The Free Thinker

Keynes the Heretic

J.M. Keynes' admiring biographer, Robert Skidelsky, writes in Return of the Master:

In my biography of Keynes I called him an 'unusual economist.' I would now go further. Deep down, he was not an economist at all. Of course, he could 'do' economics-- and with the best. He put on the mask of an economist to gain authority, just as he put on dark suits and homburgs for life in the City. But he did not believe in the system of ideas by which economists lived, and still live; he did not worship at the temple; he was a heretic who learned how to play the game. In former times he would have been forced to recant, perhaps burnt at the stake. As it was, the freedoms of the exigencies of his times enabled him to force himself on his church. Only a person of colossal self-confidence, outstanding intellect and passionate concern for his countrymen and humankind could have set himself the task of rewriting a large chunk of the Western intellectual tradition. Yet this is what Keynes set out to do. One can only marvel that he got as far as he did. He mesmerized and fascinated his contemporaries; for thirty years after his death they lived in his intellectual and moral afterglow. But to the technicians who inherited his mantle his ideas seemed strangely alien to the main themes of their subject. They tried to assimilate them, but found it difficult and made a mess of it; and the next generation gave them up altogether. Orthodoxy won out; the economic temple was shaken, but still stood.

I find this very astute, though my attitude towards it a bit different. I might substitute "blinding egoism" for "colossal self-confidence," and it was a crisis of self-confidence, rather than the "freedom" of his times, which gave Keynes his opening. "Burnt at the stake" is gratuitous hyperbole: orthodoxies rarely do such things to heretics; I am almost tempted to say that genuine orthodoxies never do; certainly orthodox economists never have. It is far more typical for heretics to burn orthodox at the stake. This claim will be opaque to the typical modern person as regards the history of religion, but it is obvious enough in economics, where all the ideologically motivated murder has been the work of disciples of heretics like Marx, and never of Hayekian free-marketeers. But the word "heretic" is right on. "Heresiarch" would be even better, though perhaps general audiences would not understand it.

Let me draw attention to the fact that there is such a thing as "Keynesian economics," but one never (or hardly ever) speaks of "Marshallian economics" after Alfred Marshall, "Friedmanian economics" after Milton Friedman, "Arrovian economics" after Kenneth Arrow, "Fisherian economics" after Irving Fisher, or even "Smithian economics" after Adam Smith; Frank Knight, David Ricardo, J.S. Mill, Gary Becker, Francis Edgeworth, William Stanley Jevons, John von Neumann, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Lucas are others who I think shrewd insiders would probably rank as equal in brilliance with Keynes. (Actually it's subtler than that; some really informed people would probably rank them much superior, while many economists would give Keynes a small edge in deference to convention, but anyway. There is one other "economist," if he deserves the name, that has a school named after him: Karl Marx. But Karl Marx was so thoroughly wrong, and by now everyone knows it, that economists just ignore him. Keynes still has influence.)

Is it just that Keynes is more famous? I don't think so. It's that the most important contributions of Smith, Marshall, Fisher, Knight, Ricardo, Edgeworth, etc. are just mainstream economics. Their ideas were often very original. But one may say they fit into the existing framework of economic thought, and their ideas are now thought without reference to their originators. I think the heart of the matter is this: their ideas made sense, and that was what made them orthodox, for that is what an orthodoxy does, it makes sense. It may insist on certain mysteries (in economics the word "assumptions" is sometimes an allusion to these), but it does not force faulty logic on anyone. For that matter, it does not force its mysteries on anyone either. Frank Knight is an interesting case here, for he, too, was an irreverent and thorough skeptic about homo economicus, a radical who urged people (sarcastically?) to vote Communist, yet because of his humility and discipline he remained a representative of orthodoxy, the teacher of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, James Buchanan and Paul Samuelson.

Skidelsky said that Keynes' successors "tried to assimilate [his ideas], but found it difficult and made a mess of it." Not exactly. Keynes' ideas themselves were a mess. Hicks, Samuelson, and others made an order of them, to some extent; they codified and clarified and formulated and explained; but in the end this intellectual edifice dissolved. It was the proverbial house built on sand, or as economists sometimes say, a theory built without microfoundations. "New Keynesians" like Greg Mankiw salvaged what was worth salvaging; reactionary Keynesians today like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, or George Akerlof are merely using Keynes' still-great name as cover for arrogant and politically-motivated revisionisms that would not stand up to critical scrutiny without it. The economics profession, I aver, simply responded to Keynes in the wrong way. It treated him as an oracle when it should have treated him as a provocateur.

I plan to back these claims up with a series of quotes from the General Theory (but I might not follow through, since there is always other business). But here's one to start with (from p. 164 of my edition):

For my own part I am now somewhat sceptical of the success of a merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest. I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investment; since it seems likely that the fluctuations in the market estimation of the marginal efficiency of different types of capital, calculated on the principles I have described above, will be too great to be offset by any practicable changes in the rate of interest.

So essentially, Keynes seems to be advocating state control of the commanding heights of the economy. The government, not the private sector, should build factories. Why? Because the volatility of financial markets makes them unsuitable for allocating capital to its most productive uses. An economist as brilliant as Keynes is reputed to be would know better than to write this. Many countries have tried policies a bit like this since, especially in the Communist bloc and the Third World. The results are uniformly wretched: the capital is wasted, the products are lousy. Hayek, Mises, or I suppose Frank Knight could have guessed this in advance. They knew that the state is certainly not in a position to determine the best uses to which capital can be put; it lacks the data, which is fundamentally the subjective experience of consumers, and is revealed by the response of budget-constrained consumers to the price mechanism, and no other way; and anyway, it lacks the incentives to manage capital well. Meanwhile, Keynes much exaggerated the inefficiency of private financial markets. Indeed, I would be surprised if any important economist today would endorse this passage.

Slavery, MacIntyre, and Natural Rights

This week's Economist provides an extended survey of the prevalence of rape in wartime:

SHORTLY after the birth of her sixth child, Mathilde went with her baby into the fields to collect the harvest. She saw two men approaching, wearing what she says was the uniform of the FDLR, a Rwandan militia. Fleeing them she ran into another man, who beat her head with a metal bar. She fell to the ground with her baby and lay still. Perhaps thinking he had murdered her, the man went away. The other two came and raped her, then they left her for dead.

Mathilde’s story is all too common. Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war. Antony Beevor, a historian who has written about rape during the Soviet conquest of Germany in 1945, says that rape has occurred in war since ancient times, often perpetrated by indisciplined soldiers. But he argues that there are also examples in history of rape being used strategically, to humiliate and to terrorise, such as the Moroccan regulares in Spain’s civil war...

Congo’s horrors are mind-boggling. A recent study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam examined rape survivors at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a town in North Kivu province. Their ages ranged from three to 80. Some were single, some married, some widows. They came from all ethnicities. They were raped in homes, fields and forests. They were raped in front of husbands and children. Almost 60% were gang-raped. Sons were forced to rape mothers, and killed if they refused...

In the Sudanese region of Darfur, rape and other forms of sexual violence have also been a brutally effective way to terrorise and control civilians. Women are raped in and around the refugee camps that litter the region, mostly when they leave the camps to collect firewood, water and food. Those of the same ethnicity as the two main rebel groups have been targeted most as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing. According to Human Rights Watch, rape is chronically underreported, partially because in the mostly Muslim region sexual violence is a sensitive subject. Between October 2004 and February 2005 Médecins Sans Frontières, a French charity, treated almost 500 women and girls in South Darfur. The actual number of victims is likely to be much higher...

But in Congo the court system is in pieces. There have been fewer than 20 prosecutions of rape as either a war crime or a crime against humanity. The American Bar Association, which helps victims bring their cases to court in eastern Congo, has processed around 145 cases in the past two years. This has resulted in about 45 trials and 36 convictions based on domestic legislation, including a law introduced in 2006 to try and address the problem of sexual violence. Those who work with the survivors of rape in Congo have mixed feelings about the 2006 law. It has pricked consciences and made people more aware of their rights, concedes [Hillary] Margolis, [who runs the International Rescue Committee's sexual-violence programme in North Kivu]. It creates a theoretical accountability that could help punish perpetrators. But for women seeking justice, it has yet to have much impact. “There is still a glimmer of hope in people’s eyes when they talk about the law. But the judicial and security systems need to be improved so that it can be applied better, or people may lose confidence in it,” Ms Margolis says.

Now, I want to make a pedestrian point, namely, that the good guys here are animated by a concern to protect human rights. This doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's the perennial dog-bites-man story of humanitarianism: atrocities are happening somewhere, human rights groups are trying to help the victims and to awaken the world's conscience to do more.

And this raises the question: what do people who don't believe in rights, like Alasdair MacIntyre, or maybe Professor Steven Smith, whose article I deal with in my last post (although it's not clear from his article whether he believes in rights or not, for a reader might suspect that he does believe in them but wants to persuade his interlocutor to accept a providentialist worldview in order to provide a basis for his belief in rights) think that human rights groups are doing? Do they approve of them? I presume so, but why, if they think these groups' basic moral concept is misguided? Would they try to offer an alternative account of how "human rights" groups should think about, and justify, their work, and if so, what would it be?

It is not so easy. Though MacIntyre-- I'll focus on him since his ethical position is more clearly stated, and Professor Smith seems to be influenced by him-- would not embrace a utilitarian view, since this is an obvious alternative, we should consider it. And to put it bluntly, it is not even clear, from a utilitarian perspective, that rape is wrong. As a matter of biology, it pleasures both perpetrator and victim. Presumably for the victim the pain exceeds the pleasure, but for the perpetrator we may make the opposite presumption, and so the effect on the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" is ambiguous. Even if, for a particular transaction of this kind, we judge the balance to be negative, one must take into account the broader effects. If the act brings children into the world, what is the balance of the pleasure and pain the children will experience? Also, since a license for rape may serve as a means of compensating soldiers, what are the broader military effects of this? If we think rape is, on balance, harmful in itself, might it be justified if it enables the more beneficent side in a civil war to recruit enough soldiers to procure victory?

If the last paragraph sounds like a peculiarly wicked and digusting abuse of the faculty of reason, it is. But that's the point. Respect for human rights is an indispensable element of moral reasoning, and to discard it makes one liable to stumble into monstrous conclusions.

However, we are arguing not with the utilitarians but with MacIntyre. What would he offer to human rights groups as a substitute for their moral errors, in order to justify continuing their good work? Or can we suspect MacIntyre, if not of personally condoning these atrocities, of holding a meta-ethical position which would tempt, or even compel, him to condone them, or at least make him incapable of providing grounds for objecting to them?

Alas, as painful and shocking as this last suggestion is, I fear there are more reasons that we cannot dismiss it.  And let me preface this by saying that MacIntyre's After Virtue is one of my favorite books on ethics, one which I both admire and to which I am much indebted.  Yet I think it must be acknowledged nonetheless that there are reasons to have grave doubts about MacIntyre.  As evidence, let me first cite the very end of After Virtue:

If my account of our moral condition is correct... what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-- doubtless very different-- St. Benedict.

Now, I am the last person to discourage calls to monasticism.  In the last chapter of Principles of a Free Society, I go so far in extolling the heroic historical role of monasticism that a reader might wonder for a moment whether there is any credit left over to give to anyone else for the achievements of civilization. And in a sense it is always correct to view ourselves as seeking refuge in the midst of a world that is falling apart, for we are all doomed to die, and only by turning away from ourselves and seeking refuge in God can we hope to pass safely through the dark age that awaits us when the soul is separated from the body.

Considered as a historical analogy, however, MacIntyre's conclusion is absurdly inapt. I tend to think, with Rodney Stark, that the fall of a Roman Empire was much less of a disaster than it has generally been held to be, indeed for some, perhaps for many, it may have been a liberation and a blessing. But it was a setback for civilization in many ways, e.g., literacy and education. There was a lot of violence; I think there were major declines in population. Some arts and luxuries declined or were lost.

Our own times are just the opposite. When MacIntyre published After Virtue in 1981, the post-World War II boom had raised living standards sharply in the West, virtually ending hunger, and bringing TVs and refrigerators and washing machines and air conditioning and all sorts of other new technologies, not only to the elite, but to the broad majority of the population. Not only was literacy not in retreat, but college education was becoming commonplace for an unprecedentedly large share of the population. But perhaps MacIntyre's words are meant as a prediction for the future? If so, they are if anything even less apt. In 1981, while such intense gloom about Western civilization was indefensible, much of the rest of the world was subject to tyranny and totalitarianism, and the 1970s in particular had been a decade of atrocities in Idi Amin's Uganda, Cambodia, China and so on. Since then, a freedom and prosperity much like that attained by the West have come within reach of more and more people's including the countries of central and eastern Europe formerly under communism and the Pacific Rim of Asia; and in the last decade Latin America and India have also been booming. The end of hunger and illiteracy worldwide no longer seems like a utopian dream, but will be achieved within the next few decades if current trends continue. Dark ages indeed!

I believe that MacIntyre was, at the time of writing, a former Marxist.  In the context of academia, one is doubly disinclined to condemn him for that, since (a) Marxism is common enough in academia (except economics) that one has to learn to regard it tolerantly, and (b) the fact that he left Marxism makes anti-Marxists want to congratulate and welcome him, and encourage him to refute his old comrades.  Still, at this point I don't think any doubt can really be admitted, in light of communist history, that ever to have been a Marxist was a huge error of judgment on anyone's part, and it is a reason to regard MacIntyre warily.  Just because your friend seems sincerely penitent about the drunken car crash he got in last week, doesn't mean you shouldn't be especially careful to ask him how much he's had to drink before he drives home.  As a Marxist, MacIntyre once thought capitalism is so bad that that it ought to be overthrown by revolution.  That's insane.  Are there any signs in After Virtue that a similar intellectual malady lingers on in his thinking?  And here I would draw attention to what MacIntyre has to say about Edmund Burke:

We are apt to be misled [in thinking about tradition] by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characeristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution-- a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital-- is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke's own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the institutions of the free market. The theoretical incoherence of this mismatch did not deprive it of ideological usefulness. But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

For an American conservative who reads MacIntyre as a presumptive intellectual ally, this passage is discombobulating.  Conservatives usually lionize Burke.  Even liberals tend to like him, since his insight that the French Revolution must lead to military dictatorship displays a wisdom that anyone who wants to defend liberty and prevent tyranny must envy and emulate.  One would expect MacIntyre, as a critic of the Enlightenment and an advocate of tradition, to appeal to the wisdom of Burke and regard as an ally or even a hero.  Bizarrely, his attitude is one of almost contemptuous dismissal. 

