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Jan. 8, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
54:43
Bowden! - 8 - On the Genealogy of Morals
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Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
The Vanguard Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome again to Vanguard.
And welcome, as well, Jonathan Bowden.
Thanks for being back on the program.
Yes, hello.
Nice to be back.
Well, today we're going to try something a little bit different.
In previous podcasts, we've taken on big philosophical issues such as democracy, feminism, Nietzsche, so on and so forth.
And today we're going to try to get a little closer to the text and focus in a little bit more.
So today we're going to record a broadcast on Nietzsche's...
On the Genealogy of Morals, which was published in 1887.
And I'm sure there are a couple of different ways that our listeners could use this podcast.
If you've never encountered Nietzsche before, I think you could still profit from it as a taste of his thought.
And also, if you're if you are interested in studying Nietzsche, I'm sure you could either read the text before or perhaps after the broadcast and use the broadcast as a reader's guide.
Jonathan, let's dive right into the text.
This is one of my favorite...
Of Nietzsche's works.
It's actually the first Nietzsche work that I read, and it's probably the best of his works that serves as an introduction, in the sense that so much of the rest of his oeuvre is aphoristic, it's poetic, and in the case of Zarathustra, it's quite bombastic, and maybe ironically so.
But on the Genealogy of Morals, it seems more like philosophy.
It deals with moral questions and historical questions, and it's written in a more straightforward style, at least straightforward for Nietzsche.
But Jonathan, why don't you give us a background of this text and some of your more general thoughts on it?
And I'd mentioned that it is a moral inquiry, but it doesn't really look at morals in themselves.
Indeed, it might treat morality on sich in itself as somewhat of an illusion.
It doesn't try to find the origin of good and evil behind the world in another region, in heaven, in a godly realm.
It actually tries to find the origins of good and evil in the world.
And it's also a question of values.
Not only morality, but it's also a question of the value of values.
That is, what does it mean that we treat un-egoistic, in Nietzsche's words, or selfless actions as good, and we treat actions that might express a superior domineering manner as evil?
What is the value of that value?
Where does that value come from?
When did this arise in the history of not just the West, but really the history of the world?
So Jonathan, maybe pick up on a few of those ideas and give us your general thought, the thoughts on what the genealogy of morals is and its background, what Nietzsche is trying to achieve.
Yes, I think he's trying to achieve an ethical superstructure.
For a radically aristocratic way of thinking, which is to return that to modernity insofar as it existed in the past.
I also think he wants to get away from what is recorded as Judaism, the idea that you have good and you have its counterpart evil, and that these are metaphysical certainties or metaphysical statements of intent and belief that are very ancient and that are Manichaean in the Persian sense which Paul took.
In early Christianity and grafted into the heart of the Christian religion, all three of the Hebraic faiths are very dualist in relation to morality and have a large pre-codified codex about what is moral and what is immoral.
And his belief is that morality is in part socially derived and is culturally expressed.
And in an aristocratic society, that which is good, beautiful, true, and so on, will be regarded as exalted and moral, as a self-evident prerequisite.
And that which is low or mean or ugly or debased will be regarded as evil, or at the very least as bad, as the opposite of good.
And he thinks that is an axiomatic and understandable way of looking at it.
What he thinks has happened is that morality has become inverted.
By virtue of the morality of those who suffered or were enslaved in the ancient world.
And this is what he calls slave morality.
And he associates slave morality and the desire to eradicate it by in turn professing its nature to be part and parcel of the ethical substructure of Christianity and of the Judeoist Christian religion in particular.
And he regards Christianity, ethically speaking, as a revenge of the low upon the high.
And as a revenge upon the low-born upon the high-born, and as a revenge almost against the ancient world itself, ushering in the Middle Ages, where everything is valorised or everything is moralised, and everything is divided into a good act or a good thought, or an evil act and an evil thought, and that if mankind is to progress on from their stupor...
Then it has to return to more ancient verities and velities, more ancient feelings and areas of psychic force, whereby actions are described as good and bad depending upon whether they impinge upon whether something is high or low.
This also leads to...
A hierarchical value in terms of morality, where actions are perceived as cascading from on high, like a sort of devouring fountain or something, rather than being alternative or alternate.
He's also very much opposed to the idea of instantaneous valorisation, this idea that you have a binary morality.
