The line leading from the lunatic anarchism of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman back to Friedrich Nietzsche led to me reading through some of him again, some of which I haven't looked at for decades. It also led me to consider how many of the various "leftists" of the past century* shared an admiration for Nietzsche's insane thinking with those on the right, up to and including Mussolini, Alfred Rosenberg and other fascists and Nazis. Clearly it isn't the logical coherence of his thinking that attracted them, nor is there anything logical in the range of his admirerers and users, any "feminist" who could think Nietzsche has anything good to offer to women probably hasn't read him, something that would seem to be common to many of today's lefty admirers of the barm pot.
I think the real motive for all of them was a hatred of Christianity, his declaration of the death of God and his rejection of morality - something that is congenial to a fascist or Nazi rightist but is certainly a fatal flaw in anyone's program for the left. It is certainly what motivated that Goldman rant about morality I linked to yesterday.
In thinking more about it, I think that the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche is far less a philosophy than it is a virology work up of a diseased mind and the spread of its pathology into other people and the general world. I would like to be able to study the idea more to see how far it holds that anyone promoted as being a figure of the left who builds on, depends on or holds up the writing of Nietzsche will turn out to have been and, so, can be expected to be a disaster for the real left. As a specimen, here's another passage from Beyond Good and Evil. Note this declaration, in particular. " Indeed, with the help of a religion which has humoured and flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this morality even in political and social arrangements: the DEMOCRATIC movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement. "
As noted here earlier this week, Habermas also noticed the geneology of democracy as a Christian heritage, though he sees democracy as a good thing. Not Nietzsche, though.
202. Let us at once say again what we have already said a hundred times, for people's ears nowadays are unwilling to hear such truths—OUR truths. We know well enough how offensive it sounds when any one plainly, and without metaphor, counts man among the animals, but it will be accounted to us almost a CRIME, that it is precisely in respect to men of "modern ideas" that we have constantly applied the terms "herd," "herd-instincts," and such like expressions. What avail is it? We cannot do otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new insight is. We have found that in all the principal moral judgments, Europe has become unanimous, including likewise the countries where European influence prevails in Europe people evidently KNOW what Socrates thought he did not know, and what the famous serpent of old once promised to teach—they "know" today what is good and evil. It must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear, when we always insist that that which here thinks it knows, that which here glorifies itself with praise and blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herding human animal, the instinct which has come and is ever coming more and more to the front, to preponderance and supremacy over other instincts, according to the increasing physiological approximation and resemblance of which it is the symptom. MORALITY IN EUROPE AT PRESENT IS HERDING-ANIMAL MORALITY, and therefore, as we understand the matter, only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, and after which many other moralities, and above all HIGHER moralities, are or should be possible. Against such a "possibility," against such a "should be," however, this morality defends itself with all its strength, it says obstinately and inexorably "I am morality itself and nothing else is morality!" Indeed, with the help of a religion which has humoured and flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this morality even in political and social arrangements: the DEMOCRATIC movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement. That its TEMPO, however, is much too slow and sleepy for the more impatient ones, for those who are sick and distracted by the herding-instinct, is indicated by the increasingly furious howling, and always less disguised teeth-gnashing of the anarchist dogs, who are now roving through the highways of European culture. Apparently in opposition to the peacefully industrious democrats and Revolution-ideologues, and still more so to the awkward philosophasters and fraternity-visionaries who call themselves Socialists and want a "free society," those are really at one with them all in their thorough and instinctive hostility to every form of society other than that of the AUTONOMOUS herd (to the extent even of repudiating the notions "master" and "servant"—ni dieu ni maitre, says a socialist formula); at one in their tenacious opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (this means ultimately opposition to EVERY right, for when all are equal, no one needs "rights" any longer); at one in their distrust of punitive justice (as though it were a violation of the weak, unfair to the NECESSARY consequences of all former society); but equally at one in their religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all that feels, lives, and suffers (down to the very animals, up even to "God"—the extravagance of "sympathy for God" belongs to a democratic age); altogether at one in the cry and impatience of their sympathy, in their deadly hatred of suffering generally, in their almost feminine incapacity for witnessing it or ALLOWING it; at one in their involuntary beglooming and heart-softening, under the spell of which Europe seems to be threatened with a new Buddhism; at one in their belief in the morality of MUTUAL sympathy, as though it were morality in itself, the climax, the ATTAINED climax of mankind, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the present, the great discharge from all the obligations of the past; altogether at one in their belief in the community as the DELIVERER, in the herd, and therefore in "themselves."
Any "anarchist" any alleged alternative to fascism, Nazism, laissez-faire capitalism, any alleged alternative to any system founded in grinding inequalty, who could take that as a serious diagnosis or prescription for society and progress is no real left, it's fascism with a few different dance steps. Any, good, upstanding academic who pretends it isn't a total disaster is a fool and a liar. Fascism is exciting and exhilarating for the predator, the few, the elite, the Supermen, and that is what modernism is all about, the excitement, titillation and pleasure of an elite few over the majority, it is anti-democratic no matter how many pledges of fidelity to democracy, Jefferson and even the tattered and upsupported safety net are made.
The intellectual class that has not entirely rejected Nietzschean ideas, the fascism that is their natural result, and tolerates them as respectable in the world of scholarship is a totally undependable source for a real, effective and potent left. Only a left that really, truly believes that egalitarian democracy is the only goal and its achievement is a moral obligation will work. Even Nietzsche would have seen the one we have today for the contented cattle in a feed lot of fascism that it is.
* As with the proto-Nazism of Ernst Haeckel (Stephen Jay Gould said it before I did) so too are the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche represented in the atheist-"leftist" tracts of the Little Blue Book series.
#11 A Guide to Nietzsche
#11 How To Understand the Philosophy of Nietzsche
#19 Nietzsche: Who He Was and What He Stood For
#19 The Story of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy
#890 Epigrams of Nietzsche
I've sort of developed the habit of checking out their publications list as well as the catalogue of its successor, the atheist version of Regnery publications, Prometheus, to see the extent to which materialists are comfortable with proto-fascist and even rather developed fascist ideas. Eugenics, another sure sign of an elitist "leftism" which will turn out to be more cosy with fascism than you'd like to imagine is another of those diagnostic markers to look for.
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