Taking Nietzsche seriously

0:00:05 Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice
0:00:07 produced with Vox Creative.
0:00:12 Inez Bordeaux is a self-described hellraiser, and she became an activist after being caught
0:00:14 up in the criminal legal system.
0:00:19 When she couldn’t afford her bond and without a trial, Inez was sent to a St. Louis detention
0:00:24 facility known as the Workhouse, notorious for its poor living conditions.
0:00:29 Here how she and other advocates fought to shut it down, and one, on the first episode
0:00:32 of this special three-part series, Out Now.
0:00:36 Subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast.
0:00:39 This is an advertisement from BetterHelp.
0:00:43 Everyone knows therapy is great for solving problems, but turns out, therapy has some
0:00:49 issues of its own, finding the right therapist, fitting into their schedule, and of course,
0:00:50 the cost.
0:00:52 BetterHelp can help solve these problems.
0:00:57 It’s online, convenient, built around your schedule, and surprisingly affordable too.
0:01:01 Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat.
0:01:03 Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more.
0:01:07 That’s BetterHELP.com.
0:01:11 Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy has been a big influence in my life.
0:01:15 If you listen to the show, you already know that.
0:01:20 But the guy is full of contradictions, and he’s one of those rare philosophers whose
0:01:24 managed to cross over into popular culture.
0:01:37 That’s from Little Miss Sunshine, an Oscar-winning 2006 movie.
0:01:44 For a 19th-century German philosopher, that’s pretty mainstream.
0:01:52 And yet, when it comes to his actual philosophy, his ideas are hard to pin down.
0:01:58 He wrote in many different voices, and in many different, and often contradictory ways.
0:02:05 Nietzsche challenged readers to live heroically, to transcend the banalities of a sick, decadent
0:02:07 culture.
0:02:11 The irony, of course, is that he himself was very sick.
0:02:23 And at the end of his life, while staying in Italy, he suffered a full, mental breakdown.
0:02:25 He never recovered.
0:02:29 The contradictions pile up in Nietzsche’s work, too.
0:02:35 In books like Beyond Good and Evil, he tosses away most of traditional morality.
0:02:42 But he’s also trying to warn us about why this is such a catastrophe for civilization.
0:02:46 That has something to do with what he called “the death of God.”
0:02:49 And trust me, we’ll get into that later.
0:02:55 He’s notorious for the concept of the “Ubermensch,” or “superman.”
0:03:01 This is an idea that Nazis would later borrow to suit their own sordid political goals.
0:03:06 And while it’s never entirely clear what Nietzsche meant by that word, it’s obvious
0:03:12 it had nothing to do with antisemitism or eugenics.
0:03:14 So Nietzsche is a bit of a mystery.
0:03:19 But he is, without question, a radical and inspiring thinker.
0:03:25 Someone who anticipated some of our modern crises better than anyone else.
0:03:31 And yet, because of how he wrote, and often what he wrote, he can, in the hands of a certain
0:03:36 kind of reader, lead to some dark places.
0:03:42 But he remains an essential thinker for our time.
0:03:48 And it’s up to us to resolve the contradictions.
0:03:50 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:04:07 My guest today is Matt McManus.
0:04:11 He’s a lecturer at the University of Michigan, and he’s the editor of an essay collection
0:04:16 called Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction.
0:04:22 As McManus reads him, Nietzsche is a political thinker, and a right-wing one at that.
0:04:28 He says if we want to really understand Nietzsche, we’re going to have to grapple with that fact.
0:04:33 McManus thinks that Nietzsche is the ultimate reactionary, and in that respect, he thinks
0:04:36 that we can use Nietzsche to understand our politics today.
0:04:42 And so I wanted to talk to him about how this weird, brilliant, singular philosopher can
0:04:45 shed light, not just on the far right.
0:04:47 And on progressives too.
0:04:53 But in order to do that, we’re going to have to take Nietzsche seriously and confront what
0:05:02 he has to say, even when we don’t like what he’s saying.
0:05:04 Matt McManus, welcome to the show.
0:05:05 Yeah, thanks.
0:05:06 I’m looking forward to this.
0:05:09 I think a Nietzsche episode is long overdue for this show.
0:05:12 This one is tough for me, because I love Nietzsche.
0:05:16 I mean, he’s one of the great intellectual influences of my life.
0:05:22 And I continue to think he understood the crisis of modernity better and sooner than
0:05:23 anyone.
0:05:25 And yet there is this dark side to Nietzsche.
0:05:30 And if you take him too far, too seriously, it can lead to some pretty ugly places.
0:05:31 We’ll get into what I mean by that.
0:05:35 But I just wanted to kind of throw my cards on the table right at the start of this thing.
0:05:37 Oh, hey, listen, I love the guy also.
0:05:41 I mean, I sometimes get annoyed emails from people being like, why are you attacking such
0:05:42 a great thinker?
0:05:43 Or are you trying to cancel Nietzsche?
0:05:45 I’m not trying to cancel Nietzsche at all.
0:05:49 I started reading him when I must have been like 17 or 18 years old, I was raised from
0:05:51 a Catholic, going through the very cliched crisis.
0:05:55 And I just thought his work was electrifying, right, changed my life in a lot of ways.
0:05:57 I mean, come on, dude, that’s so cliche.
0:05:58 Oh, 100%.
0:06:03 Did Nietzsche cause the crisis or was the crisis well underway by the time you happened
0:06:04 upon him?
0:06:06 Oh, no, it was well underway at that point.
0:06:10 I mean, part of it was prompted by politics, because a lot of the Catholics that I knew
0:06:14 and grew up with were very conservative, quite a few of them were very homophobic, which
0:06:15 I didn’t like at all.
0:06:18 But, you know, part of it was just also metaphysical.
0:06:21 Like I started asking questions like, well, does God actually exist?
0:06:22 If God exists, you know, what form does he take?
0:06:24 If there is no God, what does that say?
0:06:27 And you know, I didn’t know shit about anything at that point.
0:06:31 So I just did the typical thing, which is go on the early internet.
0:06:34 You know, this is just around when we could be is coming up being like, who answers these
0:06:35 kinds of questions.
0:06:39 And they’re like, oh, there’s this guy, Nietzsche, a book called Beyond Good and Evil
0:06:40 and the Antichrist.
0:06:42 So I went out to the store.
0:06:44 The nice thing about Nietzsche, too, is because he’s so popular, you can get him at any bookstore,
0:06:45 right?
0:06:49 So I just picked up, I have the same copy actually, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols
0:06:50 and the Antichrist for Penguin.
0:06:52 And like you, it just rocked my world, right?
0:06:54 Like I’d never thought about things like that before.
0:06:58 I didn’t understand everything, you know, I was 18 years old, but there was this real
0:07:02 sense that there was something important going on that was opening my eyes to ways of looking
0:07:04 at things that I had never even considered before.
0:07:06 So I’m very grateful for that.
0:07:12 Like a lot of people, you would sometimes say these things about slaves and women and
0:07:16 lower cultures and your eyes just kind of drift over that and you don’t really pay too
0:07:17 much attention to it.
0:07:19 And you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that we do need to pay attention to
0:07:20 that kind of stuff.
0:07:22 So it’s been a learning process for me also.
0:07:23 Yeah.
0:07:24 That’s the thing about Nietzsche, right?
0:07:27 From page to page, you can swing from, oh my God, that’s the most brilliant insight
0:07:29 I’ve ever encountered.
0:07:31 And then on the next page, it’s like, ooh, yikes.
0:07:32 Yeah, exactly.
0:07:33 Did he really just say that?
0:07:38 And you’re like, I’m not really sure that I can get on board with that one.
0:07:39 Yeah.
0:07:44 You know, you, you edited this anthology of essays about Nietzsche and you’ve completed
0:07:47 a monograph that is at least partly about Nietzsche.
0:07:49 It’s a history of right wing thought generally.
0:07:50 He figures largely in it though.
0:07:54 I think actually he has four whole sections dedicated to him more than almost everybody
0:07:55 else.
0:07:56 So what’s the motivation there?
0:08:01 Why do you think we need to engage with someone like Nietzsche at this political moment?
0:08:03 Well, I think there are two reasons.
0:08:04 One good and one bad.
0:08:09 The good reason is like you, I think that Nietzsche offers a profound diagnosis of the
0:08:14 problems of modernity that anyone can profitably learn from, including wherever you stand on
0:08:15 the political spectrum.
0:08:18 And we can talk a lot about what I think Nietzsche offers as a kind of positive program
0:08:21 for progressive or liberal thinkers going forward.
0:08:26 But the bad reason is that for a long time it was expected that Nietzsche really just
0:08:27 didn’t even have a politics.