Again, MacIntyre's verdict on "the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688... and the institutions of the free market" seems almost wholly negative.  How can this be?  The Anglo-American democracies, whose origins lie in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, have carried the standard of liberty triumphantly in good times and bad for three centuries, making a successful stand against the proto-totalitarian Napoleon and the monstrous tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin.  The liberal constitution of England had its flaws, no doubt, but surely it must be recognized as a force for good.  But MacIntyre's words suggest the opposite.

And the claim that "when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead," is even more bizarre.  Not only was the tradition of English liberty (and property) not dead when Burke defended it in the late 18th century, but it has since gone from strength to strength, thriving, spreading its influence over the globe, vanquishing one rival ideology after another.  Even in the culturally alien environment of India, British traditions took root to the extent that India still lives by British institutions of the common law and representative government to this day.  MacIntyre's historical analysis here is as bizarrely inapt as his prediction, or diagnosis, of "the new dark ages that are already upon us."  How is one to account for these huge errors of judgment in a man so obviously intelligent?

I think one reason for it is MacIntyre's former Marxism.  MacIntyre let his mind be poisoned by propaganda against the capitalist order, and he retained indefensible prejudices against it even after he outgrew belief in the Marxist system, which blinded him to the merits of Burke, and which made him look regard the triumph of liberal capitalism as a "new dark ages," in the face of overwhelming evidence of 20th-century capitalism's beneficent impact on the human condition.  In short, MacIntyre was a sore loser.  Now, God knows how to work good even out of man's folly, and in this case there is an element of higher insight even in MacIntyre's bitter grumbling, for compared to the City of God, even these most beneficent of all human polities in history which we Westerners of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are privileged to inhabit, are as unjust and miserable as MacIntyre's Marxist prejudices caused him to regard them.  MacIntyre's fans, like myself, are free to read him from that perspective and continue to admire him.  But that shouldn't cause us to be any less contemptuous of some of his historical judgments, as such.

Another reason, I think, for MacIntyre's low opinion of democratic capitalism, is that he's a snob.  If you fancy yourself a member of an intellectual elite, you might well be inclined to take a dim view of the age of mass college education.  It is notable that the various moralities that MacIntyre attacks and dismisses, particularly those of Kant and the utilitarians, are egalitarian, and those among which he leaves standing and between which at one point he offers readers a choice as the only viable alternatives-- "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" is the title of Chapter 9-- are both highly aristocratic or elitist.  And we may here make a connection to the theme with which we began, rape, or to make it more general, slavery, the coercive use of others for one's pleasure.  For purposes of this post, I wish I knew the writings of Aristotle and Nietzsche much better, but I'll do my best, and others may correct me.   

It seems clear that Nietzsche would be an enthusiastic fan of military rape.  I don't know whether he ever said so explicitly, but his vague glorification of heroes, his contempt for ordinary morality, his extreme sexism, his desire to find in evolution a source of a new ethics (and if the source of morality lies in the evolutionary imperatives of one's selfish genes then no action is more meritorious than rape) all point inexorably to this conclusion.  Not surprisingly, the Bolsheviks and Nazis, who answered Nietzsche's call to throw out the old moral order and create a new higher man, practiced military rape on a large scale. 

To digress a bit, I regard it as a scandal and a serious stain on the character of the philosophical profession that Nietzsche is regarded with respect as an important philosopher.  Philosophers often come to pretty crazy conclusions, and it seems likely that a historical survey of these "lovers of wisdom" would reveal that in their conclusions they exhibit a good deal less wisdom than ordinary people who, making less effort to reason clearly, just accept most of what common sense tells them.  But philosophers are legitimated by the presumption that they adhere to high epistemic standards, that they reason and argue in a careful and systematic way, and that even when they come to crazy conclusions, they have good reasons for them, and state them, and that they are ready to abandon their positions if refuted in argument, and thus serve as a stimulus to common sense to better articulate and defend itself.  But Nietzsche does not adhere to high epistemic standards, does not reason and argue in a careful and systematic way, does not give reasons for his views and expose himself to refutation.  His writing consists mostly of a few wild claims, a vague vision which however is never made very clear or argued for, and reams of sneering, albeit with an erudite, subtle, and poetic flavor, against moral philosophers he despises, namely almost everyone. 

So why is Nietzsche regarded, by philosophers and therefore by the public which accepts the canon approved by the specialists, as an important and venerable philosopher?  Let me ask a perhaps parallel question.  Suppose that the top twenty most-read authors among mathematicians included, amidst logicians and geometers and graph theorists, one pornographer.  I don't think we would conclude that this pornographer is a great mathematician.  It would just lower our opinion of the moral character of mathematicians.  Now suppose that a pornographer appear among the top twenty most-read authors for great literary critics.  In this case, we might suspect that this particular pornographer possessed, for his trade, unusual literary merit, which enabled him to appeal to literary critics.  However, we would probably not be inclined to rank him with Shakespeare and Tolstoy, because we would suspect that the critics' main motive was still the stimulation of lust and not literary enjoyment properly speaking. 

I think the reason for Nietzsche's popularity among philosophers is similar, namely, his writing is to snobbery as pornography is to lust.  He is extremely artful in stimulating pride and vainglory in his readers.  Philosophers like him, partly because he is erudite and subtle and poetic, but that by itself gives no one the right to regard him as a philosopher, and partly because they are prone to snobbish vainglory and elitism, and Nietzsche gratifies this vice.  The public should not tolerate it.  When a philosopher mentions Nietzsche, we should say, "Excuse me, you're paid to argue, to reason, to exchange arguments with other philosophers, that is, other devotees of reasoning and argument. If you read that trash in your spare time, that's your problem, but we need to maintain standards here. Find another way to make your point." 

But anyway.  Aristotle.  I know that he endorsed slavery, regarding some people as natural slaves.  To endorse slavery is prima facie to endorse rape, since if a master is to make decisions for his chattels and command them by force if necessary, it would seem to follow that he can make decisions about whom they'll sleep with.  There might be ways to avoid this conclusion by arguing that the rights of masters did not extend to sexual matters, and perhaps Aristotle said so, I don't know.  But slavery, including slave-concubinage, was widely practiced in ancient Greece and Rome.  I'm pretty sure Aristotle endorsed the enslavement of captives in war.  So as far as my limited knowledge goes, and I hope others will correct me if I am wrong, Aristotle would effectively have endorsed, or at least would not have condemned, practices much like those against which Human Rights Watch and Hillary Margolis of the International Rescue Committee are struggling in Congo.  And Aristotle's most famous student, Alexander the Great, seems to have committed, and incited his army to, rapes of Persian women on a large scale.

So where does this leave MacIntyre?  It's less and less clear what resources he could draw upon if he wants to support Human Rights Watch et al.  He is dismissive of the liberal capitalist order in the context of which military rape, a scourge through much of history, has ceased to be a practical danger for so many women in today's world.  The moral philosophers he lionizes, Nietzsche and especially Aristotle, could not help him and seem to be on the other side.  The fact that he is still under lingering Marxist influences puts him in some very bad company, e.g., Mussolini, Pol Pot.  But the main charge is what it was from the first: that he rejects the principle, human rights, which animates campaigns against military rape today and, before that, against slavery. 

Why does MacIntyre reject natural/human rights?  At one point in After Virtue (pp. 67ff.), MacIntyre writes:

It is first of all clear that the claim that I have a right to do or have something is a quite different type of claim from the claim that I need or want or will be benefited by something. From the first-- if it is the only relevant consideration -- it follows that others ought not to interfere with my attempts to do or have whatever it is, whether it is for my own good or not. From the second it does not.

Well said, except that MacIntyre seems to state this as if it something odd, when he has only articulated a most mundane truth which is operative in practice every day.  I am at a party, and my friend starts smoking.  I do not think that she needs to, or that it will benefit her.  On the contrary, I think it is bad for her.  She does want to do it.  But the reason why "I ought not to interfere" is that she has a right to do it.  Hence I would not rip the cigarette out of her mouth.  Neither would MacIntyre, I presume.  By contrast, if she got drunk and angry and began trying to break the host's plates, she once again (a) does not need to, (b) will not benefit from it, but (c) wants to.  In those respects, her breaking plates is the same as her smoking.  But as she does not have a right to break plates as she does to smoke, it is perfectly appropriate for me to interfere and try to stop her, even by restraining force.  MacIntyre would no doubt accept this, but he argues:

Claims to the possession of rights presuppose... the existence of a socially established set of rules.  Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods under particular social circumstances.  They are in no way universal features of the human condition...  Those forms of human behavior which presuppose notions of some ground to entitlement, such as the notion of a right, always have a highly specific and socially local character, and... the existence of particular types of social institution or practice is a necessary condition for the notion of a claim to the possession of a right being an intelligible type of human performance.  (As a matter of historical fact, such types of social institution or practice have not existed universally in human societies.)

At best, MacIntyre's argument depends on an appeal to a historical claim.  It is far from clear that his claim is true.  As far as I can tell from my certainly far from comprehensive (and no doubt inferior to MacIntyre's) knowledge of the history of morals, the idea of violence, which I say in Principles of a Free Society "may be defined as any violation of the habeas corpus principle" (or natural right of self-ownership), seems to be universal.  Even if MacIntyre's historical claim is right, his argument is not necessarily compelling, as MacIntyre seems is aware:

It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact... that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. (After Virtue, p. 69)

MacIntyre's argument is incomplete by his own confession, even if his historical claims are conceded.  "From this it does not of course follow... but the truth is plain..." seems to be an appeal to intuition.  And that intuition is heavily conditioned by the apparently impressive claim he has just made that no one could have known that there were rights before 1400 because there wasn't a word for them, or more precisely, "there was no expression... correctly translated by our expression 'a right'."  But is MacIntyre's semantic finickiness appropriate here?  If there was no word with exactly the same meaning, doubtless there were words and phrases with similar meanings.  In any case, while doing research for Principles of a Free Society I read (much of) The Idea of Natural Rights, by a philosophical medievalist, Brian Tierney, and I was struck by the brusqueness with which Tierney dismisses MacIntyre:

MacIntyre has deplored the "deep lack of historical consciousness" that infects much of modern moral philosophy, but he does not udnerstand the history of the rights theories that he criticizes. (Tierney, Kindle Edition, Locations 60-66)

Moreover, MacIntyre's critique of rights is part of his general demolition of the Enlightenment project to provide a rational basis for morality, but this demolition job obviously must be followed by an attempt at reconstruction of some kind of morality, and when MacIntyre gets around to that, he creates an opening to reintroduce the theory of rights.  MacIntyre argues that the virtues can be understood in the context of a 'practice,' by which he means "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized," e.g. architecture, music, chess, war.  This leads MacIntyre to:

a partial and tentative definition of a virtue: A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods. (After Virtue, p. 191) 

One of the virtues is "justice, [which] requires that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards" (p. 192), or as he says elsewhere, "giving what is due."  To become a philosopher, for example, one must initially "give what is due" to the established canon of philosophers, reading and respecting and emulating them.  I can't do justice to MacIntyre's argument here.  Suffice it to say that I think he does what he sets out to do, finding a basis for ethics that lies outside, and is not vulnerable to the critiques of, the spurious pleasure-pain calculus of the utilitarians and the dangerously contentless categorical imperative of Kant, and from which, as it were, a desiccated moral landscape can be re-irrigated. 

What MacIntyre does not do, and what greatly needs doing, is to codify the virtues into at least some prescriptive rules that ordinary people can live by.  In this respect, MacIntyre remains essentially pagan.  By situating the virtues in the realm of practices he seems to have designed an ethics for great chessplayers or musicians or warriors, perhaps for a Nietzschean artistic elite, which cannot obviously be transferred to, so to speak, "the bungled and the botched" who will never be masters of any craft, but who, one hopes, may still lead moral lives.  Christianity, which exalts the humble, plays very little role in After Virtue.  If one criticism of Aristotle's ethics is that is only for the wealthy (the "magnanimous man" clearly needs to have a lot of money), Alasdair MacIntyre's might be criticized as being only for college professors.  The problem which he sets out to address in Chapter 1 is not a practical one like feeding the hungry, or educating the illiterate, or military rape, but a quintessentially professorly problem, that moral discourse is "shrill" and "interminable."  In his conclusion, he wants to preserve "the intellectual and moral life," as if the two were of equal importance or even synonyms.  But this kind of pagan virtue was quite consistent, historically, with exploiting slaves and enjoying concubines, and I think we can see why, for if justice consists in "giving what is due" to those who excel in the context of practices like music or architecture, it seems quite plausible that nothing, and in particular not the retention of her virginity, is due to a simple, unaccomplished girl taken in war.

Can we say that, if "giving what is due" in the context of a practice consists of recognizing the excellence of the authorities in one's field, there is also something that is due to every human being qua human being, namely that we respect their rights?  Why can't we use MacIntyre's case for the virtue of justice to overturn MacIntyre's earlier dismissal of the idea of natural rights?  If we can say this, it might not be a problem for our ethical theory that some societies have been much more successful than others in articulating and institutionalizing concepts of rights, any more than it's a problem for musical theory that not all civilizations have discovered the circle of fifths.  And we should not be surprised that Human Rights Watch and International Rescue Committee can go to Congo and tell people about their rights and find their ideals quickly embraced by the local population (even if implementation is difficult) any more than we should be surprised to find that Chinese people can admire Beethoven.

