Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter XXVIII

by William Mackintire Salter

 

CHAPTER XXVIII

SOCIAL CRITICISM. ANALYSIS OF MODERN SOCIAL TENDENCIES

The general moral view set forth in the preceding pages implies an ideal of social organization—indeed, the two things are so closely connected that Nietzsche's ideal has already been adumbrated and I shall have only now to make it somewhat more articulate.

By way of preface I may summarize his criticism of existing society.

 

I

In a broad, general way, the present is to him a time of disorganization and degeneration. Strong, ruling forces—the condition of organization and of advancing life—do not appear. The old aristocracies are themselves corrupted; they have spoiled the image of the ruler for us^[1]—that is, have robbed it of the dignity and grace it once had in men's eyes. The contrary idea is that of freedom, and under its influence, with whatever compensatory features, a vast amount of commonness and vulgar egoism has been let loose on the world. There are two moments in the secular process of society: (1) the ever-growing conquest of larger but weaker social groups by smaller but stronger ones; (2) the ever-greater conquest of the stronger [within a group] by the mass, and in consequence the advent of democracy, with anarchy of the elements as a final result.^[2] We are in the second stage of the process now. The institutions in which and by which society has lived and been strong in the past are slowly dissolving. Men call it progress, and if progress is movement and movement to an end, progress it is—but, to Nietzsche, progressive decline. Democracy he calls "a form of decline (Verfallsform) of the state.^[3] However justifiable, or at least excusable, as a temporary measure it may be, it represents a form of unbelief—unbelief in great men and a select society: "we are all equal," it says.^[4] The sentiment of hostility to whatever rules or wills to rule, which underlies it, Nietzsche calls "misarchism"—admitting that it is a bad word for a bad thing.^[5] The individual wants to be free, but as most are constituted, "freedom" is a misfortune for them. European democracy is to a certain extent a liberation of powers, but to a far greater extent a liberation of weaknesses and other ignoble things.^[6] The demand for independence, for free development, for laisser aller is most hotly made by those for whom no control could be too strict.^[7] "A more common kind of men are getting the upper hand (in place of the noblesse, or the priests): first the business people, then the workers."^[8] These classes, whom Nietzsche puts together as "Pöbel,""Gesindel," are the "lords of today": for there need be no illusions—though they may talk only of freedom, they really want to rule.^[9] They have their place, even a necessary place, in society, but they are a lower type of men, and when they wish to order everything for their own benefit, their selfishness is only less revolting than that of degenerates, who say "all for myself."^[10] Nietzsche refers in Zarathustra to the "too many," the "much too many," and it is commonly assumed (in accordance with the usual manner of discourse in England and America) that he has in mind the vast working populations of our time; but he is really thinking of the lower sorts of men in general, and it happens (perhaps does not merely "happen") that those whom he specially mentions are the rich and would-be rich, clamberers for power, journalists and the educated class.^[11] "They gain wealth and are poorer with it." A king in Zarathustra says that he would rather live among hermits and goat-herds than with our gilded, false, painted populace (Pöbel), though it call itself "good society," or "nobility"—healthy, hard-necked peasants are better.^[12] "Populace below, populace above! what is today 'poor' and 'rich'?" "This distinction I unlearned," says another character, whom Zarathustra chides a little, but does not really condemn. Greed, envy, revenge, pride—these are more or less the motives all around.^[13]

The modern ideas of "freedom," "equal rights," "no masters and no slaves," are sometimes traced to France and the eighteenth century, but Nietzsche thinks that they are really and ultimately of English origin—the French being only the apes and actors of them, also their best soldiers, and alas! their first and profoundest victims.^[14] The ideas played a part too in the German Reformation, which on one side was a kind of peasants' insurrection, an eruption of common instincts, with pillage, lust for the riches of the churches, and an unchaining of the senses, following in its wake.^[15] Going back further still, the modern movement is a continuation and materialistic rendering of the slave-insurrection in morality, which began in ancient Israel and was carried on by Christianity—setting on high, as it did, the common man and his interests and valuations, and bent on abasing the powerful and the great.

 

II

But whatever its origin and spiritual filiations, the movement is growing and taking on ever more pronounced forms. The long, slow insurrection of populace and slaves (the two are almost equivalent expressions to Nietzsche) "grows and grows."^[16] It is not that want is greater, that social conditions are worse^[17]—the causes are of another order. The business class have not perhaps much more to get; but as to the working class, it is just because the laborer finds himself relatively so well off that he asks for more, and asks it more immodestly.^[18] "Now all benevolence and small charity stirs up the low, and the over-rich had better be on their guard! When today a person pours from a big bottle through too small a neck, people break the neck."^[19] Nietzsche was one of the few to see the intimate connection of democracy with socialism. They are, to his mind, successive waves of one ground-swell. As the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian, so socialism is the natural offspring of democracy. If workingmen are given political rights, it is only to be expected that, as the largest factor in the population, they will become the determining factor in the state and try to order things for their own benefit: the principle of majority-rule brings this species of rule with it. In the lukewarm (lauen) atmosphere of democratic ease, this may not be perceived—the power to draw conclusions relaxes under a laisser faire régime; but the conclusion is inevitable.^{[20] a} It is, indeed, often said that there is an essential difference between democracy and socialism, in that the former aims simply at individual liberty and independence, or, as James Russell Lowell put it,

