I watched another Michael Sugrue lecture.
This one was about Nietzsche.
Which meant I knew before starting that I was probably going to disagree with him.
And I did.
A lot.
But I think that might be the point.
Apparently normal people don’t matter
One of Nietzsche’s ideas that immediately annoyed me was this idea of the “higher” human being.
The genius.
The artist.
The warrior.
The exceptional person.
Sugrue explains Nietzsche as basically arguing that humanity should be judged through its highest examples, while the average person has little value compared with them.
I think that’s bullshit.
Not because all achievements are equal.
They aren’t.
Einstein’s achievements clearly have more historical importance than me successfully making breakfast this morning.
Achievements can have different value.
Human beings don’t.
That’s the distinction.
A scientist can make a world-changing discovery.
A farmer can spend their entire life farming.
One achievement might affect history far more.
That does not somehow make the scientist a more valuable human being.
You still need the farmer to eat.
You still need the sewage worker unless you want your city smelling extremely philosophical.
You still need cleaners.
Teachers.
Technicians.
Friends.
Partners.
Parents.
People doing ordinary things nobody writes biographies about.
We already love talking about standing on the shoulders of giants.
I think there are a lot of ordinary shoulders underneath those giants too.
History has terrible credits
Humanity likes stories.
Especially stories of almost mythical people.
Einstein.
Oppenheimer.
Great artists.
Conquerors.
Geniuses who apparently arrived, fought the whole world alone and changed everything through the sheer force of being built different.
It’s a much better story than:
I worked every day for ten years and slowly figured it out.
But I think the second one is probably closer to reality most of the time.
Even extraordinary people need somewhere to live.
Food.
Education.
Teachers.
Infrastructure.
People who support them.
Someone who gives them access to a laboratory.
Someone who cleans the laboratory.
Someone who taught them something when they were sixteen.
And then, yes, they also work incredibly hard.
Both things can be true.
Someone can genuinely earn their success while also being lucky enough to have the circumstances that allowed that success to happen.
The problem begins when someone takes:
“I worked hard.”
and turns it into:
“therefore everyone who didn’t achieve what I did simply didn’t work hard enough.”
Especially if dad owned the company.
Maybe genius isn’t as rare as we think
Nietzsche worries that equality, pity and concern for ordinary people suppress exceptional people.
I almost think the opposite.
Imagine if every country had excellent schools.
Healthcare.
Safety.
Libraries.
Equipment.
Teachers.
Internet.
Time.
Enough stability that ordinary people could actually breathe for a second and discover what they like doing.
How many more brilliant artists would appear?
Scientists?
Athletes?
Musicians?
Designers?
Writers?
Maybe “genius” isn’t some magical one-off creature.
Maybe there are far more potentially extraordinary people than we realise.
They just never get the chance to become visible.
A person cannot discover their strange obsession with astrophysics if their entire life is occupied by trying to survive.
Raise the floor and maybe you don’t lower the ceiling.
Maybe you discover a lot more ceilings.
Pity is complicated
Nietzsche really doesn’t like pity.
He treats Christian morality as something built around weakness, pity and the resentment of people who couldn’t exercise power themselves.
I don’t completely agree.
People who are suffering need compassion.
But I also think too much pity can become useless.
There is a difference between:
I feel sorry for you
and
I want to help you have more agency.
This happens in media a lot, especially with marginalised groups.
Even with good intentions, people can get represented through one emotional frame.
Only suffering.
Only oppression.
Only anger.
Only trauma.
Then the representation itself becomes another box.
You haven’t represented the person.
You’ve represented the one thing you already expected from them.
Show the suffering.
Absolutely.
Show the anger.
But also show the humour.
Joy.
Boredom.
Culture.
Ambition.
Stupidity.
Love.
Failure.
Everything.
Otherwise compassion becomes what I’d call pity theatre.
Everybody feels wonderfully sorry for someone.
Nothing actually changes.
Nietzsche might be right about where some morality came from
This is where it gets more complicated.
Nietzsche argues that Christian morality grew partly out of the perspective of slaves and oppressed people.
A morality where everyone is equal before God.
Where suffering matters.
Where the powerful don’t automatically get the final word.
And where justice may exist beyond the world that currently treats you horribly.
Could that have given slaves hope?
Obviously.
If you’re being treated like property, tortured and killed, and somebody tells you:
you still matter as much as the person doing this to you
that’s going to mean something.
Could anger and resentment also be mixed into that?
Probably.
They were slaves.
They had something very reasonable to be angry about.
But even if an idea came partly from pain, that doesn’t automatically make the idea wrong.
Maybe someone believes in equality because they desperately need equality to be true.