Principles of a Free Society begins by suggesting a somewhat Aristotelian approach to grounding the idea of natural rights:

A human being is mind and body. The body has a particular telos, or peculiar flourishing, of which he have some natural understanding. Thus, we see the difference between a healthy body and a body wounded, injured, decrepit, or sick... To flourish, the body must have food, water, and air; must not be subjected to cold or heat too extreme or for too long; must not be pierced by sharp objects or crushed by heavy blows; must not be exposed to certain substances, certain types of radiation, certain intensities of sound; must be allowed a certain degree fo movement and a certain amount of sleep; should not spend too much time in water or darkness; and so forth. Each body is naturally subject to one human mind. To be subject to that mind is part of the body's telos. The means by which the body can be subjected to the power of other human minds-- it can be beaten, wounded, dragged in chains, and so on-- trespass against or violate the body's telos. (Principles of a Free Society, p. 1)

I think this expresses an ideal that the benevolent and humanitarian heroes of history have always held and sought to realize in the world, while the perpetrators and tyrants of history are those who ride roughshod over it.  Its name is human, or natural, rights.

Christianity and Politics

What are the implications of Christianity for politics?  When Christians are citizens of polities, how should they behave?  Should Christians ever be rulers, and if they are, how should they govern?  Should Christians try to abolish polities, or reform them, or create new ones where they are absent or bad, and if so, what kinds of polities should Christians seek to create, reform and/or abolish?  Should Christians be monarchists, or democrats, or even anarchists?  Should Christians be pacifist, or might there be a case for making “just war,” perhaps even a lot of it?  Should Christians be political quietists, or, on the other hand, civic-minded activists and agitators, constantly voting, campaigning, or even fighting?  Should they seek to abolish slavery, or communism; to prohibit abortion; to liberate oppressed peoples from totalitarian rule; to increase foreign aid; or to open borders to immigration?  Is there such a thing as a Christian state?  If so, is it desirable?  And what would it look like?

There are some Gospel texts relevant to these questions.  Although the political context of 1^st-century Judea is important, I think it also to useful to contemplate the texts separately from their context, focusing on the meaning of the words themselves, before considering how the context affects their meaning.  The Gospels actually do not have much to say about politics directly.  For some passages it is hard to say whether they are relevant or not.  For example, if we think of the scene where Pilate asks Jesus if He is the king of the Jews and He answers “It is you who say it,” this seems to be relevant: Jesus is claiming to be a king.  Not so fast.  Jesus also says, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and His whole life and behavior makes it clear that, probably to the disappointment of many who were looking for a Messiah to re-establish the Jewish kingdom militarily, Jesus was not seeking to be a king in an earthly sense, so the passage does not have direct political implications.

The passage most cited from the Gospels with respect to politics is Luke 20:25 (with parallel verses in Matthew and Mark), “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.”  I have often heard this read as if it were a prescient endorsement of the kind of church-state relations that prevail in late 20^th-century American jurisprudence, meaning something like, “there is a state [Caesar] and a church [God] which have separate claims on us, which must be distinguished, and the Christian citizen must fulfill the legitimate demands of each, obeying the church in matters of spirituality and personal morality, but not attempting to impose the church’s will on infidels or wayward believers through the power of the state, nor, on the other hand, using allegiance to the church as a pretext for disobeying the authority of the state, except in the special case that laws of men violate the Christian’s conscience.”  Such a philosophy of church-state relations is anachronistic as a reading of Luke 20:25.  It uses conceptions of church and state that would not have been available to Jesus’s 1^st-century hearers and hardly before modern times.  Indeed, if Luke 20:25 is read by itself, it is question-begging.  One wants to answer: “Yes, but what is Caesar’s and what is God’s?”  We will return to this passage, but for the moment we will start our inquiry elsewhere.

No, if any political message emerges clearly from the Gospels, it is not the attitude of obedience to rulers that authority figures like to read into “give unto Caesar,” but a principled Christian nonviolence.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus counsels his disciples “do not resist the wicked man” and “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5: 39).  Now, if violence is ever justified, surely it is justified as a means of resisting the wicked man.  If one is ever justified in slapping, surely it is justified when one is being slapped.  Self-defense is the least controversial form of violence.  Some people find other forms of violence acceptable.  To believe in a welfare state is to believe that men who are not specially wicked, who are minding their own business and harming no one, should be made, that is, coerced, under an implicit or explicit threat of violence, to give of their substance to the government for redistribution to the less fortunate.  This form of violence is more controversial.  If few would reject non-self-defensive violence absolutely and universally and consistently—it seems doubtful that violence solely as self-defense can provide the basis for any state at all—then almost everyone is at least wary about extending such justifications for violence too far.  So if Jesus rejects violence even in self-defense, as He does explicitly in “turn the other cheek,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that He is exhorting his disciples to refrain from all violence whatsoever.  But Max Weber is probably right in defining government as an entity that claims a monopoly of legitimate violence.  A nonviolent state is a contradiction in terms.  So “do not resist the wicked man” and “turn the other cheek” imply a rejection of government as such.

Such is the case that Jesus was an anarchist, or, to coin an unwieldy term which is unfortunately necessary to distinguish the attitude from two other attitudes which are less coherent but have large followings, a pacifist-anarchist.  A pacifist-anarchist is quite distinct, on the one hand, from the kind of anarchist that engages in random violence—bombing buildings, assassinating policemen and presidents—in hopes of bringing about anarchy by overthrowing governments, and on the other hand, from the kind of pacifist that opposes war in the foreign policy arena but takes it for granted that policemen should keep (violently if necessary) catching and locking up criminals.  A pacifist-anarchist rejects resistance to the wicked man—except of course by persuasion; this is presumably implicit in the Sermon on the Mount teaching and is advocated explicitly by Jesus elsewhere in the Gospels—both by private individuals and by “governments,” and without regard to the place where violence occurs or whether those who commit and suffer violence are fellow-citizens of any polity or not.  

Now, although I do not think Christian nonviolence is the whole answer to the question of what attitude Christians should have to politics, I am always surprised that it is not a more influential idea.  I have heard rumors of Christians who dismiss out of hand, as if it were absurd, the idea that Jesus was a pacifist.  If there really are such Christians, I don’t know how to regard their opinion as anything but a function of ignorance, prejudice, and/or unseriousness.  A simple and direct reading of the Sermon on the Mount points to Christian nonviolence or pacifist-anarchism so clearly that someone unfamiliar with this idea must, it seems to me, either never have read the Sermon on the Mount or not paid attention to it.  Yet through most of the history of Christianity, Christians have lived in states and been loyal to rulers and fought in wars and enforced laws and not felt this to be inconsistent with their Christianity.  Why?

As a way to underline the point it might be worthwhile to mention another argument that is superficially parallel to the one I am making, but much stupider.  I seem to remember seeing an anti-war bumper sticker that says “What part of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ don’t you understand?” and have heard arguments to this effect in a few other places.  Now, “Thou shalt not kill,” if taken literally and universally, would imply something like pacifist-anarchism.  All governments claim the prerogative of killing under certain circumstances, e.g. in the event of foreign invasion, and probably no government could do without it.  But it is clear that the Jewish law, of which the Ten Commandments are a part, is not a pacifist-anarchist program.  It prescribed the death penalty for some crimes, to be carried out, it seems, by judges or kings of some sort—different political arrangements occurred in different phases of Jewish history, as recorded in the Bible—and a distinctive class with special legal—we might say, “sovereign”—authority that suspended the ordinary prohibition on killing for these people while they were acting as enforcers of the law was clearly implicit.  Jewish history was also full of wars, not only just wars, but also wars which hardly seem to meet any standard of “just war” that could be articulated and defended today—we would call the conquest of the Promised Land “ethnic cleansing”—and yet which the Bible seems to condone.   Clearly, taken in context, “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to soldiers or judges, but means “Thou shalt not murder,” that is, thou shalt not kill without provocation and in the capacity of a mere private citizen.

But “do not resist the wicked man” and “turn the other cheek” are different.  It does not involve any tendentious interpretation of the text to read these as a general or universal exhortation to nonviolence.  On the contrary.  Consider the verses in context:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’  39 But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.  40 And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.  41 If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.  42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”

So Jesus introduces “do not resist the wicked man” by explicitly invoking the old law and signaling that His teaching is superseding it.  To read this as an exhortation to private citizens only with no political ramifications is deliberately to ignore this parallelism and seems exegetically indefensible.  The old law with which it is contrasted was not merely an exhortation to private citizens.  It was meant to be enforced by a judge or some other third party.  It would not have made sense as an exhortation to private citizens.  If A gouges out B’s eye, presumably he is able to do so because A is stronger than B.  If so, B cannot gouge out A’s eye in return.  Certainly there is unlikely to be any credible threat from B’s side that would deter A from violence in the first place.  The old law would have to be applied by someone who is neutral between A and B and stronger than either of them, who can recognize that A has done wrong to B and must be punished, and who can carry out the punishment, either overcoming any resistance A might make, or else deterring such resistance by its known superiority in strength.  In other words, the old law must be applied by some kind of state.  The old law implies and depends on politics. 

Jesus’s new teaching, by contrast, neither requires a state gives any opening for the state to have a role.  A private individual can turn the other cheek without the help of a government.  And if everyone practices nonviolence, there can be no governments.  There can be no entities claiming a monopoly of violence if everyone has renounced violence.  Jesus’s teaching, then, points to the disappearance of the state if it is universally practiced.  If only some practice Christian nonviolence, then since calling on the state for help is a way to resist the wicked man, those must, it would seem, turn their backs on the state or renounce it to a certain extent, and certainly must decline to participate in it, as rulers, magistrates, soldiers, or even plaintiffs (or for that matter defendants, as “if someone sue thee at the law…” states).

An adherent of Christian nonviolence will pay taxes to the state, but not on “give unto Caesar” grounds as that verse is usually understood, rather on “turn the other cheek” grounds.  They will submit to the demands of the state as they would submit to the demands of a robber.  This is not to say that adherents of Christian nonviolence would regard the state as a robber.  If we are not to resist wicked men, we are presumably also not to resist good men, that is, men who live by a lesser good than that which we aspire to live by, such as just and beneficent government in a secular sense.  We need not morally equate the tax collector with the bandit in order to submit to both for the same reason and in the same way.  The state is, first and foremost, a collective means to resist the wicked man.  To accept the Sermon on the Mount in this way is to reject the state’s not only particular means that the state uses but the end of the state.  It leaves the state without a raison d’etre.

The Roman Catholics have a way out of the radical implications of this reading of the Sermon on the Mount.  They argue that the Sermon on the Mount was advice but to a select inner circle, to the apostles, perhaps also to clergy or monastics and others who feel called to follow it, but not on Christians generally.  In support of this, they point out that the Gospel of Matthew says Jesus took His disciples up onto a mountaintop—thus the phrase “the Sermon on the Mount”—away from the crowds.  The physical setting of the sermon is taken as indicative of its narrower intended audience.  Possibly.  But in other cases where Jesus speaks to His disciples separately from the crowds, e.g., the parable of the sower, He does not say He is doing so because the teaching applies only to them.  On the contrary, the parable of the sower clearly carries a universal message.  And the reason Jesus gives on that occasion for speaking to them separately is that “the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them,” that is, to the crowds.  Of course, the message is ultimately intended for all mankind, but there seems to be an initiation process, and there are some truths for which the mass of the people are not ready.  So this Argument from Audience for treating the Sermon on the Mount as a special calling for a select few is not compelling.  And the style of the argument, introducing an allusion to the old law with “you have heard that it was said,” then contrasting the new teaching that is to supersede it by the words “but I say unto you,” suggests the opposite.  The old law, of course, was intended for everyone, or at least for all Jews, for all those God had brought under His special direct rule, as all mankind is invited to be in the new dispension that came with Christ.  This at least suggests that the new law should be similarly universal in its scope.

Having said all that, the position I will ultimately arrive at may strike some as a variation, elucidation, or reiteration of this Roman Catholic view.  Still, for now we may register dissatisfaction with it and put it on one side.

A difference response to the direct reading of the Sermon on the Mount is to embrace it, to accept Christian nonviolence as an ethos or political philosophy, a rule of life.  I am aware of one historical example of a people that has done this, the Amish—I think there are other examples—and of three important intellectuals who, though none of them are orthodox Christians, have embraced this position, surely in each case under the influence of Jesus’s teachings: Henry David Thoreau; Leo Tolstoy; and Mahatma Gandhi.  The Amish have adopted nonviolence as a way of life for centuries.  Leo Tolstoy developed a political philosophy of nonviolence in The Kingdom of God is Within You, Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience.”  Gandhi adopted nonviolence as a tactic and ideology for his movement for Indian independence.  All these examples shed light on the virtue and the limitations of the pacifist-anarchist ideal.

Amish nonviolence is widely admired, other parts of Amish culture not so much.  Their practice of shunning, of strict and specific rules against interaction with those deemed persona non grata by the community, which involves alienating even family members, seems downright cruel and immoral.  Their rejection of so many modern technologies, a more salient feature of Amish society even than nonviolence, as well as of education above the 8^th-grade level, strike most as gratuitous and unappealing.  Why can’t the Amish be nonviolent without being so harsh and weird? 

But stop a moment.  How, after all, does Amish nonviolence set them apart from mainstream society (e.g., in America)?  If the Amish never kill, neither does most of the rest of the population.  In American society, as in all advanced societies today, and probably to a lesser extent in most civilized societies of the past for thousands of years, violence is a specialized function of professional policemen and soldiers.  Most people never engage in violence, just as they don’t repair computers, renovate bathrooms, cut hair, or teach sociology.  The Amish are against violence in principle, rather than merely refraining from it as a matter of professional specialization, but how much does that matter?  Does it have any effect on what one does, how one lives, given that most citizens perhaps not once in their lives encounter a situation in which they would be willing to commit violence? 

