WILLIAM E. CONNOLLYevade taxes, orphaned children to be placed under the care of incompetent adults, adult
citizens to be unemployed for too long, the gap between the real cost of living in a system
and the income-earning ability of most citizens to grow too large, the income hierarchy
to become too extreme, or narrow unitarians of whatever stripe to take charge of the
regime. Pluralists thus agree with Strauss that ‘‘absolute tolerance is altogether impossi-
ble,’’ even as we may set the limits in question at different points and places.
Moreover, a diverse culture is one in which pluralisticvirtuesof public accountability,
self-discipline, receptive listening, gritted-teeth tolerance of some things you hate, and a
commitment to justice are widespread. Pluralism, particularly of the multidimensional,
embedded variety supported here, requires a set of civic virtues to support itself.
But what is the ‘‘ground’’ or ‘‘basis’’ of pluralist virtues? Must it, at least, not come
from a single, universal source? And how authoritative or self-certain is that ground?
When Strauss alludes to the liberal’s ‘‘ferocious hatred of those who have stated most
clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature
of man and the nature of things,’’ it seems reasonable to assume that he endorses un-
changeable standards anchored in a single source. Perhaps he does. But he also says, in a
statement quoted earlier, that ‘‘Plato knew that most men read more with their ‘imagina-
tion’ than with open-minded care and are therefore much more benefited by salutary
myths than by the naked truth.’’ And several times Strauss says that he sometimes inserts
his own beliefs into the words of others rather than stating them directly. So it is at least
possible that, while Strauss thinks the untutored must be made to believe that there is an
eternal, undeniable basis of fixed virtue, he himself doubts that the source needed can
be demonstrated. If so, one way to protect this politically necessary but philosophically
unanchored idea would be to attack vociferously those who publicly call the weight of the
anchor into question. The virulence of Strauss’s attack on Havelock, then, might express
a desire to identify the single, universal basis of virtueora desire to veil his own skepticism
about the ability to provide the ground that civilization needs. It is hard to tell.
Let’s pursue this question a step further, turning to an essay in which Strauss engages
a great thinker of the past, an essay, therefore, less freighted with the political passions of
Strauss’s day. In the ‘‘Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,’’ Strauss explores the
relation between reason and religious tradition in Spinoza’s philosophy. Spinoza is pivotal
because he helped launch the modern idea that reason is sufficient to itself, that it need
not invoke an element of faith to support itself. After a rich account of responses by
Jewish intellectuals in Weimar Germany to Spinoza’s thought, Strauss turns to the funda-
mental issue dividing Jewish orthodoxy from Spinoza’s heterodox philosophy. With re-
spect to faith in ‘‘an omnipotent God whose will is unfathomable, whose ways are not
our ways, who has decided to dwell in the thick darkness,’’ Strauss says, ‘‘The orthodox
premise cannot be refuted by experience nor by recourse to the principle of contradiction.
An indirect proof of this is the fact that Spinoza and his like owed such success as they
had in their fight against orthodoxy to laughter and mockery.... One is tempted to say
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