By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 19, 2015
‘God,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, “is dead.”
God, it has been noted, made a similar yet more lasting
pronouncement about Nietzsche.
But before the German philosopher departed this mortal
coil, he had some interesting things to say. Nietzsche argued that one of the
most powerful forces in society was “ressentiment.” Similar to the everyday
word “resentment,” ressentiment lay at the heart of new kinds of morality. In
ancient times, nobility was associated with power. The downtrodden, the poor,
the weak, the enslaved were ignoble.
The masses of have-nots, to use a more modern language,
resented their plight for understandable reasons. But they were too weak to
launch a real, armed revolution. Instead, the powerless resorted to a moral
revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness, and morality and
rendering them evil in the popular imagination.
Wrote Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals:
It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to the inversion with their teeth . . ., saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God . . .”
But if the Jewish prophets introduced the idea that
success in this world was a sign of corruption and evil, the Christians
perfected it, according to Nietzsche. “Christianity,” he wrote, “was from the
beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life,
merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or
‘better’ life.”
Nietzsche wasn’t a historian, but a literary philosopher.
He didn’t rely on many primary sources — and it wouldn’t have occurred to him
to cite actual data of any kind. And he certainly had the devil’s gift for
quoting scripture. So one needn’t agree with all he said, never mind take it as
authoritative, to see that he was on to something about the cycles of
civilizations. One can reject his writings completely while still acknowledging
his impact on our society.
In 2015, our society is shot through with Nietzschean
ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to
make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or
otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.
The University of California recently issued a set of
guidelines about the terrible danger of “microaggressions” — small, usually
unintended slights that allegedly hurt the feelings of the newly anointed
classes of victims. One must no longer say that America is a “melting pot,” for
to do so is to suggest that minorities should “assimilate to the dominant
culture,” according to the new moralists at the University of California.
And one mustn’t say anything that advances “the Myth of
Meritocracy.” Saying “America is the land of opportunity” or “everyone can
succeed in this society if they work hard enough” is now a form of bigotry.
Of course, the surest way to guarantee that America is
not a meritocracy is to teach young people not only that it isn’t one, but that
it’s evil to say it is, or should be, one.
Ressentiment is first and foremost the psychology of
blame. It surveys the social landscape and blames the failures and hardships of
the alleged have-nots on the successes of the haves. It is more than envy,
which is a timeless human emotion — and one of the seven deadly sins. It is a
theory of morality that says the success of the successful is proof of their
wickedness.
Such is the allure of ressentiment today that it produces
creatures like Rachel Dolezal, the blue-eyed white woman who had to invent an
entire narrative around her stolen fictional identity as an oppressed black
woman.
Such is the political power of ressentiment that Hillary
Clinton, who earns in a one-hour speech five times what the average American
makes in a year, feels compelled to campaign as a “champion” for all those who
feel micro- (or macro-) aggressed by a system rigged by the very same
institutions she is happy to shake down for donations. (When asked to explain
the contradiction on Fox News Sunday, a Clinton spokeswoman pointed to the fact
that Clinton’s mother had been downtrodden in her youth.)
When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he meant that there
was no longer an ideal outside of ourselves to which we’re all answerable.
Everything was a contest of power and will. America isn’t there yet, thank God.
But it surely seems like that is where we are heading.
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