Suppose that Mr. Bourgeois Tolstoyan is persuaded by the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount of Tolstoy and the Amish, and makes an inward personal commitment to Christian nonviolence.  Having done so, he lives exactly as he did before, since he had never previously found it to his advantage or taste to use violence anyway.  It would seem odd to argue that this inward commitment that has no practical effect is really very important.  Is the principled nonviolence of the Amish more important than that of Mr. Tolstoyan?  There are two reasons why it might be.  First, as the Amish are known to be nonviolent, and as Amish dress and lifestyle makes them conspicuous and identifiable, their commitment to nonviolence subjects them to special risks.  If I am a thuggish sort of person who does not scruple to take what I want by force, and I see Mr. Bourgeois Tolstoyan walking down an isolated street with something I want, say a shirt or a bit of food or wine.  I do not know who Mr. Tolstoyan is or what he believes in.  I consider robbing him, but I notice that he’s a fairly strong man and reflect that he may, after all, be armed, and decide it isn’t worth the risk.  Mr. Tolstoyan is morally committed “not to resist the wicked man,” and would, in fact, let me take everything from him.  Nonetheless, he benefits by the presumption that he would resist, based on the fact that he looks like others—like normal people—who would do so.  By contrast, if I see an Amish walking down the street, with his beard and his odd clothes, and he has something I want, I know that he is forbidden to resist me, so I will rob him without hesitation.

The second reason that Amish nonviolence is more serious than that of Mr. Bourgeois Tolstoyan is that the whole Amish way of life cuts them off from many of the benefits of division of labor that the broader society enjoys with the help of its use of violence, especially in enforcing property rights.  If Mr. Tolstoyan doesn’t practice violence himself, it is done on his behalf by armies and police forces that are paid with his tax dollars and that regard his safety and that of his fellow citizens as their mission.  But that is not so true of the Amish.  Their technological primitivism and social exclusiveness make them less intensively dependent than others are on the society and economy they live in the midst of.  If society were to break down around them, they would probably suffer less than others, and it would be an exaggeration but not an absurdity to regard their community as more or less self-sufficient.  And just as they stand to lose less by a breakdown of society, so they stand to gain less by its continuation, since their various scruples make their lives poor and simple.

Still, if the Amish takes extra risks by advertising his nonviolence in the way he lives and dresses, he is still much safer because the state locks up so many of the criminal types who would be willing to rob him.  And though he may be less dependent than others are on the kind of advanced capitalism that is underpinned by violent enforcement of property rights and national frontiers, the American armed forces are, at the end of the day, protecting him too.  He could not practice his distinctive way of life if the Soviets had won the Cold War.  And this is a general problem for all these pacifist-anarchists: they depend on those who practices they disavow.  Tolstoy was a wealthy man.  His wealth was protected by the laws of the Russian state whose dissolution he willed.  Gandhi’s nonviolent methods worked only because the British Raj was too liberal and constitutionalist to resort to the repressive methods that might have stopped him.  Indeed, he didn’t survive long in the communal violence that ensued when that Raj ended, and he could have had no impact in Soviet Russia or French Indochina.  Thoreau spent only a single night in jail because someone else paid for him the tax (in support of the war with Mexico) that Thoreau refused on principle to pay, and this benignity of the society against he was protesting gives “Civil Disobedience” a slightly comic flavor. 

Are these principled practitioners of nonviolence ungrateful to the nonpractitioners of nonviolence who protect their lives and prosperity?  I do not think a charge of ingratitude is warranted, as long as the pacifist-anarchist acknowledges the benefits he receives from the soldier and policemen, even if he doesn’t exactly thank them.  In effect, the Christian pacifist-anarchist says to the soldier: “I accept that you believe that what you are doing is right. I agree, moreover, that I benefit from your efforts to protect me.  I also acknowledge that you risk your own life to do so, and respect your sacrifice.  Nonetheless I desire a world in which you cease to do so, fully recognizing the costs to myself if this world were brought about.  I am willing to face the risks of being plundered or murdered so that none may practice or threaten violence on my behalf.  Of course, I cannot stop you from exercising violence in ways that benefit me.  You will continue doing so for your own reasons, which may include a desire for my welfare.  I merely make it known to you that I do not consent to the arrangement, and will continue to try to end it through moral suasion.” 

All this is perfectly logical but I think it contains some moral dangers.  To put it bluntly, this might all be humbug.  As long as the policemen and soldiers do their work well, my claim to moral distinctiveness rests on a claim about how I would behave in a situation that never occurs.  But how do I know how I would behave?  Perhaps, faced with a real robber, I would resist after all.  Perhaps, faced with a weaker but murderous enemy, I would lack the courage to accept death rather than to kill.  Also, the argument is a too subtle.  Only an intellectual could understand it.  The ethic will inevitably remain abstract and utopian.  The believer in nonviolence will in practice live by the ethic of ordinary bourgeoisie who outsource the violent functions to others.  The pacifist-anarchist ethos will make little by way of demands, and be a temptation to pedantry and pride.  (The Amish avoid this problem by making many other demands on their members, which, unlike nonviolence, involve real and heavy sacrifice, but we are treating nonviolence as a separate ideal of its own.)

This is a good place in the argument to take note of another group of practitioners of nonviolence, namely, priests, monks, the apostles, the early Church and its martyrs.  It is characteristic of all these “not to resist the wicked man” and to “turn the other cheek.”  This is not to say that monks and priests never engage in self-defense, sometimes they do.  But they hardly ever fight with weapons or kill.  Apostles such as Peter and Paul, and according to tradition most of the rest of them as well, accepted martyrdom without resistance, perfectly following the Sermon on the Mount in this respect.  Monasteries are unique examples of durable miniature societies based on voluntary and noncoercive socialistic central planning.  The Rule of St. Benedict is a constitutional document, a set of rules to govern a society, but with this difference, that under no circumstances does it envision killing, or even severe coercion—beating is prescribed at one point but a penitent monk might consent to this form of discipline, and could presumably leave if not (this is forbidden by the Rule but no physical prevention of it is prescribed).  As with the Amish, complicated systems of shunning are used as a method of discipline, reflecting the fact that this method is effective yet avoids violence.  The forerunner of monastic voluntary socialism was the early Christian commune described in the Book of Acts.  There is a harrowing story in Acts about how a husband and wife who lied to the apostles about the price for which they sold some property in order to join the commune were miraculously killed, but importantly, though Peter foretold their deaths, it is clearly God and not Peter who does the killing.  And of course, Jesus himself practices His own teaching of “do not resist the wicked man” and “turn the other cheek” when, having ordered Peter to put away his sword, He goes unresistingly to His own death on the cross.

And so the Church, or if not quite the Church as a whole then certain agencies within it, gives an example of a society organized on the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.  (I would argue that the Church, properly understood, has always practiced “do not resist the wicked man” and “turn the other cheek,” but that the organization of the Church as it can be perceived from a secular point of view has often been infiltrated by hostile elements and instrumentalized by external powers, while the essence of the Church, the community of love among the believers, has remained mystically pure throughout, but this is a bit of a mystery and it would be beyond the scope of the present argument to defend the claim here.)  Unlike the Amish or the Tolstoyan, however, the monks and priests and apostles and martyrs have not, in general, felt the need to disapprove, either of the soldier and the policeman who uphold the secular polities in which they live.  Many, and perhaps those who best embody the ideal member of these classes of persons, seem hardly to have had any opinions one way or the other on whether there ought to be a state with a monopoly of violence.  Others definitely supported the state, and some actively campaigned for even greater violence.  Pope Urban II and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, preached the crusades.  So we’re left with our original question, “What are the implications of Christianity for politics?”, as well as a new one, “Why don’t most Christians seem to regard the Sermon on the Mount as the universal political program which it seems to purport to be?”

There is something else that we should note about the apostles, martyrs, monks, and priests: many of them were celibate.  Not all: Peter had a wife, plenty of martyrs were married (though many weren’t), and in the Orthodox east priests can marry and for those who wish to serve in parish this is even preferred or semi-required.  But it is a common pattern.  And I think it’s clear enough why living the Sermon on the Mount is connected with celibacy.  For it is very hard for a householder to take the Sermon on the Mount literally.  A householder, after all, has a reason to practice violence which is even more compelling than self-defense: the defense of his wife and children.  To turn the other cheek when one is slapped on the cheek may be regarded as brave; to stand idly by as one’s wife is raped or one’s child killed seems monstrous.  Again, consider the question of property.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches:

²⁵"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life^[b]?

 ²⁸"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³²For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

This ideal of apostolic poverty is actually connected to the ideal of Christian nonviolence, because if one disavows violence, one disavows the defense of property.  As St. Francis said, “If we had any possessions, we would need weapons and laws to defend them.”  For a solitary individual to practice this ethos involves not only physical but moral risk, for it threatens to reduce him to a parasite, begging others for the bread which he refuses to hoard for himself.  Yet I think readers will have the intuition that a person who disavows worldly possessions for the love of God may—it is hard to foresee exactly how, but that is because the story of life is too full of the unexpected for us to predict it—not be a burden but be of great service to his fellow man.  Still, this hardly seems appropriate advice to give to a householder, or at least, to householders generally (Peter might have been a special case).  To consent not to know where one’s next meal is coming from may be gloriously humble and brave; but to consent not to know where one’s child’s next meal is coming from seems monstrous.

So unless we are going to take the view that Jesus wanted to impose universal celibacy—and this is hardly tenable since he made remarks on marriage that seem to uphold the institution—we seem to be compelled in the direction of thinking that Jesus saw two classes of people, “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12) who would give up marriage and family to serve God alone, and those who married and raised families.  The ideal laid down in the Sermon on the Mount can only be taken as strict and literal prescription for the first category.  God might, indeed, grant to some married couples to live in circumstances in which they can turn the other cheek and the rest of it without jeopardizing their children and family, but in general they may, for a time, have to remain in the world, with its polities that claim a monopoly of violence.  And these, for the householders, for those not yet ready for the higher path of apostolic poverty and Christian nonviolence, must still think about politics, must be prepared to wield and/or to support violence, must live by those ideals which the Sermon on the Mount supersedes but which are still ideals of a sort, which in the Old Testament seem to enjoy God’s blessing even if the Christian’s intuition is too strong to be gainsaid that some Old Testament writers did not understand God’s real nature and purposes as well as the early Christians did.

Unfortunately, if we are going to “resist the wicked man” after all, we can’t stop there.  John Locke is, I think, the most benign of the great political thinkers of modern times.  Most of the others—Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sorel, Sartre, Spengler, Nietzsche, you name it—had a baneful influence, giving rise to one or another form of tyranny or totalitarianism.  Locke, by contrast, was the chief ideologist of the Glorious Revolution in England and the forerunner of the American Revolution, and is thus associated with the birth of the two great, free, humane polities that have been the model, bastion, and champion of liberty for three centuries.  This is not only because of Locke’s unique genius but, even more, because he was in large part the spokesman of a tradition.  Locke’s theory begins with the idea that people have rights, and he goes on to suggest that the origin of government is a social contract by which people agree to defend these rights.  Subsequent history suggests that states behave much better when this is their founding myth.  But the logic of Locke’s theory is flawed.  People don’t really sign a social contract, and it would surely be impossible to get them to do so.  Aside from the practical difficulties and the differences of opinion that would arise in any such attempt, there’s a temptation to free-ride.  If A and B agree to pay their taxes to support an army to defend the frontier, C’s best bet may be to have them count him out, and trust that the soldiers paid by other people’s money will also keep the wolf from his door.  With no justification, Locke gives the majority the right of deciding: A and B will take C’s money for national defense, whether he likes it or not.  But already we have stepped beyond using violence to resist the wicked man, to using it to confiscate the property of the good man.

A certain degree of violence, not against the wicked, but against those who have done us no harm, is an inevitable side-effect of bringing into existence any kind of state.  Even the most wisely and justly designed state in the world will be guilty of it.  And real states never limit their use of unjust (i.e., unprovoked) violence to the minimum amount needed to sustain government.  Most states historically have supported kings and nobles in parasitic luxury.  Few states are innocent of squandering and killing in campaigns of territorial aggrandizement.  Most states have compelled men to lie, or at least to conceal the truth: subjects are made to speak praise of rulers they hate, or to remain silent when justice demands denunciations of the wrongdoings of the mighty.  All states prior to the emergence of Christianity and most states since, including many whose rulers and populations were baptized Christians, have practiced slavery, subordinating some individuals to the wills and whims of others for their whole lives.  Today, the world’s advanced democratic states have organized vast systems of social engineering by which individuals not born within the borders of these states are compelled by men with guns to remain outside these states, depriving them thereby of the chance to fulfill just and natural desires to migrate, in many cases making these states complicit in religious and political oppression, and always exacerbating world poverty and inequality. 

What I suggest, then, for a Christian politics, is that Christians should strive to build up and strengthen the kingdom of heaven, the nonviolent kingdom based on the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.  Those who are householders will have to live in the world and make various compromises, but they must not give their hearts to it, and even those who are in the world should try to emulate the ideal laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, the ideals of nonviolence and apostolic poverty, as much as they can.  A husband may have to live in a worldly manner for a wife’s sake, or a wife for a husband’s sake, or both for their children’s sake, if their loved ones have not yet consented to try to live by the Gospel ideal, but a married couple or even a whole family might all live in apostolic poverty and Christian nonviolence by mutual consent.  Meanwhile there should also be some who forsake marriage and family so as to follow the Gospel ideal in as literal a manner as their faith and strength enable them to do.  All Christians should remember to “trust not in princes, in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.”  And Christians should be very careful about all the subtle ways in which they can become enmeshed in worldly injustices through the complex division of labor that occurs in modern society.  It will often be their duty to look for ways to “flee the world,” not only in the extreme sense of retreating into the desert or emigrating to America to practice their faith, but in more limited senses, e.g., leaving a law firm or a vacuum-cleaner-selling job that requires them to be dishonest; giving up a corporate or government sinecure which they recognize as an abuse of taxpayer or shareholder money; refusing to engage in payday lending or in a trade associated with gambling; refusing to fight in an unjust war, etc.  If they live in a slaveowning society, they should at least treat their slaves with exceptional kindness and should probably manumit them and refuse to own slaves altogether.  Of any property they may own, they should regard themselves not as owners but as stewards, and in spending it they should seek not their own good but the good of all their fellow men.

