Timothy Birdnow

Our old friend Daren Jonescu is a Professor of Philosophy and a fan of Heinrich Nietzche. I've not liked Nietzche myself, largely because of his biting anti-Christian sentiments and his views on "The Will". Be it noted Nietzche went mad at the end, the result of gazing into an abyss without the safety harness of the Holy Spirit to protect him. But Nietzche was more subtle than he is often portrayed, and while the Nazis embraced elements of Nietzchism as it was beneficial to them, the fact is they failed to understand the German thinker in a fundamental way. Nietzche was far more clever than the brutish National Socialists could ever understand.

He clearly wouldn't have approved of them. Doubt that? Daren posts an entire essay of Nietzche at his website, and I urge everyone to read it in it's entirety. See it here.

The thing about it is it is written about Germany, but it sounds very much like the modern United States. Frighteningly so. While I strongly urge the reader to read the entire essay (it is short) I would like everyone to ponder some of these passages.

THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
from Twilight of the Idols, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici

"Let me add that in this country people still obey without feeling that obedience humiliates. And no one despises his opponent." End

Here Nietzche was speaking about Germany in his day. That would change, especially toward minorities in the Third Reich. It certainly does not apply to America any longer, where once it most certainly did. People used to obey laws, obey civil and moral authorities, without feeling "the obedience humiliates". No longer. Now rebellion is seen as a moral good and obedience is cowardice or weakness. A nation of rebels is not a nation for very long.

Here's more:

"It costs a good deal to attain to a position of power; for power stultifies. The Germans—they were once called a people of thinkers: do they really think at all at present? Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect, they mistrust intellect; politics have swallowed up all earnestness for really intellectual things— "Germany, Germany above all” ["Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the national hymn]. I fear this was the death-blow to German philosophy. "Are there any German philosophers? Are there any German poets? Are there any good German books?” people ask me abroad. I blush; but with that pluck which is peculiar to me, even in moments of desperation, I reply: "Yes, Bismarck!”—Could I have dared to confess what books are read to-day? Cursed instinct of mediocrity!—"

end

Ah, indeed, America has degenerated in precisely this same way. We have no art any longer, but rather a grotesque imitation, featuring dung on the Virgin Mary, or a crucifix in a glass or urine, or something that resembles vomit on a canvass. Our literature consists of "Fifty Shades of Gray" and other inconsequential and degenerate works, with no social or moral value. Modern philosophers endlessly debate nonsense, like "intersectinalism", "cultural appropriations", and a host of other navel-gazing stupidity that is nothing but pseudo-intellectualism, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. It exists to make weak thinkers feel important, to make the politics of anger sound intellectual, to depress and enrage students. But it is no more substantial than morning dew, to melt away under the light of reason.

And the sole reason this sort of nonsense has overwhelmed our nation's intellectual centers is that the government funds education, and particularly higher education. Nietzche hit the nail on the head; "politics has swallowed up all earnestness for really intellectual things". Universities no longer teach the great books. Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, none of the great literary works are read anymore, and when they are it is to impose a revisionist theory upon them, to condemn them as old white misogynistic guys. The past is despised by the current crop of "intellectuals" precisely because that past illustrates quite plainly the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern times and the world created by the Progressive thinkers.

Again, money is at the root of this; since our government took over funding for all education we have seen a downward spiral, a decline as "scholars" find it easier and more useful to themselves to put out rubbish rather than actually produce scholarly work. And it is even true in the sciences, where complete crap is favorably peer-reviewed. There have been numerous hoax papers which have been published in prestigious journals. And papers that have been proven to be works of fiction. That is because it's easier to publish nonsense in an environment where government pays and expects only results favorable to what it wishes to do. The rest is all gravy.

Let us continue on:

"Nothing is more deleterious to this age than the superfluity of pretentious loafers and fragmentary human beings; our universities are really the involuntary forcing houses for this kind of withering-up of the instincts of intellectuality"

End

Yep.

