Costin Alamariu, the “Bronze Age Pervert”: Leo Strauss Remains a Fixture in the Tikvah Trumpist Dark Web Echo-Chamber
David Shasha
Costin Alamariu, the “Bronze Age Pervert”: Leo Strauss Remains a Fixture in the Tikvah Trumpist Dark Web Echo-Chamber
Tikvah Fund love of the New Fascism can be seen in Tikvah Tablet Trumpscum Jacob Siegel’s promotion of Nazi Curtis Yarvin and the “Intellectual Dark Web”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rWT3XkUp2GM/m/1e2zO0M0AQAJ
For those still not familiar with the vile Yarvin, this will bring you up to date:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/kZios09FInY/m/TSIkbnErCAAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/5VLMcOKBquA/m/NfF1agtzAAAJ
Siegel followed in the footsteps of Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf, who used her time at The New York Times very wisely, as can be seen in her pathbreaking article “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html
She has always been deep in the Fascist weeds!
I included her disgusting article in the following special newsletter, linking her intersectionally with her WOKE reactionary pals Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/K7Zs4QMWhck/m/__xpi9TCAQAJ
But it now seems that Yarvin is old news.
We have the New Fascist of the moment, Costin Alamariu:
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/2005/04/08/hypocrisy-academic-freedom/
Indeed, the earliest evidence I could find of Alamariu is that Columbia Spectator article against Academic Freedom, praising The David Project’s “Columbia Unbecoming”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GQ1T91xG72SCnuUwl7WQwGYGZk95Dg65zRphnSZxPWg/edit
Which of course links him right back to Weiss:
His Fascist Straussian manifesto Bronze Age Manifesto brought him to the attention of Trumpworld:
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/23/alt-right-book-trump-1472413
The complete article follows this note.
Naturally, the Fascist incoherence was noted by the Whore of Trump and her prize “thinker” Blake Smith:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/bronze-age-pervert-dissertation-leo-strauss
On the same day that the Tikvah Tablet article was posted, National Review did its duty as well:
But I did not learn of Alamariu until I received the following Substack post from New York Times columnist Damon Linker:
All three articles follow this note.
It is all founded on Strauss’ seminal article “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” which claims that religious philosophers like Maimonides were inveterate liars who hid their true thoughts from the public, while espousing an elitist Platonic ruling class:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_and_the_Art_of_Writing
For those who know Maimonides, all of this might be truly bizarre, but Strauss is less known as a scholar of the Greco-Arab philosophical tradition and its religious elements, and more as the leader of the contemporary Fascism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
Which has clearly had its impact on Trumpworld:
http://www.asjournal.org/65-2018/donald-trump-american-caesarism-and-the-legacy-of-leo-strauss/
For a traditional Sephardic understanding of Maimonides, I have prepared a special newsletter which provides some basic resources for the novice:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yKrFgzG88Zpe4b5YtIV96pSzwFf7jMl2R27Le7XFtio/edit
A more advanced study of Maimonidean Humanism can be found in Jose Faur’s Golden Doves with Silver Dots, which links the classical Sephardic heritage to Post-Modernism:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXQnNIeEJ3aGdSSjQ/view?ths=true
The Blake Smith and Damon Linker articles go very deep into the ancient Straussian weeds, but what does seem to be clear at this point is that the old-style Strasussians are being challenged by New Fascist Hipsters like Yarvin and Alamariu.
It is the New Platonism.
Read it all if you have the stomach, but be aware that, once again, The Tikvah Fund is at the very cutting edge of the New Fascism, as it posits itself at the very center of a movement that is intent on destroying American Democracy and Liberal values.
And that is what it means to be a Whore of Trump.
David Shasha
The alt-right manifesto that has Trumpworld talking
By: Ben Schreckinger
The most important political book of the past year just might be a grammatically challenged manifesto in favor of nude sunbathing written under the pen name Bronze Age Pervert.
Where Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” inspired generations of libertarians to enter politics, and Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” did the same for idealistic liberals, a cohort of young, right-wing men are today gravitating toward “Bronze Age Mindset.” The self-published book urges them to join the armed forces in preparation for the onset of military rule.
Since its publication in June 2018, the book has gained a following online, and its author, known to his fans as BAP for short, has come to the attention of notable figures on the Trumpist right. Earlier this month, the book was the subject of a 5,000-word review by Michael Anton, a conservative intellectual who served as a spokesman for Donald Trump’s National Security Council. Anton concludes by warning, “In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAP-ism is winning.”