0:08:30 Or if he did, that it was a pretty minor aspect of his thinking.
0:08:34 What we’ve seen is of course that he does have a politics and it’s an extremely right
0:08:36 wing politics.
0:08:40 And understanding that not only helps us gain a better appreciation of his own thought,
0:08:44 but it allows us to see how it is that he’s influenced generations of right and hard right
0:08:46 thinkers, including many who are very active today.
0:08:47 Yeah.
0:08:51 You know, the idea that Nietzsche was anti political or apolitical was always so bizarre
0:08:52 to me.
0:08:53 I mean, it’s true.
0:08:58 He spends a lot of time fretting about culture, but for him, culture and politics are very
0:09:00 clearly bound up with one another.
0:09:05 And so his concerns about culture are very much tethered to his concerns about politics.
0:09:08 So you just simply can’t separate those things out.
0:09:12 My friend Hugo Drogon wrote a book called Nietzsche’s Great Politics.
0:09:16 And that’s actually a line that comes from Eke Homo, right, his autobiography, where
0:09:20 Nietzsche actually explicitly says, “It’s only with me that great politics will finally
0:09:24 enter into the world or will begin again,” sometimes it’s translated variably.
0:09:29 And by great politics, he means war that the earth has never seen before, quite prophetic
0:09:32 if you think that World War I and World War II were upcoming, right?
0:09:33 Oh, yeah.
0:09:36 And this isn’t something that he looks upon with exclusively terror, it’s something that
0:09:41 he’s really anticipating because it will provide a kind of edifying, a purifying function
0:09:42 over the face of the earth.
0:09:48 So it’s very hard once you recognize these statements to then go back and say, you know,
0:09:52 he was just a bohemian intellectual who was offering critiques of art or psychological
0:09:53 advice.
0:09:58 It may help to set the table a little bit for the rest of the conversation to just ask
0:10:03 you how people have interpreted Nietzsche over the years.
0:10:08 He wasn’t terribly well known when he was alive and writing, he died in 1900.
0:10:12 Then he ends up getting appropriated by the Nazis for sordid reasons that we don’t have
0:10:15 to get into here.
0:10:22 And then later in the 20th century, he becomes a kind of radical, proto-postmodern progressive
0:10:23 darling.
0:10:26 I mean, is it possible to give us some of the broad strokes here in terms of how he has
0:10:28 been read over the years?
0:10:31 Why has this guy had so many philosophical lives?
0:10:34 I think that there are a number of different things to be said about this.
0:10:39 Nietzsche early in his own career actually enjoyed tremendous academic prominence, something
0:10:42 that people don’t know, but as a philologist, right?
0:10:45 And super quickly, what’s philology for those of us who don’t know?
0:10:50 Generally the study of ancient languages, but really examining the roots of various words
0:10:52 and ancient languages.
0:10:57 And this of course contributes to Nietzsche’s early interest in things like Greek philosophy.
0:11:01 And people thought he was a wonder kid, somebody who was going to revolutionize the discipline
0:11:04 and great expectations were put on him.
0:11:08 And then he relates his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and pretty much the whole philological
0:11:11 community is like, what is this?
0:11:16 This is not philology, this isn’t quite philosophy, it’s not even art commentary, it’s just weird.
0:11:22 And his academic position pretty much craters at that point, undeservedly, because it’s
0:11:23 a minor masterpiece.
0:11:26 I think he wrote better books later on, but it’s a very interesting text.
0:11:29 Then he spends the rest of his life flirting with a bunch of different movements, won’t
0:11:31 get too much into them.
0:11:36 He’s only really gaining a little, tiny little bit of attention near the end of his life,
0:11:38 wearing an important correspondence.
0:11:42 He’s chatting with one of the first lecturers in Denmark who’s talking about Nietzsche’s
0:11:43 work.
0:11:47 It’s important because the lecturer says, “I think of your philosophy as a kind of aristocratic
0:11:48 radicalism.”
0:11:52 And Nietzsche says, “That’s exactly right, you know, that’s what I’m aiming for.”
0:11:56 And then of course, after Nietzsche collapsed into madness, he enjoyed this extraordinary
0:12:00 intellectual prominence, unfortunately, amongst a lot of the worst kinds of people, particularly
0:12:06 on the political right, where the Nazis appropriated him and almost transformed them into their
0:12:07 philosopher.
0:12:10 German imperialists did the same in the First World War, where they would hand out copies
0:12:13 of the Spokesarithorst or two German soldiers on the front.
0:12:18 So then after the First and Second World War, there was a real effort by people like Walter
0:12:21 Kaufman to rehabilitate him deservedly, right, for English-speaking audiences.
0:12:25 And we could just say just real quickly, Walter Kaufman is the sort of foremost translator
0:12:27 of Nietzsche for American audiences.
0:12:28 Absolutely.
0:12:32 I mean, if you’ve read a book by Nietzsche, odds are it’s the Kaufman translation.
0:12:33 And you know, he’s a great translator.
0:12:36 He also wrote a very good book on Nietzsche as a psychologist, but that’s kind of itself
0:12:41 telling because the way that Kaufman tried to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation amongst
0:12:47 the Anglosphere, especially, was by presenting him as a kind of bohemian existential psychologist
0:12:49 who more or less doesn’t have any bearing on politics at all.
0:12:53 And this was pretty effective in convincing people that they could read Nietzsche safely
0:12:58 while not having to align him with these far-right movements that he had once been so associated
0:12:59 with.
0:13:00 Yeah, he’s not fascist.
0:13:01 He’s just a little weird.
0:13:02 Yeah, exactly.
0:13:03 He’s a little cranky and eccentric around the edges, right?
0:13:08 Then starting, you know, in the 1950s and really climaxing in the ’60s and ’70s, he’s
0:13:14 appropriated by generations of French intellectuals, mostly leftists, who find all kinds of interesting
0:13:15 stuff to do with his work.
0:13:20 So much so that by the 1970s, you even find people like Michel Foucault just saying, “I
0:13:24 am a Nietzschean,” right, with a hundred different qualifications to that, of course.
0:13:28 But this led to the kind of presupposition, even amongst conservative thinkers, that Nietzsche
0:13:34 was fundamentally a kind of bohemian, liberal, maybe even radical intellectual.
0:13:38 And now, we’ve kind of come full circle since a new generation of right and far-right thinkers
0:13:43 have really rediscovered him and reinterpreted him, I think, more appropriately as a right-wing
0:13:44 thinker.
0:13:47 His politics are not Foucault’s politics, and they’re definitely not Kaufman’s kind
0:13:49 of soft psychologism.
0:13:53 He is very committed to aristocratic radicalism and is a pretty nasty thing, especially if
0:13:56 you hold to liberal and progressive views like I do.
0:13:58 So let’s get into the ideas.
0:14:04 As you point out, Nietzsche is one of those rare philosophers who has managed to enter
0:14:08 into the pop cultural imagination.
0:14:14 That’s partly why so many people have opinions about him, despite having never read him.
0:14:22 And the thing I hear the most about Nietzsche is he’s the guy who was a nihilist who gleefully
0:14:25 pronounced that God is dead.
0:14:27 That trope triggers the hell out of me.
0:14:35 I don’t know about you, Matt, but we should clear this up right now, because I think understanding
0:14:39 this part of his thought, what he actually meant here, is really essential to making
0:14:42 sense of everything else that comes out of his mouth later.
0:14:47 So what did Nietzsche mean by God is dead?
0:14:52 One thing that it doesn’t mean is that Nietzsche is there to kill God or offer a scholastic
0:14:56 rebuttal of conventional proofs for God’s existence.
0:15:01 What’s important when he says God is dead and we have killed him is that Nietzsche is describing
0:15:06 something that has already occurred, even if people aren’t really acknowledging it,
0:15:09 or more importantly, even if they’re not prepared to deal with the implications of what it is
0:15:10 that they’ve done.
0:15:15 So the crisis that he’s talking about is really the crisis in European Christianity that he
0:15:21 sees as emerging in the middle of the 19th century when the natural sciences, which themselves
0:15:26 were an offspring of the Christian worldview, basically killed their father and established
0:15:29 a new secular view of the universe.
0:15:33 But he is very concerned that it’s going to generate many new kinds of outlooks and
0:15:37 new kinds of approaches to the world, many of which are going to be sick, unhealthy,
0:15:42 and lead people to be profoundly either unhappy or potentially even worse, to seek happiness
0:15:44 in the most crass, venal places.
0:15:49 I mean, that’s sort of what’s so ironic here.
