Misperception makes for strange bedfellows.
While speaking with Ryan McMaken about his important essay on anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal themes in Westerns, it occurred to me that his libertarian critics display an ironic interpretive error. As Ryan commented:
In response to my piece on Westerns, I had more than one reader write that the portrayal of railroads and banks in Westerns as bad guys is really a commentary on corporatism and not on capitalism. Since government was so much involved with banks and railroads in real life, they say, the anti-business sentiment is really anti-government…I'm sympathetic to this point of view since it's the one I started with when I began working on this project. The problem with this theory though is that it is not reflected in the films and is nothing more than libertarian wishful thinking.
"That's Strauss!" I said.
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, the political philosopher Leo Strauss – whose students at the University of Chicago included Allan Bloom and Paul Wolfowitz – claims certain texts have exoteric (public) messages that conceal esoteric teachings, "hidden treasures which disclose themselves only after very long, never easy, but always pleasant work." The political contexts for esoteric writings are tyrannical:
Exoteric literature presupposes that there are basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man, because they would do harm to many people who, having been hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths. It presupposes, in other words, that freedom of inquiry, and of publication of all results of inquiry, is not guaranteed as a basic right. This literature is then essentially related to a society that is not liberal.
Thus, "The exoteric teaching was needed for protecting philosophy. It was the armor in which philosophy had to appear." Strauss examines exoteric armor in thinkers such as Plato, Maimonides, and Machiavelli.
The exoteric-esoteric distinction isn't an intellectual fiction. As Shadia Drury (no Strauss enthusiast) notes about Maimonides in Leo Strauss and the American Right:
Strauss is quite right to point to the esoteric nature of Maimonides's writing. Maimonides himself calls attention to the secretive nature of his work. In the introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, he warns his readers that his book is filled with hints, equivocations, and even contradictions; he insists that nothing in it is haphazard, and all of his diction is chosen with "great exactness and exceeding precision."
In a modern context, a journalist in East Germany or Iran today might exoterically denounce certain Western music and movies with the esoteric intention of making their countrymen aware of and interested in this art.
Inherently unobjectionable, esotericism becomes nonsense when applied without evidence or credible inference. Consider this photo of Ryan and I at this year's Austrian Scholars Conference.
"Note McMaken's black jacket and Kantor's blue shirt," says the eager esotericist. "Exoterically they're reflecting clothing preferences, but esoterically they're promoting the 1976 Rolling Stones album Black and Blue!" (I was ignorant of the album at the time, so this quite creative claim wouldn't be persuasive.)
In his discussion of Strauss and esotericism, David Gordon quotes Murray Rothbard on Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli, which claims great significance in "Machiavelli's use of the number 26 or, more precisely, of 13 and multiples of 13":
…it is one thing to look for circumspection, and quite another to construct a veritable architectonic of myth and conjecture based on the assumption of Machiavelli as an omniscient Devil, writing on a dozen different levels of "hidden meaning." The Straussian ratiocination is generally so absurd as to be a kind of scholar's version of the Great Pyramid crackpots.
A related absurd conjecture is that the Westerns Ryan examines contain exoteric anti-business messages and esoteric anti-state messages. As he observes regarding the depiction of railroad companies:
Very rarely do the movies that feature greedy railroads ever contain anything about the government’s historical control of the venture…There’s nothing there with a libertarian, pro-business message. We’d just like to believe it’s there. Let's face it, both the text and subtext say that big businesses can't be trusted and they'll steal from you and ruin your life.
It's unpleasant to acknowledge that a dearly regarded work of art has lousy themes; the mind wants the text to accommodate its outlook. What entertains us, however, should not erode intellectual honesty.
November 1, 2005