Anton is just one of the Trump world figures who has taken notice. “It’s still a cult book,” said another former Trump White House official. “If you’re a young person, intelligent, adjacent in some way to the right, it’s very likely you would have heard of it.”
Right-wing agitator Mike Cernovich said he knows of young staffers in the White House who are fans of Bronze Age Pervert’s Twitter account — where the author posts photos of buff, shirtless men and promotes far-right positions on the culture war — though he does not know if they have read the book.
The 200-page book mixes Nietzschean philosophy with critiques of contemporary Western society, denigrating homosexuality, Judiasm, Islam, feminism and much else along the way. “Inside every noble Greek was an unquenchable lust for power,” is one fairly typical statement. “Modern world not bad just because modern,” is another, displaying the author’s habit of lapsing into broken English by dropping articles. The book claims that the leaders of the European Union have “tiny moleman eyes.” Many of its passages are profane and unprintable.
The book’s ascendance in online, far-right circles is indicative of the latest phase of the culture war that has fueled Trump’s presidency.
Most of the well-known figures associated with the alt-right or “alt-lite” — Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Richard Spencer — have been successfully demoralized, deplatformed or otherwise banished from the public square. But this has not eliminated the underlying source of their relevance: disaffected young men, mostly white, with internet access.
In large part, what’s left in the online spaces they inhabit are pseudonymous figures like Bronze Age Pervert, whose output tends to be more intellectualized, even esoteric.
While the loose alt-right network that became infamous in 2016 was filled with attention-seeking provocateurs who cheered on Trump’s rise, the new voices in this space are alienated and ambivalent about Trump. And far from being inspired by his signature call to “Make America Great Again,” their view of contemporary American society is decidedly dystopian.
Bronze Age Pervert is active on Twitter in a network of similar, pseudonymous accounts with names like Just Loki and 17thCenturyShytePost that revel in mythic, aristocratic pasts while trafficking in racism and anti-Semitism.
The memes — catchy ideas and images that are widely shared online — produced in such far-right internet circles, such as Pepe the Frog, regularly intrude on mainstream political discourse, sometimes even getting adopted by Trump himself. And the current fixations of these figures offer a glimpse of the concepts gaining traction there.
Figures in this space frequently refer to their belief that elite media is preparing Americans for a future in which their quality of life is greatly diminished and they are reduced to eating insects for protein.
“What is up with all these ‘we need to learn to eat cockroaches and maybe each other haha’ articles,” tweeted Just Loki on Wednesday, linking to a Newsweek article referencing cannibalism. “Perfect beer food—wash down your meal worms with a nice IPA!” tweeted17thCenturyShytePost sarcastically in response to another article about eating insects earlier this month.
And because this corner of the internet fixates on population genetics and has a high affinity for Slavic and northern European cultures, there is a fascination with the Udmurt people, a small ethnic group that lives mostly in Russia, and the fact that a high proportion of its members have red hair.
The accounts also oppose mass migration, echoing the themes of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory invoked by the gunman who perpetrated the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, and apparently again by the El Paso shooter. The idea, articulated in a 2011 book by the French writer Renaud Camus, claims that European elites are secretly conspiring to replace their countries’ white majorities with immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.
In his book, Bronze Age Pervert describes Western societies as ruled by “bug men” and “lords of lies,” urging readers to pursue a life of “sun and steel” — that is, tanning and weightlifting.
Across 77 chapters of cryptic musing, the book describes social justice as “disgusting parasitism,” opines that women who succeed in traditionally male domains are “spiritual lesbians,” and complains that the U.S. intelligence services employ too many Mormons.
Anton, in his review, earnestly reckons with the book’s critique of Charles Darwin and notes that at one point it cracked the top 150 bestsellers on Amazon. Anton writes that the book was given to him by Curtis Yarvin, an internet philosopher who writes under the name Mencius Moldbug, favors a return to monarchy and reportedly communicated with Steve Bannon through an intermediary while Bannon was in the White House.
After encountering the book’s intentional spelling and grammar mistakes, Anton gave up on it until former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie urged him to read it in its entirety. Beattie was fired from Trump’s White House last year after it was revealed he spoke at a 2016 conference attended by Peter Brimelow, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a white nationalist. Beattie, who denounced the firing as guilt-by-association, now works as a speechwriter for Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a close ally of Trump’s in the House.