0:15:53 When Nietzsche is talking about the death of God, it’s really a lamentation.
0:15:57 He’s saying like, “Yo, yo, people, do you see what we’ve done here?
0:16:00 Do you understand the crisis this is going to unleash?
0:16:05 We are absolutely not prepared for what is about to happen, or for what has already happened,
0:16:06 actually.
0:16:10 It’s so different from this notion that he was sort of dancing on God’s grave.”
0:16:12 Oh, absolutely.
0:16:15 One of the things that I find frustrating about, say the Richard Dawkins types, Richard
0:16:19 Dawkins famously had a bus that would go around the UK.
0:16:23 London’s iconic red buses will soon display the message that God does not exist.
0:16:29 The plan is to have 30 buses carrying signs that say, “There’s probably no God, now stop
0:16:31 worrying and enjoy your life.”
0:16:35 The campaign has the support of prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins.
0:16:40 It’s funny, and it gets people to talk about it, it gets people to think.
0:16:41 I don’t even like it’s up.
0:16:47 That’s a very crude, simplistic, almost banal atheism, because it almost tries to ignore
0:16:51 religion and the history of religion and the way that it contributed to our very basic
0:16:55 moral values and say, “Now that we don’t believe in God, we’ll just carry on like everything
0:16:58 was going on before, we’ll just take this little bit out of that.”
0:17:02 Whatever you can say about Nietzsche and his approach to Christianity, he took it extremely
0:17:03 seriously.
0:17:04 He did not ignore religion.
0:17:09 If anything, he was trying to develop what you might call an active atheism, or even an
0:17:10 active anti-theism.
0:17:15 There are some remarkable things that come out of his work from that, but it’s really
0:17:20 a testament to his creativity and honesty that he took this kind of issue as seriously
0:17:24 as he did and really dedicated his life to trying to solve the problems that he thought
0:17:28 were thrown up from this, even if I think most of his solutions were quite repellent.
0:17:35 Yeah, he has this startling line, and like so many of his lines, it packs so much into
0:17:37 a few words.
0:17:43 He writes, “Ever since Copernicus, man has been rolling away from the center toward X.”
0:17:49 It’s getting at this idea that humanity’s self-understanding of its place in the cosmos,
0:17:56 our understanding of our own creaturely significance, that starts to melt away with Copernicus when
0:17:59 we realize we’re actually not the center of things, and then it finally gets extinguished
0:18:06 by Darwin when we realize, “Oh, we’re just a random product of blind impersonal forces,”
0:18:10 and that is a gigantic event in human history.
0:18:11 Absolutely, right?
0:18:16 It implies fundamentally that there’s nothing all that significant about human life, and
0:18:20 that consequently any kind of meaning we attribute to it has to be ours for the making.
0:18:26 But I think it’s also just important to stress that even his approach to antitheism was extraordinarily
0:18:31 creative and innovative, and has been of great influence even to theologians going forward.
0:18:36 For instance, it can be very tempting to see natural science as kind of the antithesis
0:18:38 of Christianity.
0:18:42 What’s remarkable about Nietzsche is he says that, actually, modern science has its basis
0:18:47 in this Christian ethic that you must always search after the truth, and you must be relentlessly
0:18:51 honest in that pursuit, which could also trace back to Plato, for example, and he says this
0:18:55 led to a lethal situation where in one of his most striking comments he says, “One day
0:19:00 Christians were compelled to ask the horrifying question, which is to ask the question against
0:19:02 themselves, right?
0:19:07 Is the Christian ethic about truth that I buy into itself true?”
0:19:10 And that’s where all the kind of problems start to begin, because this is where you
0:19:15 start to see the scientific method that emerges from this Christian outlook turn inwards.
0:19:20 I don’t know whether this is entirely true as a kind of unpacking of the basis of modern
0:19:26 science and its association with antitheism, but it’s a really striking, creative claim.
0:19:30 And again, very contrary to cruder atheists like Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who just
0:19:34 say science emerged, had nothing to do with religion, and then destroyed religion, we
0:19:35 don’t need it anymore.
0:19:41 So if God is dead wasn’t a celebration and it wasn’t, Nietzsche wasn’t a champion of
0:19:42 nihilism.
0:19:44 He was diagnosing it.
0:19:50 So in terms of the story we want to tell here about his legacy, why was the death of God
0:19:54 such a cataclysmic political event for him?
0:19:57 Why did he think we really need to grapple with this?
0:20:04 Well, this brings us to the roots of his aristocratic radicalism, and it’s a very complicated question.
0:20:07 So I’ll try to unpack it as simply as I can.
0:20:13 He believes that ultimately the basis of most conventionally egalitarian systems, including
0:20:18 liberalism, democracy, and socialism, ultimately is this Christian ethic, right?
0:20:21 Think about Thomas Jefferson saying all men are created equal.
0:20:24 I didn’t really believe that obviously because he had slaves, right, but still a very inspiring
0:20:25 statement.
0:20:31 Nietzsche says at its root, this comes from the lie, he calls it, of the quality of souls
0:20:36 that you find in Christianity, because according to the Christian outlook, all human beings
0:20:41 are sinners, all of us are finite, and all of us are equally loved and equally responsible
0:20:42 before the throne of God.
0:20:46 Once you take that away, what you find is something that looks a lot more like a kind
0:20:50 of socially Darwinian universe, where Nietzsche says, “Of course there are fundamental
0:20:55 inequalities between people, just like there are certain kinds of fundamental inequalities
0:20:56 between animals.
0:21:00 There are some animals that are brought into the world destined to die because they’re
0:21:03 too sick and they’re not going to be able to survive.”
0:21:05 And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that.
0:21:08 It’s just a kind of natural fact that we need to learn to accept.
0:21:11 And this is, again, what’s eventually going to lead to his convictions about aristocratic
0:21:15 radicalism, which he sees as the necessary substitute for Christian egalitarianism.
0:21:24 Right, so it’s this idea that our whole notion of absolute moral truth was tethered to God.
0:21:29 So the real problem wasn’t that everyone is now suddenly on the road to atheism.
0:21:35 The problem for him is that we are still clinging to these absolute values about good and evil
0:21:40 about, as you were saying, the fundamental equality of human beings.
0:21:45 But the foundations for these original claims had dropped out beneath us.
0:21:49 Once you take God away, the notion that human life has any kind of dignity or any kind of
0:21:52 intrinsic value at all vanishes with it.
0:21:56 And Nietzsche is very critical of people, let’s say Emmanuel Kant, who think that you
0:22:00 can somehow secularize a notion of dignity and say that each individual life has an intrinsic
0:22:03 worth even if we don’t necessarily buy into God.
0:22:08 And he thinks this is why Kant, for example, needs to bring God back in even after his critical
0:22:12 thought had destroyed the possibility of proving God’s existence, because it’s so important
0:22:13 morally.
0:22:18 And again, he says, once you deny the idea that life has any intrinsic value, let alone
0:22:22 that each person’s life is of equal value relative to everyone’s else’s, there’s much
0:22:30 more competitive, diverse, and quite frankly, brutal world where you have to will value
0:22:33 to your life into being through your own efforts.
0:22:39 And it is worth saying that the claim here wasn’t that there could be no morality or
0:22:41 truth without God.
0:22:46 He’s saying the moral order that shaped our civilization, that had collapsed.
0:22:49 And that was a political crisis as much as anything else.
0:22:55 And this is so important for Nietzsche, partly because he thinks it reopens this question
0:22:58 of what humanity actually is.
0:23:02 And he’s trying to force this confrontation with this crisis.
0:23:09 And given how the 20th century unfolded, it is unnerving to revisit some of his predictions
0:23:13 about, you know, quote, wars to determine the future of mankind, right?
0:23:17 Like the destruction of established religion for him wasn’t the end of religion.
0:23:19 This is the beginning of nihilism, right?
0:23:23 Nihilism was what happens when our, to use his language, our highest values lose their
0:23:25 value, lose their ground.
0:23:28 And that sort of sets us adrift in this moral abyss.
0:23:30 It’s quite startling.
0:23:34 He does predict a lot of things that have a very clear coincidence with different subgroups
0:23:36 and subcultures that we see each day.
0:23:39 So for instance, he says, one of the things that I’m concerned with is that people are
0:23:43 going to give into a kind of passive nihilism where they’re going to assume there’s really
0:23:44 no point to my life.
0:23:48 So the only thing that’s worth pursuing is a kind of hedonic pleasure.
0:23:52 And so they’re going to dedicate themselves to drugs and alcohol and opiates to dull the
0:23:55 pain of not having any kind of meaning to their life.
0:23:59 And Nietzsche is very contemptuous of this in a way that I think is deeply unfair.
