Dramas of the Mind
2. NIETZSCHE: MORAL ENTROPY & THE EXTINCTION OF MAN
Of modern society's seminal critics,
Nietzsche may well turn out to be the most farsighted: the problems he
identified at the close of the 19th century are now truly acute and
pandemic, issues for everyone, issues that no one has really mastered.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Nietzsche posed an inspiration and a tribulation: the inspiration was
the vision of moral/cultural/spiritual evolution, the idea that it was
folly for presumptuous man to take himself as the terminus of all
previous history. Never has man been more uninspiring — "human all too
human" plumbs the pathos of the term for us, "human" now meaning nothing
more than fallible and pathetic. Where is the nobility, the
metaphysical uniqueness, the grandeur that the ancient Greeks and Jews
invested in man? Is it our inevitable fate to become pygmies, insects,
epigoni, ever-more diminishing mockeries of our ancestral aspirations?
Surely man was meant for
transcendence, argued Nietzsche, as everything in the transient world of
nature was meant to participate in a great dynamic order, species
sustaining themselves by one individual after another surpassing and
being surpassed? Nietzsche may have affected a revolutionary position,
but he was one of the most traditional thinkers recent philosophy has
managed to produce: a philhellene, crypto-Aritotelian, devout believer
in normative natural law. He still believes it is possible and necessary
for man to get beyond himself, to gain access to a perspective superior
to this mundane and trivial order: man is meant to be a bridge between
himself and an Uebermensch who fulfills and makes whole the
feeble promises implicit in man. And the tribulation Nietzsche observes
is man obstructing his own ultimate potential and responsibility, his
own exercise of the powers of self-overcoming: instead of advancing
toward that ideal, he hamstrings himself and makes of himself the
lowliest, the minimal thing he can be — an economic animal, a
conformist, a barbarian so obtuse that all the grand issues of Western
civilization fly right over his head.
To Nietzsche the chief fallacy of
modern thought and modern life is its absurd humanism, its attempt to
take man uncritically as an ultimate of some sort. For all his
antagonism to extant religion, Nietzsche is demonstrably a thinker who
takes the premises of religion, the trans-historical viewpoint (sub specie aeternitatis,
under the aspect of eternity) radically seriously. He also takes
historicism radically seriously: everything participates in the roiling
currents of history, everything is a child of its time, everything takes
its most profound orientations from its historical force — and whatever
is not advancing is regressing. In the world of nature and history,
there is no steady-state, there is only the dynamism of ascent toward
one's prime or decline into decadence.
However acrid his pessimism about
the real stature of modern society, Nietzsche takes the foundation of
19th-century optimism — the faith in historical progress — far more
seriously than his glib contemporaries do. Whatever does not advance the
cultivation of values, whatever is not dedicated to the improvement of
man's society and thinking, is pathological: life has no neutral corner.
Something vital in man and in society will atrophy if man reneges on
his metaphysical duty to enhance the quality of values, the amplitude of
good and evil of which man is capable. The very apathy of moderns about
philosophical and moral matters, their presumption that life can be
lived mechanically, instrumentally, perfunctorily, is evidence galore
that a sociopathic ideological regime has subverted the purpose of human
life and derailed the metaphysical design of evolution in general and
history in particular.
Modern Europe had forfeited its
claim to be the civilizational heir to Athens and Jerusalem. Modern life
had wandered into a vast miasmal swamp, a historical sinkhole of
amorality, barbarism, political and philosophical triviality. We are a
people becalmed, paralyzed, inert, impotent, sterile: at the heart of
the modern technological whirlwind is a stasis, a cultural standstill,
the nihilistic envelope of indifference about just the most essential
issues in human life — values, obligations, the cultivation of freedom
and seasoned intelligence.