Much like the Trump phenomenon itself, it can be difficult to tell where to place “Bronze Age Mindset” along the spectrum between elaborate joke and deadly serious. Reached via direct message on Twitter, Bronze Age Pervert, declined to discuss his real-world identity. In a rambling note, he said he was influenced by a book about homosexuality in the Nazi army and claimed, “I’m largely responsible for the Trump administration’s push for universal worldwide sodomy promotion,” an apparent reference to the administration’s campaign to abolish laws that criminalize homosexuality. (This appears to be a joke. A source close to the White House who is familiar with the initiative scoffed at the claim.)
Satirical nonsense aside, events such as recent mass shootings inspired by far right ideas, as well as acts of violence by believers in the fantastical QAnon conspiracy theory, underscore the gravity of this corner of internet culture.
“There’s a whole generation of younger guys who are reading this and buying into this, but there aren’t a lot of paths to channel that constructively,” said one organizer on the Trumpist right, who declined to be named in an article that contained the term “alt-right.”
“Insofar as people are worried about radicalization on the right towards violence, one of the things I worry about is this generation of younger guys are going to conclude there’s no space for them or their voice in the political process, and the only way they can express themselves is in these ugly, corrosive ways,” the organizer said. “In my opinion, the way to help these people is not to turn them 180 degrees, but to turn them 15 degrees.”
From Politico, August 23, 2019
Bronze Age Pervert’s Dissertation on Leo Strauss
By: Blake Smith
Whatever passes for conservative thought in the American academy usually passes through the influence of Leo Strauss. In his teaching, the political philosopher combined an outward respect for liberal democracy with concern that this regime neutralizes the higher types of human beings, those capable of free thinking. Strauss, however, developed his ideas in an elliptical fashion meant to evoke the kind of thought he held to be the privilege of this type.
Out of the Straussian fold sometimes emerge singular thinkers who galvanize public opinion. One was Strauss’ student Allan Bloom, who in the 1980s transformed himself from a translator of Plato into a bestselling culture warrior with his book The Closing of the American Mind. Its success proved the truth of the Straussian insight that texts address multiple audiences, and that their perceptive readers are a small minority.
On the surface, Bloom offered Reagan’s America a defense of the literary canon and old-fashioned morality against the “relativism” of the post-’60s left. But perspicacious readers—including Bloom’s former student, the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick—would notice he argued that the true pedagogue awakens intelligent young men to free thinking by inculcating contempt for democracy and mass culture, and that this awakening includes a (homo)erotic element. Closing of the American Mind was misrecognized by ordinary readers in something of the way that the Village People’s ode to gay cruising, “YMCA,” became the anthem of dorky straight people at sporting events. For all the absurdity of this situation, however, Bloom’s bestseller served a philosophical aim, directing a minority of readers to his studies of Plato’s Republic and Symposium, which are pinnacles of philosophical and political insight.
Bloom might have remained an isolated monument of reactionary homoeroticism, but our era has its own Closing of the American Mind and its own Bloom: Bronze Age Mindset and Costin Alamariu, who is widely understood to have been its author. Bronze Age Mindset, a campy, fascistic “exhortation” written half in internet slang, has by now been reviewed by every would-be intellectual trying to demonstrate his daring proximity to the limits of acceptable opinion. Alamariu, however, is no basement-dwelling “incel,” as some of his sneering critics would have it. He is an Ivy-educated political philosopher, trained in the Straussian tradition. His doctoral dissertation, The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in Plato and Nietzsche, deserves recognition as one of the most lucid reformulations Strauss’ teaching, and most bracing revivals of Bloom’s practice.
Alamariu lays out with great clarity what he takes to be Strauss’ views. Strauss, he argues, held that Plato took from Athens’ execution of Socrates the lesson that political life—perhaps particularly in a democracy—threatens philosophy, i.e., the free exercise of reason in search of truth. Because truly thinking people challenge convention, they appear wicked to their less-intelligent neighbors, who persecute them. A society, like that of classical Athens, in which public opinion finds ready expression in law, requires such thinkers to disguise themselves. To evade persecution, or perhaps even to rule the beguiled multitude, Plato secretly enjoined philosophers to wear a mask of virtue, conforming in appearance with—but quietly influencing—their neighbor’s beliefs.