0:24:03 Another kind of nihilism that he thinks is going to emerge very interesting is the strong
0:24:06 commitment to scientific realism.
0:24:10 Because he says, what you see when people describe themselves as realist is a rearticulation
0:24:14 of the idea that knowledge has some kind of worth for its own sake.
0:24:18 And the fact that I have a lot of knowledge and see the world the way that it is without
0:24:22 judging it, without evaluating it gives me a kind of purity.
0:24:26 But the other more important predictions he makes is that there will actually be very
0:24:30 active kinds of nihilism or active responses to nihilism that will emerge.
0:24:34 Some of these more active forms of nihilism will be people who just enjoy destruction
0:24:38 for its own sake, want to take revenge against the world on the basis of their feelings of
0:24:40 profound resentment and alienation.
0:24:44 Other groups, he thinks, will be unwilling to accept the full implication of the death
0:24:45 of God.
0:24:49 And what’s going to be interesting about them is he says they will try to produce utopias
0:24:54 on Earth that essentially they’ll say, we no longer have a kind of heaven that will guarantee
0:24:59 us bliss in the future, but we are still committed to this Christian ethic of everyone achieving
0:25:04 redemption and happiness, but we need to achieve it in the world here and now.
0:25:08 In one of his most remarkable formulations, he says, the truest forms of Christianity
0:25:12 that are available right now are liberalism, utilitarianism, democracy, and especially
0:25:15 socialism, because all of these people are committed to this idea that we can carry on
0:25:22 Christian morality, but we’re just going to try to achieve a more happy, equal, dignified
0:25:24 society in this life now.
0:25:27 And he thinks again that that’s contemptuous, because it’s not fully dealing with the implications
0:25:29 of the death of God.
0:25:40 And you want to smash it.
0:25:43 Human beings seem naturally inclined toward religion.
0:25:49 So what happens to our religious impulses after the death of God?
0:26:02 That’s coming up after a short break.
0:26:05 Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile.
0:26:10 This summer could be the summer you start cutting down those steep monthly expenses.
0:26:13 That workout app you never used, gone.
0:26:18 That streaming service that only offers movies with subtitles, lose it.
0:26:20 In that phone bill, you think you’re stuck with?
0:26:24 Well, it might be time to check out Mint Mobile.
0:26:28 By switching to Mint Mobile, you can get three months of premium wireless service for just
0:26:30 15 bucks a month.
0:26:34 All of their phone plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered
0:26:37 on the nation’s largest 5G network.
0:26:41 You also don’t need to worry about getting a new phone or phone number.
0:26:43 Just port those over to your new Mint plan.
0:26:47 To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just
0:26:52 15 bucks a month, you can go to mintmobile.com/grayarea.
0:26:54 That’s mintmobile.com/grayarea.
0:27:00 You can cut your wireless bill to just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/grayarea.
0:27:05 $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 per month.
0:27:08 New customers on first three-month plan only.
0:27:11 Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan.
0:27:14 Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply.
0:27:19 See Mint Mobile for details.
0:27:21 Support for the gray area comes from Burrow.
0:27:24 Ah, it’s almost here.
0:27:25 Summer.
0:27:29 Or in case you’re tuning in from the southern hemisphere, ah, it’s almost here.
0:27:30 Winter.
0:27:32 I’m currently in the northern hemisphere.
0:27:38 The Gulf Coast, to be exact, which means it’s basically already summer here.
0:27:42 Which means I get to do one of my favorite things in the world, which is run on the beach
0:27:44 every day.
0:27:47 But you know what else is great to do all year round?
0:27:48 Sitting.
0:27:51 You can always find time to make butt meet cushion.
0:27:52 Relax a bit.
0:27:57 Which is the perfect state to be in to take full advantage of Burrow’s Memorial Day sale.
0:28:00 You can save up to 30% off on seating.
0:28:04 You can also save up to 25% off Burrow’s two outdoor collections.
0:28:08 Which feature the same easy assembly, durable construction, and timeless design of their
0:28:10 indoor furniture.
0:28:11 And good news.
0:28:14 You can also save up to 60% on Burrow’s bedroom collection.
0:28:19 They’ve got solid hardwood bed frames, cooling mattresses, and modular dressers.
0:28:21 You know, bedroom stuff.
0:28:26 You can check out Burrow’s Memorial Day sale and all their furniture at burrow.com/box
0:28:28 and get 15% off when you do.
0:28:30 That’s burrow.com/box.
0:28:32 For 15% off, you’re Burrow Purchase.
0:28:39 Burrow.com/box.
0:28:42 Support for the gray area comes from Shopify.
0:28:46 If people don’t buy anything from your business, your business won’t be a business for very
0:28:47 long.
0:28:50 There are a ton of different ways to connect with customers, but only one that combines
0:28:55 point of sale management with the tools you need to grow your operation.
0:28:58 If that sounds appealing, you might want to try Shopify.
0:29:02 Shopify is a global commerce platform that can help your business grow, no matter what
0:29:03 stage you’re at.
0:29:08 The platform makes it easier than ever to sell everywhere, combining a class-leading
0:29:12 e-commerce platform with an adaptable in-person point of sale system.
0:29:17 According to Shopify, they can help convert more browsers into buyers with a checkout
0:29:21 process that performs 36% better than comparable commerce platforms.
0:29:26 You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/box.
0:29:31 You can go to Shopify.com/box now to grow your business, no matter what stage you’re
0:29:32 at.
0:29:34 Shopify.com/box.
0:29:52 You know, I always read Nietzsche as saying there’s going to be a vacuum in the wake of
0:29:55 this enlightenment destruction of God.
0:29:57 And something’s going to fill it.
0:30:01 And what’s going to fill it is political religions, for lack of a better phrase, like
0:30:06 nationalism or communism or fascism, right, like that these isms would become the new
0:30:09 anchors of identity.
0:30:12 And human beings are deeply religious by nature.
0:30:15 And that doesn’t mean we’re conventionally religious.
0:30:21 I think what he meant was that human beings have a thirst for absolutes.
0:30:22 We want to be certain.
0:30:26 We want a horizon and a story that secures it for us.
0:30:32 We want capital T truth, and whether it’s God or political ideologies, we’re going to
0:30:36 glom on to whatever provides us with this horizon of meaning, whatever gives us this
0:30:41 way to interpret events and validate action and all that kind of thing.
0:30:46 That is partly why he was anticipating that there’s going to be a new kind of ideological
0:30:52 metaphysical conflict in the 20th century, and it is a direct result of this destruction.
0:30:56 I think Nietzsche himself had complicated feelings about this as he did about everything.
0:31:00 At points in his writing, he does seem to be attracted to this kind of aesthetic idea
0:31:05 of being a philosopher, right, somebody who apprehends the world the way that it is without
0:31:09 illusions, without faith, without any kind of ulterior convictions being brought to bear
0:31:10 on it.
0:31:14 But more often than not, I think you’re absolutely right that he says human beings actually cannot
0:31:15 live like that, right?
0:31:18 We cannot live according to this aesthetic outlook.
0:31:25 We need to put our faith in something, and Nietzsche himself was one of the great secular
0:31:26 myth makers of all time.
0:31:31 I mean, his chief work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” is essentially a prophesizing of the appearance
0:31:36 of the Superman or the overman who’s going to redeem the history of humankind because
0:31:40 when he arrives, he’s going to build great projects that will provide a sense of meaning
0:31:43 and vindication to human life.
0:31:46 So he set himself a task in some ways that no one could possibly achieve.
0:31:52 He wanted simultaneously to be honest enough to reject any potential myth making that wasn’t
0:31:57 firmly grounded in reality, while at the same time being sufficiently honest to recognize
0:32:00 that no human being, including himself, could possibly live with that.
0:32:05 A lot of the interesting dynamics of his texts come from the clash between these competing
0:32:07 impulses, I think.
0:32:09 You use the term “Ubermensch,” right?
0:32:14 The Superman, I think this is another term that people know, and they probably know it
0:32:18 came from Nietzsche, but they may not know what he actually meant by that.
0:32:19 What was the “Ubermensch” for him?
0:32:22 I’m not sure he knew what the “Ubermensch” was for him.
0:32:27 At points, he suggests, “I am not an “Ubermensch,” and any “Ubermensch” is going to be necessarily
0:32:30 stronger than me, so he’s not going to look like what I project onto him because he’s
0:32:33 going to will his own identity into being.”