That doesn’t disprove equality.
Where something came from and whether it is correct are two separate questions.
Sometimes you need to bite the leg
Nietzsche talks a lot about resentment.
And I think resentment can absolutely become destructive.
But I also think there is something wrong if someone has their boot on your neck and you’re somehow not angry about it.
Anger tells you:
this is wrong.
The question is what you do next.
Sometimes resistance is nonviolent.
Sometimes it isn’t.
India’s independence involved enormous nonviolent movements.
It also involved revolutionaries and people who used very different methods.
I don’t know how much a boot cares about your moral purity if it has no intention of moving.
Sometimes you need to bite the leg.
But the goal should be:
get the boot off.
Not:
the boot is gone, now I want to make the other person suffer forever because I suffered.
That’s where resistance starts becoming revenge.
And that’s a very thin line.
I understand revenge.
There is a reason revenge is probably one of the most reliable action-movie plots ever invented.
People understand:
you hurt me, I want you to hurt too.
But understanding the emotion doesn’t automatically justify everything you do because of it.
We’ve talked about this before.
People are incredibly good at moving their moral line while still imagining themselves as the good person.
Conscience isn’t necessarily self-torture
Nietzsche has a strange theory of conscience.
Basically, humans want to direct aggression outward, society stops us, so that aggression gets turned inward.
Now you hurt yourself instead.
Guilt.
Conscience.
The “bite” moves inward.
I don’t really buy that explanation.
We’ve already talked about morality as something that could have evolved through social living.
Cooperation.
Emotion.
Survival.
Reciprocity.
If you look at it that way, conscience can be much simpler.
You crossed a line. Fix it.
Guilt is unpleasant because it probably needs to be.
It tells you something you did clashes with what you believe you should have done.
But guilt should eventually lead somewhere.
Understand what happened.
Repair what you can.
Try not to do it again.
If guilt becomes:
I did something bad, therefore I am permanently bad and should punish myself forever
then it has stopped being useful.
Now it’s just suffering eating itself.
Suffering doesn’t need a cosmic reason
This is one part where I think Nietzsche raises a genuinely useful problem.
He attacks the idea that suffering must have some grand cosmic meaning.
Especially when people start thinking:
this happened to me because I deserved it.
That can make suffering even worse.
I don’t think everything happens for a reason.
I’ve personally seen good things eventually come after periods of suffering.
But that doesn’t mean the suffering was deliberately sent to create the good thing.
Maybe something horrible just happened.
Then afterward you learned.
Now you know what to do.
What not to do.
What you can handle.
What you don’t want to become.
Humans can create practical meaning after the fact.
That doesn’t mean the universe planned your character arc.
And too much suffering is simply horrible.
There is no need to sugar-coat it.
Pain doesn’t automatically make you stronger.
Sometimes it just destroys you.
Master Roshi was right:
work hard.
Study.
Eat.
Sleep.
Rest matters too.
Even stories understand this.
If every chapter is violence, death, misery, violence, death, misery…
eventually you just go:
okay man.
The suffering stops meaning anything because there is nothing else around it.
Life has ups and downs.
The annoying part is you don’t always know which one you’re currently in until later.
Nietzsche’s “power” sounds a lot like agency
Nietzsche talks about the will to power as this enormous underlying human drive.
Dominate others.
Dominate the environment.
Master yourself.
Shape culture.
Create art.
Control ideas.
At some point I’m just sitting there thinking:
isn’t this agency?
People want control over their own lives.
Of course they do.
We don’t want to be helpless.
We want to make things better.
Build better houses.
Create better medicine.
Learn new skills.
Improve our circumstances.
That’s not particularly sinister.
The important distinction to me is:
I want more control over my life
versus
I want more control over yours.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Agency is important.
Domination needs a much better explanation.
With great power comes…
Yes.
I’m doing Spider-Man again.
I keep coming back to:
with great power comes great responsibility
because there’s a reason that line survived.
If you know more, teach.
If you have authority, don’t abuse it.
If you have resources, help where you reasonably can.
If you’re stronger, that doesn’t suddenly give you permission to treat weaker people as less human.
Knowledge itself works like this.
People discover something.
Teach it.
Write it down.
Record a lecture.
Train a student.
The student takes it further.
That’s how we have systems of knowledge in the first place.
The exceptional person doesn’t owe society nothing because they’re exceptional.
If anything, having more ability gives you more ways to affect other people.
That sounds like more responsibility, not less.
I don’t think anyone creates values from nothing
Nietzsche likes the idea of stronger individuals creating values rather than accepting inherited morality.
I don’t really think there’s much “creation” happening.