To make a man a Man an' let him be,"

while socialism would submerge individual liberty under a régime of strict social organization. But the socialists are keen enough to see (it is really a very old truth) that individual aims may sometimes best be secured by social organization—the individual first getting effective rights and powers in this way. That is to say, socialism and individualism are not really antithetical, but play into one another; as Nietzsche says, "Socialism is only a means of agitation for individualism."^[21] It is but a specious self-surrender to the whole which the socialist workingman makes—he gives himself up only the better to secure individual rights and enjoyment; the whole is simply a new instrument with which to serve private aims.^{[22] b} Moreover without intending to, democratic institutions are making socialism practically possible, for they are putting into the worker's hands the means for obtaining his ends. They are giving him the ballot, giving him the right of combination, making him capable of bearing arms (militärtüchtig). He thus becomes part of the political power, yes, in virtue of his numbers, the leading factor in it—he can do what he will, at least can try to (for there may be a gap between the hope and the performance).^[23]

The socialist movement sometimes takes on an anarchist form. The final aims are the same, but the anarchists are more impatient, wish to proceed more summarily with the existing order. Nietzsche has in mind such communist-anarchists as we in America knew (particularly in Chicago) in the eighties, not of course the so-called "philosophical anarchists"—who are not socialists at all. As socialism is a means of agitation for individualism, so this anarchism is a means of agitation for socialism; with it socialism excites fear and begins to have the fascination of fearful things—it draws the bold, the adventurous to its side, the intellectually daring included. Uprisings, violences, novel state-experiments are to be expected.^[24]

 

III

What unites anarchism, socialism, and democracy is the common man's impatience of rule, his hatred of lords and masters, his opposition to laws he does not himself make, his disallowance of separate and special claims, rights, and privileges—this on the negative side. Positively, as already stated, he wants himself to rule, to bring all that has hitherto been separate and on high into subjection to him: it is an extreme of self-assertion, of will to power—only now not in the quarter where we have been accustomed to look for it.^[25] Restraint from tradition is as unwelcome as from rulers. The tendency is to judge everything by individual standards, to make personal or even momentary happiness the measure of right and wrong. Authorities are questioned, the aged no longer have the accustomed reverence, institutions grow weak, discipline and the idea of discipline tend to vanish. On the other hand, the desire for personal enjoyment, for wealth and luxury, knows no bounds. Nietzsche once gives a formal characterization of modernity: absence of moral discipline—human beings being left to grow; lack of authority; lack of moderation within settled horizons; lack of fineness in judgment; a chaos of contradictory valuations.^[26] They are marks of life in process of disorganization. Nietzsche admits that our institutions no longer fit us, but he says that the trouble is with us, not with them. We live for today, live very fast, very irresponsibly—this is our "freedom"; at the mere mention of "authority" we think we are in danger of a new slavery. But in order that there may be great social growths and institutions that fit them, there must be a species of will, instinct, imperative, which is "antiliberal bis zur Bosheit"; a will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility stretching over centuries, to a solidarity of the generations forward and backward in infinitum. Then comes a growth like the imperium Romanum.^[27]

To illustrate what he means, he speaks of marriage. The institution is losing its reason today—why? Because the instincts and aims that have created it and lie back of it are disappearing. More and more there is a tendency to (Nietzsche says "indulgence in favor of") love-matches. But the institutions of society are never founded on an idiosyncrasy, and marriage cannot rest on an idiosyncrasy like "love." At its basis is a combination of impulses belonging to human nature, i.e., strong human nature, as such: the impulse of sex, the impulse of property (wife and child as property), the impulse of dominion, which continually organizes that smallest social structure, the family, and which needs children and heirs in order to hold fast even physiologically an attained measure of power, influence, wealth, and so to make possible tasks and instinct-solidarity reaching from century to century. The reason of marriage lay in the sole juristic responsibility of the man-thereby it got a center of gravity, while today it goes hitching along (auf beiden Beinen hinkt); it lay in its indissolubleness in principle—thereby it won an authority that could make itself heard over against accidents of feeling, passion, and the moment; it lay in the responsibility of the families concerned for the selection of the marriage partners—the whole presupposing a lasting organization of society itself, under whose protection and guarantees the family-process could go on. But in these modern days, with idiosyncrasies, thoughts of momentary pleasure rampant, marriage is losing its meaning—hence its tendency to disappear. The objection, however, is not to marriage, but to modernity.^[28] It is but an instance. All along the line tradition is attacked—tradition which is the condition of the possibility of a continuity of valuations and policies over long stretches of time. The whole Western world lacks the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows. Among former means for producing continuity in the generations have been inalienable ownership of land and reverence for ancestors: our tendencies are in an opposite direction—land becomes an individual possession and is sold according to individual pleasure; it is one more exhibition of our ruling idea of each man for himself, and even for the mood of the moment.^[29]