You put forward a statement and there's a click-click response, moral-immoral, good-bad, good-evil.
And although he's more keen on good-bad disjunction than the good-evil disjunction, he always wants to get away from the idea that you can just valorise everything with an appropriate clip of the dial.
He's very opposed to televisual morality in a strange sort of way, whereby everything is determined in accordance with a prior indicator as to whether it's good or evil, and that all of one's judgments are then coloured by that particular alternation.
And he sees Christianity over 2,000 years as the main vehicle for this valorization and this sort of ethical charging and supersweat.
Jonathan, let's put some pressure on this because...
The distinction between good and bad and good and evil is simple in a way, but as revealed by your last talk, it branches out into all these interesting directions.
One way that Nietzsche talks about this is purely in terms of linguistics, and a good example that works well with English is the history of the word virtue.
And that is, it obviously originates from, excuse me, it's obviously connected with words like virile and things like this.
And it originates with the original Latin of virtus, which, of course, connotes manliness, being a man, and connotes all of those things around it, like courage in battle, steadfastness, and so forth.
And in some ways, you know, a word doesn't hold its meaning throughout time.
It can shift subtly.
And what you have over the course of centuries with the word virtue is that it becomes Christianized and in a kind of ironic way feminized to the point that virtue now means female chastity.
Almost, you know, not quite the opposite of its original meaning, but certainly one that is quite alien.
And this linguistic aspect of this is something that is very important to Nietzsche.
I mean, he thinks the origin of the word good is really something even with, connect with the word God.
I think he connects bonus with Bellum and so he does a lot of things of connecting the the word good with the warrior.
So, Jonathan, let's put a little pressure on this before we talk about the re-evaluation of values and so on and so forth.
Just that original formation of the notion of good and bad.
And in particular, how Nietzsche, this view, is different from, say, a utilitarian view of the like of Herbert Spencer, who thought that good and evil were simply connoting something that's useful or not.
It's something very different in Nietzsche's aristocratic morality.
Yes.
I mean, language is extraordinarily important to Nietzsche, not just because he was a master of the German of his day, but also because he was a trained philologist.
So he would look at the ancient origins of words and trace through over centuries their change over time and their differentiated usage.
So much of the genealogy is actually concerned with the origin of words, where many words meant masculine or masculine beauty or warlike ardor or chivalry or courage under stress and bravery under pressure.
And these words would have themselves...
themselves changed over time, as in the case of virtue, to mean something that was approximately its opposite or near, damn it, its opposite over time.
And this is part of the way in which words are wrenched out of their context and reused for all sorts of purposes.
Partly just a sort of natural selection and wordplay, but also much more subtle ideological repositionings in order to deflate one set of meanings and enhance another at a later date.
So he basically considers the good and the good life to be that which tends towards aristocratic virtue in its prior definitional structure.
So one carries oneself well, one has an integration of body and spirit.
One looks well and looks good.
That which manifests greater manliness and greater courage and greater dexterity in the use of these things on the battlefield and in the senatorial sort of structure or political structures of a particular time.
These are naturally good in and of themselves, but they're not universally good.
They're good for a particular class of persons.
They're good for a particular sensibility that goes with that aristocratic class of persons.
They're not necessarily good for others, and therefore, in effect, they're reverse utilitarian.
They're sort of negative utilitarian.
They're sort of futilitarian in utilitarian terms.
To develop their neologism, they don't really go with the flow of majority desires at all.
Indeed, they're militant minority desires.
I've just seen the British film of Shakespeare's Carolinus for the actor Ralph Fiennes in it, and Carolinus always strikes me as a particular text that's very emblematic of the sort of genealogy of the morals of which Nietzsche approved.
Where you have this extraordinary arrogance towards the Roman plebs.
You have this refusal to obey the dictates of the tribunite structure in ancient Rome.
You have the consul, as in a sense, set above the people, if not even the Senate itself.
And you have an aristocratic morality to court, which is not just conceptual, but rooted in the words that it chooses to use, rooted in a detestation of the majority, even.
And rooted in a maximalization of particularism and of the pathos of difference and of minority and individualized sentiment as long as that individualism is high-born.
Well, also, in many ways, Nietzsche personifies good and evil and good and bad in the text in quite dramatic fashion.