"Let us examine another aspect of the question: it is not only obvious that German culture is declining, but adequate reasons for this decline are not lacking. After all, nobody can spend more than he has:—this is true of individuals, it is also true of nations. If you spend your strength in acquiring power, or in politics on a large scale, or in economy, or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or in military interests—if you dissipate the modicum of reason, of earnestness, of will, and of self-control that constitutes your nature in one particular fashion, you cannot dissipate it in another. Culture and the state—let no one be deceived on this point—are antagonists: A "culture-state” [Kultur-Staat] is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other."

End

Indeed the coarsening of modern American culture can be seen as a concurrent with the rise of politics as the major concern of most citizens. America was created on the theory of limited government. The people who settled this country did so because they wanted to be free of the quick-sand of the leviathan State, and they built communities that were largely self-governing. Small s states had limited resources, and the central government was developed as a federal system to be a weak partner, a kind of better business bureau for state governments. In the end the local communities had as much power as any, and the citizenry largely minded their own business. In such a community the churches had considerable authority, and as a result moral and spiritual interests were more important to the public than law or regulation or politics.

In fact, England ruled America hardly at all, imposing "salutary Neglect" on the Colonies. Basically, the Crown understood that the Americas were filled with dissidents and religious objectors and the like, and let them pretty much handle their own affairs. When the British government stopped treating the Colonies as self-ruling the Revolution came; a conservative revolution to return America to the former status-quo.

And since the Colonies were so different, and since the colonial governments did not have the power to impose the kinds of laws we see in America today, the nation was largely ruled at the local level. The end result was a flowering of the American culture, because people's energy, their interests, their talents and enthusiasms, found their outlet in creating, in building, in writing and other such pursuits. No longer. Americans now spend most of their time trying to circumvent an octopodal system of regulations, laws, limitations, and intrusions. Businesses spend more time finding ways to shelter income than to generate it. People have to be very careful to avoid violating a byzantine maze of legal restraints. Case in point; conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza went to prison for making a donation to a personal friend who was running for public office. His crime? Violating campaign finance law. In a world where politics was less important that never would have happened, and D'Souza would have spent his time writing a book or whatnot.

In short, government is into everything. As Al Pacino aka the Devil says in the movie "Devil's Advocate" "the Law puts us into everything...we're the new high priests!" That line was brilliant, a last gasp of intellect in the degenerate world of make believe.

Moving along:

"Everything that matters has been lost sight of by the whole of the higher educational system of Germany: the end quite as much as the means to that end. People forget that education, the process of cultivation itself, is the end—and not "the Empire”—they forget that the educator is required for this end—and not the public-school teacher and university scholar. Educators are needed who are themselves educated, superior and noble intellects, who can prove that they are thus qualified, that they are ripe and mellow products of culture at every moment of their lives, in word and in gesture;—not the learned louts who, like "superior wet-nurses,” are now thrust upon the youth of the land by public schools and universities. With but rare exceptions, that which is lacking in Germany is the first prerequisite of education—that is to say, the educators; hence the decline of German culture.

[...]

"What the higher schools of Germany really do accomplish is this, they brutally train a vast crowd of young men, in the smallest amount of time possible, to become useful and exploitable servants of the state.

[...]

What is it that brings about the decline of German culture? The fact that "higher education” is no longer a special privilege—the democracy of a process of cultivation that has become "general,” common."

End

Common Core virtually screams in the corridors of the mind here. It is about producing workers, not teaching children - or young adults - to think, to reason, to understand. And our young people think college is a civil right, and demand the government aka their fellow citizens pay for it. But what this does is devalue a college education, which more resembles a high school diploma. Herein Nietzche gets it wrong as there is a massive institution in America which feeds off the public trough and has a vested interest in NOT educating the young. Why, when they can make kids stay in school longer and pay out more money? The young are a commodity, and the parents are the customers, customers who have little choice as there are mandatory education laws and a near monopoly on outlets that dole this education out in a niggardly fashion. Like all monopolies, education puts out an inferior product. But you have to pay for it, even if you don't have children in schools (I own two houses in St. Louis and have to pay property taxes to fund the local school districts on both of them, despite not having children and never having them.)

