Ours is seemingly a polarized society, but the extreme “left” and the extreme “right” have more in common than they realize. In fact, the postmodernist academy with its identity politics, moral relativism, and power reductionism and the Ayn Rand objectivists with their “virtue of selfishness” and social Darwinism share a common philosophy: that of Friedrich Nietzsche.
We live in an unusually anomalous culture whose politics and economics are now dominated by Nietzscheans of both the Right and the Left, united particularly in their contempt for long-standing, traditional ideas of reason and ethics, which they believe they have “seen through” and exploded. With the plausibility implosion and waning of Marxism, their ascendancy has increased.
The Nietzscheans of the Right — in-your-face social-Darwinist capitalists, or their servitors, whose Trumpery is now the national brand — are the most obvious. The late Ayn Rand is one of their exemplars and heroines, and if they are literate enough to know her history among conservatives they bitterly resent the expulsion of her from their traditionalist ranks by William F. Buckley Jr. and his friend Whittaker Chambers, who denounced her in a notable essay in National Review in 1957.
But shrewd immoralism and the will to power — what Saint Augustine called the libido dominandi — have always been with us and were highlighted from the Renaissance onward by partisans of Machiavelli and their opponents. The Machiavellian worship of earthly glory and the will to power by Christopher Marlowe has been frequently contrasted with the candid, courteous, classical-Christian ethical nobility of William Shakespeare, as explained and discussed in a long and eloquent tradition of literary commentary on Shakespeare, and of teaching and productions of his work, that have shaped and nourished four centuries of English-speaking people, including Abraham Lincoln.
Conor Cruise O’Brien argues persuasively in The Suspecting Glance (1972) that “the gentle Nietzscheans” constantly tried to excuse and de-fang the most obviously irrational, anti-rational, and anti-ethical statements of the Teutonic master, led prominently by Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann in his influential Portable Nietzsche (1954 et seq.). But since O’Brien wrote, the Left Nietzscheans have established in the culture, the publishing houses, and the universities what Michael Polanyi called a pervasive “moral inversion” — having invalidated all traditional “logocentric” ideas of epistemology and ethics, any consistent basis for ethics, they do not, like the Right Nietzscheans, simply dismiss ethics as a fraud, or use it hypocritically for fraud; instead they fiercely assert ethical demands based on identity politics and an analysis of power relations, an analysis that actually lacks any coherent logical or fiduciary basis for moral generalization per se. But this is a thematic-performative self-contradiction: If there is no basis for ethics, for transpersonal and inter-subjective norms, then do not assert ethical criticisms and imperatives.
Even decent agnostics and pragmatists sometimes recognize the problem. The contemporary intellectual historian Thomas L. Haskell regards Nietzsche’s attack on objectivity, “logocentrism,” altruism, and intellectual chastity as “a cultural calamity. . . . Morality is what suffers most from the devaluation of [such] practices, but such practices are also indispensable to the pursuit of truth” and “the very possibility of historical scholarship as an enterprise distinct from propaganda.” One of Nietzsche’s most profound, self-refuting insights is found in Twilight of the Idols (1888): “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Including, of course, the grammar of that sentence itself: tu quoque!
Photo: Friedrich Nietzsche by Gustav Schultze, 1882, via Flickr, Public Domain
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