Chicken joke: Leo Strauss

27Jun09

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Leo Strauss: This is just another instance of the chaos wrought by modern man’s permissive egalitarianism. The ancients tell us that the road was made by and for free men, not for collectivized domestic fowl. Today we are faced with a tyranny of ‘technology’ and ‘the conquest of nature,’ in which the relentless tread of crossing chickens slowly and gently wears away the road of human freedom, reducing it to a trackless, value-free wasteland. These processes of gentle nihilism must remain, for all practical purposes, unintelligible to us if we do not have recourse to the political science of the classical philosophers.

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Tags: 20th century, conservatism, Leo Strauss, political scientists