There are two particular current or recent issues where I want to bring to bear a Christian perspective.  The first is immigration.  Of the immigration restrictions of today’s rich countries, both the ends—the exacerbation of global inequality to protect the privileges of the American-, or British-, or French-born, etc.—and the means—the separation of families, the expulsion of children from the countries where they weren’t born but have spent nearly all their lives, the use of violence against peaceful workers—should be intolerable to each and every Christian.  Every Christian ought to regard it as his duty never to collaborate with such laws by reporting an illegal immigrant to the police.  Those whose personal or family position allows them to make relatively fewer compromises with the world may be called on to defy the law by employing or giving accommodations to those whom the laws of men reject but whom God loves, risking fines or prison thereby.  Christians should stand with their illegal immigrant brethren when these protest to demand decent treatment.

The second is the Iraq war.  Here I am a bit less sure of myself.  It would be odd to say that Christians who don’t choose the higher way of nonviolence and apostolic poverty are therefore bound to practice violence not only in their own defense but also to save others from totalitarianism.  Though on the other hand, I think that if one is not called to the apostolic way, to fight for distant just causes is just as appropriate as to fight for nearby ones.  Why not?  If I am being robbed, I can defend myself.  If I see my neighbor being robbed, I can equally well go and defend him, no?  More than that, though, world trade, global political organizations like the UN, and the nature of modern weapons have created a sort of integration of all the world’s political systems, which, even if limited and/or shallow in extent, gives us a certain stake and a certain complicity in what goes on far away.  We were complicit in Saddam’s regime.  We helped bring him to power.  We supported him against Iran.  The oil-for-food program strengthened him.  The weapons inspections served our interests but worsened the plight of the Iraqi people, even making us, in a way, their co-oppressors.  That’s why I think we had a duty to extricate ourselves from that.  The monk, busy fleeing the world, trusting not in princes and the sons of men, would have no such duty.  But worldly people, who benefit from the geopolitical system which in turn collaborated in various ways with the Baathist regime, did, I think, have that duty.  Liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam may or may not have been the only way to discharge that duty, but it was one way.  As for the objection that it’s a violation of “Iraq’s sovereignty,” I don’t think it should have the slightest weight for the Christian.  I simply don’t think there is any basis for the concept of sovereignty in a Christian approach to politics.

Polygyny and the Meta-Ethics of "Flourishing"

How should one evaluate the ethics of polygyny (men having more than one wife) from the perspective of an Aristotelian, a Kantian, and a utilitarian ethos?

Kantian.  There are two reasons that a Kantian might regard polygyny as immoral.  First, if we restrict our attention on men as moral agents, it is largely and in most cases inconsistent to will that "Marry multiple women," be a universal maxim, because there aren't enough women for all men to marry more than one.  Strictly speaking, this is not universally true.  If population growth rates are fast enough and men marry much younger women, universal polygyny could be possible.  Also, in the wake of large wars male populations are sometimes sufficiently depleted that the remaining men could practice generalized polygyny.  Still, where populations are stable and/or spouses are roughly the same age, and where there have been no demography-altering calamities, if some men have two wives, others will have to go without. 

Second, if we extend our attention to women as moral agents, a universal maxim to "Marry multiple people," making marriage exclusive on neither side, would clearly destroy the character of marriage altogether.  However, to apply the same sexual morality to men and women is not unproblematic.  Men have a biological reason to desire exclusive devotion from their mates that does not apply to women, namely that unless their mates are faithful, men will not know the paternity of any children they bear.  More generally, women may have different sexual needs and desires than men do, such that ethical maxims appropriate for men could not be validly cross-applied.  "Don't initiate romances; let the initiative come from the other side" might be a tenable, perhaps even wise maxim for women, but would hardly produce good results if practiced by both sexes, while "In situations of danger to yourself and your mate, value the other's safety above your own to the extent of sacrificing your life if necessary," might be a correct maxim for men, but would create oddities if applied to both sexes alike.  I think the false application of universalizability to sex is one reason why the case for free love can seem so overwhelming to logical young males: since promiscuous sex appeals to the untrained masculine nature, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," combined with an assumption of gender equality, seems to be a formula for free love.  But this overemphasizes the body at the expense of the mind.  If marriage is to be a connection of minds as well as of bodies, it does make sense to demand that maxims about marriage be universalizable to women as well as men, and to condemn polygyny on the grounds that polygynous husbands don't want their wives to practice polyandry, too.

Utilitarian.  Presumably, as a rule, a man gets more (marginal) pleasure from his first wife than his second, and less still from his third.  If so, to distribute women equally among men, in pairs of one husband, one wife, would yield more happiness to men than polygynous arrangements in which some men get several wives, others none.  Polygyny can fuel social conflict, as some men are left frustrated and with "nothing to lose."  Also, although the torments of jealousy suffered by women in polygynous arrangements may (at least "selfish gene" logic gives reason to think so) be less than those suffered by lovers of unfaithful women, the tug-of-war of wives for the attentions of one husband are surely painful.  The Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern poignantly portrays the rivalries among the wives of a polygynous Chinese gentleman.  So there are, it seems, pretty strong reasons to presume that monogamy serves the "greatest good of the greatest number."  A survey of the world's monogamous and polygynous societies suggests that the former are more peaceful, dynamic and creative, as well as a possible reason: when men can have multiple wives, men's efforts may be devoted to competing for a scarce resource, what is called a "zero-sum game," whereas if they are strictly limited to one, sexual competition is greatly reduced, and competitive energies are directed more into positive-sum games like commerce, art, and scholarship.

Aristotelian.  I don't know, but I expect Aristotle disapproved of polygyny, which was not practiced in Greece, as this article observes:

To a modern western audience, the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans were not supposed to be married to more than one person at any given time, nor even to cohabit with others alongside legal spouses, must seem perfectly ‘normal’. This may explain why this practice has received hardly any attention from historians of the classical world. Yet from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there is nothing ‘normal’ or unremarkable about this. Instead, until very recently, polygynous arrangements of marriage or cohabitation were the norm in world history, and strict monogamy remained an exception. Barely one in six of the 1,195 societies surveyed in the largest anthropological dataset have been classified as ‘monogamous’, while polygyny was frequently considered the preferred choice even if it failed to be common in practice (Gray (1998) 89-90, with Clark (1998)). Smaller samples of better documented societies convey a similar picture, and while ‘monogamy’ is observed in a small proportion of all cases (16-20% in samples of 348 and 862 systems: Murdock (1967); Burton et al. (1996)), due to their failure to distinguish between rare instances of polygamy and its formal prohibition these surveys tend to overestimate the actual incidence of strictly monogamous rules. In fact, although the nature of the evidence does not allow us to rule out the existence of strictly monogamous systems prior to the first millennium BCE, the earliest unequivocal documentation originates from the archaic Greek and early Roman periods. Thus, even though Greeks and Romans need not have been the first cultures to prescribe monogamy, these are the earliest securely attested cases and, moreover, established a paradigm for subsequent periods that eventually attained global dominance. In this sense, Greco-Roman monogamy may well be the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognized. What is more, the global positive correlation between patricentric kinship systems and polygyny (Burton et al. (1996) 93-4) renders the emergence of prescriptive monogamy in the patricentric societies of Greece and Rome even more remarkable.

However, I doubt whether an Aristotelian meta-ethics really lends itself to the rejection of polygyny.  Aristotle's measure of ethics was the realization of a man's telos, which was conceived as parallel to the "flourishing" of biological organisms.  Clearly, for a male of any species to "flourish" in the biological sense involves polygyny.  The reasoning of Darwin, or Dawkins, makes this especially clear, but the fact that polygyny for the wealthy and successful of human societies has been the general practice is evidence enough.  Thus King David and the prophet Muhammad were polygynous, as is Osama bin Laden; the Bible treats King David's polygyny unproblematically as evidence of his success and glory.  Even today, the polygynous impulse is not dead among the successful.  US presidents can't be polygamous by law but many of them-- Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton-- have been in practice.  If we see a picture of a Hollywood star with a beautiful woman on each arm, it's a symbol of success.  I once saw a crude wrestling type sport in which the contestants each came with a girl, and the victor in each match appropriated his opponent's girl, so that the winner ended up with four of them clustered around him.

I'm sure Aristotelian ethicists can find ways to argue that polygyny is not ("really") the height of human flourishing, and I'd probably agree, in a way, with the arguments they would make.  And yet it seems clear to me that the real reasons polygyny is wrong are the Kantian and utilitarian ones, namely, that to practice polygyny is inegalitarian and causes unhappiness in others.  Of course, I would also agree that man does not flourish, in the most important sense, by being polygynous: his soul does not flourish.  But that is because the flourishing of a man's soul depends on his doing what is right, and Kant and the utilitarians can tell us why polygyny is not right, and therefore, why it is harmful to the soul.  "Natural man," so to speak, flourishes by being polygynous; but man is not only a natural, but also a supernatural being.  Supernatural man flourishes better when monogamous or celibate; polygyny is a burden to him; but this is only an illustration of the more general point that the flourishing of supernatural man has hardly anything to do with the flourishing of natural man and is often opposed to it.  Man's soul may attain its utmost health just as his body is being ripped aparts by lions in the arena.

Argument versus Scorn

The first verse of Psalm 1 makes an interesting parallel:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. (Psalms 1:1)

Repetition is a frequently used poetic device in the psalms; a thought is said, then said again in different words.  So the parallel placement of "the ungodly... sinners... the scornful" suggests that the psalmist saw these three as almost synonyms, or at least closely related.  I have also seen the last word translated "the mockers."  I should add that ungodly sinners do not have a monopoly on mockery in the Psalms, for Psalm 2 says:

He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision. (Psalms 2:4)

Still, I think Psalms 1's identification of scorn as a defining trait of the wicked is more typical, and it reminds me of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is certainly "scornful" and a "mocker," and this is an important if not the principal mode of persuasion he uses.  I think his heavy reliance on this mode of persuasion should be regarded as illegitimate, and should go a long way towards discrediting him as a major philosopher.  Furthermore, I think a worldview as evil and insane as Nietzsche's could not be advocated solely or primarily by argument.  Argument as a mode of persuasion cannot always be cleanly distinguished from rhetoric or poetry or scorn.  It is prone to error, and also, perhaps, has a tendency to lead to excessive skepticism and abdication of truth-claims.  Yet it has a sufficiently stubborn and persistent tendency towards truth that a capable and devoted practitioner of argument could never become as far gone as Nietzsche.

The following passage from Beyond Good and Evil was chosen more or less at random as an illustration:

228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances--and that "virtue," in my opinion, has been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything else;

Nietzsche, the mocker, attacks moral philosophers by calling them boring.  To an arguer, this is irrelevant: some truths may be boring, some falsehoods interesting, but one's business is to look for truth.  Statistics is a very boring subject but useful for understanding the world.

at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! But let us not be afraid! Things still remain today as they have always been: I see no one in Europe who has (or DISCLOSES) an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner--that CALAMITY might be involved therein.

More mockery: Nietzsche suggests that moral philosophers are either cowards and hypocrites or playing the fool, performing a function of putting the mind to sleep which is the opposite of their stated mission yet which earns their bread.  There are also, of course, tantalizing hints here of arguments that might be interesting if they were developed.  Why and for whom is it "desirable" that few should reflect about morals?  He might be saying, like Voltaire, that one should not doubt the existence of God in front of the servants lest they steal the spoons.  Or, if Nietzsche is being ironic, what real view is he hinting at and masking?  None of this rises to the level of argument, however.

Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, to use an expression of Galiani).

Let me submit that to mock is essentially to devalue something, and this may consist of little more than conveying to one's interlocutor a low estimate of its value.  "Indefatigable" literally means something like not easily tired and thus ought to be something good, but a mocker uses the phrase as a means of devaluing it.  "Inevitable," a value-neutral word in itself, is if anything value-positive to an arguer, to say that B follows inevitably from A is (provided that we believe A) as much as to say that B is true.  Yet Nietzsche manages to suggest that the very inevitability of English utilitarians somehow devalues them.  Nietzsche gives "respectable" a negative connotation by coupling it with ponderous, and he uses "dangerous" with a positive connotation.  Such tricks illuminate the "ungodly... sinners... mockers" parallel in Psalm 1.  The mocker devalues the holy and the good, and thus spares the ungodly and the sinners from any pangs of conscience they might have.  No arguments are needed.

No new thought, nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought, not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief.

If Bentham and other utilitarians never expressed a new thought, nor fine-tuned or better expressed an old thought, why did anyone read them?  Yet people did.  So perhaps Nietzsche is missing something.  But the claim is, anyway, irrelevant.  Whether or not the English utilitarians were original has nothing to do with whether they were right.

In effect, the old English vice called CANT, which is MORAL TARTUFFISM, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one MUST read them),

Why?  Aren't ad hominem attacks invalid?  If someone makes a good argument with bad motives, it is no less true.  Of course, if we are to interrogate the motives of the utilitarians, we might also interrogate those of Nietzsche, the pathetic, lonely, sexually inactive invalid, comforting himself by persuading himself he was better than others, enjoying the pleasures of scorn to compensate for lacking those of health and family and friendship that others enjoy.  Nietzsche seems rather more vulnerable than the utilitarians on this score.  But it's better to put all questions of motives to one side.

concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with morals.

