On politics (from three years ago, when I was political)
If Western Civilization is the product of the Christian Church, then if follows that Nietzsche’s stand against Christianity is a stand against contemporary Western civilization. Nietzsche talks of the sickness, the dècadence that Christianity represents and embodies. Christianity is not the sickness, but the symptoms of the sickness. There is no cure for Christianity because it is not the disease attacking the organism.
Why do I read Nietzsche? Not because I’ve found a philosophy that makes sense, or because I’ve devoted myself to one particular theorist (like some people manage to do), but because his writing makes me think. I don’t mean thinking about the man, or his language, but his ideas, and what his ideas mean to my own interpretation of the word. In some ways, it’s validation of core concepts I’ve always struggled with but never been able to find expression of - exactly what is truth for example.
But there’s a deeper question, one that has always pervaded my rants on humanity as a whole. What is the nature of morality, of morals, and why does every religion go against instinct?. Why do we have instincts at all if they are not valid, or useful, or right? Putting aside the question of the divinity of man and other religious concepts, it’s time to analyse man as an animal, as the core biological entity. Our psychology retains so much of the primal, the evolutionary needs, wants and reactions to the world around us. Every emotion has its biological reason for existence. Except at least one.
Pity. Nietzsche thought of pity as the abnormality that brought about the decadence of the great religions, one of the reasons for man’s downfall and his current state of illness. Pity for others, self-pity - what biological function does pity address?
We are not the sum evolutionary product of our world, but a mere point on a vast continuum of evolution. We are not the be-all and end-all of mankind as a species. As part of the evolutionary process, we must conform to evolution’s basic rules or find ourselves not evolving, but stagnating. Outside the loop of survival and genetic refinement, our evolution comes to a standstill whilst the evolution of the species here on earth, and possibly other worlds, continues along at a blinding speed. On the autobahn of evolutionary progress, we’ve punctured our own tyres and left ourselves by the side of the road.
I’m not talking about extermination, anarchy, direct human genetic intervention or biological exam taking, only redressing the direction we are headed in, and extinguishing the concept that every human life is sacred. Life in itself is prolific, but fleeting; great men and women do not last longer than anybody else, only the knowledge, or ideas, or philosophies they pass on. Legacies can be powerful, sometimes detrimental, sometimes uplifting the human race to new levels, but they remain legacies. They are not the people who instituted or created them. When I am long dead, and my carbon atoms reassimilated into the big flurry of the carbon exchange cycle, do I matter? Or does what I have achieved or not achieved matter?
I think it boils down to what matters most; existence, evolution, or extermination. What each of us does as individuals is based on these three things, these three possible paths we may take. To exist is not to live, to evolve is to live, to add to the evolutionary total rather than not affect it at all. If you have twenty children, are you contributing to evolution? Not necessarily - if all twenty children do nothing towards humanity’s future, then your contribution is negated by their lack of contribution. The sum total of evolutionary progress is nil in this case. We have to not only procreate, but educate our creations so they can take steps further down the path of evolution. Or we face extermination.
Which people have contributed to evolution? Contributed to not the lives of the few, or the mere course of history, but made concrete changes to mankind’s evolutionary progress? Off the top of my head, I cannot name a single person in the past thousand years or so who has made a definite leap forward. Dr Alexander Fleming may have blundered when he discovered antibiotics, creating the temporary end to diseases that had killed men in the past. What progress have we made? We now face hepatitis, AIDS, and other nastier super viruses, and Fleming’s contribution becomes negated. He cured, in the short-term, millions, but in the long term has he contributed to mankind’s health, or made us more reliant on our own creations rather than reliant on ourselves?
“…Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war…”
War is struggle. Evolution is struggle. Evolution is war, war against extinction, against mediocrity, against decay. Yet these are the qualities most sought after by not only most religions, but most political doctrines as well. ‘Preserve’ the teachings, the politics, the laws of our forebears because they must have been right. Retain the grand parochial, patriarchal establishments because they preserve life as it was. Male lions between prides will kill any cubs they suspect as not being of their own creation. There is a direct analogy between that behaviour and the gross behaviours of patriarchal institutions past. Killing off the seeds of change, of evolution, preserves the status quo of times past. This is what Christ and Marx were fighting against and preserving at the same time, the pretension that man has not only lived in better times, but is damned unless he follows an ‘enlightened’ path; an idea so inherently anti-evolutionary it would kill off any species that wholly disposed of pure instinct.