Alamariu deserves credit for divining, and insisting upon, this aspect of Strauss’ thought—that Strauss was only a friend to our liberal democracy in an ironic, unstraightforward way, and that his praise or blame of our regime and its enemies must be interpreted with great hermeneutic finesse. Alamariu is a careful, thoughtful exegete—when it suits him to be. For this reason the superficial crudeness, even stupidity, of Bronze Age Mindset and Alamariu’s persona on Twitter (@bronzeagemantis), appear as a strategic dumbing-down of certain of the points made in his dissertation, as a tactic for generating interest in his work, or as a means of acting, in a peculiar fashion, on another, non-philosophical audience. In fact, his dissertation outlines, quite openly, the rationale for such an approach, which shows Alamariu to be a rogue disciple of Bloom.
Like many closeted gay men, and indeed many uncloseted ones, Bloom seems to have enjoyed little more than speculating on who else was secretly gay. As his friend Saul Bellow reports in Ravelstein, his novelized version of Bloom’s last days, the philosopher spent much of their conversations speculating about the sexuality of his students—and thus, potentially, their sexual availability. He had a passion for bringing young male minds to philosophy and young male bodies to his bed. Indeed, Closing of the American Mind and Bloom’s final essay in his less-read but far more brilliant Love and Friendship are semi-clandestine justifications for a postmodern version of the original “Socratic method” of combining erotic and intellectual approaches to pedagogy.
Recognizing kindred spirits was the core of Bloom’s pedagogy, and not only in the sexual sense. Bloom inherited from his mentor Leo Strauss a vision of teaching and writing that aimed at separating a handful of potential philosophers who could be awakened into original thinking from the vulgar mass of ordinary mortals. There was a gradation of human types, with people like themselves at the top; the primary purpose of education, as of eros, is of finding one’s type.
This was true not only in the libidinally charged space of the classroom, but also in the public sphere, where Bloom, through his bestselling Closing of the American Mind, could address two audiences. On the one hand were the conservative masses willing to pay for Bloom’s diatribes against the Rolling Stones, blue jeans, and oral sex, and his defense of traditional liberal arts education; on the other were the unbelieving few who, seeing through his moralizing bromides, could detect the transgressive sexual and intellectual exhortation at the heart of his teaching. The latter types would learn, ideally, not only this teaching, but how to conceal it from the former, following the political prudence inculcated by Strauss.
Bloom’s combination of culture-war sloganeering and philosophical eroticism, public success and private deviance, was unstable, even ridiculous, in his own work; since his death of AIDS in 1992 there has been no sequel to it among American Straussians. Following what seemed to be the message of Strauss’ famous 1941 essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” they have disguised themselves as—and, in the end, perhaps become—conventional conservatives and patriots. Alamariu’s dissertation advisor at Yale, Steven Smith, exemplifies the soporific dullness of this tradition.
At conservative gatherings I have twice struggled to remain awake through Smith’s presentations on the necessity of being moderately patriotic, loving America in a rational, genial fashion. Such sermons are not exactly wrong—it would be nice, after all, if we were more united with our fellow citizens in a not-too-energetic appreciation of our country. But they seem hopelessly ineffectual, unable to arouse conviction even in those, like me, who are sympathetic to their point. Indeed, they are not even able to convince other Straussians. In recent years, a set of wholly immoderate West Coast Straussians have convinced themselves that America needs a Trumpist revolution to reclaim “the republic” from the progressive-bureaucratic “regime,” election results notwithstanding. Divided between hapless moderates and unhinged reactionaries, the American Straussian project seems to be unraveling.
Strauss himself observed that his own “Platonic” approach to politics—of external caution and esoteric injunctions to inner nonconformity—had been powerfully critiqued by Friedrich Nietzsche a generation before him. Nietzsche, in Strauss’ account, noted that Plato’s followers had failed to preserve the independence either of their own thinking or of the Greek city-states. Both intellectual and political liberty were subsumed, eventually, in what Nietzsche regarded as the degenerate form of Platonism for the masses: Christianity.
A vulgarized Christian version of the Platonists’ own outward beliefs, made simple enough for ordinary people to understand—and with increasingly persecutory energy, to believe in and impose on others—may have first appeared to the philosophers as an instrument by which to govern. It became, in the end, an illusion in which they were ensnared. In Nietzsche’s telling, either the philosopher speaking to the public fails to capture its attention, and is thus unable to lead it, or, by lowering his own thought to the level of the herd, he does capture its attention—only to be captured by his audience in turn.