I want to talk about the Jewish issue, which is a very complex one, a little bit later.
But first, I just want to talk about his idea of the originators of good.
And as you were saying...
It certainly had little to do with what it means to be good now, like you might hear in church or something like that.
It was the aristocratic leader's kind of expression of their own joy in themselves and things like this.
And let me just read a little bit from Nietzsche's text to give you a taste of this, because he had a...
He had a very distinct idea of the originators of the word good to the point that he thought of them really as a people.
There they savor the freedom from all social constraints.
They compensate themselves in the wilderness for the tension engendered by protected confinement and closure within the peace of society.
They go back to the innocent conscious of the beast of prey as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from the disgusting process of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student's prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise.
One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey.
The splendid, blonde beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory.
This hidden core needs to erupt from time to time.
The animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.
The Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility.
The Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings.
They all shared this need.
It is the noble races that have left behind them the concept of barbarian.
Wherever they have gone.
Even their highest culture betrays a consciousness of it, and even a pride in it.
For example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in his famous funeral oration, Our boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere, raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness.
So, just to, you can pick up on this, just to make everything clear, I think this is some, passages like that certainly disturb Nietzsche's liberal...
defenders like Walter Kaufman, who, you know, to give him credit, certainly did a lot of good in bringing Nietzsche to the wider public.
But, Yes, yes, Koffman.
He's a liberal revisionist, really, in terms of Nietzsche's studies.
I suppose he had to emerge at a particular time in order to safeguard Nietzsche's reputation after the Second World War.
And it's possible that without people like Kaufman, I doubt he would have gone down the memory hole, but he might not have the present talented notoriety which he presently enjoys.
But yes...
One sees in examples like that, there's a definite attempt to make these things non-literal as well.
For example, the blonde beast is meant to mean a lion rather than anything else.
But of course, that's just one of many meanings that you can have of it.
Yes, this creation of the Codex as a master morality, the morality of Greek tragedy in a way, as being the inner morality of the Grecian aristocracy and of other aristocracies as well, such as the Persian, Scandinavian, Japanese and so forth.
Maybe the British imperial aristocracy in its heyday, which could be analogous to the Elizabethan period rather than later periods.
Which probably Nietzsche would have found the 19th century too stultifying and too moralistic.
But the Elizabethan swagger was something that was very close to his heart and was very close to the Renaissance sensibility, which he prized in amoral readers and rulers like the Borgia House and so on, who he regarded as untainted by Christian morality and existing in a pagan Right.
And then also he personifies evil, the creation of evil, the earlier transvaluation of all values.
And he does it in a way that is equally...
I don't mean to beat up on Walter Kaufman.
He is a good translator, but he certainly did try to turn Nietzsche into some kind of enlightened liberal or something like this.
But he personifies the creation of the notion of evil and the turning on its head, the earlier good and bad, with the Jews.
He says in section 7 of the first book, With the Jews, there begins the slave revolt of morality, that revolt which has a history of 2,000 years behind it, in which we no longer see it because it has been victorious.
So, Jonathan, talk a little bit about the Jews.
And Nietzsche is, of course, referring to the Jews in the Roman Empire and pre-Jesus Jews.
But he sees in many ways the domination of Christianity as a kind of culmination of their mission to destroy the Roman Empire, even if they rejected the actual religion.
So talk a little bit about how the Jews function in Nietzsche's work.
Yes, this is the idea that they carry to the strongest degree the sort of anti or transverse moralism, which is opposed to what he considers to be these verities of the ancient world.
They invert the master morality and make of a slave or beholden morality a master morality of a different sort, the masterful morality, one might say.
This is the idea that those who suffer...
And those who undergo the agonies of privation and those who are in a weaker position are automatically morally in an enhanced state and are indeed superior by virtue of their suffering.
And the more suffering that they have, the more ennobled they are by it.
And obliviousness to the suffering of another is itself a sign of moral inadequacy.
So that those who sympathize with the suffering of others and those who undergo suffering themselves are on the way to a superior lexicon in relation to what it is to be moral.
And also the concept of pity, pity for oneself and pity for another, becomes the elixir of moral goodness, or becomes part and parcel of such an elixir, where Nietzsche himself, of course, loathes and reviles pity for oneself and for others.