0:32:37 But at other points, he has a kind of formula for the “Ubermensch,” and this is actually
0:32:41 something that goes back to his early work on the birth of tragedy, where one of the things
0:32:46 that he points out is that with the elevation of the Christian egalitarian ethic, you see
0:32:52 the diminuation of heroic values of the sort that you saw in Homeric poems, where if you
0:32:58 think about somebody like Achilles, Achilles doesn’t feel guilt over the massacres that
0:32:59 he conducts.
0:33:03 If anything, he sees his capacity to inflict violence as a testament to his strength and
0:33:06 as a sign that he’s going to achieve immortality.
0:33:11 And Nietzsche really admires this to a certain extent, where he says, “There is a vital,
0:33:17 powerful, proud individual who doesn’t allow the mass who looks upon him as a frightening
0:33:20 figure to diminish his near-divinity.”
0:33:24 At the same time, Nietzsche also points out, Achilles is kind of a dumbass, is the only
0:33:25 way to describe it.
0:33:30 He has two modes of apprehension, either “come at me, bro,” or “I’m the biggest and the
0:33:35 strongest and you’re all going to bow before me,” and he does at points say that one of
0:33:39 the things that Christianity accomplished was a deepening of the human soul through the
0:33:43 inventions of things like guilt, through the invention of something like conscience.
0:33:48 Even though this had the effect of undermining these kind of vital, heroic characteristics,
0:33:51 he still wants to keep a little bit of that in his new Ebermensch.
0:33:54 One of the descriptions he gives of him is he would be a kind of Caesar with the soul
0:33:58 of Christ, which is a remarkably paradoxical formulation.
0:34:00 But I think you can kind of get the idea, right?
0:34:05 It’s somebody who’s going to be thoughtful and reflective about the world in a way that
0:34:08 somebody like Achilles just never is, but he’s still going to embody these kinds of
0:34:11 heroic, confident characteristics.
0:34:17 And a lot of people have tried to pinpoint somebody who seems to match this configuration,
0:34:20 but I don’t think that anybody who would have emerged in the 20th century quite met it to
0:34:21 his satisfaction.
0:34:25 So they’re not all the people like Hitler who claimed to be a figure like this.
0:34:31 One of the most, I think, beautiful accounts of Christ, actually, is in Nietzsche’s book,
0:34:32 The Antichrist.
0:34:34 He has this kind of begrudging respect for Christ.
0:34:35 Oh, yeah.
0:34:39 There’s this figure who established this kind of new moral universe, right?
0:34:42 That is a supreme act of creation.
0:34:44 And that is something he admires as much as anything.
0:34:49 Nietzsche often thought that having a great opponent who was worthy of you would, of course,
0:34:50 compel you to become stronger.
0:34:54 And it’s very clear in The Antichrist, his best book on the subject that Christ was
0:34:56 the one opponent he thought was worthy of him.
0:35:00 Sometimes Socrates also gets thrown in there, but by his very late life, he was even signing
0:35:01 his letters.
0:35:02 The Antichrist.
0:35:05 And he’s as big a maniacal as you can possibly get, right?
0:35:09 But I think that you’re absolutely right, that he sees Christ as doing something that
0:35:14 is genuinely awe-inspiring, which is to create a world historical faith that injures over
0:35:16 the course of 2,000 years.
0:35:20 One of the reasons he says Christ was able to do that, of course, is because Jesus was
0:35:26 willing to commit a supreme act of sacrifice in order to live according to his value system.
0:35:29 He died on the cross for humanity, right?
0:35:33 Compared to him, most other Christians are kind of pale imitation, since how many Christians
0:35:37 you know who would actually be willing to lay down their life for another, the way that
0:35:38 Jesus calls upon them to do.
0:35:42 Yeah, he says that there was but one Christian and he died on the cross.
0:35:43 Exactly, right?
0:35:48 I sometimes think it’s a shame in an ulterior universe, Nietzsche actually reads Soren Kierkegaard,
0:35:52 who was planning on reading before he fell into madness, because Kierkegaard himself
0:35:56 had very similar views of Christianity near the end of his life.
0:35:59 He would point out things like, listen, there’s a fundamental difference between Christianity
0:36:04 and Christendom, this kind of conservative nationalist outlook that reduces religion
0:36:08 down to being essentially a social glue that allows people to live more easily.
0:36:13 I think Nietzsche would have found a kind of kinship with this view.
0:36:18 I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, and that is really his hatred for
0:36:26 democracy and his contempt for egalitarianism in your essay in that anthology on Nietzsche.
0:36:32 You say that we really ought to understand him as, now I’m quoting you, the most profound
0:36:37 and dark defender of hierarchical reaction in the modern era.
0:36:41 What makes him both profound and dark from your point of view?
0:36:44 First off, I just want to say that I think that Nietzsche is the greatest reactionary
0:36:48 thinker of all time, maybe rivaled only by Dostoevsky.
0:36:53 But what’s interesting about Nietzsche is, and Lesardo points this out in his book, earlier
0:36:58 Kinds of Conservatives, we’re really committed to this idea that what we need in order to
0:37:03 support a hierarchical worldview is more religion because religion serves as a kind of social
0:37:07 conservative glue that also sublimates human hierarchies in important ways.
0:37:11 So you see people like Joseph de Maistre, for instance, characterizing the French Revolution
0:37:14 as a fundamentally satanic enterprise.
0:37:17 It’s actually the term he uses in his considerations on France.
0:37:18 Nietzsche has no truck with that.
0:37:22 Nietzsche says, actually, and this is what’s remarkable, the French revolutionaries were
0:37:25 absolutely Christian in their orientation.
0:37:29 If anything, they took Christianity far more seriously because they really believe in human
0:37:33 equality, human dignity, and human freedom for the herd.
0:37:38 Whereas these kind of crass social conservatives who think that you can use Christianity just
0:37:41 aren’t brave enough to interrogate their own worldviews sufficiently.
0:37:42 And Nietzsche is.
0:37:47 And he says, at the root of the French Revolution, socialism, liberalism, and democracy is this
0:37:52 Christian idea that all human souls are equal and that we should try to create a humane,
0:37:57 beatific world where the criteria of justice is how well is your society doing for the
0:37:59 least among us?
0:38:01 And he says, I reject that emphatically.
0:38:05 So we need to get rid of all these secular forms of Christianity, particularly socialism,
0:38:08 but liberalism and democracy also need to go hard.
0:38:13 And we need to replace it with this system of aristocratic radicalism that is deeply
0:38:15 committed to inequality at its very core.
0:38:21 Yeah, I mean, this is something you see really throughout Nietzsche’s writing this deep fear
0:38:25 of the leveling power of mass culture.
0:38:30 And he’s always trying to protect the free creative individual against to use his language,
0:38:33 which you just used as well, the herd.
0:38:35 And we shouldn’t dance around this part of it, right?
0:38:36 Oh, no.
0:38:43 He pretty clearly thinks that the average person cannot face up to reality isn’t up for the
0:38:46 challenge of creating themselves, right, in the wake of God’s death.
0:38:53 And the average person, for that reason, prefers to make a virtue of ignorance and self-fulfillment.
0:38:58 And that’s all he sees when he looks at democracy, this triumph of the least creative.
0:39:00 Absolutely, right?
0:39:05 He thinks that what you’re going to see in a democratic society, let alone a liberal or
0:39:12 socialist society, is a leveling of all higher values and a reduction of all human beings
0:39:15 to the most animalistic level, where the kind of politics that people will be concerned
0:39:20 about is how do we redistribute food to the poor more effectively?
0:39:23 How do we show greater compassion to human weakness and disability?
0:39:27 You know, he would look at the kind of woke activists that people like Jordan Peterson
0:39:32 hate so much and say, “These are the most Christian individuals in society right now,
0:39:36 way more Christian in many respects than the social conservatives who claim allegiance
0:39:40 to this faith because they really believe in placating human weakness.”
0:39:41 He doesn’t want any of that.
0:39:47 What he wants, again, is an aristocratic, radical society where the lower orders can
0:39:48 be used even as slaves.
0:39:52 And he’s not afraid of that term for the projects of these truly great individuals.
0:39:58 And the reason for this is he thinks that some people are just herds, right, animals.
0:40:00 They don’t really contribute that much to life.
0:40:03 They’re going to go about their merry loy and if you give them too much power, they’re
0:40:05 going to drag the truly great amongst us down.
0:40:11 So why not reduce them to the level of slavery and allow the great individuals out there,
0:40:16 the Napoleons or whatever, to get on with the project of producing genuinely edifying
0:40:17 enterprises in human life?
0:40:22 Look, human beings are not all the exact same.
0:40:25 There are differences between individuals.
0:40:26 Anyone can observe that.
0:40:29 It is the epitome of non-controversial.
