Why deranged male loners love Nietzsche
Because when he's take out of context he mirrors their own narcissistic confusion ... read this from Slate ...
Angry Nerds
How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types.
By Matt FeeneyPosted Friday, Jan. 14, 2011, at 11:22 AM ET
Friedrich Nietzsche - If we never discovered that Jared Lee Loughner honed his murderous outlook while sitting alone in his bedroom, reading Nietzsche and thinking about nihilism, that would have been real news. Instead of real news, though, we've gotten a dreary iteration of a cultural cliché. The New York Times and other media are saying the addled and alienated young man arrested for trying to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords, and for the murders of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green and five other people, took himself to be a Nietzschean. Of course he did.
I suppose we could start plucking out incendiary quotations from Nietzsche's works and assess how much blame to lay on his head for Loughner's alleged crimes and the crimes of other young men with similar philosophical interests, but such a project would tend toward philistinism or obscurity. Better, I think, to leave aside the indictment and treat the nexus of Nietzsche and troubled young manhood as Nietzsche himself would have—that is, anthropologically.
The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers you'd prefer not to bother with anyway). He's funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you're a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.
If you're a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldn't you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, there's something in every book you're likely to pick up—some enticement of form or content or both—that addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first work, it's the celebration of anarchic and sexually with-it Dionysus over boring Apollo, who's like the Greek god of algebra or something. In Zarathustra, it's the beckoning first-person narration, a crazy novel or memoir kind of thing, a heroic story of Zarathustra "going under," gathering spiritual strength in hermetic solitude that reminds you of your own bedroom, and then "rising" to "shine" upon a people who don't even understand or deserve him. In The Genealogy of Morals it's Nietzsche examining the real history of that Bible stuff your lame pastor barks at you in church (which you understand as saying two main things: no sex, no touching yourself) and proving that morality originates not in God but in the will to power—ancient priests seizing power over ancient masters by guilt-tripping them about the suffering of slaves. (Christianity is just "slave morality." So much for that dilemma.) In Ecce Homo it's those excellent chapter headings ("Why I Am So Clever," "Why I Write Such Good Books"). And in Beyond Good and Evil it is, well, the awesome title of the book itself, and that hilarious opening line ("Supposing truth is a woman—what then?"), and that first chapter where he mocks all those philosophers you don't have to read anymore, now that Nietzsche has told you how lame they are.
And, also in Beyond Good and Evil, it's the aphorisms—a section entitled "Epigrams and Interludes" comprising over a hundred one- and two-sentence masterworks of moral paradox and counterintuition, calculated outrage and elegant eye-poking. Nietzsche is aphoristic even when he's being systematic, and when he's being aphoristic, his writing is simply unmatched in its beauty and mayhem, its uncanny mix of compression and infinite suggestion. And for a young guy who's intellectually hungry but doesn't much enjoy reading, finding this section of philosophy-bits in the middle of this famous book is like a homecoming. You don't even have to know what these epigrams mean to enjoy them. You just feel manly and brave in entertaining them at all, not flinching but laughing when Nietzsche says: "One is best punished for ones virtues." (You even get to work out some of your girl-troubles by lingering over Nietzsche's several jabs at women.)
Of course, Nietzsche scholars will tell you not to run too far with these little wisecracks. You need to understand them in the context of his larger body of work, in which he often circles back to themes, again and again, revising and even contradicting his earlier writings. You have to understand the aphorisms as part of a vast poetic project of self-creation or becoming in which nothing is truly settled. Nietzsche himself predicted he would be misread, acquire misguided disciples, and so he has.
Loughner's favorite book, according to news reports, fits with these troubled-guy tendencies and their associated pitfalls. It's not Beyond Good and Evil, but rather The Will to Power, the notorious compilation of Nietzsche's working notes (which Nietzsche's sister peddled, wrongly, as his great systematic work). The observations are longer-form in The Will to Power, but, like the "Epigrams and Interludes," they are too-easily separated from Nietzsche's other work. They have a tidy thematic organization that is largely his sister's. This scheme is helpful to the scholar who knows his other books. It's also helpful to the troubled young man obsessed with one thing in particular. In Loughner's case, this one thing was apparently nihilism, which happens to be the first topic in The Will to Power.