And regards it as the epitome of what he calls slave morality.
Now, the reason all of this was done was to upend the fact that the Jews were victims of Romanism and of Roman imperialism as it existed in the Middle East.
And they wished to slip the yoke of Rome and assert their own tribal and cultural independence as they had done before.
And they took away from the masters the weapons of the masters subtly and religiously and linguistically.
And in a code-like way, in order to give themselves the weapons to store their own armory.
Nietzsche sees ideas very much as the pursuit of warfare by other means, particularly when groups and peoples become involved in their adoption or their non-adoption.
So he considers this taking of the idea of the beauty of pitilessness when perceived in an aristocratic vein and inverting it so that beauty is sympathy for the weak and those who suffer.
be one of the great blasphemers of human history and to be one of the great sort of non-utilitarian utilitarian devices by a means of which the weak can humiliate and humble the strong.
And he considers that the Jews were a cardinal in developing this semi-text, if you like, this textuality for what it was to be moral in the future.
Yes, I mean, he sees this in world-historical terms.
In chapter 16 of the first book, he says, Rome felt the Jews to be something like anti-nature itself, its antipodal monstrosity, as it were.
In Rome, the Jews stood convicted of hatred for the whole human race, and rightly, provided one has a right to link the salvation and future of the human race with the unconditional dominance of the aristocratic values, Roman values.
So he obviously sees it in the original revaluation of values in the figure of the Jews.
But how does that, obviously it goes beyond them to Christianity itself.
So what was first a kind of warfare, a subterfuge warfare where...
The Jews were able to, by means of values, able to turn Rome against itself.
But then you have a new situation where, you know, Jesus is worshipped in Rome, in what used to be the center of the Roman Empire, and thus, you know, aristocratic values of the old world.
So maybe talk a little bit about, I guess maybe one way to think about this is that...
What first was subversion on the part of the Jewish system of values almost became a general decadence of Western culture as a whole, and it spread obviously far beyond the Jews.
But talk a little bit about this, Jonathan, about this original subversive activity of ancient Jews and that spilling out into all sorts of things, which I'm sure Nietzsche would associate with egalitarianism, with democracy.
With, you know, the destruction of the old ways of life and so on and so forth.
Yes, it's a sort of that Christianity becomes a generalized ethical Judaism for Gentiles and is perceived as such by me.
I think it's his version of the Passion, which is a unique reading in modern Western civics and in modern Western literature.
If one thinks of the very notorious and controversial film, The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, there's the famous moment where the Jewish Pharisees are screaming on behalf of their mob for the crucifixion of this religious prostrate to take place.
Somebody claims to be, in some respects, the king of the Jews, and yet has nothing but a discreet and rather minor religious following.
And as a minor Jewish fringe political and millenarial leader on the one hand.
And on the other hand, you have Pilate's natural distaste for these intra-Jewish disputes.
And you have this moment where he washes his hands in front of all of them to tell them there's a plague on both your houses.
I refuse to take part in any of this.
And in the end, he just allows the majority of the Jewish subjects of Rome's imperialism in Palestine to have their way in relation to the killing of what he perceives to be a relatively innocent and harmless man.
But by virtue of, say, washing his hands, Nietzsche describes him as the most moral character in the whole story, which of course is a blasphemous usage.
Because to all Christians, the most moral person in the whole story is Christ himself, of course.
And Pilate is condemned, because although he carries out his necessary function, he doesn't side with the cause which is morally better.
But his attitude towards the thing is one of divining shrug and a divine indifference, which has about it the welter of an aristocratic further, the welter of an aristocratic disdain.
For these popular excitations and amusements.
And the morality that was put forward by ancient Hebraic faith as an inversion of classical and aristocratic values to be used by a people that wished to claim its own destiny is then wrenched from their hands and sublimated into the big ethical structures of the enormous religions of the Middle East.
Which are for Gentile consumption, principally Christianity and Islam.
Nietzsche has very little to say about Islam, and probably taking certain actions from Schopenhauer would be more favourable towards Islam than towards Christianity, partly because of Islam's patriarchy,
partly because of its attitude towards women, partly because Islam is a third pagan in terms of the Arab structures and religious faith that pre-existed in the Middle East, unlike Christianity which seeks to be a complete repudiation of the pagan past ethically and in other ways.