0:40:34 Some people are stronger, faster, smarter, better looking, but plenty of thinkers have
0:40:41 made that same, banal observation and still supported egalitarianism and liberal democracy.
0:40:46 So despite our differences, maybe all humans are equal on some deep metaphysical level
0:40:48 or moral level or whatever you prefer.
0:40:53 Does Nietzsche actually give an argument for why he doesn’t think that’s true?
0:40:57 Well, I don’t think that he actually provides a lot of arguments for this.
0:41:03 Now to be fair to him, he does point out that a lot of egalitarians just treat the equality
0:41:05 of souls as an axiomatic truth, right?
0:41:09 It’s just something that’s obvious and that we start our moral musings from.
0:41:11 And I don’t know that that is true.
0:41:15 I think that you need to develop a theory of equality that defends it comprehensively
0:41:18 from a philosophical or theological perspective.
0:41:22 And many of us don’t bother to do that, and we should.
0:41:26 On his front though, arguing that there is a fundamental inequality of the souls, I don’t
0:41:29 think he ever really provides compelling arguments for that.
0:41:33 And I’m not sure that he’s really confident about that either precisely because he keeps
0:41:36 flipping through the deck, if you want to call it that, looking for the kind of right
0:41:39 argument that will knock down prove his point.
0:41:43 So sometimes he’ll say things like, “Look, what I mean by an inequality of the souls,
0:41:47 it’s just the kind of Darwinian inequality that you see in nature where, yeah, the lambs
0:41:52 look upon the eagles and they think that eagle is a really monstrous figure because it is
0:41:54 strong and it is dangerous.”
0:41:56 And Nietzsche says, “No, you know, the bird is just hungry.
0:41:58 It probably doesn’t even think about the lambs.
0:42:02 It just looks upon them as a kind of tasty snack and almost has a bit of love for them
0:42:03 in that respect.”
0:42:07 Now, I don’t think that that’s all that convincing, and not least of which because from a purely
0:42:10 Darwinian standpoint, cockroaches are the most evolved species, right?
0:42:12 Because they’ll fucking survive anything.
0:42:15 And I don’t think that Nietzsche is saying, “Be more like the cockroach,” right?
0:42:17 That is the more evolved sensibility.
0:42:21 Out of the points, he tends to align it with a kind of health, psychological health or
0:42:23 even physical health.
0:42:27 He says, “Look, just like there are healthier bodies and stronger bodies, so too are there
0:42:29 healthier and stronger minds.”
0:42:33 He never really provides that much of a template for this, but there’s a kind of, I know it
0:42:35 when I see it, mentality.
0:42:40 And again, I’m just not really sure that I buy this idea that people who are psychologically
0:42:45 more healthy are necessarily better than others.
0:42:48 I’m not even sure how one would actually define that, especially because a lot of great people,
0:42:51 including Nietzsche, seem psychologically very fucking unhealthy.
0:42:53 Let’s put it that way, right?
0:42:58 If anything, their deep deficiencies as individuals and their profound anxieties seems to be a
0:43:01 catalyst for them engaging in these grand enterprises.
0:43:03 Again, is that self-evident?
0:43:04 I don’t think so.
0:43:05 I agree.
0:43:07 But it’s a remarkably creative kind of interpretation.
0:43:12 And I think that what’s important about this is it does put pressure, theoretical pressure,
0:43:17 on people like myself who are democratic socialists to defend equality on a more theoretically
0:43:22 sophisticated basis, rather than just treating it as axiomatically obvious that either people
0:43:25 are equal or that everybody is going to accept that people are equal.
0:43:37 What would you say is the defining belief of the political right?
0:43:41 Is it a defensive tradition, a devotion to the past?
0:43:54 Matt’s going to tell us what he thinks after one last quick break.
0:44:00 Now our change honors LM Montgomery, along with Anne of Green Gables, the ambitious and
0:44:05 inquisitive orphan every generation has embraced as its own.
0:44:12 These special edition $1 circulation coins celebrate a timeless storyteller and story,
0:44:18 the power of imagination and the place that Montgomery’s PEI holds in our hearts.
0:44:23 Find the LM Montgomery $1 coin today.
0:44:27 Once you’re listening to this news podcast, consider that McDonald’s now has a small
0:44:32 premium roast coffee for only $1 plus tax every day.
0:44:35 So technically, this is news too.
0:44:41 $1 small premium roast coffee every single day must be McCafe, plus tax at participating
0:44:47 restaurants in Canada prices exclude delivery.
0:44:49 Welcome to BMO ETFs.
0:44:51 Where do you get your insights?
0:44:54 Volatility has continued to be a hot topic.
0:44:58 I think the Fed does have other cards to play.
0:45:00 Are these mega cap tech companies here to stay?
0:45:04 Never before has there been a better time to be an ETF investor.
0:45:11 BMO ETFs presents Views from the Desk, a show all about markets and investing with ETFs.
0:45:13 New episodes every Thursday morning.
0:45:36 We tend to think of the political right as being mostly about this devotion to tradition
0:45:43 or to gradual change, but you say, “No, it’s really much more about a defense of hierarchical
0:45:45 organization.”
0:45:50 Why is that an important distinction for you to make, especially today?
0:45:55 Well, the political right has never actually been that committed to maintaining tradition.
0:45:59 The way I define the political right is in terms of its commitments to inequality.
0:46:03 I think that FAHA is absolutely right that to be on the political right means that you
0:46:07 believe there are demonstrably superior people in society and they are entitled to higher
0:46:10 status, higher political influence, and more wealth if you’re kind of crude.
0:46:15 Ever since liberal and egalitarian movements have gained hegemony over much of the world,
0:46:19 the effort has always been to try to push back against them, which is necessarily going
0:46:22 to entail transformative change of a certain type.
0:46:26 This is true of even people who will label themselves traditionalists of a certain sort.
0:46:29 Think about somebody like Ronald Reagan in this country.
0:46:33 Ronald Reagan instituted some of the most profound transformations in the United States
0:46:34 since FDR.
0:46:38 Now, I think Reagan changed the country very much for the worse, and it’s worth noting
0:46:41 that in the so-called land of the free that he constantly talked about, there were more
0:46:46 people in jail in the USA by 1991 than there were in the Soviet Union, the so-called evil
0:46:47 empire.
0:46:49 Or even think about somebody like Margit Thatcher.
0:46:53 Margit Thatcher presented herself as a conservative and enacted a revolutionary set of changes
0:46:58 that were consciously intended to profoundly reformat British society.
0:47:03 Even these traditionalist figures are not comfortable with retaining forms of egalitarian
0:47:08 institutions that they don’t want, and they are very happy to reconstruct them or even
0:47:12 get rid of them, if that’s what’s necessary, even if they’ve been around for decades.
0:47:16 Really telling example of this also is William Buckley, I’m sure you know Buckley, right?
0:47:17 Sure.
0:47:21 The founder of the National Review, a very famous American conservative writer, thinker,
0:47:22 pundit.
0:47:26 He used to go on campus tours, and a bunch of know-it-all professors and eggheads like
0:47:30 me would sometimes sit there and be like, “You know, Buckley, you’re all about conserving
0:47:34 and preserving and tradition and all that stuff, but what about FDR’s welfare state?
0:47:37 Isn’t that part of the American consensus, and shouldn’t you be committed to conserving
0:47:38 that?”
0:47:42 And every single time they said that, he laughed in their face, saying, “I am not interested
0:47:44 in conserving that at all.
0:47:48 We have to get rid of it, and if that means big transformations, then so be it,” right?
0:47:53 So the way that this aligns with Nietzsche is that he is very much in keeping with this
0:47:56 attitude towards change that you see on the part of the political right, but he wants
0:48:00 to go further than any of them are usually willing to go.
0:48:04 For many on the political right, the ambition is to kind of turn back the clock on liberal
0:48:11 secularism and move back to this more Christian-model hierarchical complementarity, where there
0:48:16 will be social stratification, it’ll be justified according to a religious basis, and we’ll
0:48:17 all get along.
0:48:22 Nietzsche says, “Actually, the problem is that Christianity is at the base of all these
0:48:24 egalitarian movements.
0:48:29 Any kind of religion that emerges will probably also have the same propensities inherent within
0:48:30 it.”
0:48:33 So what we need to do is actually commit ourselves to a kind of militant secularism, because
0:48:37 it only wants to become militant secularists that we can realize that Darwin is right,
0:48:40 that there are fundamental inequalities between people, and that those should be reflected
0:48:41 in society.
0:48:44 This is a really huge point.
0:48:48 Most of the conservatives drawn to Nietzsche over the years don’t really want to face up
0:48:51 to his challenge, right?