Along with this egoistic, momentary life goes a variety of lesser traits characteristic of the time. There is a feverish haste, an aimlessness (easy turning from one aim to another), an over-stimulation of the head and senses (the peasant himself being drawn into the cities and their whirl), a growth of nervous diseases and insanity, an increase of alcoholism, vice, crime, celibacy, libertinism, pessimism, anarchism (they are all classed together by Nietzsche), an inability to resist impulse and yet a need for resistance (itself a "formula for decadence," since, when life is moving upward, happiness and instinct coincide).^[30] This does not mean that there is not fairly good order in modern society—the business classes, the enjoying classes, and the general comfort require it. Indeed, there is almost too much order. "The streets so clean, the police so superabundant, manners so peaceable, events so small, so predictable, that one aime la grandeur et l'imprévu."^[31] But there is little vigor in the social body. Indeed, there Scarcely is a social body, but rather a conglomerate of egoistic individuals, who tolerate one another and on occasion help one another and have too much sensibility and pity to do what the health of the social organism really requires. For there are unsound elements in society today, inappropriable, useless individuals, refuse, and society should slough them off (Nietzsche uses the word "excrete"). The vicious, the criminal, the insane, the anarchists come under this head. Nietzsche is satirical toward tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.^[32] He regards the demand for the abolition of punishment as diseased mellowness and effeminacy—sometimes weak nerves more than anything else.^[33] The brutal, the canaille, and the cattle should be strictly controlled—or else removed.^[34] As one cannot carry the law of altruism into physiology and put hopelessly diseased parts of the organism on a par with sound ones, so with the social body. Nature is not to be set down as unmoral for showing no pity to what is degenerate, and it is a sickly and unnatural morality which has brought about the accumulation of physiological and moral evils which we witness in society today.^[35] All of which is to say that modern society is not properly a "society," a "body" at all—being without the normal instincts of one.^[36]

1. Will to Power, § 750. Nietzsclie thinks that Aryan blood, whence European aristocracies originally sprung, is no longer predominant in the Western world—the pre-Aryan populations, a more numerous and more social, but inferior breed, having now in effect the upper hand (Genealogy etc., I, §§ 5, 11; cf. Werke, XIV, 218, § 440).
2. Will to Power, § 712.
3. Twilight etc., ix, § 39; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 203; Human, etc., § 472.
4. Will to Power, § 752.
5. Genealogy etc., II, § 12.
6. Will to Power, § 762.
7. Twilight etc., ix, § 41.
8. Werke, XI, 374, § 570.
9. Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 3; Beyond Good and Evil, § 225.
10. Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 1.
11. Ibid., I, xxii, § 12. Cf. further, as to the "much too many," I, ix; II, vi.
12. Ibid., IV, iii, § 1.
13. Ibid., IV, viii.
14. Beyond Good and Evil, § 253.
15. Joyful Science, § 358; Werke, XIII, 333, § 827.
16. Zarathustra, IV, viii; cf. Werke, XI, 367-8, § 656.
17. Will to Power, § 65.
18. Twilight etc., ix, § 40.
19. Zarathustra, IV, viii.
20. Beyond Good and Evil, § 202; Twilight etc., ix, § 940; Will to Power, § 125.
21. Will to Power, § 784.
22. In other classes, however, a socialistic way of thinking resting on broad grounds of justice is possible (Human, etc., § 451).
23. Twilight etc., ix, § 40; Will to Power, § 754; Dawn of Day, §§ 14, 206; Werke, XI, 369, § 559.
24. Beyond Good and Evil, § 202: Will to Power, §§ 753, 784.
25. Cf. Werke, XII, 205, § 436; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202.
26. Werke, XIV, 203, § 404. The socialist apostles are reproached for undermining the workingman's satisfaction with his small round of existenceand pleasure in it (The Antichristian, § 57).
27. Twilight etc., ix, § 39.
28. Ibid., § 39. Cf. the reflection in Zarathustra, I, xx, on the low ideas of marriage of the "much-too-many."
29. Will to Power, §§ 65, 67.
30. Cf. ibid., §§ 748, 42-50; Werke, XIV, 119, § 251; 214-5; Twilight etc., ii, § 11.
31. Werke, XIV, 208, § 417.
32. Will to Power, § 81.
33. Beyond Good and Evil, § 201; Werke, XIII, 199, § 438. Cf., as to mildness to crime and stupidity, Will to Power, § 130; as to the anarchist attitude to punitive justice. Beyond Good and Evil, § 202. For all this, Nietzsche gives no sanction to the spirit of revenge and does not really unsay what he had said about punishment before.
34. Cf. Will to Power, §§ 237-8.
35. Will to Power, § 52; cf. Ecce Homo, III, v, § 2.
36. Will to Power, § 50.