In contrast to Plato’s failed strategy of accommodation, Nietzsche implied that “free spirits” should adopt the pose not of the orator or preacher who address the multitude, but rather of the fool who scorns it. They should adopt wild, perverse rhetorical disguises to incite uncomprehending shock among the many—and thought among the few. The outlandish statements, self-contradictions, and incessant, boorish humor that Nietzsche used in his writing, Strauss insisted, conceal the depths of his thinking from all but the free spirits. Moreover, they are also intended to have an effect on a class of readers sensitive enough to be enlivened by such prose, but not insightful enough for philosophy. This intermediary human type was described by Strauss as the “gentlemen,” and by Alamariu as “aristocrats.”
Bronze Age Mindset, written in an internet pidgin reminiscent of the “Lolcats Bible,” uses the tactics of Nietzsche as described by Strauss. It is aimed—and has been quite successful at reaching—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.
Alamariu’s dissertation explains the rationale behind the strange, offensive style and content offered in Bronze Age Manifesto. In it, he elucidates Strauss’ interpretation of Nietzsche, and explains why he finds Nietzsche’s critique of Plato more convincing than Strauss’ own rearticulation of a Platonic, prudential politics. 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.
Alamariu continues his internal critique of Straussian tradition, and his frank assessment of its failures, by insisting that Bloom, in his attempts to seduce students and readers into the philosophical life, missed an essential point. The “type” of the philosopher, the person capable of freely thinking, is not one that randomly appears among a mass of duller fellows, to be separated from them by an attentive teacher. Rather, such 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, like Bloom, is frankly uninterested in women). 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.
This is a deeply disturbing vision. It is perhaps even more disturbing that Alamariu forces us to recall how little distance separates the teachings of Strauss—on which much of modern American conservative intellectual life is based—from outright totalitarianism. Indeed, Plato, the cornerstone of Western philosophy, has often appeared to readers as a guide to utterly illiberal government. Strauss and Bloom, and their wiser students, take up Plato, and Nietzsche’s critiques of Plato, in a spirit of prudence, distancing philosophical thought from political action. They want to protect American liberal democracy, seeing it as a decent enough regime within which free thinkers like themselves could, sheltered by discretion, pursue their own way of life.
Our regime needs protection, they sensed, from its most dangerous enemies—those who imagine themselves as exceptionally intelligent and worthy, and unfairly restrained by the rules and standards of ordinary people. This type, which rebels against the conformism and mediocrity of democratic life, has to be coaxed back into the fold of convention, or at least into an outward, ironic acceptance of public norms. Such people can be made safe for, and perhaps even useful to, democracy, on the condition that they be convinced that they are in fact superior to the rest of us—so dangerously superior that they cannot even make their superiority known. Strauss’ and Bloom’s analysis of human types, by these lights, is to be read not as the self-affirmation of a philosophical elite, but as a ploy by which readers who take themselves to be stifled by the democratic herd can be reconciled to our society. The real esoteric teaching would be that the very idea of an “esoteric teaching,” and of a philosophical few who alone can divine it, is not addressed to genuine free-thinkers but to the “gentlemen” who naively take themselves to be intellectual elites. These are the enemies of democracy.
If they are not read in such an ironic light, Strauss and Bloom appear only as hesitant, timid pseudo-aristocrats of spirit, who do not dare to defy the herdlike multitude of their inferiors. This is the position taken by Alamariu, who writes in Bronze Age Mindset, “I don’t do irony! Learn that I don’t understand the gay idea of ‘irony.’” 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.” He briefly notes, and rapidly dismisses, the critique of this ambition offered by Hannah Arendt, who had argued that the modern era differs from the classical in critical ways that make a revival of “tyranny” an absurd prospect.
In her analysis of the origin of totalitarianism, Arendt observed that modern dictators have little resemblance to ancient tyrants. If the latter possessed overweening ambition to demonstrate their excellence, the former are histrionic mediocrities pushed forward by the crowds they only imagine that they lead. The apparent weakness of modern democracies, whether in the early 20th century or our own day, does not create a situation ripe for the emergence of truly great men.
If the public sphere of ancient Athens could turn the potentially tyrannical he-man into a rent boy, just imagine what Twitter can do.
