Ping Pong 40: The Essence of…
Nietzsche suggested that a widescale collapse in very traditional religious belief (a belief that has included religion as a part of the social fabric) was likely be highly problematic, and complex. The main problem he suggested, was that words like ‘soul’ or ‘evil’, words that were defined in the context of a religion, were very likely to malinger on, long past the spiritual realities that were thought to support them had faltered. These words or concepts would then flap about, looking for new contexts or places to manifest themselves within the wider social fabric. Perhaps in the modern context five such elements are worth highlighting.
Firstly to sweep away the entire notion of original sin, is to challenge humanity’s core faith in justice. All the suffering in the world suddenly loses its rhyme or reason. Pain becomes then just that, a pain. One might respond, Nietzsche says, to such a situation in either of two ways. One might embrace difficulty and use it as a chance to change one’s own nature and power. This was Nietzsche’s own professed option. He wrote therefore that that which did not kill him, helped him. The alternative ruse was however to start resenting it, and wanting all pain and all suffering to go away or for ever cease. The trouble with such a reaction was and indeed is, then that it warps and devalues life. Life involves a degree of struggle and suffering: Its challenge, Nietzsche suggests lies in how you use that challenge. To start resenting it, or wish that it would go away is therefore to be at war with the very powers that made one what one is.
What is more, such a war, would be a multi level affair. There would be the endless personal resentments of a world that does not really care too much about any one individual. But on a wider level, there are those deep worries we have about such diseases as cancer, or such social problems as poverty, which malform our lives in three main ways. Firstly they can risk devaluing our own lives, if we start inappropriately applying them to ourselves. The problem is a tricky one because there is not a real rational delimit to what one worries about. The worry about illness in itself might be justified, but that worry, when it is applied to a specific individual, such that they endlessly police themselves, looking for symptoms, and possible illnesses, becomes utterly crippling. Secondly and more critically we start to judge and devalue other’s lives. If someone has a life we cannot understand, but which is attached to one of these labels (they are poor or have a debilitating illness) we start to build a ‘world’ for them, a world based on our expectations, and not their realities. The worry therefore which others have about a disease or a state is allowed to define the conditions for those with the disease or state and so becomes an additional burden for them. Being in a wheelchair is not so bad that human expectations (and even a certain type of ‘tolerance’ ) cannot make it worse… Finally our worry encourages us to slip into a world of fantasy. We demand to live in a world where illness is cured or poverty or abuse abolished (and start inventing ways that this is the case, irrespective of what the reality is). The problem then is, that we are prepared to accept God knows what injustice to remove poverty itself (‘workfare’ etc); while we confuse our aspirations for human rights with the passing of an act, and so fantasise that we have already acted. The problem is further compounded because it is as likely as not, that we will stop wanting to worry about the problem of human rights, once the grand act is passed, and so ignore the actual ways in which we might help.
Going even deeper into the problem, the real problem with illness, the real oddity, Nietzsche suggests, is how powerful it is. There is something intoxicating in worrying about one’s health, and making others worry. One becomes in that worry centre stage. It becomes then very difficult to abandon one’s chosen illness (as to do so is to risk losing what makes one special). The endless demand which we have that the world is perfect, is then hooked not just to a worry, but to an entire series of personalities and demands to be centre stage that spin off that worry, and make it all the more prevalent.
Secondly, Nietzsche says that is very unlikely that Evil as a category will disappear with conventional faith. The problem with such a definition is that it personified forces that were if not natural, at least impersonal. Lambs will therefore claim that an eagle is evil (and by implication they are good), because the eagle must eat them to exist. The entire state of being an eagle becomes as evil to the (good) lamb. Or again any suffering that one has undergone, might be seen as the result of someone else’s evil intent. The world thereby resolves into a series of fairly gross generalizations. We look for evils (usually located in peoples or organizations) to remove. Change this one thing, the mantra goes and the entire system will alter and shift. It does not matter that such ‘surgical strikes’ seldom hit their desired goal. If evil continues in the world, another source could be found for it. If removing Saddam Hussein produces anarchy, one must then remove the figures (Al-Qaeda) inspiring that anarchy. The world dissolves into a series of rather simplistic quests, each nesting inside the last, and the real manner in which things are actually patterned is lost in the process.
The problem with evil therefore, is that it ignores the highly complex fabric of causes by which the world is formed. These forces are merely summarised in one word and that word becomes itself a manifesto (for who could be against the eradication of evil?). This personification then destroys any hope of uncovering any real ‘evil’ in the world. Take the example of Karen Matthews. Is she evil? In a sense the answer is of course not. She might be stupid, callous, greedy, desperate, lazy but not evil. And yet standing back a little, one might say there was something very wrong with the society, or even more particularly the media, that allowed things like Karen Matthews to be. That is, a media which turns kidnaps into peep shows (and money-making exercises), and confuses reality with endless bland soap opera like dramas. There is something very wrong (call it in a sense evil) with then the ingredients that tumbled into Karen Matthews’ mind: to that degree she personifies something that is wrong, something which is evil. However the confusing of this element with her identity will ensure that the organizations who are most caught up in the forming of this mind will not need to re-examine their own part in it. They will rather use her as an example of what is wrong, to sell more newspapers or spin off shows. While those elements of the media (and the government) who might worry about how they were caught up the process, will manage the entire argument to demonstrate how they are not solely to blame (which was never the claim). The argument always thereby becomes a personal demonstration (or justification) by parts of the media that they are not (in all cases) evil (which again no one could claim or would claim that they were). In effect therefore the worry (by the media that they are somehow guilty and so evil) actually lets them off the hook, by over egging the cause against them, and so allowing them to defend themselves against a charge of which they are certainly innocent (and so ignore the deeper charge).