That's one of the important elements here that Nietzsche just doesn't Right.
Right.
But morally, he wishes to see a return to paganism, a return to its offices and to its sort of hierarchy of deities, household and social.
And he also wishes to see that each layer of the society has a role in such a pagan context, but its role is defined from the top downwards, not from the bottom upwards.
A little more on the Jewish question.
And when I was reading this, again, I haven't read it in a number of years.
It was a great pleasure to read it again.
Nietzsche talks about the Jews, on the contrary, were the priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt an unequaled popular moral genius.
And do you think that there is something to be said that a book like Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique Is in some ways this Jewish revolution in a nutshell spoken of in terms of intellectual history in the 20th century in the sense that MacDonald talks about Jews entering American society under the guise of universalism
or something that promotes freedom and tolerance.
They actually bring in a kind of poisonous doctrine, whether it be cultural Marxism, pro-immigration views, Freudianism, etc.
Later taken up by, it's kind of swallowed whole by the Gentile host community, and it leads to their decadence and maybe even their death.
Do you think that, you know, obviously many would consider that, you know, anti-Semitic, but do you think that there is, that Nietzsche sees there is something peculiar about the Jews?
Maybe it's related to their ethnicity, maybe it's related to their monotheistic faith, that leads them to seek to revalue the values of their neighbors and their host communities.
Do you think Nietzsche saw it like that?
Or am I maybe reading a little too much into it with MacDonald?
Or is there a basis for this in monotheism, their general religion?
Yes, I think that's largely true, what you said, whether Nietzsche would have had he lived.
I'm not subscribed to the sort of McDonald's axioms one can never say, but he certainly believes in this monotheistic identitarianism, this sort of belief that a unique people is set on one side to re-evaluate the world morally, but also sees the re-evaluation and transvaluation of morals from its own perspective to be part of a group analogy of hostility and defence towards others.
So that ideas tend to be dual track.
On the one hand, you have them because they are your ideas, but on the other hand, they serve a destiny greater than themselves and can be, particularly for a community that isn't militarily defended and can only defend itself in exile through the notion of what it says and how it can get others to behave in relation to what it is or is felt to be.
So I think that the...
The uniqueness of this monotheistic cult and the uniqueness of monotheism as a doctrine totally contrary to the plurality of gods and goddesses that's part and parcel of the pagan pantheon and worldview in all pre-existent societies is cardinal for understanding the way in which modern morality works, particularly in universal faiths, unlike Judaism.
Which are monotheistic.
The difference between Christianity and Islam and Judaism, of course, is that Jews don't really seek, apart from the odd individual, converts, and even that's plausibly deniable and is on the liberal end of their faith.
Whereas Judeo-Christianity and Islam rely on conversion as the very sort of blood and bone marrow of their dispensation.
So this conversion of the rest of the world, or large stretches of it, certainly of the Western and Near Eastern worlds, to enormous standalone monotheistic structures, the morality of which favors the morality of suffering, the efficacy of pity, the sanctimony of, in some respects, the feminine over the masculine.
The adoption of pacifism as a moral standard, even though pacifism itself may be eschewed as an overall morality, and the belief that the last shall be first and the first shall be last in almost all areas, whether before or after death, and however otherwise put, is part and parcel of these faiths.
And he considers this to be...
Uniquely Jewish in origin.
The notion of anti-Semitism in relation to Nietzsche, which is nearly always non-existent or extremely dormant in comparison to much more traditional Germanic discourses of the time in which he wrote, always surfaces in relation to the genealogy of morals.
But it's basically because he holds this particular group responsible for an original transvaluation of values.
But the ultimate recrudescence of spiritual Judaism is in Christianity.
Right.
Also, it's worth pointing out that Nietzsche was no mere might-makes-right philosopher.
He wasn't just going to unequivocally endorse the Vikings as the ultimate expression of values.
Because he says in other places that, yes, it's true that...
The Christian revolution, the Judeo-Christian revolution, knocked the legs out from under aristocratic values.
At the same time, it offered Western man depth, and it made him, it changed him in a way that in some ways are productive.
It made him...
It at least gave him a sense that he should begin examining himself.