Public schooling is no longer about education at all, but rather indoctrinates children to be good little Progressives. In short, it serves it's master, the governing classes. There is a strong disincentive to actually teach anything real, because a truly educated nation would be wise enough to see when they are being lied to. Power corrupts the denizens of the State, and the retention of power is everything to the ruling class. What public education purchases is stupidity, and intentionally so.

Moving right along:

"All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus:—one must respond or react, every impulse is indulged. In many cases such necessary action is already a sign of morbidity, of decline, and a symptom of exhaustion. Almost everything that coarse popular language characterises as vicious, is merely that physiological inability to refrain from reacting.—As an instance of what it means to have learnt to see, let me state that a man thus trained will as a learner have become generally slow, suspicious, and refractory. With hostile calm he will first allow every kind of strange and new thing to come right up to him,—he will draw back his hand at its approach. To stand with all the doors of one’s soul wide open, to be slavishly in the dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day to be strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit one’s self, to plunge one’s self, into other souls and other things, in short, the famous "objectivity” of modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar and cheap."

end

Here Nietzche is discussing the discipline of intellect, and the lack thereof in Germans of his time. His point is that truly educated people learn to restrain their emotions and their flights of fancy until all the facts are in. That wasn't happening in 19th century Germany, and the end result was Hitler in the 20th (and Hitler was the result of undisciplined German militarism in the late 19th and early 20'th centuries.)

Is America any different? Look at the way people are demonized for caution disagreement. Global Warming is a great example; any scientist who urges caution on the apocalyptic claims of impending doom is demonized, called a rat, a stooge of "Big Oil", and there are suggestions of Nuremberg-style trials for "Climate Change Deniers". Caution has been thrown to the wind over this issue, with it being said it is "a planetary emergency" even though physical evidence shows no warming since the mid 1990's, there is no acceleration of sea level rise (which has been rising for ten thousand years, since the last ice age), and in fact polar ice caps are growing. But it's not the nature of the evidence but the seriousness of the charge.

And the embrace of endless intellectual fads, be the oat bran, non-judgementalism, "transgenderism" or scares over Alar, DDT, Roundup herbicide, etc. distracts the intellect and confuses the average person. Today we exist on an ever changing surface, with claims and counter-claims occupying our attention. Eggs are the cause of all heart disease until they are not, for instance. Why? Because society has lost discernment. America threw away her belief in God and a concrete reality created by that God. The people in high places all believe in Relativism to one degree or another, and so we all are caught in a maelstrom of shifting ideas and opinions. And without a strong intellectual grounding and moral faith we are blown about like the sinners in Dante's Inferno Circle 2, weightless waifs blowing about in tornadic winds with no grounding, nothing to grab onto to anchor ones-self.

The end result? A society of followers, desperate to find any source of permanence. Today America is rootless, with divorce leading to broken families, children separated from parents and each-other. We have a dizzying array of ever changing technology, of buildings built over the remains of older buildings, of ever changing admonitions, of changing mores and beliefs. (Alvin Toffler was correct in Future Shock in his concern that people would drown in the torrent of change that was coming.) While change is inevitable, there was always an understanding that there were permanent things, eternal truths that remain unchanged and unchangeable. But modern philosophy and science reject that, and without that grounding America is thrashing about like a drowning man. We can trace so much of modern societal decay to the efforts of modern philosophers and the intelligentsia. Oh, and in Germany they wound up embracing Hitler, who offered the public clarity even while offering them monstrosity. For many it seemed an equitable trade at the time.

Moving right along:

"As to learning how to think—our schools no longer have any notion of such a thing. Even at the universities, among the actual scholars in philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practical pursuit, and as a business, is beginning to die out. Turn to any German book: you will not find the remotest trace of a realisation that there is such a thing as a technique, a plan of study, a will to mastery, in the matter of thinking"

End

Sounds as American as apple pie, doesn't it? At least as modern Americans see things.