This is the kind of reading I'd prefer to be doing - reading something that alters the way I think. Not polemic philosophy or politics that demands you follow a certain way of thinking, but reading that gives you a thousand options that you have to filter yourself. Nietzsche has changed my views on socialism; not because of his views on socialism, but because of a shift in the paradigm of my own thinking. In the same week I read a companion to Marx and Nietzsche’s unfinished Will To Power. And then last week, it was Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist.
Socialism has at its heart the philosophy that all men are equal. Equality is the foundation in a system where the workers work not for the property-owners, but for themselves. For socialism to work at all, all men must follow laws, morals and thought patterns established by society as a whole; the great éclat of socialism is its ability to reduce or expand everyone to the capacity of being a worker.
If socialism was to work, every man, woman and child would need to follow the same laws, and have the same value and values.
Man prospers during war. It is a sad truth, and a horrible one to contemplate, but during times of war economies boom, technology leaps ahead and the competitive drive of whole societies is focused on protecting those societies. It is only in peace that cultures decay - Rome may have disintegrated because it was lulled into peace, into thinking it had done away with the barbarians. But what happened to Rome before this change? What changed the views and values of the Romans, from lethal legions to cowering sheep? We're only talking about a few hundred years really, but a disease manifested itself amidst the Romans that created the soporific peace that allowed the barbarians to prosper. If you can’t figure out what I’m talking about then this entire tirade isn’t going to make much sense anyhow.
All men are not created equal. If they were, evolution would have ended, and if that ever happens then we become an extinct race. It is the inequality between human beings that creates art - who has not envied the raw talent of another person when they can realise their worldview in art? - indeed it might be what drives us at the most basic level. I think there's a correlation between evolution and competition that is expressed on nearly every level in society.
I know there are some devout Christians that might read this, but there are some things I have to say. Fact: Christianity is a monotheistic religion. Another fact: All monotheistic religions are anti-evolutionary. Yes, there are Christian Science fringe elements, a term as contrary as humanitarian politics, but they believe in evolution like I believe in the tooth fairy. Sure, she might exist, in fact, she probably does given the amount of believers, but as an adult it makes little difference to me or what I believe. Anti-evolutionary means anti-nature, and anti-nature is the greatest self-evident lie to ever pervade any culture. We are not above the animals, we are merely one species of animal that has evolved consciousness as an evolutionary advantage. We can create environments because of our evolved abilities, yet instead we destroy them.
If Jehovah created Man in his image, why are we burdened with the ‘sins’ of instinct? Of emotion? Why are we made to feel guilt over our actions, and repent in the name of absolution? Because Jehovah himself was inconsistent and moody? Or because he never existed except as an ideal patriarch, and his ‘word’, or more correctly the words of the priests, were an extension of that patriarchal hypocrisy and anti-evolutionary tendencies?
What if we have nothing to be absolved from? What if raw instincts and emotions are the core of existence, and modern society no more than an attempt to corral those base drives? Humans don’t feel ‘alive’ without some kind of threat, hence the adrenaline-junkies of modern times. A thousand years ago they would have been berserkers, alchemists or martyrs - the primal drive to not conform has always been with us, a root evolutionary trait of experimentalism that is as ingrained as consciousness.
Clarification: Christianity is not the teachings of Christ anymore than Stalinism was the interpretation of Marx. The New Testament is as misinterpreted and maltreated as The Communist Manifesto, but even at its heart it is not Christ’s words. Imagine you are in your mid-forties, and asked to write down what your teachers at high school taught you. Is it likely to be word for word? Are you going to consciously (or unconsciously) leave out large parts of what you were taught? Are you going to fill in some of what you were taught with what you had learned in the twenty years afterwards? In modern law courts, eyewitness testimony is the least regarded evidence in a trial, and for a very good reason - it is ultimately inconclusive, and so coloured by consciousness, education and belief that it can be mangled beyond recognition. So why is it a book based on just such testimony became the ‘foundation of Western society’?