It gave him a conscience, which of course led to a whole host of different philosophies and so forth.
So in many ways, Nietzsche is never a philosopher who is a kind of, let's say, a reactionary or someone who thinks of, well, you know, the Jews are bad, let's just go.
I think Nietzsche thinks that we need to, in some ways, the whole West and all of Europe needed to have actually experienced the Judeo-Christian revolution in order to move on to something higher.
Do you agree with my kind of dialectical reading of Nietzsche?
Yes, Nietzsche is deeply dialectical and also always draws a positive from a negative so that he doesn't end up with a pessimistic position.
Because Nietzsche is, contrary to many people who are metapolitically of the right insofar as Nietzsche can be described as on it, Nietzsche is non-pessimistic.
And is a fabulous optimist in his way, even when there seems to be no real grounds for it.
His bias is optimism and heroic optimism.
So he will take from Christianity all sorts of positive things, particularly the depth of its psychologism.
And this is part and parcel of his fascination with the figure of Pascal.
Who is the originator of Jansenism, the small p Protestant discourse within French Catholicism.
And he was one of the most extraordinary phorepsychologists that there has been in the Western historical and philosophical tradition.
And yet, like a lot of Puritans of various sorts, he tormented himself in relation to his faith.
But he achieved greatness out of that sort of aesthetic struggle.
And of course Nietzschean morality is about the struggle that one has with oneself in order less to be human than to possibly rise above that.
So morality, one is one's own anvil and one life hammers down upon it in order to raise a man from what he might have been to what could be.
So Nietzsche will always see in almost everything that occurs a positive or a positive splinter that might fire off to create a fire that can warm the hands of the children of tomorrow.
I don't know.
To bring the conversation to a close, I want to ask you two questions that are speculative in nature.
Again, I focused on book one.
I think that's really the keystone.
There are a lot of, certainly, treasures to be found in the second and third books of Genealogy of Morals.
But in book one, He mentions that everything is visibly becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized.
And then he goes on to say, and this is a very ironic passage, and I think it's worth speculating on this passage.
To this end, does the church today still have any necessary role to play?
Does it still have the right to exist?
Or could one do without it?
It seems to hinder rather than hasten this progress.
But perhaps that is its usefulness.
And this is obviously Nietzschean in the sense that it's very playful and it looks at an idea from all these different angles.
But if I were to sum up what he said in that passage, I would say that we live in a world in which...
Judeo-Christian egalitarianism dominates, even, or perhaps even especially, amongst those people who have gone beyond the faith.
And I'm thinking of, just to choose an example for the sake of usefulness, someone like Christopher Hitchens, who of course thinks God is the worst thing that ever happened, hates all religion, so on and so forth.
But at the end of the day, fundamentally reaffirms...
Universalism, egalitarianism, human rights, the last shall be first, first shall be last, so on and so forth.
Christopher Hitchens is deeply Judeo-Christian from a Nietzschean point of view.
And I think Nietzsche is kind of asking in some ways, what usefulness does the church play?
And one could say that...
In some way, as Nietzsche does, that the Church is actually holding back Judeo-Christianity from dominating.
And some of the truly devotional and ceremonial aspects of, say, Catholicism or Episcopalianism, or some of the quite serious and almost monkish aspects of the Lutheran faith, that these are almost reactionary throwbacks to an era when one lived in the...
The world, like the Borgia's Rome or something like this, or one, you know, went to a cathedral and set about, you know, hours upon hours of study, that in some ways those, these aspects are holding back the ultimate triumph of the Judeo-Christian message.
And, you know, Jonathan, what I want to ask is maybe if you can take that idea and speculate about the future.
Of Christianity.
And I'm thinking here, I recently saw a YouTube video, which I could link to on the website, and it was basically this person, and this YouTube video had millions of hits.
It went viral.
It became popular really quickly.
And what this person was saying is essentially, I hate religion, I hate the church, but I love Jesus.
And his message was essentially the church is corrupt, it's hierarchical, it has all these funny things from the European past, you know, it's connected with old costumes and old paintings and so on and so forth.
But I truly love the message of Jesus, which of course is the leftist message that everyone...
We should tolerate everyone.
Everyone's wonderful.
We're all the same and interchangeable, so on and so forth.