Arendt warned that the conditions that produced totalitarianism—which she argued threaten all modern societies—pose as much of an obstacle to the emergence of a true philosopher as they do to a true tyrant. In particular, mass media so warps our minds that we are becoming unable to think freely. Our most apparently private intellectual acts are shaped by our sense of how they will appear to other people. The latter are not, increasingly, specific others who might elicit, guide and refine our thinking, in the manner of Socrates, but anonymous, generic others. Life in this virtual multitude annihilates the possibility of either free thinking or political greatness.
Ironically, one of the critical passages in Alamariu’s dissertation concerns a moment in a Platonic dialogue when Socrates seems to best his interlocutor Callicles, whose views anticipate Alamariu’s own. Callicles calls for an aggressive, virile pursuit of open political power in the name of philosophical superiority. Socrates warns that such a course, in fact, will show Callicles to be the same type of person as an effeminate “catamite” who is guided only by his own pleasure.
Alamariu performs some awkward hermeneutic wrangling to argue that Callicles, “shamed” into silence by this comparison, should in fact be understood to represent what Plato took to be the better argument. This is just the point of view taken by another radical thinker inspired by Nietzsche, and usually identified with the left—Gilles Deleuze, in his 1962 Nietzsche and Philosophy. And indeed, the attacks that Deleuze and his co-author, Felix Guattari, would go on to make in such works as Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus against such supposedly “fascist” institutions as psychoanalysis, traditional party politics, conventional heterosexuality, etc., anticipate those made by Alamariu, our renegade Straussian fascist.
These readings that vindicate Callicles, whether from the “left” or the “right,” are a kind of covering one’s ears to Socrates’ warning that neither virility nor philosophy can avoid being corrupted if they display themselves openly—least of all, if Arendt is right, under modern social conditions and through contemporary social media. If the public sphere of ancient Athens could turn the potentially tyrannical he-man into a rent boy, just imagine what Twitter can do.
Socrates’ warning and Arendt’s pessimism are unlikely to bring sobriety to illiberals who dream of returning to a pre-modern age of tyranny and avowed hierarchies among human types, by which they imagine people like themselves will be placed at the top of a nakedly unequal society (as if our own hierarchies were not already brutal and obvious). But, for the remaining friends of liberal democracy, it may be at least a reminder that the problem is not, after all, one of finding the right message to inculcate our fellow citizens in civic virtue, to “deradicalize” them, or to awaken among them an enlightened few.
The problem, as Alamariu notes but cannot apply to his own case, is that the very conditions of possibility for thinking, alone and together, are being undermined—that whatever we attempt to express in public, whether intellect or eros or will to power, becomes an image of itself, in which we are narcissistically and fatally delighted. In our time, the social context for either of the Straussian solutions—rational collection action guided by political rhetoric or authentic private thought at a safe distance from public life—appears to be disappearing, if it is not already absent. In such an era, discursive games of seduction as practiced by Bloom and Alamariu may still be bring attention and profit to those who play them, but seem capable neither of defending nor truly endangering our decadent regime.
From Tablet magazine, February 14, 2023
Why Conservatives Must Reject the ‘Bronze Age Mindset’ — and Offer Something Better
By: Jack Butler
In the past few years, some people and institutions on the right have either fallen for or taken far too seriously the musings of a figure who goes by the online pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert.” His real name is Costin Alamariu, a Yale University political-science Ph.D. originally from Romania. In 2018, Alamariu compiled his musings into a lurid, deliberately ungrammatical, book-length “exhortation” called Bronze Age Mindset, which became an underground hit on the right. In 2019, Politico reported that it had some fans among young male staffers in the Trump administration. (Alamariu’s true popularity may be hard to discern, as he counsels fans to deny having read him, and to moderate their public views strategically.) He seems to be really into lifting (nothing wrong with that, even if I prefer running myself), and resents modern society for suppressing the authentic expression of masculine virtue (which, indeed, it does).
But there is far more to Alamariu’s worldview than just being pro-lifting and pro-masculinity. In a piece for the Daily Beast over the weekend, I outlined some of its unsavory details, as evidenced in Bronze Age Mindset and elsewhere. He has contempt for the American Founding, which he dismisses as “so much nonsense” that has “nothing to do” with America’s success. He is similarly disdainful of Christianity, which he thinks may have begun as the same faith that originated Buddhism, or perhaps Zoroastrianism, and whose central figures, such as Saint Augustine, were probably made up. As I elaborate in the piece:
He speculates that the New Testament was “written by a Jewish woman, as a parody of Greek tragedy,” and criticizes Christians (and Jews) for “suppressing the natural spirit of man.” The nicest thing he has to say about Christianity is that offending its believers is “stupid” when they have the same enemy.