Again: ad hominem, therefore irrelevant.  But perhaps persuasive, as mockery.

(Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing not-immoral?)

This remark is a display of ignorance.  It is common, even typical, for puritanical men and women to interrogate their morality, as history shows.

In the end, they all want English morality to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or the "general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest number,"--no! the happiness of ENGLAND, will be best served thereby. They would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness, I mean after COMFORT and FASHION (and in the highest instance, a seat in Parliament), is at the same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving.

A charge like this certainly would need to be backed up.  The claim that utilitarians identify "the happiness of the greatest number" with the happiness of England is obviously and grossly unjust-- clearly Bentham's principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain applies to all humans, not just Englishmen.  Any utilitarian knows that people might derive pleasure from many things, not just comfort and fashion, and that there are differences among people and cultures as to what brings pleasure.  Certainly pleasure and pain are concepts readily intelligible to people of all cultures.  The charge of English ethnocentrism is singularly inapt as a critique of utilitarianism.

Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,

Nietzsche has been building up to this, and we may credit him here with a shred of something that might be characterized as argument.  Nietzsche is, in his vague and hysterical way, making a point which was made by his contemporary Vilfredo Pareto and is now more cogently expressed in the standard doctrines of mainstream economics.  Utility can be deduced from behavior, but we have no compelling grounds for defining utility in such a way as to be amenable to cardinal rather than ordinal representation (that is, to say "x gives Person A twice as much (as opposed to simply more) satisfaction than y), or to regard it as inter-personally comparable.  Unfortunately, he exaggerates to the point of making his claim untenable.  People possess and can express some notion of their own good, can derive from analogy to themselves and from listening to what other people say some notion of the good of others, and can, by observing people's consumption of market commodities and summing up total consumption across the economy, arrive at some concrete measures of the general welfare.  Certainly there can be differences of opinion about how to define and measure the general welfare, and there may even be fundamental and fatal flaws in the concept that careful argument could expose-- ultimately I might even agree that there are-- but to say it is only a "nostrum" and that it cannot "at all be grasped" is simply naive. 

The phrase "herding-animals" is one of Nietzsche's favorite expressions of mockery.  It is, as usual, singularly inapt.  Modern European civilization places unique emphasis on the individual's welfare and liberty, where most other civilizations have been more inclined to subordinate the individual to the society, or, to put it in Nietzschean terms, the "herd."

--that what is fair to one MAY NOT at all be fair to another,

Notice the switch from talk of "the general welfare" to talk of what is "fair."  Nietzsche is either confused or sloppy here, for he seems to treat considerations of justice and utility as synonymous.  They are, of course, distinct: a claim of justice characteristically overrides considerations of utility at least in the immediate sense.  Of course, many moral philosophers would deny that "what is fair to one may not... be fair to another," arguing instead that actions and decisions are just or unjust objectively, independently of anyone's point of view.  Nietzsche's relativistic alternative is asserted here as if it were revealed truth, with no argument in its support. 

that the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men, in short, that there is a DISTINCTION OF RANK between man and man, and consequently between morality and morality.

If Nietzsche had offered a clear explanation of what "higher men" are, of why we should believe in (innate?) "distinctions of rank" in some fundamental sense, then we could have an argument about (a) whether "the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men," and (b) if so, whether that is a cogent point against it-- for one might, after all, say that yes, the requirement of one morality hurts higher men, but it benefits the rest of us, and that is more important.  But Nietzsche does not, and could not, define what "higher men" are.  To the "higher man" we apply the criticism which Nietzsche unwarrantedly made of the concept of the "general welfare": it is "no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum."

Nietzsche's words here eerily suggest the philosophy of Dostoyevsky's character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.  Raskolnikov thought that morality is binding on most people, on ordinary people, but that some higher personalities are entitled to step over obstacles.  He acts on this philosophy by murdering an old woman, and the novel describes (among other things) this act and the breakdown of Raskolnikov's personality under the weight of secrecy and remorse thereafter.  Strangely, Nietzsche seems to have bought into Raskolnikov's personal philosophy, without irony.

On the other hand, Nietzsche is in another sense right, even unproblematically right.  There are indeed distinctions of rank (vertical) and of profession (horizontal) in life, and sometimes certain differences in morality attach to them.  Thus, unconsidered, opinionated outbursts might be a great sin for a statesman, but a small sin or even an appealing foible in a carpenter.  The same utterance might be a valiant effort from the mouth of a schoolboy, but an appalling lapse from the mouth of a professor.  To sell his services to the highest bidder is meritorious in a businessman but wicked in a judge.  All this can be quite consistent with a utilitarian meta-ethics.

They are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. One ought even to ENCOURAGE them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:--

Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
"Longer--better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT!

Again note the mocking tone, exemplified by the word "mediocre," an odd word which superficially means merely average or moderate, but which has come to have a highly derogatory connotation.  The verse certainly makes the English utilitarians seem ridiculous, but what does it have to do with the validity of their arguments?

Mockery can be an effective form of persuasion because it makes people want to be on the side of the mocker rather than the mocked.  In sixth grade, I found myself in an environment in which mockery was the dominant mode of social competition.  Kids were always "making fun of" each other, often in new, sexual ways which they were just becoming old enough to know about.  Those who were best at it rose to the top of the cool hierarchy, because others were intimidated.  Losers and pariahs had a role to play because they were the objects on which others practiced, and demonstrated, their skills of insulting others.  One could, of course, present evidence that one is not, say, a "faggot," but in that climate of discourse, one would only be laughed at all the more. 

Nietzsche relies heavily on these schoolyard-bully tactics.  Those tempted to agree with the English utilitarians are threatened with being called "unenraptured, never jesting," "mediocre," "ponderous" and "inevitable," guilty of "cant" and "tartuffism," ethnocentric and narrow-minded "herding animals."  Those who agree with Nietzsche are enticed with the promise of being classified as "higher men," "distinguished by rank" from the "mediocre;" they are addressed elsewhere as "ye free spirits" and "philosophers of the future."  To snobs, this incentive is hard to resist.  (Might this explain why Nietzsche is overrated by academic philosophers?)

Joyless Moralist, who has some credibility because she does not agree with Nietzsche herself, writes that "I have to recognize Nietzsche as a thinker of a very high order, because he simply is. Very few have had such deep insight into the character of modern philosophy, or levied such cutting criticisms."  If such is Nietzsche's specialty, a passage like the above, where Nietzsche is levying "cutting criticisms" against an important school of modern philosophy, should represent Nietzsche at his best.  Am I suppose to believe, then, that this is a powerful critique of utilitarianism? 

But it isn't.  In the middle of Beyond Good and Evil (228), Nietzsche gestures towards an argument against utilitarianism, which he expresses in an exaggerated way that renders it untenable.  His sneer that the general welfare is "no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum" might serve as a provocation to some clarifications by utilitarians, but only a gullible and foolish reader would simply be convinced by the claim.  Granted, a related argument, subtler and less exaggerated, was made by economists of the "marginal revolution," roughly contemporary with Nietzsche, and became a point of departure for significant revisions of utilitarianism as a meta-ethics and a retreat from some of its stronger claims, but we can't give Nietzsche credit for that, since he does not indicate he could have understood, let alone originated the arguments of Pareto (or of Menger, his chronological predecessor).  A hint of mediocre argument is embedded in sentence after sentence of sneering, which account for most of the persuasive force of the paragraph, yet which must be regarded as so many wasted words unless we are ready to concede that scorn is a valid mode of philosophizing.  Should we?  (Meanwhile, a few words about "the higher man" that are thrown in may help to persuade via snob appeal.)

This is one of hundreds of paragraphs in Beyond Good and Evil, and notice how laboriously I have had to answer it.  Nietzsche is like a philosophical guerrilla warrior: he can't win a fair fight, but he can make so many sneak attacks that he might achieve a sort of victory through attrition if you try to argue with him.  His fans never have to concede defeat, because one can always respond to a rout of this or that paragraph by saying that it needs to be understood in the context of his broader work.  (One would not have to do this with a philosopher who persuades by argument, of course.  He can be attacked at any point and is obliged to defend his claims.)  That's why I think what is needed is to disqualify him ex ante by conceiving the philosophical enterprise in such a way that philosophers can refuse to let themselves be baited by Nietzsche's tactics.  Joyless Moralist challenges me:

But it does seem pretty funny to me that you want to insist that Nietzsche isn't really a philosopher when pretty much the whole philosophical world agrees that he is. Perhaps you should lay out more clearly and exactly what the guidelines are for being a philosopher.

Sure.  What is philosophy?  The paradigmatic philosophers, as I see it, are Socrates and Descartes.  Not that they are the best philosophers, but more than others they embody the spirit of inquiry.  In each case, the type of man, and the enterprise he represented, has an importance separate from the content of his thought.  Doubt everything, or question everything, is the ideal Socrates and Descartes represent, and it marks an ethic definitive of philosophy even if it is also, perhaps, an unattainable ideal.  Of course, there are things one finds one can't doubt-- cogito ergo sum-- but a good philosopher does not simply dismiss his own doubts, or those expressed by others, and he often anticipates and answers those that others might express.  A good philosopher tries not to make lots of unwarranted claims.  He relies on reason to persuade, because he does not believe or take himself to know lots of things that cannot be rationally arrived at.  Or, if he does accept some things on non-rational grounds, he accepts that he does not quite have a right to do so as a philosopher, and makes apologies and disclaimers where appropriate.  We might say, without condemnation, that he is, to that extent, not a philosopher.

This way of defining philosophy is somewhat consistent with traditional intellectual history.  Historically, Descartes' challenge is usually taken as the starting-point of modern philosophy.  Greek philosophy preceded Socrates, but the pre-Socratics were, for the most part, more like forerunners of the natural sciences than philosophers in our sense.  I get the sense that few contemporary philosophers feel they owe much to thinkers before Plato and Aristotle.  (A few might be indebted to Heraclitus or Pythagoras.)  Socrates and Descartes can thus be taken as symbols or representatives of traditions, the traditions of ancient and modern philosophy respectively.  Of course, this leaves medieval Catholic philosophy out in the cold, which won't quite do.  It seems to me that academic philosophers do tend to regard medieval Catholic philosophy a bit condescendingly or dismissively, because these philosophers were willing to accept religious authority as decisive evidence, which strikes them as morally cowardly and/or rationally invalid.  Yet the medieval scholastics were assiduous reasoners and arguers, and on the strength of that may be counted among philosophers despite a somewhat unphilosopherly epistemology.

Not surprisingly, Nietzsche, who hated Socrates and the modern philosophy that Nietzsche saw as vitiated by Platonist habits, does not fit in these traditions.  The fact that Nietzsche is demanding a change in the rules seems to make JM more willing to score him by different rules than other philosophers are scored by.  Believing in instinct, he writes by instinct like a prophet, and relies for persuasion on the instinct of his readers to side with the strong rather than the weak.  Believing in the Ubermensch and the will-to-power, he writes imperiously, dictating from above.  Seeing one morality as detrimental to "higher man," he refuses to accept one epistemological morality and to do battle on the level playing field of argument.  Perhaps it seems to JM and other philosophers unfair, even question-begging, to demand that Nietzsche play by rules which his philosophy repudiates.

But it is equally unfair to ask philosophers who rely on argument to persuade, to enter the arena against Nietzsche, who persuades mainly by the use of scorn.  Scorn is an easier weapon to use than argument, after all.  And argumentative philosophers could deploy scorn, as Bertrand Russell does to some extent in his appraisal of Nietzsche in History of Western Philosophy, for example, if it were not against their scruples.  (The bumper sticker "God is dead - Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead - God." is another example of attacking Nietzsche via his own weapon of scornful rhetoric.)  We could easily imagine a discipline of philosophy that consisted of dueling scorners satirizing and mocking each other and impugning each other's motives.  But I don't believe that a discipline like that would be likely to lead to any truth, whereas a discipline based on argument might lead to a good deal. 

If Nietzsche is to be ranked among the philosophers without the risk of legitimizing scorn as a tactic, it would really be necessary to perform a culling operation first, separating the wheat of argument from the chaff of scorn.  But I get the impression that there would be very little wheat.  Psalm 1 compares the ungoldy to "chaff which the wind blows away."  Apt.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 212:

It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day.

"It is always obvious to me..."  But if so, he should have no trouble proving it with examples.  He would not be able to do so because the claim is false.  For example.  Locke accepted much from the schoolmen.  Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants.  Jesus sought to fulfill the Jewish law.  Aristotle borrowed many ideas from Plato.  Pick any philosopher at random and you'll find that he was largely building on his predecessors, though no doubt he will have differed in certain ways (or why write?).  As for "the ideal of his day," the concept is itself crude.  Every age, and especially the creative age, is diverse enough to have many ideals.

Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers--who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement.

Prophets and philosophers have indeed often criticized much that is regarded as virtue.  But they must have some standard by which to criticize it.  And their criticism has no force unless their audience accepts, or at least sympathizes with, the standard.  Thus, Socrates accepts love of knowledge as an ideal, which his contemporary Athenians shared; but he charges them with falling short of this ideal.  Nietzsche is doing the same thing, only less honestly because he is pretending not to. 

They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was OUTLIVED,

From every pulpit in Christendom are frequently heard charges that congregations are guilty of all sorts of sins, including "hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect"-- the joke is on Nietzsche that he thinks he is doing something novel when he is (for the moment at least) following the script of the Sunday morning preacher.  But for this criticism to have any force, the moral critic's audience must already believe that hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect are vices; that is, the moral critic must borrow a standard from his audience in order to blame them for falling short of it.  He may, indeed, persuade them to see more in it than they saw; but to say that the moral philosopher proposes a "NEW greatness" is to misunderstand his role and to render him incoherent.

they have always said "We must remove hence to where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas," which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the EXTENT to which a man could stretch his responsibility.

