Tag: Friedrich Nietzsche

The slow cultural suicide of Europe

The Dutch ex-politician and right-wing intellectual Frits Bolkestein, no stranger to defying political taboos, published a remarkable article in the Wall Street Journal called “How Europe Lost Faith in Its Own Civilization.” He is not the first person to wonder how Europe lost confidence in its own civilization (“the noble Western traditions of self-assessment and self-criticism have often degraded into sentimental self-flagellation”) but then he draws attention to the possibility that one of the sources of this phenomenon may be found in Christianity itself:

“Whether we like it or not, our civilization remains deeply marked by Christianity. Consider the Gospel of Saint Matthew, which states that “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (23:12). Friedrich Nietzsche characterized this as “slave morality.” But one does not have to go that far to realize that this saying, along with instructions to “turn the other cheek” and “go the extra mile,” do not exactly prod people to stick up for their own.

Instead of suggesting that Europeans can prevent their “slow cultural suicide” by finding inspiration in Christianity, he advocates to “take pride in our classical values.” It is not every day that one can reject both multiculturalism and Christianity, quote Friedrich Nietzsche, and get published in one of America’s biggest newspapers.

What is not sufficiently made clear in Bolkestein’s article is that “our current masochism” is something that only really resonates with politicians, progressive intellectuals and conformist hipsters. It is not something that has caught on with the majority of the European people. As a matter of fact, multiculturalism needs continuous reinforcement and support by the State to sustain itself.

The philosopher Michael Levin has suggested that multiculturalism is not popular despite the fact that it contradicts common sense and empirical observation but because of it:

The theme uniting the tenets of conventional liberal wisdom is that they all run exactly counter to experience; I think they are arrived at from experience, via the assumption that experience always misleads.

Levin thinks that the common observation in science that things are often not what they appear is responsible for the tendency of progressives to embrace ideas that are the opposite what common sense would dictate.

Another explanation is that progressives prefer “unconstrained” visions of society. Thomas Sowell identifies the unconstrained vision as one that does not accept any limits to human malleability or the ability of experts to improve on “chaotic” decentralized processes such as free markets. Progressives are therefore quite hostile to claims that human nature or economic incentives are guaranteed to defeat their objectives.  Despite all the logical and empirical arguments against it, the progressive vision of man is one of a human being endowed with “free will” unconstrained by evolutionary traits.

The quest for a European political union and a single currency can be seen as the culmination of this view of society exacerbated by profound guilt over Nazism. As Simon Kuper wrote in a recent article in the Financial Times:

…there was never much economic logic behind the euro – certainly not a euro that includes everyone from Germany to Greece. Economics wasn’t what the currency was about. Rather, the euro is a war baby. It was created because Europe was struggling to get over the second world war…The general thinking was that a common currency would “bind in” a new Germany and somehow prevent Hitlerism…much of European life then was built on memories of war. Hardly any Europeans would vote for anti-immigrant parties, because look what Hitler had done…The European Central Bank, too, was a war baby. It inherited the Bundesbank’s obsession with inflation, traceable to the trauma of German hyperinflation of the 1920s that had helped create Nazism.

The advocates of an “integrated” Europe were not just content with abolishing nationalism and expressions of ethnic identity in their member countries, but also aimed to eliminate the recurrence of such ethnic politics by celebrating the changing ethnic composition of these nations. The ideology of multiculturalism was supposed to reconcile citizens with these events by presenting the demise of a dominant culture as a benefit.

One of the reasons why modern Western governments have become increasingly authoritarian again (suppression of free speech and free association) is because this project goes so firmly against what we understand about human nature and history that only coercion can secure its implementation – and even that may be temporary. Ironically, the consequences now seem to undermine the welfare state consensus in Europe (including Scandinavia) and trigger a renaissance of identity politics.

In hindsight it is striking how the objective of denazification was conceived as a defense of the welfare state and increased centralization; the socialism of the National Socialists was never identified as a great concern, nor the micro-management of people’s thinking, feeling, and behavior which has remained a constant elements of modern politics.

Jonathan Bowden’s Mad

From the publisher who brought us a new and expanded edition of L.A. Rollins’ excellent “The Myth of Natural Rights” comes  a rare little book by Jonathan Bowden called “Mad.” The book was originally published in 1989 but I have not been able to find much information about it. Before publication Nine-Banded Books announced it as a “Stirnerite belle letters.”