0:48:57 They may hate progressivism, and they want to reinforce Christianity as a moral and
0:49:02 civilizational anchor, but Nietzsche’s whole point is that it doesn’t work like that.
0:49:07 If you’re a conservative who hates progressivism, you have to realize that the progressive movement
0:49:11 for more egalitarianism grew out of Christian soil.
0:49:15 It is a secular extension of Christian morality.
0:49:19 Nietzsche is at least consistent in his contempt for that, but a lot of conservatives aren’t,
0:49:21 so they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too.
0:49:22 Oh, absolutely.
0:49:23 Right?
0:49:24 I’ll give two examples.
0:49:27 Nietzsche would look at people like, say, Jordan Peterson and Dinesh D’Souza, both claim
0:49:32 to like Nietzsche and also want to defend christian civilization, and he’d say, “You people may
0:49:36 claim to believe in the christian god, but you certainly don’t like his message at all.
0:49:39 You want to reject his message as emphatically as you possibly can.
0:49:44 By contrast, all those woke secularists that you constantly rail against might not even
0:49:48 believe in the christian god anymore, but boy, oh boy, do they love his message.”
0:49:51 They absolutely agree, as Franz Fanon once put it, that the wretched of the earth have
0:49:55 god on their side in one day triumph, and should triumph, right?
0:49:59 So think about Dinesh D’Souza’s recent book, United States of Socialism.
0:50:03 He is very contemptuous of people like Bernie Sanders for undermining a kind of religious
0:50:07 conviction that he thinks is essential to holding the United States together, but at
0:50:12 the same time, he will directly appeal to Nietzsche to criticize things like the Scandinavian
0:50:17 social democracies by saying, even if a kind of social democracy could work as it seems
0:50:19 to there, why would we want to do that?
0:50:23 That’s a society, he says, of last men and the way that Nietzsche describes, where they
0:50:25 are concerned for the least amongst them.
0:50:27 They don’t commit themselves to any kind of great projects.
0:50:28 I want none of that.
0:50:32 And this remarkable tension is never reconciled in his book.
0:50:37 Jordan Peterson is even worse in a lot of senses, where on the one hand, he will sit
0:50:41 there and constantly appeal to Nietzsche, describing how this death of God has led to
0:50:45 the birth of all kinds of secular totalitarian ideologies like communism or Marxism, while
0:50:50 never taking on board Nietzsche’s fundamental point that communism isn’t antithetical to
0:50:52 Christianity.
0:50:53 Communism was Christianity.
0:50:57 It’s the herd gaining control of the house and doing what they are inevitably going to
0:50:59 do, which is lovely.
0:51:03 It does feel like you sort of make a plea to the left.
0:51:10 The left, certainly in this country, has a kind of reflexive discomfort with religion,
0:51:11 certainly in the American tradition.
0:51:16 But part of what you’re saying here and certainly part of what Nietzsche would say is that,
0:51:21 no, actually contemporary progressivism is very much an heir to the Christian tradition
0:51:26 and that presents a kind of political opportunity for the left that they probably haven’t made
0:51:29 good use of up to this point, but maybe they should.
0:51:31 Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that.
0:51:37 The most important Christian figure in American history is, I think, inarguably MLK, right?
0:51:41 And MLK was a radical in almost every respect.
0:51:46 He wanted a very pronounced form of economic democracy in addition to the elimination of
0:51:48 all forms of racial hierarchalization.
0:51:52 And he argued for that on a Christian basis, I think, correctly.
0:51:56 And Nietzsche would have had nothing but contempt for someone like MLK, but at least he would
0:51:58 have said he really gets it.
0:52:00 He understands what this message is about.
0:52:05 It’s about empowering the lower orders of society to strike back against the elites.
0:52:10 And I think that the left is mistaken if it assumes that there isn’t a kind of power
0:52:15 to this Christian ethic that it could mobilize on behalf of more progressive causes than it
0:52:17 traditionally has been used for.
0:52:22 What do you make of Nietzsche’s appeal on what we now call the alt-right?
0:52:29 I wrote a piece about this for Vox a few years ago after I heard that racist half-wit Richard
0:52:34 Spencer tell someone in an interview that he was, quote, “red-pilled” by Nietzsche.
0:52:41 But this faction of reactionary politics today or right-wing politics today, it’s younger
0:52:48 and more transgressive, and it’s kind of weird and clearly Nietzsche is a popular figure
0:52:49 for them.
0:52:55 I think part of what I see happening here is Nietzsche is a very subversive writer and
0:53:02 thinker, and in the last decade or so, the left has achieved a kind of cultural supremacy.
0:53:06 The left is sort of influencing the culture more than the right has been, and that has
0:53:11 shifted some of that subversive, transgressive energy to the alt-right or whatever.
0:53:17 And now there’s this kind of punk rock delight in shitposting, anti-woke memes, and there’s
0:53:23 just something really juvenile about it, but I could see how Nietzsche could inspire it.
0:53:27 I mean, he tells you, “Yeah, look, the society is all upside down.
0:53:29 All these sacred cows need to be slaughtered.
0:53:33 If you’re living in a multi-ethnic society, then you trash pluralism.
0:53:36 If you’re part of a liberal democracy, then you play with fascism.”
0:53:41 It’s just negation for the sake of negation or just poking holes in sacred cows for the
0:53:44 sake of poking holes in sacred cows and really nothing besides.
0:53:48 I mean, think of somebody like Paul Joseph Watson who once said, “Conservatism is the
0:53:49 new counterculture.”
0:53:52 Paul Watson is that the Alex Jones guy?
0:53:53 The very same.
0:53:54 Okay.
0:53:59 In fact, I’ve never seen so many members of the lefty Twitter arty so triggered as when
0:54:02 I tweeted, “Conservatism is the new counterculture.”
0:54:07 So I tweeted it again, and again, and again, and again.
0:54:10 You know, and I was pissed off at that because he says he likes things like Nirvana and Punk.
0:54:14 I’m like, you know, I don’t know that defending the cops is all that punk buddy, but we’ll
0:54:15 put that aside for now.
0:54:18 I think that that’s absolutely true, and I think this tells us something important about
0:54:19 Nietzsche.
0:54:24 Nietzsche’s worry really was that even though God was dead and we should commit ourselves
0:54:28 to this aristocratically radical vision of the world, that was not what was going to
0:54:29 happen.
0:54:32 Instead, the herd would continue to try them, and various forms of secularized Christian
0:54:37 doctrines would become ever more hegemonic, and this would lead to a leveling of all higher
0:54:43 values and the entrenchment of a very kind of nihilistic outlook over the world.
0:54:48 And if you view these kinds of ideas as hegemonic, culturally, the way that you just described,
0:54:53 you can understand why you could turn to Nietzsche as a kind of countercultural figure and present
0:54:58 yourself as a kind of right-wing punk or right-wing countercultural figure.
0:55:02 Now I think a lot of this is done in bad faith, and it’s extremely crude, and we can talk
0:55:05 about how the alt-right misappropriates Nietzsche.
0:55:09 But there is a kind of affinity there to his work that we shouldn’t deny.
0:55:13 What do you think is the primary way in which the alt-right misappropriates or abuses or
0:55:15 misreads Nietzsche?
0:55:19 Richard Evans in his third-right trilogy points out that Nietzsche had a profound influence
0:55:22 on fascism, and this is something that has been better understood by historians than
0:55:24 by philosophers.
0:55:27 We like Nietzsche and we want to read him, and the idea that he is aligned with the most
0:55:32 sinister movement of all time and profoundly influenced them is a deeply discomforting thought.
0:55:37 But it is something that should give us pause because I think that Nietzsche was not a fascist
0:55:41 thinker in some respects, but he definitely provides ammunition for far-right movements
0:55:44 very overtly in many other respects.
0:55:48 He wasn’t a far-right thinker in the sense that he was deeply contemptuous of nationalism.
0:55:53 It was just another herd morality that was emerging by weak people because they weren’t
0:55:56 able to will their own destiny as individuals.
0:55:59 They needed to kind of project it onto this collective identity that would then be the
0:56:03 standard barrier for great politics going forward.
0:56:05 Some of the things that I admire about Nietzsche is just how much fun he’ll poke at things
0:56:09 like anti-Semitism, German nationalism.
0:56:14 In these respects, we can criticize the far-right for its appropriation of Nietzsche since it
0:56:19 almost invariably turns in this kind of nationalist, identitarian, racist direction.
0:56:24 On the other hand, there is no denying that a person again who says, “We should train
0:56:30 and group of slaves that will be at the service of the truly great people who will demonstrate
0:56:37 their arrival through great politics of violence,” that can be very conducive to a kind of far-right
0:56:40 alt-right politics.