Nature abhors a vacuum. We are teaching our young that reality is not real, which is the most vicious cruelty imaginable. The result is they will grasp at anything offering safe harbor, be it socialism, fascism, scientism, what have you. They would turn to religion, as people used to do, but Christianity has been so demonized in the popular culture because it denies people the right to do whatsoever they please that a young person would sooner become a cannibal than one of those "evil" Christians. But they are free to adopt Islam or another anti-American belief system, and so we see young American kids going to the Middle East to join ISIS or some other Jihadist group. Islam offers clarity at least.

It is also true that, as in German books, there is no plan, no technique, will to mastery in the matter of thinking. Textbooks are a scattergun approach full of political correctness and lacking any overarching structure of thought. Few Americans can think any longer. Their minds are always moving in multiple directions, distracted by I-phones, by social media, by multiple sensory inputs. The young are completely incapable of following a thought to it's conclusion, or of doing the hard intellectual work necessary to actually understand an issue. Oh, they are very good at handling technology, having grown up with it. I am mindful of the instant celebrity David Hogg, the kid who made his fame calling for gun control after his school got shot up. Hogg famously stated that his generation would have to implement gun control because it was just like the way he and his friends had to take the f#@king cell phones away from their parents. Hogg fully believes he knows more because he can use technology better than adults. He fails to realize how poorly educated he is, why gun control was never implemented in America. All he knows is that some of his friends were killed by gun and that's good enough for him. See the utter failure of education here? Hogg cannot follow the argument, is incapable of studying the finer shades of it and understanding the meaning of it all. And yet he arrogantly believes he knows better than his elders, who have had an entire \lifetime to ponder the question. David Hogg never learned to think. Nor did so very many of his compatriots.That is not to say he is stupid, but rather that he has been miseducated. He thinks with his emotions and argues based on that.

That has been modern educational theory for some time now. Emotions have trumped reason in our schools.

It's been coming a long time. I remember when I was in college in the mid '80's this sort of thing was ramping up. One professor I had used a lot of Jungian psychology to argue that we promoted Reason far too much and needed to balance it with more emotion. I thought that nonsense then; what was I going to school for (and paying lots of money) other than to nurture my reasoning skills? Emotions come naturally; they must be tempered by reason. If you teach emotions you are teaching our lower, animalistic hindbrain. It doesn't need teaching.

But nurturing emotional responses at the expense of reason is ideal if you want to create a generation that you can manipulate. It's difficult to manipulate people's rational minds, but easy to manipulate their emotions. Doubt that? If you want to get a black person angry just call him the N word and watch the fireworks. It would take you a long, long time to manipulate him in similar fashion using pure reason.

Since schools and universities are government funded our educational system has a vested interest in detaching human reason from human affairs. The ruling elites don't want to have to explain themselves every time they take action and try to convince a majority. It is much easier to manipulate their emotions. Read any news story and see how the "human element" is front and center, an attempt to manipulate the emotions of the reader. Case in point; so many of the stories about the "migrant caravans" preparing to invade the United States feature buzzwords about "fleeing violence" and "poverty" and show young mothers with children. This is pure emotional blackmail; if you continue to have negative feelings towards these poor, destitute people you are a bad person. That most of this isn't true, that most of these "migrants" are young, working age men, and that they are dressed in pretty new, decent clothing, are well fed, etc. is never highlighted or even mentioned by the news stories. These stories are designed to manipulate emotions, and they work when dealing with modern Americans who have been miseducated to place emotion uber alles.

Nietzche saw all this way back when. It is interesting to note Nietzche's criticisms of Germany were spot on, and in the end Germany plunged the world into chaos and darkness. America is heading in the same direction.

At any rate, do read the entire essay at Daren Jonescu's website

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 3542 words, total size 23 kb.