That Loughner was reading Nietzsche on nihilism fits so perfectly into a template for such tragedies that it's easy to miss the gaping confusion in news stories about the shooting. These stories echo claims by some acquaintances that Loughner was a nihilist, and by others that he was "obsessed with nihilism," as if these are the same thing. But Loughner didn't see himself as a nihilist. He saw himself as fighting nihilism. This is evident in his fixation in his YouTube videos on the idea that words have no meaning, or have somehow lost their meaning in a process of nihilistic decline—a fixation that seems to lie at the basis of his tragic grudge against Gabrielle Giffords.
Nietzsche, oddly, has suffered a similar fate. Because of his assault on religion and rationalist metaphysics, and because of the hints of anarchy in his assorted visions of the future (e.g., "the transvaluation of all values"), he's taken as the West's über-nihilist. But he saw himself as the scourge of European nihilism, and possibly also its remedy. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a disease, which grows from, in Alexander Nehamas' words, "the assumption that if some single standard is not good for everyone and all time, then no standard is good for anyone at any time." It presents itself as mindless hedonism and flaccid spirit, but also as fanaticism.
So does that make Nietzsche and Jared Lee Loughner philosophical brethren after all, joined in the same fanatical fight against nihilism? In a word, no, and Loughner's pathological fixation on the meaning of words is the giveaway. One way of looking at Nietzsche's project is that he set out to teach himself and his readers to love the world in its imperfection and multiplicity, for itself. This is behind his assaults on religion, liberal idealism, and utilitarian systems of social organization. He saw these as different ways of effacing or annihilating the world as it is. It is behind his infamous doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence—in which he embraces the "most abysmal thought," that the given world, and not the idealizing stories we tell of it, is all there is, and he will affirm this reality even if it recurs eternally.
Jared Loughner's despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It's the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.
Thanks to Cris Campbell of the University of Colorado for some key insights and background on Nietzsche and nihilism.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Home of the ... racist, intolerant and unhinged?
Thats the view I get this morning, considering the Giffords assassination attempt, the bomb found in Spokane on the route of a MLK Jr. Day parade route, and the new governor of Alabama turning his inaugural bully pulpit into just that - a pulpit for bullying and threatening non-Christians. I think that it should be clear to most Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, that the current atmosphere will see sectarianism only grow. The right in particular feels emboldened, and the Tuscon shootings, far from making them rethink their strategies, will only help those who feel threatened by plurality, non-whites and non-regressive thinkers to use violent means. And the timing couldn't be worse: right at a moment in world history when other countries (China and India the leaders, but many others also) are readjusting to take advantage of a new era in global economics and power, the most conservative and repressive elements of American society are attempting to dominate with individual acts of cruelty and idiocy - ecce homo, ergo Palin.
Thats the view I get this morning, considering the Giffords assassination attempt, the bomb found in Spokane on the route of a MLK Jr. Day parade route, and the new governor of Alabama turning his inaugural bully pulpit into just that - a pulpit for bullying and threatening non-Christians. I think that it should be clear to most Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, that the current atmosphere will see sectarianism only grow. The right in particular feels emboldened, and the Tuscon shootings, far from making them rethink their strategies, will only help those who feel threatened by plurality, non-whites and non-regressive thinkers to use violent means. And the timing couldn't be worse: right at a moment in world history when other countries (China and India the leaders, but many others also) are readjusting to take advantage of a new era in global economics and power, the most conservative and repressive elements of American society are attempting to dominate with individual acts of cruelty and idiocy - ecce homo, ergo Palin.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Recipe for Disaster
Here's something that could end up very badly - lots of novices, tourists and the curious heading to the South Pole to commemorate the centenary of Admunsen's ski trip to the pole. Of course Scott and party perished after reaching the same spot just weeks later. Apparently people are ponying up to pay tens of thousands of dollars to live the experience, some skiing (or attempting to) all, or part, of the way, like this one Briton in the NYTimes article who has never x-country skied before and doesn't like cold weather! Are you serious? This is like Everest - one bad stretch of weather, and at the South Pole this is the norm, like on Everest - and there will be dead and/or missing peoplel all over, I'm afraid. The Times does specialize in the adventures of the effete and underinformed, so we will have to see how it turns out .... Read at your own peril.