This travesty of a ‘war on terror’, so easily labelled a war on Islam. In fact it might be, in which case it’s a particularly ill-humoured joke. Islam is the direct descendant of both Judaism and Christianity, a continuation of a tradition rooted in anti-human tendencies. I’ve read extracts of the Torah, all of the Bible and the Koran, and the connections are all there - a war on Islam by a Christian nation is tantamount to violent, almost suicidal hypocrisy. Their god is your god is the Jew’s god. The Bible says, rather unambiguously, ‘love thy neighbour’ and the one about ‘turning the other cheek’. Yet we have 2000 years of warfare not entirely indirectly caused by religious disharmony. But I’m sick of waving the tired case of the Crusades about like a tattered war banner. A thousand years have come and gone since the first crusade.
Obesity and depression are two of the greatest killers in western society. Obesity and its associated disorders like heart disease, can, and usually does, manifest itself from a diet rich in sugars, fats, and salt. The primal cravings for such foods come from a time when mankind had virtually no access to such frivolities of diet, and the neural connections for addiction were laid down to connect a certain food with survival. Honey is believed to be one of the first of such addictions - rich in sugar, a natural energy boost, early man would have gone to great lengths (and pains) to isolate and secure such a source, because his animal body knew it was survival food, and could mean the difference between existence and extinction. We have not lost that instinct towards rich foods, but our diet now consists solely of those foods. McDonalds, despite its new age menu, catered exclusively to that kind of diet, and resulted in the gross obesity of an entire nation. The same sickness has spread to other first world nations because of the limbic tendencies towards those foods. When anxiety, guilt or other negative stimuli assault the human organism, what are the first foods we turn to? Carrots and lettuce? Or the foods that provide the quick physiological high to overcome the short-term negativity? Caffeine is one of the prime examples - in high doses it is lethal, but in the short term, in short doses, it is a boost to flagging energy and alertness levels, because we feel a need to be alert, to be able to think straight. The human body then associates alertness and clarity with coffee, and the connections are laid down - to be alert, and to think straight, we need coffee. I know because I suffer from this like a heroin addict. If I don’t have coffee, I turn bestial and near-violent.
ADD is the new plague of youth. Are we breeding a disorder, or does it come from overstimulation in the formative years? Are we providing stimulation in excess of what a child can tolerate and overloading a system?
Is depression a reaction to the synthetic emotion of guilt? Or a neurochemical adjustment to diet? It can stem from a sense of overbearing pressure, but that pressure we create ourselves in our society - a sense of grief over the death of a close relation may have procreative analogies in the preservation of genetic material, or it might be an artificial construct of society in valuing one life over the life of a species. What is good for one is not necessarily good for all, and vice versa.
The movie “The Fiddler on the Roof” is based on the lives of Russian Jews. The core of the movie is Judaism itself, and the ghastly theme ‘Tradition’. The opening song bellows the word out like a lost cow, and it becomes an anthem even though the movie is about the dangers of traditionalism.
* Barbarians - I use the classical term for any non-Roman European, not because they were of a lesser culture but because they were not Roman. A stroll through any European museum displaying non-Roman artefacts from the same period can illustrate the technical brilliance and innovation of the peoples surrounding the Roman Empire; La Tene enamelwork for example.
* I use the word 'men' in place of men & women. I am not misogynous, it's just that the English language has yet to present an asexual pronoun without politically correct connotations. PC is the antithesis of human nature - men and women are different, and the agenda should be to embrace those differences instead of universalizing them.
* Before I’m mentally raped by some anti-anti-Jewish universalist, it was a non-disparaging remark. The only (sub)humans more anti-choice, anti-universalist and fascist than the Nazi phenomenon are the anti-Nazis. I demand the right to a choice, not the right to only have the ‘best’ choice, the ‘right’ choice.
* A ‘foundation of Western society’ in the same way Coke is the beverage of the twentieth century. Completely untrue, but open to interpretation.