Just as problematically, Evil as a stand alone word, looks for people to ‘be’ it (and so reverses the natural causality of things). Evils (such as terrorism) seep into our language as the demand to be manifested. We look for proto terrorists be they depressed doctors or teenage poets and treat them as if they were a full blown advocate of ‘Evilitude’. In exactly the same way that the seventeenth century found witches, our world is warped into a quest after ‘Evil’ individuals, and is quite determined to find them (in whatever condition or place). The notion of evil thereby breeds callousness and stupidity on our part, an action which then of course breeds new problems, new evils of its own. And of course even more problematically for us, those problems which cannot be understood in this way, those problems such as environmental collapse, which have no simple rogue (or one we do not want to think about, for it is us), are kicked into the long grass, as simply to difficult to solve…
Thirdly the corollary of evil is that those who represent ‘the norm’ are good. Morality rises and falls with the majority, which becomes truly, and self righteously moral. A collective myth is therefore born that everyone or a least a large proportion of the ‘right thinking’, are automatically right. The problem here is not that there is not some value in this, some degree of Kantian style morality. The majority of people in Britain at least do oppose torture and unnecessary war. The real problem is that ‘the majority’ understands itself as the only conveyer of morality. Those who are a little odd get excluded and are rendered problematic. Far worse though, is the fact that all the norms of this self professed majority become moral. So that morality suddenly and very problematically includes (amongst others): the moral majority’s quite unjustified distrust of foreigners (mixed up with personal worries about jobs); their desire that they have a comfortable living (even if the planet cannot afford it); their disliking of alternative ways of doing things… Behind this moral majority wish list is the fact that the very set up of this group as the self confessed righteous precludes any ability they might otherwise have had of understanding others within the world. As they are the majority, they simply assert that what they are is what is right and that that is it. They would not easily therefore understand for example, that the world of work is a social construction. It suits very many individuals, and enhances what they can do. But that does not mean that it must suit everyone. Others looking at that world might well very genuinely not see the possibilities it allows. They might not partake of the majority view, but rather see only the problems and sacrifices (or idiocies) of that world of work. The problem then becomes what does one do about such a reaction? Does one really attempt to eliminate it? Or if one must tolerate it, then how? A problem which the majority find very difficult to understand (their only solution being either to stigmatize or medicalize this group).
Fourthly one of the oddities of modern humans Nietzsche says, is that they are bred to keep their word. At one level one might of course say that this is all very moral and proper. However Nietzsche means to remind us, that keeping one’s word when the world changes and alters all the time is very problematic. To do what one says in a world that shifts, is in a sense the height of mendacity. It is better, by far Nietzsche suggests, to allow one’s ideas to shift and change in time, and be honest about the fact, than stick to firm and out dated promises. However the problem here is not that politicians (or business or individuals) do not do the latter, but rather that they have in a sense to be ashamed of doing so. That is the norm of changing how one reacts to the world as it changes, becomes somehow shameful. One ought to stick to principles come what may, the cry goes out. If one does not, one risks failure. A complex front is therefore opened up within political debate: a front where parties change their viewpoint, but need to be careful about how and when they do it, and a rather natural process thereby becomes unnecessarily problematic. What is even more tricky is that the ghosts of the past are endlessly conjured into the present. This week has seen Cameron currently therefore attempting to stigmatize Brown with the mantra of the 1970’s Labour Party, while Brown is retaliating with the attacks of the 1980’s. A conflict that in effect ignores the fact that the world and its problems are very different than they were in either of the two aforementioned decades. Sensible debate is thereby drowned in a welter of cod history, which endlessly is doomed to repeat itself.
Finally, and running through all the previous points, is the fact that societies operate for Nietzsche, as veritable systems for managing, harbouring, and even nurturing, resentment. Personal grudges or slights are thereby taken up, and echoed into a wider picture. A society feels itself at strife with other societies in the world. It resents (as the Serbs resent the West), and feels its own unity in that pain. The endless replaying of 9/11, its endless echoing around the political world, ensured that what was a shock (and a personal pain for 3000 or so families) became a very real political force. Pain (and with it the claims that one must all struggle through together) becomes an effective and elusive social glue. We need it, and the hate it brings with it.
Nietzsche suggests that suffering is actually a part of the social fabric. We need it, and the simplicities that it brings, in order to frame modernity (democracy, the media, nations, etc). And this reaction to pain, frames the kind of problem which a society is able to simply tackle. If the problems fall out of blame’s remit, and it is too complex to be solved by an appeal to evil (or to history), we find it very difficult to grasp. The problem is, Nietzsche suggests, that most of the real problems with modernity do lie out of this compass, a problem which has only got worse over the years, and might now be critical. The problem is that Nietzsche then has very little answer, beyond the personal sphere to this problem. He suggests that we need to lose sight of democracy, and return to a system that rewards the special (the aristocrats), but does not then develop the argument that much further. He ends with an appeal to a different way to understand ourselves and our lives and with it our political order, but then leaves it at that. It was up to other thinkers to attempt to understand how modernity needed to change our conception of humanity, and with it our notion of justice - a topic which the next Rant will consider.