The logical positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach wrote in his seminal work “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy”:

“The philosopher…appears incapable of mastering his desire to know. Throughout the history of philosophy we find the philosophical mind associated with the imagination of the poet; where the philosopher asked, the poet answers.”

A brief glance at a random page of Bowden’s Mad will suffice to identify the phenomenon that Reichenbach is talking about. The author identifies a dazzling number of relations between historical, sociological, political,  and psychological phenomena without providing little epistemological clues about how he has established such wisdom. For example, we learn that “death is man’s cardinal reality: an act of danger, complete self-absorption, becoming, in the moment of transfiguration, complete self-negation.”………Right. Better to treat Mad as an powerful and imaginative  form of literature!

Art exists for its own sake, and rarely benefits from being analyzed. As Bowden states himself, “science and art are brought into conflict by those who have the interests of neither near to their hearts.”

So I will suffice with quoting a number of representative passages from Mad to give you a taste of the book:

“Those who don’t lie down and die soon discover that happiness and intellect are at opposite sides of the pole.”

“Life’s essential fragility is preserved with due regard for its importance. We know that we’re perched on a knife-edge  and the slightest oscillation kills us.”

“In essence life is conflict between those in control and those endeavoring to throw off control.”

And as the writer reminds us repeatedly, “sex is the mark of the beast married to the spirit of the divine.”

In what is my favorite passage of the book, the author’s knowledge of the history of human thought meets his bleak outlook on the human condition, culminating in the following deadpan, but dead-on statement:

“Prior to the establishment of a state, life is nasty, brutish and short. Nothing changes once a state’s created. Only the longevity of the participants alters. And even that’s arbitrary.”

There is structure to Bowden’s MADness. One detects an outlook on life  similar to thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Stirner and Ragnar Redbeard. It should not be completely surprising, then, that  Jonathan Bowden has become associated with the “New Right,” and less fortunate, petty party politics. Despite his interest in thinkers associated with esoteric Traditionalism such as Julius Evola, it seems that his elitist moment of distancing himself from mass politics still has to come.

Bowden’s H.P. Lovecraft: Aryan Mystic is a typical example of New Right writing. Bowden rightly identifies Lovecraft’s “mechanistic” and “ultra-conservative” outlook  on life but then drowns  the good man in the obligatory occultist purple prose. And that is unfortunate  because it is not hard to  picture a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and  distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism.  But as a book about Thinkers of the Right indicates, the Traditionalist Right is just not capable of “remaining true to the Earth,” as Nietzsche put it, and remains unified in its case against “materialism” and flirtations with mysticism.

In the same piece, Bowden draws attention to H.P. Lovecraft’s publication The Conservative. Despite the growing interest in Lovecraft’s writings, prevailing orthodoxy does not make it likely that someone will produce a complete and handsome  collection of this vehicle of Lovecraft’s most reactionary thoughts  anytime soon.

Nine-Banded Books, are you listening?!

John Rawls and the sin of merit

For those who have always suspected a strong religious undertone in the writings of John Rawls, the following piece by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel will come as a revelation. Reflecting on Rawls’s senior thesis “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community” they write:

…the moral and social convictions that the thesis expresses in religious form are related in complex and illuminating ways to the central ideas of Rawls’s later writings on moral and political theory.

Most illuminating is the continuity between Rawls’s older and later views on merit:

He sides with Augustine in denying that we can earn salvation by our own merit – by freely choosing virtue, or by works of any kind: “There is no merit before God. Nor should there be merit before Him. True community does not count the merits of its members. Merit is a concept rooted in sin, and well disposed of.

It should be no surprise then that some writers have identified Rawls as a cryptocalvinist:

My contention is that Rawls is not a philosopher, but a minister. Like his Calvinist forebears, he is trying to establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Unlike them, he doesn’t admit it….The great engineering problem of designing a system in which fallible humans can govern each other and get along simply does not exist in Rawls’ philosophy.

In another post the author proposes “the “ultracalvinist hypothesis”:

the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.

This perspective reflects a respectable Nietzschean tradition in which modern liberalism and socialism are not departures of religious thinking but the logical culmination of a religious / communitarian mindset. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this phenomenon is the highly puritan nature of contemporary “political correctness. “

John Rawls is often associated with rationalism but the concept of rationally in Rawls’s work is not that of the classical economist but that of the pre-Hobbesian moralist. His work offers little if any contribution to the scientific study of human nature or human interaction.

HT Marginal Revolution