And in many ways, when I looked at this, I thought it was kind of tragic in a way, in the sense that...
This person is deeply Christian, yet he's imagining a world, perhaps prophesying a world, where there's really no need for any kind of Christian church or structure in this way.
So Jonathan, taking all these things that I've just mentioned, what do you speculate on the future of Christianity, or does it have a future?
Yes, I think it does have a future.
Probably along slightly different lines to those that Hitchens and this viral YouTube person profess.
And it's history over the last century has been the gradual deflation in the importance of Christian structures.
The Catholic Church less so than some of the others.
The Orthodox Church is slightly less so than their Protestant equivalents.
But certainly you've seen a collapse.
In the importance socially that Protestantism had, maybe outside the United States, but you have seen a collapse in the importance of the Church of England in a society like Britain or England, and yet Christian values and post-Christian values are more entrenched than ever before.
Iris Murdoch, the English novelist, was a Quaker, which is a particular type of edgy sort of Christian adherence.
And she once said that she would like to forgo the religious trappings of Christianity and keep its ethics.
And certainly its ethics are as strong now as they ever have been.
And the conservatism that was part of those ethics has largely been eschewed or done away with.
So you now have a large secular liberal humanism seizing upon Christian ethics without the Christian faith.
And yet you still have the trappings of the Christian faith.
Coexisting with this large spread and widespread secularization.
I think that Christianity has a long way to go, particularly in the third world, and the second world, and the fourth world, and however one chooses to divide those up.
And I believe that Christianity still will be the dominant religion, not Islam, 100 to 200 years from now, because it has so much fodder.
So much to feed on in the third world, because it is a religion for all who suffer.
It is a religion for all who know outsider status, no matter how ever defined.
It is a religion for all those who feel they're not in the inner circle.
It's a religion for all those who are not necessarily at the top.
Or would conceive themselves to be near the top of their own group or their own society, or have a reason for looking at those things in a way which would lead them not to identify with the bottom, even if they weren't technically at the top.
And it, in some ways, spreads that part of Islam, which is itself Christian, that preaches love, peace, and tolerance, which nestles up uneasily with the militarized, masculine, heroic, more pagan elements that coexist in Islam at this particular time.
But Islam, without Vahadism and without Sadrism and without Islamism, without Islamism, without Sufi Islam would be very close, ethically, to Christianity.
Indeed, it would be an extension of the same thing by other means, essentially, and it's a religiosity of brotherhood and love, and without strict adherence to form as well.
Because you make up the form as you go along.
Indeed, Christianity may have a future that's rather like Islam, because there is no Islamic Pope.
Although there's Mecca and Medina and there's a center to turn to, there's no clerisy for the whole of Islam.
There's just localized priesthoods and semi-priesthoods and holy men who go about preaching who know something about what they're talking about.
Sheikhs, those who are moved upon to speak.
So Islam's always had this devolved and rather libertarian structure.
It's a very authoritarian religion, but it's very non-authoritarian in the way in which it operates.
Any house can be turned into a mosque just by doing a few simple things and putting down a few carpets and segregating the believers when they pray along gender lines and so on.
It's very homely in that sense.
And many of the values of Christianity can and are being spread by Islam, paradoxically, and vice versa, if you see these things on a universal level rather than on a parochial one.
And so I think Christianity's got quite a lively future, but it's not necessarily in the West, where in the West it is being overtaken by the secular humanism that's eating it alive, and yet in terms of values to which it is given rise.
I think that Nietzsche was not entirely right about the fact that if Christianity disappears in its observational form and in its churches and its structures and its civic adornments, that it's really achieving a triumph as another remove.
Theoretically, you could say that, but I think that once it goes, it goes, and the number of people who live in the West now without any fixed adherence to Christianity at all is quite startling from a Christian point of view.
You also have the paradox of mass immigration into the Western world that consists of people from much more conservative and religious societies, and you have the replenishing of Christianity and its observers.
manner by many of these immigrants who wish to cling to the prior adherence of faith, partly in relation to the alienation they feel from societies which are not their own.
Christianity is a great source of comfort to many immigrants in the West, and that's why many of them adopt a quite conservative type of Christianity, either Catholicism or So I feel that...