0:56:45 Most of the people who’ve taken up his mantle, people like Richard Spencer, are inconsistent,
0:56:51 but they’re not wrong to assume that Nietzsche provides a license for violence, exploitation,
0:56:54 slavery, radical forms of inequality.
0:56:58 I think that we need to be attentive to that in a way that we haven’t been in the past.
0:57:00 Well, that’s sort of the other side of this.
0:57:09 If you’re someone stewing in resentment and you’re searching for a psychologically satisfying
0:57:16 explanation for your own discontent, this punk rock side of Nietzsche is pretty intoxicating.
0:57:19 You read him and you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, the problem isn’t me.
0:57:21 It’s this unthinking herd out there.
0:57:27 The world is rejecting me because I refuse to dance to the same conformist music as everyone
0:57:28 else.”
0:57:35 Of course, the reality, almost invariably, is that the person thinking that is not the
0:57:42 ubermensch he thinks he is, and yes, it’s usually men, but if you’re the type who doesn’t
0:57:47 like what the world’s become or becoming, it is not hard to see the appeal of Nietzsche’s
0:57:54 obsession with decline and decadence, and like the Iran fanatics who read or work and
0:57:58 think they’re John Galt in society is stifling their greatness.
0:58:01 You’re not, I’m sorry to say, actually.
0:58:05 Whenever somebody puts down on pen and paper that we should have an aristocratic and highly
0:58:09 elitist society, it’s a pretty good bet that they think they’re going to be part of that
0:58:10 elite.
0:58:11 Of course.
0:58:13 The problem with texts like this is, of course, it invites readers who are sympathetic to
0:58:16 the text to imagine that they will also be part of that elite.
0:58:21 You very rarely will find Iran fanatics who will sit there and say, “I’m not John Galt.
0:58:22 I’m one of the second handers.”
0:58:23 Same is true.
0:58:27 You very rarely find people who read Nietzsche’s politics sympathetically imagining, “Well,
0:58:31 I am part of that herd, and I will be the slave, and that’s all well and good.”
0:58:36 But I think this is where I would offer my own critiques of Nietzsche, and I think we
0:58:40 need to be critical of him as a philosopher in a way that maybe we haven’t before.
0:58:43 One of the things that’s interesting about Nietzsche is he’s a profound diagnostician
0:58:50 of resentment, but he only ever locates resentment on the political left, where it’s envious
0:58:55 people looking up and wanting to bring others down.
0:58:59 He very rarely talks about the kind of resentment that can emerge on the political right, which
0:59:04 I think is by far the most potent kind of resentment that you find in politics today.
0:59:07 The resentment that you see emerging on the political right very much is this kind of
0:59:14 aristocratic attitude that I am entitled to superior status relative to others, and this
0:59:17 is being taken away from me by the losers on society.
0:59:22 I can’t quite understand how, but they keep managing to accomplish that, and I am embittered
0:59:25 about that, and I will do something about it.
0:59:28 Sometimes this can take extraordinarily malicious forms.
0:59:32 Probably the worst example of this kind of right-wing resultimale that I found is George
0:59:36 Wallace in the 1960s, who was the governor of Alabama.
0:59:42 He once said that if the Supreme Court will actually enforce desegregation in schools,
0:59:45 then I will just get rid of all public schools in Alabama.
0:59:49 My white children will not go to school with black children, and if that’s the kind of
0:59:53 equality that we’re going to see, then no one will go to school.
0:59:57 This is just something that Nietzsche never really contemplates, this idea of aristocratic
1:00:02 resentment, and I think we need to be much, much more pronounced in diagnosing that in
1:00:03 our society right now.
1:00:09 The real creatures of spite and malice that exist right now usually aren’t people on
1:00:10 the political left.
1:00:14 There are plenty of them in the Trumpist movement who think that this is their country.
1:00:15 They were entitled to it.
1:00:20 They’re better than others, and they will not allow the losers and immigrants of the
1:00:21 world to take it from them.
1:00:23 I mean, you’re a teacher.
1:00:28 I assume you teach Nietzsche, and I’m not asking you how do you counsel your students
1:00:29 not to read Nietzsche?
1:00:32 I mean, I think you and I both pretty firmly believe he is absolutely worth reading.
1:00:37 Whatever you think of him, he’s indispensable to trying to make sense of the pathologies
1:00:40 of modern politics and much, much more.
1:00:45 But when you do encounter someone who’s younger, like we once were, but when you do encounter
1:00:50 someone who’s being entranced by Nietzsche in some of these ways we’ve described, but
1:00:52 what do you say to them?
1:00:56 How do you tell them to read Nietzsche or to take Nietzsche, or do you at all?
1:00:57 Yeah.
1:01:00 I mean, look, I teach a class on the political right, and Nietzsche is an important module
1:01:01 on that.
1:01:06 I think that Nietzsche can have a profoundly beneficial effect on students by getting them
1:01:10 to ask questions that they didn’t before, by instilling them a deep sense of intellectual
1:01:13 honesty, and really just by fostering their creativity, right?
1:01:16 I mean, that’s something we didn’t talk about, but Nietzsche has been a profound influence
1:01:20 on all kinds of artists through the 20th and 21st century, most of whom I really admire,
1:01:22 people like James Joyce, for example.
1:01:27 So if anything, we encourage people to read more of Nietzsche, but we need to also insist
1:01:33 that they read him carefully and recognize that there is a deep politics in his work.
1:01:37 It is a politics that is fundamentally contrary to the liberal and egalitarian values on which
1:01:39 your society is predicated.
1:01:43 And I think that there’s a lot of, I’ll just use the term “evil” in what it is that he’s
1:01:48 trying to accomplish politically, and we should be critical of that while also accepting the
1:01:51 fact that there are extraordinary gems in that work as well.
1:01:55 What I’ve always said about Nietzsche, and I used to teach him as well, he can only take
1:02:02 you so far, and if you’re concerned with politics, he will lead you into an abyss because he
1:02:08 can’t offer, doesn’t want to offer any basis for meaningful collective action.
1:02:15 His thought necessarily collapses into a muddled individualism, which is why he, I think,
1:02:21 ultimately becomes much more useful to artists than to politicians and legislators.
1:02:27 That he remains incredibly important and incredibly dangerous because he was right about quite
1:02:32 a bit, and we are still very much living in the shadow of his destruction.
1:02:37 I mean, along with Marx, he’s one of the great diagnosticians of the crisis and modernity
1:02:41 that emerged in the 19th century, and he’s indispensable to understanding that.
1:02:47 The way that I go about rebutting him is by saying, “Look, I take seriously this idea
1:02:51 that Resultimant can lie at the basis of all human actions,” and I don’t think that there’s
1:02:55 any denying that there’s plenty of Resultimant on the left as well.
1:02:58 Anyone who sits there and sees those “burn the rich” or “eat the rich” signs can’t
1:03:02 help but be a little bit worried about that, but I think that progressive causes, unlike
1:03:07 what he thinks, actually require quite a bit of strength, creativity, and will to go into
1:03:11 them if they’re going to be successful, and I think he profoundly underestimated the emotional
1:03:17 importance of love as a kind of empowerment, including universal love, whether you understand
1:03:22 that in a Christian, a liberal, or a socialist way, that’s the kind of emotional basis on
1:03:28 which I’d want to ground my politics, not this kind of aristocratically radical sensibility.
1:03:32 I think that’s a good note on which to end.
1:03:33 This is awesome, man.
1:03:38 I love this stuff, so I appreciate you coming in to help me think it all through, Matt.
1:03:39 Yeah, thanks.
1:03:39 I had a great time.
1:04:02 Eric Janikas is our producer, Patrick Boyd engineered this episode, Alex Overington wrote
1:04:07 our theme music, and A.M. Hall is the boss.
1:04:15 I think it’s really easy to write Nietzsche off, but he, as much as anyone, maybe better
1:04:21 than anyone, was willing to stare down some of our darkest instincts, some of our worst
1:04:26 impulses, and really reckon with them, and to go on that journey with Nietzsche, looking
1:04:32 into the abyss, as he would put it, is kind of a thrill as a reader, and whatever one
1:04:40 thinks of Nietzsche, I think he’s always going to be worth reading.
1:04:42 But tell me what you think.
1:04:48 Drop us a line at thegreyarea@box.com, and if you appreciated this episode, as always,
1:04:51 share it with your friends on all the socials.
1:04:54 New episodes drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
1:04:56 [Music]
1:04:58 [Music]
1:05:02 [Music]
1:05:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]