret ever since.
I've been thinking of Herman lately, especially with all the talk about neocons, about allegations that some in the Bush administration planned attacks on Iraq in cold blood and then went looking for an excuse. it's the kind of language people used about him, too. And yet I have never met any person as deeply committed to prosperity, peace and freedom - of thought and action - for all people around the world as he was. Freedom, too, to be called on sloppy or emotional thinking, or bureacratic short-sightedness. Or politicians covering ass. To fight that, he gleefully uncovered his own ... at least to the BBC.
He deeply wished for peace ... and to that end, he contributed greatly to US national strategy in the Cold War. We all owe a debt of gratitude to him, and to his patient, bemused and deeply loving family as well. It's fitting that, after his untimely death, the trustees moved the Hudson Institute from the elite shores of Westchester County NY to Indianapolis, to be closer to the ideological center of the country. It's a move he would have deeply approved of.
And it's no coincidence that, 30 years later, I teach and research analytic techniques in the tradition he pioneered.
Next time in Part 3 - Leo Strauss, Midge Dector - two neocons for sure! Why I'm not a social conservative. And what St. John's College has to do with Dan Darling's summer internship. (I promise.)
Robin,
You should write here more often. Or maybe a book.....
What a great post.
Now I need to show it to Middle Guy and see if I can spark his interest in going to school back East, like his brother...
A.L.
I recently read The Prince for the first time. In the first 20 pages, he covered everything that we did right in Iraq and everything we did wrong.
It should be required reading for any future President.
Thanks for the encouragement, Lurker and AL.
AL, if the East coast is too much of a culture shock for a southern California kid, Middle Guy might like the Santa Fe NM campus. A slightly different feel and social life to it, same academic program.
ABerman, yes -- Machiavelli is surprisingly insightful. He, and Strauss, and Kahn and others are vilified in part, I think, because they speak openly.
But more on that in post 3, which probably won't be up until Thursday since I'm at a seminar all day tomorrow.
Robin -
Re: Machiavelli - most peole just read the Prince, and never read the Discourses, which is one of the great works of pre-modernity, and one of the first to have a modern conception of the nation and the role of leadership in it.
A.L.
A.L. - seconds on The Discourses. People read The Prince because it's shorter, but it has to be understood in context. The Prince was written basically as a suck-up to the Medicis (he needed a job). The Discourses covers everything in The Prince, but includes material on republics and democratic government. It was enormously influential on the founding fathers - it's amazing how Machiavellian the constitution is: the whole structure of checks and balances is straight out of Machiavelli.
Unfortunately laziness leads people to read the shorter book, thinking they are getting a fair treatment of the man's work. The upshot is that Machiavellian does no mean what it ought to mean, and the man is remembered as an apologist for raw power rather than a rational observer of the principles of human nature and the consequences of those principles for effective government. The Discourses in fact defends the republic as the superior form of government for a number of reasons, reasons which have been borne out quite well by history.
Yes.
His On War, however, is no more interesting than it ought to be. A strong illustration of Machiavelli's tragedy, which is that he was a political genius obsessed with military issues for which he had no real talent. To a certain degree, he was forced to suck up to the de Medicis because his republic was militarily and diplomatically routed by its enemies.
The Discourses ought to be required undergraduate reading for all history and political science majors. I'm undecided about whether it ought to be part of a high school level civics course or no.