Christianity has still got quite a lot of tick in it, but it will be third-world immigration into Western societies, it will be the extension of Christianity's strength outside the West, and it will be the growing totalizing of liberal humanist values within the West as a surrogate for Christian norms, at least in the area of ethics.
So I think these three areas are the areas where the egalitarian impulses of Christianity will continue to grow, even as the religion faces near collapse in countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland and England.
In closing, let me ask you about the possibilities of something one might call anti-Christianity, and that is the possibility for a revival of the aristocratic ideals, Nietzsche admired in the Europe that he envisioned.
And let me read just one more passage.
And that is, with the French Revolution, Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal.
This time in an even more profound and decisive sense.
And then he goes on and he talks about, again, dialectically, he talks about how...
This triumph of the French Revolution kind of turned into its opposite and did it rather quickly.
Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has ever been.
And in him, the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh.
One might well ponder what kind of problem it is.
Napoleon is synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman.
So obviously it's a mesmerizing passage.
It's one that I find inspiring.
What do you think, Jonathan, just to, let's say you have the, you're now allowed to let your hair down a little bit.
What do you think of the possibilities of this new world historical antichrist like Nietzsche viewed Napoleon as arising in the ruins of the old Christian world?
Yes, there's a similar spirit at the end of Spengler's The Decline of the West, when in 1918 he preaches the fact that there will be a new Caesarism abroad in Europe, something that was sort of well around the way and discernible at the margins.
Even when he was speaking at that time.
It's difficult to see it now at the moment, but whenever chaos and radical revolutionary change comes abroad, these ideas inevitably return.
The sort of the left-wing version of dictatorial tyrannists, the red czars that were thrown up by certain social and political revolutions on the European continent.
...themselves increasingly came to resemble, often in a sort of macabrely comic way, the aristocratic noblesse of the past, and it was even more pronounced in authoritarian structures which were on the other side.
Yet, as of this moment in time, it's difficult to see where the Napoleons of this world will come from.
Yet Napoleon, of course, conquered most of Europe and on the flags of his armies.
It was the slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", and yet conquest is what was happening.
And they were flying a revolutionary flag, the tricolor, which consists of three colours: the blue and the red of Paris, and the white of Versailles.
The red and the blue having captured the old monarchical dispensation at Versailles, when the monarch was forcibly dragged back from Versailles to the capital Paris.
Where traditionally the Bourbons had never felt particularly comfortable.
I don't know if you've ever seen Goncé's enormous five to seven hour film, Napoleon, which is a silent film from the 1920s.
No, I haven't.
Where Napoleon is depicted as a sort of Superman.
And the film's been restored several times.
And it was...
Goncé was an admirer of Mussolini.
And there's a strong element of restorationist imperial aristocracy about the nature of the film.
And it's quite funny in some ways because Napoleon's depicted as very thin and aesthetic.
He's not the sort of portly dictator of the later portraits by David and that sort of thing.
And that Napoleon's most remembered in history.
But Napoleon will always emerge in a period of radical and absolute change.
And that can only occur if there is a socioeconomic breakdown of a sort threatened by the implosion of the European Union over its economic difficulties.
However, I personally think the very fact that Nietzsche remains so important intellectually and theoretically is the harbinger of the fact that such ideas are not dead.
The fact that if you go into the philosophy dissection of any bookshop in the Western world, Nietzsche will be there, and all sorts of other philosophers will not be there.
Indeed, even Marx will not be there.
His children may be there, theoretically speaking, but he may not be.
And the very fact that the genealogy of morals and dissimilar texts are widely on sale, you don't have to go very far to get them if you're interested.
It indicates to me that part of the spectrum, part of the human brain scan, is still out there and still open towards these sorts of opinions, opinions which are elitist and which are inegalitarian and which have a streak of hubris about them in the ancient sense and are aristo-oriented and are morally aristocratic without necessarily being sociologically so.
And the very fact that these ideas are still there, despite the fact that the valency is against them or in every other respect, in every other respect they're crowded from the spectrum or shouted down.
And yet Nietzsche is complicated enough, virile enough, epigrammatic enough, not really to have escaped the census mark and to still be there.
Are the interviews which, at one level of reckoning, are 2,000 years old.
Jonathan, I think we just scratched the surface of the genealogy of morals and you just thought in general.
But thank you for being with us once again on Vancom.
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