At once both to ridicule the futile
and passionless personality this society has mass-produced and also to
warn of the very real dangers to the whole dynamic of history posed by
this self-centered creature — a consumer but no longer a producer of
values, culture, and ideas, "a reader" as Nietzsche so scathingly
describes him — Nietzsche gives this entropic mentality a name: the
"Last Man." The obligation to improve and sustain a world-order, to
nurture a culture to pass on to those who come after — this holiest of
human tasks is as nothing in the eyes of this egocentric slug. He lives
as he thinks, perfunctorily, just to get it over with: he is a dullard
on whom the privilege of being alive is just as wasted as is the
obligation of making oneself a thoughtful individual. "No shepherd and
one herd!" writes Nietzsche. "Everybody wants the same, everybody is the
same; whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse."
It is more than statistically
significant, therefore, when mediocrity becomes a mass-phenomenon. It is
an ideological eruption, the consolidation of a new personality-type —
what Philip Rieff has called "psychological man," successor to
medieval-religious man and ancient-political man — no longer possessed
of even an inkling of character, moral concerns, political commitments,
intellectual integrity, or the other earmarks of traditional
individuality. This is the New Streamlined Man, and in his perspective
all the traditional accoutrements of a fulfilled life (wisdom, piety,
purpose, conscience, and the like) are only complications and obstacles:
the New Man is a generic model, a creature so undeveloped and
simpleminded as to take the breath away from any lingering old-model
humans. It is for his sake that schools have been uniformly dummied
down, books mass-produced by unvarying formula, and indeed books
supplanted by far less taxing, far more passive visual media. It is to
his standards of uncritical intelligence that quickie political
commercials and impulse-ads are tailored. Get out of his way; he is the
Marching Morons, and he can't begin to understand any of the problems he
creates for other people and other nations.
"Live and let live"; "Judge not";
"Different strokes," and other appropriately simplified slogans
predigest for the Last Man the precepts of his religion, relativism. He
expects to be tolerated and he is tolerant, unless you happen not to
share his religion: if you live or think in such a way as to reflect ill
on the habits of others, if you think there is something objective
about better or worse, then you are dangerous indeed. So if you find the
tenets of his religion intellectually interesting, you'd better think
again: they were never meant to appeal to or serve the interests of
anyone who thinks. They are rationalizations against the very need for
thinking: they are facile presumptions designed to quell the possibility
of curiosity, inquiry, and discriminating judgement. They inoculate
minds against subtlety, against the comparison of values and the ranking
of values into a hierarchy; they militate against the very mode of
thinking we call philosophy — you might as well shit in such people's
midst as say anything serious — and most particularly, against any form
of protest against this ideological status quo.
These slogans can be understood
only in spite of themselves, because they mean to foreclose on the very
prospect of understanding. They are the heat-death of intellectual and
cultural life, the homogenization of the differences and conflicts that
have traditionally sparked individuals into thinking. Just that kind of
moral and political contest has forever been the lifeblood of healthy
societies:
"And you tell
me, friends, that there is no disputing of taste and tasting? But all of
life is a dispute over taste and tasting. Taste — that is at the same
time weight and scales and weigher; and woe unto all the living that
would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers!"
—(Kaufmann tr.)
The Last Man, however, is what humans
devolve into when they no longer care to endure the tensions of a
purposing life: they care more about their own psychological indulgences
than they do about the sublime structures of civilization. Hedonism,
utilitarianism, materialism — these are the historical earmarks of the
wholesale dissolution of will that we call decadence.
This is the whimper at the end of
an eon, or better yet, the sigh: the will declines into comfort, the
mind into a lukewarm bath of miasma. Moral and intellectual energy, the
movement of spirit, is spent at last; the values that shielded the
primal cultural urges from demoralization grow thin, errant, and senile.
At the end of its productive life, Western mind is defenseless against
the Slogan of all Slogans: Why Bother? — Why bother indeed? Why bother
oneself, when sloth pays instant rewards? Why carry forward the burdens
that dead people have passed on to us? Why live, why think, why assume
responsibilities, why reproduce?