Creation is a loose word.
It’s modification.
Your parents teach you things.
Their parents taught them things.
Culture gives you things.
Religion.
Friends.
Teachers.
Books.
Films.
Everything.
Then you look at what you inherited and go:
does this still make sense?
Maybe yes.
Maybe no.
Maybe your family handed you something good.
Maybe they handed you racism.
Just because something arrived before you doesn’t make it right.
But just because it’s old doesn’t automatically make it wrong either.
You inherit.
You inspect.
You modify.
Then eventually someone inherits your version.
One finger out, three back
My basic yardstick for a lot of morality is pretty simple.
Would I accept this if I were the one on the receiving end?
You know the saying.
When you point one finger at someone, three point back at you.
If I say:
those people deserve fewer rights
would I accept that rule if I belonged to that group?
If I say:
they should be treated this way
would I accept the treatment if the positions reversed?
If the principle suddenly becomes unacceptable the second I end up underneath it, maybe it wasn’t much of a principle.
Maybe I just liked where I was standing.
Tradition deserves an inspection, not automatic destruction
This might be the Nietzsche idea I ended up liking most.
Question what you inherited.
But I don’t think questioning something means you have to destroy it.
Traditions exist for reasons.
Sometimes those reasons are serious.
Religion.
Culture.
History.
Sometimes they’re simply nice.
A family does something because their grandparents did it.
A festival exists because people enjoy it.
A ritual connects you to people who came before you.
That’s still a purpose.
Not everything needs some gigantic rational justification.
But there are also traditions like racism or casteism.
Those deserve the hammer.
And then there’s everything in the middle.
That’s where I think you tap it first.
Why does this exist?
Who does it help?
Who does it hurt?
Is the reason still relevant?
Is it sacred?
Is it harmless?
Is it stupid?
If it’s stupid, change it.
Sugrue describes Nietzsche as “philosophizing with a hammer” and also warns that smashing everything can turn into intellectual vandalism.
I think that’s fair.
Don’t swing first.
Inspect first.
Some things are load-bearing.
Some things are decorative.
Some things are rotten.
Perfect systems don’t exist
Nothing is perfect.
Except Perfect Cell himself.
Obviously.
But no system created by imperfect humans is going to be perfect either.
There will always be something wrong.
Something unfair.
Something inefficient.
Something we didn’t think about.
And maybe that’s part of the point.
If everything were perfect, where would there be to go?
Maybe progress happens because every generation receives an imperfect system and has the opportunity to improve it.
Not necessarily destroy it.
Improve it.
What scares me more is a system that says:
this is finished.
Never question it.
A healthier system probably says:
this is the best we’ve managed so far. Tell us where it breaks.
My descendants should be allowed to tell me I’m wrong
Nietzsche was thinking from his period.
His culture.
His knowledge.
His assumptions.
I’m thinking from mine.
And my descendants will probably look at some things I believe and go:
what was wrong with this guy?
That’s fine.
Actually, I hope they have enough freedom to do that.
But I also hope they can tell me why.
I don’t want:
“he’s from the past, therefore he’s wrong.”
That’s just another lazy rule.
Tell me what changed.
Tell me what I couldn’t see.
Tell me why the old value doesn’t work anymore.
Maybe we’ll discover intelligent alien life.
Maybe artificial life becomes something completely different from what we understand now.
Maybe concepts we currently think are obvious become embarrassingly limited.
Who knows.
Maybe I’m the future uncle saying:
no clanker will ever marry my niece.
I sincerely hope not.
But that’s kind of the point.
We don’t know what moral problems future generations are going to inherit.
All we can do is leave them enough room to question us.
No conclusion
I don’t think Nietzsche is useful to me because he’s right.
He’s wrong too often for that.
But he’s also right often enough that you can’t just ignore him.
Maybe he’s more useful as a yardstick.
A way of seeing how someone from another time looked at morality, religion, power and human value.
And then asking:
do I agree?
Usually:
not completely.
But the question itself is useful.
Maybe that’s what I like most.
Nietzsche doesn’t just ask you to defend your convictions.
He forces you to question why you have them in the first place.
And then you get to turn the hammer back on Nietzsche.
Which seems fair.
I don’t think the goal is to smash everything our ancestors gave us.
And I don’t think the goal is to worship it either.
Maybe the job is simpler.
Take what you inherited.
Look at it properly.
Keep what still matters.
Repair what can be repaired.
Break what deserves breaking.
Pass the rest forward.
And hopefully the people after you do the same thing to your ideas.
Nietzsche is wrong enough to defend against.
Right enough to be useful.
Maybe that’s enough.