But why should mere multifariousness and all-roundness be a standard of greatness?  The jack-of-all-trades as hero?  Nietzsche is proposing a standard here, and of course it is not a novel one: commonsense regards someone with many talents as better than one with few, ceteris paribus.  But it is a very inadequate one.

Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will

We have here, please note, what appears to be an empirical claim.  Is it true?  How would it be tested?  It does not strike me as a very astute opinion.  Even to define "weakness of the will" seems rather difficult, and seems to me also to require a prior notion of will, i.e., free will, as something separate from external/involuntary factors.  Since Nietzsche has elsewhere denied free will any such effort on his part would seem to be fatally flawed from the start.  Still, if we are to rely on the casual, intuitive connotations of the phrase "freedom of the will," the Europeans of Nietzsche's day, who were inventing, building, fighting, conquering, governing themselves and others, raising families, writing, distributing charity, worshipping, etc., abundantly and energetically, would seem to be, by historical standards and by objective measures to the extent that these can be contrived, unusually strong-willed.

 consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of "greatness",

This presupposes that "strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution" are virtues; for otherwise, if we thought they were lacking, we should welcome their decline.  Obviously, commonsense does regard these (except maybe "sternness") as virtues; or in other words, they are already "included in the concept of 'greatness'," with no help from Nietzsche's new philosopher.  We might credit Nietzsche with reinventing the wheel, if he explained why these things are virtues; but he does not, so we can't.

with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity,

Nietzsche seems to contrast "strength of will" with "renunciation" and "humility."  But of course, to practice renunciation as an ascetic requires precisely strength of will, and humility is not at all inconsistent with "capacity for prolonged resolution."

was suited to an opposite age--such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go--"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated--and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!" At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding- animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong--I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility,

Higher, higher, higher, higher.  The extent to which leans on this physical metaphor, is, as Chesterton noticed, a mark of weakness.  Note also the use of the phrase "rare, strange, and privileged" as an expression of approval.  But of course, what is rare is not necessarily good.  Is it not only not necessary but seemingly impossible that is strange is privileged, for "privilege" implies a position of routinized respect within a social system, and social norms can relate only to the familiar.  Nietzsche likes to argue via word-association.  It is possible to dissect and eviscerate the word-associations; but it is really better to simply ignore this illegitimate and invalid argumentative tactic.

the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts "He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." And to ask once more the question: Is greatness POSSIBLE-- nowadays?

Nietzsche arrives at the phrase "the man beyond good and evil" via a stream of suggestive rhetoric.  We are supposed to approve of him, on the grounds that he is "noble," "capable of being different," and "living by personal initiative."  We approve, of course, of those who are noble, who are capable of being different, and who live by personal initiative, because we regard these things, at least tentatively and conditionally, as good.  "Noble" is a rather vague word, the content of which is more than usually dependent on situations and social conventions.  To be "capable of being different" is good because sometimes one ought to be different, i.e., sometimes it is good to be different.  To have "personal initiative" is good if we assume that people generally desire the good and lack of initiative is one reason they often fail to achieve it; but of course, a person who shows great initiative in seeking evil is not good.  So, in effect, Nietzsche throws out a bunch of phrases that we approve of because we regard them as connected with goodness, and then connects these rhetorically with "the man beyond good and evil."  To the extent that any reader is convinced by this he is merely confused.  Whether or not Nietzsche in general is, as I have said, a "trivial and incoherent thinker," he certainly is that in this passage. 

Joyless Moralist has written that:

This will never do. You cannot read Nietzsche this way; or if you insist that this is the only way you know how to read, then by all means, put him away and don't bother about him at all.

I do not insist that this is the only way I know how to read; I insist that this, or something like this-- that is, rational argument rather than mere suggestive rhetoric-- is the only legitimate way to read/evaluate an argument, at any rate by anyone claiming to be a philosopher or to be thinking and writing in a philosophical mode.  JM quotes a friend who says that "Nietzsche's love of truth was so great that he felt compelled to shower her in mud, lest the unworthy identify her and use her for sport."  I reject this defense of Nietzsche.  A lover of truth must have more scruples in his methods of persuasion than Nietzsche displays in Beyond Good and Evil (212) and elsewhere.

It is troubling that JM is willing to condone Nietzsche in the same way that it would be troubling if honorable soldiers were willing to condone terrorists.  The great merit of philosophers is that they try hard to think clearly, that they practice a certain high honesty, that they avoid merely opinionated or prejudiced claims, that they do not let the mere wish be father of the thought, that they explain themselves from first principles as much as possible, that they seek to be ojective, to give arguments for their views which can be acceptable to all regardless of their station in life or disposition.  Nietzsche practices none of these intellectual virtues.  As such he is entitled to none of the respect that the public traditionally grants to philosophers.  To admit Nietzsche to the company of great philosophers is to debase the currency of philosophy.

What Does MacIntyre See in Nietzsche?

After reading a bit of Nietzsche I became puzzled at his high reputation, and particularly at the respect shown him from someone I respect, Alasdair MacIntyre, of which Joyless Moralist reminded me.  JM writes:

It shouldn't be so hard to understand why people like MacIntyre see Nietzsche as one of the main (perhaps THE main) interlocutors. In a way, Nietzsche is one of the only modern thinkers who poses a *real* challenge to MacIntyre's way of thinking.

This was bewildering, since after listening to a few hours of Beyond Good and Evil I didn't see how Nietzsche could pose a challenge to anyone's way of thinking.  There are snatches of reasoning here and there, but in general he scarcely presents a shred of argument for the ethos he is advocating, preferring to thrust it out there as if we are supposed to take it as revelation or prophecy, or at least as if it should have some appeal to our intuition.  The ethos is in itself grotesque, but Nietzsche is enough of an artist to give it a certain limited aesthetic appeal, so that you can see how he continues to attract a small but dedicated following, and even, perhaps, how he might have been able to drive an entire age mad.  But what appeal Nietzsche has is based on rhetoric and insults to his opponents (thus giving us motives of cowardice and/or vanity to take his side rather than be the target of his jeers).  So it seems the best answer is to offer a sober outline the logic and foreseeable evil consequences of Nietzsche's ethos, mixed with expressions of well-earned contempt, in order to make those tempted to indulge in Nietzschean vainglory will be overcome with shame and disgust and turn away from it.  And yet MacIntyre seems to want, not only to put Nietzsche on a level with Kant and Bentham, but to put him above them.  How can this be?

So I re-read the relevant chapter, Chapter 9, entitled "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" from After Virtue, to see what MacIntyre really has to say.  First, it was a relief to see that MacIntyre has only contempt for the positive ethos Nietzsche advocates:

I have already said justifiably harsh words about Nietzsche's construction of that at once absurd and dangerous fantasy, the Ubermensch... (p. 113)  For it is in his relentlessly serious pursuit of the problem [of how to construct a new good], not in his frivolous solutions that Nietzsche's greatness lies... (p. 114)

So, MacIntyre shares my horror and contempt at Nietzsche's wicked, elitist ethos, dismissing it with casual sentences.  This is in contrast to Joyless Moralist, who plays devil's advocate, seemingly in an attempt to defend Nietzsche's status as a great philosopher even if she disagrees with him:

The kind of death he worries about (which is to his mind much worse) is the groveling, self-flagellating pitifulness of those who have been taught to loathe all that is strongest or most noble in themselves. He's thinking of the pacifist who lets himself get trampled in the mud, and then feels a self-righteous pride for doing so. Or the ascetic who forgoes all the pleasures of life but dreams greedily of the rich compensation he expects to receive in the life to come. Of course, Nietzsche doesn't believe that there's any *real* self-sacrifice or humility in the Christian sense; all of these postures are to his mind just another manifestation of the will to power, but they are a contemptible, weak, passive-aggressive sort. He would have a field day with foreign policy today, wherein America flexes its muscles around the globe, but can't stop apologizing for it, while smaller countries beg for our help, and then get prissy and aloof with us after we give it.

Joyless Moralist is being a good educator here, helping a modern mind to penetrate imaginatively into the thinking of a philosopher who, justifiably or not, is part of the canon and whom it is an educated citizen's duty to try to understand.  But of course, one can't separate "all that is... most noble" in us from mercy, advocating the former and denigrating the latter, for mercy is noble, and cruelty, ignoble.  And if Nietzsche thinks that one can't be a pacifist without feeling self-righteous pride, or that ascetics only give up the pleasures of this life for rich compensation later (as opposed to the truth, that ascetics have found a greater enjoyment in worshipping God than earthly pleasures can offer), that simply shows his stupidity and the poverty of his historical imagination.  If he is influential we may have to deal with him, but we don't have to respect him.  Here I think I am in agreement with MacIntyre, who seems to regard Nietzsche's whole Ubermensch idea as worthless nonsense.

So what does MacIntyre see in Nietzsche?  He writes:

For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher -- certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism -- not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy... 

In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalizability, on the other.  In five swift, witty and cogent paragraphs he disposes of both what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order.  But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has created.  The underlying structure of his argument is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates.  There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  I myself must now bring into existence 'new tables of what is good.'

I'll take MacIntyre's word for it that Nietzsche is the major forerunner of MacIntyre's own conviction that the Enlightenment project to find a rational justification for morality failed.  But how is "my morality can only be what my will creates" any solution?  In early chapters, MacIntyre has knocked down the arguments of Kant and Bentham, pointing out that the categorical imperative could have almost any content you please, and that Bentham's "pleasure" and "pain" concepts are illegitimate oversimplifications of human experience.  But surely Nietzsche's argument, as MacIntyre summarizes it, can be knocked down even more easily.  Morality means something that constrains the will.  How can my will be constrained by something my will itself created?  Suppose I create morality x today, then find tomorrow that it would be more convenient to abide by morality y?  Surely if I can choose my own morality, I can re-choose it.  If my morality has no authority greater than my will, it can hardly be immoral for me to do so.  But that means morality is never binding, and therefore that it is no morality.  So the insight with which MacIntyre is crediting Nietzsche is either moral nihilism, or else it is something that stops short of moral nihilism very unwarrantedly with the incoherent suggestion that we can, as MacIntyre puts it, "make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will."

If moral nihilism is Nietzsche's insight, I can think of two better sources for it.  One is Dostoyevsky, specifically the theme that runs through The Brothers Karamazov: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."  The other is J.L. Mackie, author of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.  Both of these authors seem to perceive the idea of moral nihilism (though Dostoyevsky regards the view is an adversary to be combated) more clearly than Nietzsche, who, having destroyed the basis for believing in morality, then persists in the use of morally charged words like "noble," a word which a consistent moral nihilist cannot legitimately use, without seeming to realize that he's being inconsistent. 

A comment on Nietzsche by G. K. Chesterton, in Ch. 7 of Orthodoxy, is astute:

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.

Chesterton is cleverly hitting Nietzsche where it hurts by calling him "timid," since timidity was just what Nietzsche most held in contempt.  But Chesterton is right.  Nietzsche may be a landmark figure because he was the father of modern moral relativism-- I am not intellectual historian enough to say-- but he tried to be more than that; he wanted to be the champion of a new morality.  But his new moral vision had little content and what content it had was repugnant, so he could only make it appealing with the help of rhetoric and metaphor.  The resulting line of thought, though it had a large and insidious historical influence, is really empty and even silly, or "nonsense" as Chesterton rightly puts it.

I should mention that MacIntyre never cites Beyond Good and Evil, the only work of Nietzsche's that I have (partly) read.  Perhaps Nietzsche has better arguments elsewhere.

More Nietzsche:

We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS--there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths. 

Note the word: "compel."

To teach man the future of humanity as his WILL, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, 

One "vast hazardous enterprise and collective attempt in rearing and educating" occurred in Soviet Russia.  Another occurred in Germany.

in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number" is only its last form)--for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. 

Note this curious juxtaposition: "philosopher and commander."  The ordinary conception of a philosopher today is the professor, the scholar, the writer, the man of contemplation.  Nietzsche is looking for a man of action.  So we should not, I think, look to the universities to see whether Nietzsche's hope for a "new type of philosopher and commander" was fulfilled, but rather to the authors of What is to be Done? and Mein Kampf, who not only wrote and thought, but also took command of the destinies of nations.  And yes, in the heyday of these men, one might say that all that had previously seemed terrible was pale and dwarfed.

The image of such leaders hovers before OUR eyes:--is it lawful for me to say it aloud, ye free spirits? 

Is the phrase "free spirits" here meant ironically?  Nietzsche has already said that his heroes would "compel" mankind along new paths; the opposite of freedom.  Perhaps he means freedom for the "new type of philosopher and commander," not to be extended to, and rather to be at the expense of, "the greatest number?"

The conditions which one would partly have to create and partly utilize for their genesis; the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up to such an elevation and power as to feel a CONSTRAINT to these tasks; a transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the weight of such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:--these are OUR real anxieties and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! 

They were not lacking.  There occurred, indeed, a "transvaluation of values"; the Bolshevik, the Nazi, said with Milton's Satan: "Evil, be thou my good."  

these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven of OUR life. There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated; but he who has the rare eye for the universal danger of "man" himself DETERIORATING, he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind--a game in which neither the hand, nor even a "finger of God" has participated!--he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of "modern ideas," and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality--suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at a glance all that could still BE MADE OUT OF MAN through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:--he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. 

But Nietzsche does not know what he means by "the greatest possibilities" or "promising developments," which is why he can only express himself vaguely and suggestively when he talks about it.

The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF MANKIND to the level of the "man of the future"--as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates--this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind--and perhaps also a new MISSION!

