Matt Feeney has an
intelligent piece at Slate on the connections between Jared Lee Loughner and Nietzsche. As he says,
If we never discovered that Jared Lee Loughner honed his murderous outlook while sitting alone in his bedroom, reading Nietzsche and thinking about nihilism, that would have been real news.
Feeney goes on to explain why so many violent, alienated young men find Nietzsche appealing: his contempt for orthodox opinion, his dismissal of conventional sexual morality, his snide comments about women, his sense of himself as an ignored genius, and so on. But, as he notes, Nietzsche saw himself not as promoting of violent anarchy, but as offering the only possible way to avoid it:
One way of looking at Nietzsche's project is that he set out to teach himself and his readers to love the world in its imperfection and multiplicity, for itself. This is behind his assaults on religion, liberal idealism, and utilitarian systems of social organization. He saw these as different ways of effacing or annihilating the world as it is. It is behind his infamous doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence—in which he embraces the "most abysmal thought," that the given world, and not the idealizing stories we tell of it, is all there is, and he will affirm this reality even if it recurs eternally.
Jared Loughner's despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It's the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.
Nietzsche's own comment on his murderous followers might have been, "Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong."
6 comments:
Yeah well, this isn't the first apology for Nietzsche (he really wasn't a fascist! wasn't! wasn't!) that I've seen.
"Beyond Good & Evil" contains some pretty straightforward praise of barbarians for their violence and rules-ignoring. If such subtlety as the author's is required to see how this really doesn't promote violence, perhaps Nietzsche should take the blame for it anyway.
David
How is Nietzsche's praise of barbarians more culpable than the average textbook's praise of the Romans for conquering such a big empire? Or the lionizing of kings like Charlemagne, Edward I, and Louis XIV? Admiration for the violence of the established powers is pretty much built into the way we teach history, so I don't see why a little lionizing of anarchic rebellion is necessarily such a bad thing.
Do you blame the way we study World War II for the violence committed by people like Dick Cheney, which is a hundred thousand times greater than the violence committed by angry, lonely punks?
You seem upset. I know you like Nietzsche. But am I wrong? If you have to be so subtle and learned about the way you read a thinker on a particular point that keeps coming up, aren't you perhaps just trying to cover up something that's really there in him? It's like saying Freud didn't really mean "penis envy" when he said "penis envy," or that when the Quran talks about hot chicks in heaven, it really means white grapes in heaven.
You are exactly right that Nietzsche encourages the violence of lonely, angry young men. Of course he does.
But since the world is full of violence, almost any description of the world, or account of what moves history, or anthropology of male behavior, will contain violence that someone might take as a model for his own behavior.
An honest account of the Civil War would show that Confederates fought with great bravery and resourcefulness for their cause, which many of them saw as defending their homes and way of life against Yankee aggression. And no doubt this inspired many southerners to join the Klan.
Napoleon's reading of history convinced him that a man who believed enough in himself could carry millions of lesser men along behind him; that if he acted like he was a cause worth dying for, men would die for him. He was right. I have sometimes mused about writing an essay with a title something like "Megalomaniacs and the Sheep Who Follow Them," commenting on this phenomenon. If a future Napoleon read my essay and was confirmed by it in his belief that he was the man of destiny, for what would I be culpable?
Nietzsche looked at history and saw no sign of progress or justice; what he saw was an endless scurrying of weak-minded mammals occasionally redeemed by the great deeds of artists, heroes, or heroic civilizations. I see more in history than that, but I take his point. If one accepts that civilizations grow ossified and decadent and cease to produce new ideas, meanwhile grinding down the masses every more effectively -- and this was widely accepted in Nietzsche's time -- then why wouldn't one celebrate the barbarians who destroy the old way?
I have myself written that I can't read an account of a protocol-obsessed court, like that of 17th-century France or 19th-century China, where outsiders are always humiliated by their mistakes or done in by back-stairs whispering, without wishing that a barbarian horde would sweep them away.
Should the truth about history be a sort of esoteric truth reserved for people of approved sanity and non-violence? Ok, Nietzsche isn't exactly the truth; should any interpretation of history that emphasizes competition, violence, and the victory of the strong over the weak be kept quiet?
Nietzsche looked at the world from a perspective much like that of the disturbed young men who sometimes go crazy and kill people. But he was also very learned and astute. Should thinking about the world in this way be discouraged?
Who said anything about keeping Nietzsche quiet?
Things would have come to a pretty pass if we took Nietzsche off the public library shelves because he was too dangerous, but continued to purvey Glocks on demand.
Nietzsche evokes little sympathy in me, I admit. I see him as a typical nineteenth-century blusterer, the sort who makes that century one of my least favorite. Cf. your Mutter quote earlier. I speak, of course, in terms of taste rather than morals.
BTW, have you read Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier? It offers a fascinating alternative perspective on the men who followed Napoleon, one that makes his soldiers look more like those of the Seven Years War. Of course, the author was a German. I've seen it remarked that the really amazing thing about his armies was not his personal magnetism over them, but the way the training system could turn out disciplined and loyal troops quickly, even when he became bloated and unpopular.
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