To Alamariu, moreover, women are a malign force who “drain” men of their “vital essence” and are responsible for all the world’s ills over the past century; immigrants are “zombi hordes” and “sh**” from the “Turd World” ruining our cities and national parks; and rebreeding “the original Aryan race, or as close an approximation as possible, through some kind of a Platonic Lebensborn program” is a desirable fantasy.
At the root of Alamariu’s worldview is a dark vision of the future in which his followers, whom he describes as “superior specimens” in need of “space,” “wipe away” our “corrupt civilization,” and unleash their vengeance upon the “lower types of mankind,” or “humancockroach” who have repressed them. (The Bronze Age Mindset is defined as the desire “to be worshiped as a god!”) Alamariu describes his vision of “true justice” in this way:
the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds….four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns.
This godless, neopagan, will-to-power fantasia is not conservative. Which makes it unfortunate that people and institutions affiliated with the Claremont Institute, which has done much great work, have engaged with and elevated Alamariu’s worldview. It was a misguided attempt to channel this worldview into something more responsible that served instead to strengthen and popularize it. This misbegotten attempt at dialogue failed to realize that Alamariu’s right-wing nihilism — anti-religious, anti-Founding — exists in a kind of perverse symbiosis with the left-wing nihilism so regnant today that it ostensibly criticizes. We need something better than both.
To provide a superior alternative, however, one must admit that conservatism, as a whole, has seriously failed at doing so. The trouble that confronts us today is partially the result of conservatism’s failure since the Cold War’s end. The challenges we now face, in large part due to conservatism’s failures, include an emboldened Chinese Communist Party, the crisis of American masculinity, the weaponization of capital and technology against the Right, and an administrative state that brazenly violates the U.S. Constitution even while failing to perform core responsibilities.
So no, simply perpetuating conservatism as usual will not suffice. Conservatives need to do better, lest only voices such as Alamariu’s are seen as providing answers to our current ills, or lest conservatives be seen as defenders of a status quo we all know is seriously defective. As I write:
Alamariu should not be permitted—by default—to claim the moral high ground in his denunciations of modern nihilism and egalitarianism. The American Right must present a positive and distinctly American vision of a free and virtuous society that mollifies young right-wing discontent.
Even granting the highest possible charity to Alamariu’s nihilism, however, it could only ever critique. It cannot build. Apart from his worldview’s aforementioned defects, Alamariu advises his followers to reject the “Phariseeism” of virtue and to consider descending into “a floating world of complete vice.” He also downplays the importance of starting a family, doubting that such an act would “ever be enough” to meaningfully address our contemporary moral decay. To dismiss not just Christianity and the American Founding but also morality and family life is not to save our country, but to renounce our best chances for rehabilitating it, thereby ensuring its doom.
And to use very-real attacks on masculinity as an excuse to unbridle it completely instead of defending and channeling it properly is not to address the crisis of men, but to exacerbate it. That crisis will not be solved if more men reject family responsibilities and embrace vice. Strength and courage are necessary tools, but they must be directed by principles higher than mere violence, or base self-aggrandizement. Men should worship God, not themselves. Alamariu’s program is for debaucherous teenagers and those who still act like them. Not men.
This century’s challenges may exceed even those that last century’s conservatives confronted. To meet them, conservatives must not join Alamariu in rejecting the cross, the flag, and the family. But a halfhearted embrace of these causes won’t suffice either. Only a full-throated promulgation of these essential elements can ward off the Bronze Age temptation while also defending American liberty and prosperity from ever-more-clever aggressors, at home and abroad. To the extent conservatism has failed at this, it deserves condemnation; to the extent it continues to fail at this, it will face defeat, from one band of nihilists or the other. If we believe what we believe, and hold dear what we hold dear, we must only accept victory. This is the challenge conservatives and our allies face today. Let us face it with bravery — and without fear.
From National Review, February 14, 2023
Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole
By: Damon Linker
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.
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 19th 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.
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.”
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.
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.
From author Substack page, February 22, 2023