Nietzsche would no doubt be glad to know that the new type of philosopher and commander, the incarnation of the Will-to-Power, soon appeared, tearing tradition apart, despising "the greatest number," ravaging, conquering continents.  The Bolshevik and the Nazi appointed themselves the lawgiver and the master race.  They sought to "fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths," to build a heaven-on-earth and a thousand-year Reich.

But then something strange happened.  Nietzsche would perhaps not be disturbed that "the greatest number" condemn the new ubermenschen of Germany and Russia as evil, as monsters.  That, he would no doubt say, is the "morality of timidity," the "herd instinct," the voice of the "rabble."  But they failed in Nietzsche's own terms, too.  The will-to-power, it turns out, does not make men strong.  It turned out that the utilitarians, the democrats, the "pigmies with equal rights and claims," the free societies (no need for quotation marks), the men animated by "idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of 'modern ideas'" and "Christo-European morality," the rabble with their "parliamentary nonsense," could squash the Nietzschean ubermenschen like bugs.  The Americans, who had so little will-to-power that even when the Europeans begged them, after WWI, to stay and lead, they brought their conquering army home with all possible speed, defeated, rather easily, the heirs of Frederick the Great.  At times, e.g., in the fire-bombing of Dresden or the nuking of Hiroshima, they even exhibited the cruelty and abandon that Nietzsche idolized; and they did it so effectively precisely because they did not desire it or enjoy it.  

Nor did the ubermenschen get the consolation prize of honor.  It turned out that even Napoleon, a century of admiration for whom did so much to plant the seeds for the world wars and Nazism, could be admired only because he had traces of Christo-European morality.  He did not exult in "the law of thousand-fold perishings"; or to be more specific, he did not commit many murders.  He claimed to be an orthodox Catholic and was crowned emperor by the pope.  For Hitler there were no garlands, no eulogies; he inspired no poets.  There was nothing noble about Hitler, precisely because he had thrown out the old morality.  No heroic death for Hitler; he died in a bunker, by suicide, after marrying a wench-- another indignity, Nietzsche, that despiser of marriage, might think.  And yet it is not that Nietzsche's "new type of philosopher and commander" merely happened to degenerate or miscarry, and I think even Nietzsche might have been honest enough to admit that, could he have witnessed the event.  It was not accidental but essential to Hitler, to the type Hitler represented, that his death was not noble, bold, grand, heroic, picturesque or inspiring, but wretched, pathetic, ignoble, cowardly, and meaningless.  This is simply what happens to men who abandon morality for the sake of the will-to-power.  Nietzsche was too stupid, too wilfully blind to grasp the great mysteries: the meek shall inherit the earth.  And You have scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

Nietzsche's hopes were fulfilled, in another, ironic way: the destiny he predicted for the ubermenschen, fell to the rabble instead.  It was the great democracies, represented by Churchill and Attlee and Roosevelt and Truman, who would "fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel" -- or, persuade-- "millenniums"-- or at least, decades-- "to take NEW paths."  In founding the United Nations, in forming NATO, in "making the world safe for democracy," they led humanity into new paths of peace, burying, without honors, the age of noble savagery which of which Nietzsche was the ignominious prophet.

Nietzsche, the Manic Muddlehead

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil is typical:

To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means. Among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception;

To call men "defective," "diseased," etc. implies a standard compared to which men fall short.  If we apply a commonsense standard Nietzsche's claim is false.  Thus, most men are healthy; disease is the exception.  Or again, most of the obvious, material sufferings of humanity-- infant mortality, say, or hunger-- have been proven by economic growth not to be "necessary," for they have been overcome.   Nietzsche is trying to apply Darwinist biology as a metaphor for mankind, but the effort is misguided, for civilized man has escaped the old Malthusian trap, so that success in the merely biological sense is now the norm, not the exception.  If Nietzsche wants to define success in some other sense he is obliged to tell us what it is and defend it.  But he could not do so.  That's why he writes so cryptically, wrapping his thoughts in darkness; they could not stand up to the light.

and in view of the fact that man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception.

The concept of adaptation to an environment is not applicable to man, who has transcended mere dependency on an ecological niche, and makes his own environment.

But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine.

What does Nietzsche mean by this physical metaphor, "the higher type?"  The metaphor will seem to some extent meaningful to readers raised in a Christian culture, because Christianity lives in the light of a lofty moral ideal, laid out in the Gospels, and compared to that standard we observe greater and lesser degrees of success which can be called "higher" or "lower."  Nietzsche wants to destroy the Gospels, and in doing so, he renders his own physical metaphor meaningless.  He is forever the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.

What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible.

Here, Nietzsche seems to have some sort of a value standard, but he refuses to tell us what it is (because, I think, he doesn't know).  Apparently, Nietzsche ascribes negative value to the life-experience of most human beings; as he makes no case, there can be no rebuttal.  One of the absurdities here is that Nietzsche is always calling his opponents "dogmatists," as if he were the Cartesian rationalist, yet he is always making emphatic claims like this one that are at best groundless and probably meaningless as well.  But here is a question.  Nietzsche claims that the great religions "treat every other experience of life as false and impossible."  Since the word "other" must "other than" something, and since that something in this case is "suffering from life as a disease," Nietzsche is claiming that religions claim any experience of life other than suffering from it as a disease.  This claim might possibly be true of Buddhism; of Christianity it is wildly false.  If we put this to one side, however, it's true that the great religions do dismiss as "false and impossible" some "experiences of life" that some "free spirits" might aspire to, e.g., free love.  A sober philosopher might ask: Are there, in fact, some experiences of life which we can dimly imagine and can desire, which are, in fact, false and impossible, e.g., free love?  Nietzsche could have presented arguments that some lifestyles forbidden by Christianity as dangerous illusions are actually possible and happy.  But honest argument is a field which he steers clear of, knowing perhaps that he would be unhorsed there at once.

However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give a general appreciation of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of "man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE PERISHED.

Should have, in what sense?  Where are these repugnant value-judgments coming from?  Of course, the link between Nietzsche's thought and Nazi race policy is evident here.

One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto!

Well, yes, and this line could have come from Chesterton, but what does Nietzsche mean by it?  To call for gratitude for past achievements of civilization is to appeal to some common standard of good between Nietzsche and the reader; what is that standard?

But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE?

The racism of this claim-via-rhetorical-question is not only repugnant but, I believe, empirically false.  If Nietzsche meant that Europeans would have been superior in objective respects, e.g., in intelligence, strength, courage or whatever, had European civilization been less humanitarian, this theory makes a testable prediction, namely that Europeans should be genetically inferior to Tagalog, Bantu, or Amerindian peoples where the sick and suffering were allowed to die.  I do not think there is any evidence suggesting this is the case.  If there were evidence for this, of course, it would not necessarily follow, and most people nowadays would emphatically reject, the value-judgment that it would have been better to improve the race by letting the weak die.

To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they had to do!

One can't help but be bemused here.  Nietzsche is advocating that most of mankind be allowed to perish because they are "defective, diseased," etc., and yet he is accusing Christianity of "reversing all estimates of value!"  Christianity is on the side of life for all; Nietzsche, on the side of death for most.  Who is reversing estimates of value here?

And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"-- into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction;

What is one to answer to a writer who charges the civilization and faith that came to dominate (in the Age of Imperialism during which Nietzsche was writing) most of the world through its military superiority with "shattering the strong?"  That Christianity did not shatter the strong is a lesson of history that cannot be doubted; if anything, it seems to have strengthened and emboldened them.  Nietzsche seems always to start from the claim that 2+2=5.  Of course, the identification of "manly, conquering, and imperious" with "highest and most successful" is merely question-begging and dogmatic; again, no case has been made and no rebuttal can be offered.  But the identity of conscience with self-destruction is a simple falsehood.  Suicide is forbidden by the Christian conscience.

forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one sentiment.

Hmm...  Has Nietzsche given us some notion here of the origins of his otherwise mysterious "higher man" concept?  To appropriate and repurpose this notion from Christianity even while he attacks Christianity is another case of the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.  Anyway, the charge that Christianity "hates all earthly things" is manifestly false, as is evident both from the writings of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians who affirm the goodness of earthly things (Augustine even argues that evil is only a privation of good) and from the fact that Christian civilization has achieved more in producing and enjoying earthly things than any other, and that monastics in particular have contributed to advances of material civilization out of all proportion to their numbers.  Christianity does, in a sense, "hate" some earthly things-- not all, of course; does the Church hate the bread and wine that are used in its sacraments?-- that are good in themselves, to the extent that they get in the way of heavenly things.  But then, Nietzsche himself really does hate most earthly things, regarding them as "defective," "diseased," etc.  Here, as in many places, Nietzsche's arguments are worthless against their intended targets but cogent against himself.

If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man?

The absurdity here becomes at once so extreme and so subtle as to be a sort of marvel.  Consider: Abortion causes death.  Christian civilization has given rise to free constitutions, market economies, and technological progress which has made possible a twenty-fold increase in the human population; that is, it has caused a great increase in life.  Nietzsche, on the other hand, is explicitly advocating that most of mankind "should have perished" because it is "defective"; that is, he is advocating death, or, as we might put to do justice to his noble-sounding tone, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man."  As a criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche's claim is so obviously, utterly false that one feels he cannot have failed to understand its falsehood but rather exulted in it.  One feels the need for a new word which, like the words lie, joke, or fiction describes a false utterance, but which has a connotation of joy or exultation in carrying to virtuoso extremes the opposition between one's utterances and the truth, and does not so much deceive one's hearers as invite them to join in the exultation.  Meanwhile, as a criticism of Nietzsche's own philosophy, the claim is extremely astute.  Indeed, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man" is a good description of that historic climax of Nietzscheanism, WWII.

He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed to do!"--

This Nietzsche writes, of the civilization and the faith that built the European cathedrals, that produced Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime self- constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail;

Note how Nietzsche bluters that the "law of the thousandfold failures and perishings" is "obvious" to mask his total inability to defend or even to define it.

men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.

As a minor symptom of the absurdity of this passage, we may observe that the "dwarfed" Europeans of Nietzsche's day and after are, on average, about a foot taller in stature than the prehistoric men of the age before human destinies were shaped by Platonism and Christianity.  This is characteristic.  Nietzsche's ravings are usually meaningless.  When meaning can be ascribed to them they are distinctive for being the opposite of the truth.

Nietzsche's point of departure seems to be an effort to apply a Darwinian paradigm to man and human society.  But the paradigm is inapplicable to civilized man, since modern man has more or less solved the problem of scarcity in the basic biological sense if not in the economic sense, and since in any case civilization replaces biological evolution with cultural evolution as the driving force of human development.  Nietzsche uses the rhetoric of "higher man," a metaphor somewhat useful for capture the advantages, ineffable because of their complexity, of civilization, in order to advocate the opposite of civilization, a return to savagery and the law of the jungle.  This grotesquely perverse wordplay is at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Yet Joyless Moralist says that Nietzsche is a "very great philosopher," "worth taking seriously," who "understands what is really at stake in Western philosophy."  If he's so smart, why does he have all his facts wrong and fail to make valid arguments for any of his claims?  Shouldn't philosophers treat Nietzsche as economists treat Marx, as a thinker to whom some attention must be paid because of his historical influence, and whom it is sometimes fun to refute, but who is understood to have been comprehensively wrong and to have contributed nothing of value to human knowledge?

Is Nietzsche Worth Answering?

I was recently reading Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and among other things I was struck by the respect that Bloom, a cultural conservative who might be expected not to like them, had for Nietzsche and Rousseau.  It is no doubt an indication of the narrowness and bias of my education and self-education in philosophy, but I don't think I've ever encountered a favorable treatment of Nietzsche or Rousseau before.  Bertrand Russell and Paul Johnson, for example, both regard both men with feelings of contempt, disapproval, and occasional horror.  I thought of Rousseau and Nietzsche more or less as sophists and enemies of civilization, philosophical forerunners of the French Revolution and Nazi Germany, respectively.  But Bloom finds it worthwhile to deal with Rousseau and Nietzsche at great length and in some ways sympathetically (especially towards Rousseau).

So I downloaded Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and have been listening to it.  It seems to me that Nietzsche is a lot like G.K. Chesterton: an unsystematic, aphoristic thinker, sometimes insightful, sometimes merely polemical, but full of unwarranted claims and lacking the scruples of a systematic philosopher.  Nietzsche's elitism may neutralize resistance to his arguments in a manner like that from the story The Emperor's New Clothes: one hesitates to say, or even think, What nonsense, this doesn't make any sense, for fear of feeling the knife-edge of Nietzsche's keen contempt.  But in fact, not only are Nietzsche's grounds for rejecting tradition inadequate, but they are parasitic on tradition.  Nietzsche is, in a thousand different ways.  Nietzsche is forever in the position of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch on which he himself is sitting.

I found this passage in the introduction striking:

The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its “super- terrestrial” pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when

Europe

, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered.

The rhetorical force of the word "nightmare" is felt by the reader because the reader thinks of nightmares as evil, or bad.  If Nietzsche wants us to be "beyond good and evil," that force is lost.  Elsewhere Nietzsche says that "the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life," and that "the question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing?"  This seems to suggest-- but Nietzsche never deigns to express a thought so clearly-- that what matters is that ideas be useful rather than true.  By that standard, Christianity, the chrysalis in which the world's most materially successful civilization formed, would seem to be vindicated.  Of course, the real nightmare was the age following Nietzsche in which the "Will-to-Power" which he glorified seized Moscow and Rome and Berlin and burst forth to ravage Europe.  If Nietzsche wants to call two thousand years of Western civilization a "nightmare," one might wish to ask the standard by which Nietzsche judges, but he offers no ground.  My impression so far is that Nietzsche is greatly overpromoted when great thinkers like Bloom and MacIntyre make him their major interlocutor.  You see a brilliant mind at work in Nietzsche's writings, sometimes, but he wastes it on ranting.  He is an incoherent and trivial thinker.