To hear these questions is like
listening to an insane goddamned parrot: it is the mindless repetition
of the word "why?" in the mouth of a person who has no respect or
concern for the very meaning of why. "Why?" is not a serious
question here, it is only a shrug, an evasion, a dismissal: it is like
Pontius Pilate asking, "What is truth?" Why is defeated a priori, rendered futile by the very attitude that manipulates the term. Why
was meant to provoke some deepset train of motives and questions, to
animate and mobilize that organ the ancients thought was the very heart
of self-movement (anima-animus-psyche). Why is a goad to stir up the roiling stew of sediments, to stoke up fires in the smithy of our souls. Spirit to the Christians and Nous
to the Greeks was nothing if not a leavening and ferment, an
inflationary urgency in our souls. What can the language of these
ancient principles mean to moderns who have "procured abortions of the
spirit," as Kierkegaard put it? Far too many have made an unnatural
peace in the war that used to be their spirits: they have settled for a
scraggly, barren bit of land that will not support life. They have
settled. "...Not a few who wanted to drive out their devil have
themselves entered into swine," Nietzsche tartly remarked.
To the impervious and obtuse,
nothing matters: but precisely because they are obtuse, they project
blame for this indifference on everything but themselves. Nihilism
becomes a cosmic and metaphysical problem, anything other than the fault
of self-anesthetized personalities. The Last Man inverts and repels all
of the traditional characteristics by which human beings interpreted,
comprehended, and evaluated themselves: in him, will has no integrity,
no structure, no discipline; intellect has no coherence, no
independence, no focus; and conscience utterly capitulates to
circumstance and appetite. Modernism's legacy is a monstrous moral
illiteracy that prevents us entirely from understanding what values are
(in general or in particular) and why we need them; it has set in motion
a period of decivilization, and its citizens are so bereft of standards
as neither to understand nor care. In the Last Man's own
self-interpretation, he is victim pure and simple: literary anti-hero,
pathetic creature of circumstances he never willed, product of
socio-economic conditions, hapless hod carrier for his genes, a being
fallen even further below Adam's already fallen estate. This
thundershower of pathos is only the way he wants to see
himself, however; and if you agree with him however much, then you have
been suckered into playing on his terms. His rationalizations are
extremely contagious: they are sold as the wisdom of modernity to
freshmen in English, Philosophy, Sociology, and other university
courses.
The ploy of pathos is essential to
the syndrome: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky all perceived this,
independently of one another. The Last Man defends himself against the
residual counterexamples of traditional humans with cunning that is
close to genius: How can you criticize me, I'm so pathetic? And indeed
he is: by comparison with any other archetype of character, he is a
miserable wretch, a truly sorry specimen of human existence. But his
cunning is, to perceive that this amounts to a rhetorical and moral
advantage: he is pitiful indeed, because pity is his shield and his
permit for moral goldbricking. Man as pathos, as hapless victim of
forces he neither controls nor even understands — that is the
exculpatory banner behind which the Last Man advances, and advances, and
advances. He is free from criticism, free from the expectations of
others, one of life's insulted and injured: that is what you concede
when you pity him. In actual truth, pathos is here a contrived and
calculated posture, as much so as in The Threepenny Opera,
where rags, grime, limps, and boils are all so much dramaturgy,
unionized and standardized assaults upon the conscience and purse of
every passer-by.
The Last Man is master of only one
culture, and that is camouflage: he appears innocuous, well-meaning, and
hopeless. But his sincerity is able to be mobilized behind any sort of
rationalization, and en masse he is vicious, intolerant, and
unconscionable against any who try to prove alternative ways of life are
possible. There is a venom in his bite, a motive (as Nietzsche
perceived) of resentment against anything that reflects ill on his way
of unthinking. In the Last Man's licentious era, only one absolute sin
remains, and it provokes rabid reactions from all who have bought his
ideology: it is the sin of "elitism" — the need and demand that
occasional individuals will have for resources to feed their
independence.
You've given this creature your
educational institutions, your government, and very likely the key to
your conscience. He wants one thing more, the same thing all despots
want: it's not enough to have you in chains. He wants to see you kiss
them and thank him.
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