Tourists Mimic Polar Pioneers, Except With Planes and Blogs
Extreme World Races
Participants in a previous race sponsored by Extreme World Races.
By JENNIFER A. KINGSON
Published: January 15, 2011
Recommend
Twitter
E-Mail
Send To Phone
Print
Reprints
Share
CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that he had been beaten there by Roald Amundsen and his team of Norwegians, he was despondent. “Great God! This is an awful place,” he lamented in his diary.
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Robert F. Scott, standing center, with his 1912 polar expedition. A Norwegian team arrived first, and Scott’s group perished.
Enlarge This Image
Amundsen Omega 3
The flags of the signers of the Antarctic Treaty are planted near the geographic pole.
Awful as it may be, it is about to get a lot of foot traffic. Hundreds of people — tourists, adventurers and history buffs — are lining up to visit the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversaries of Amundsen’s arrival (on Dec. 14, 1911) and Scott’s (Jan. 17, 1912). The preparations are already speeding along.
Some people intend to ski the exact routes of Amundsen and Scott, reading the explorers’ diaries daily and blogging about the experience. Others will drive to the pole by truck. For those seeking less exertion, there will be catered flights to the pole, including several that will let passengers off a few miles away so they can ski the remaining stretch and feel the thrill of victory.
One of the many tour operators trying to cash in on the fervor is Polar Explorers, a company in suburban Chicago that is charging $40,500 for a flight to the pole on either anniversary (weather permitting). People who want to be dropped off a degree or two away so they can ski in will pay up to $57,500.
“We’re going to have lots of Champagne toasts and take a lot of pictures, and you can call home to your loved ones from the pole,” said Annie Aggens of Polar Explorers. “It’s super exciting just to walk in the footsteps of these early explorers.”
Needless to say, people will not want to replicate Scott’s entire expedition. He and his men died in a blizzard during the 800-mile trek back from the pole, huddled in a tent that was, famously, just 11 miles from a vital cache of supplies.
Instead, many people plan to ski to the pole, then fly back. One of them is Matt Elliott, a 28-year-old Briton, who will compete in a 440-mile ski race, pulling 200 pounds of gear the whole way. A resident of Windsor, he works for his family’s paper wholesaling business and calls himself “a complete polar novice.”
He has never tried cross-country skiing, and he is not a big fan of cold weather, but he has been practicing by dragging two car tires on a rope for several hours at a time.
“I want to know how far, physically, I can go,” said Mr. Elliott, who is paying about $95,000 to enter the competition, sponsored by a London-based company called Extreme World Races. “It would be great to get there first and run the Union Jack at the South Pole before the Norwegians get there,” he said.
Davis Nelsen, who is 52 and runs a steel manufacturing company in Chicago, will have a less stressful trip. He plans to be on one of the Amundsen flights run by Polar Explorers, in honor of his Norwegian heritage. This will be his second polar adventure: in 2009, he flew to the North Pole to mark the centenary of Robert Peary’s expedition.
In polar travel, “you have to be prepared to be uncomfortable,” said Mr. Nelsen, who plans to ski the last 30 or so miles.
The crowds going to the South Pole are not expected to amount to more than a blip in overall tourism numbers to Antarctica, which peaked at 46,000 in the 2007-8 season and have dropped off because of the global recession. But because most people who visit Antarctica go by cruise ship and do not venture beyond the coast, a spike in tourism to the pole itself is expected.
The National Science Foundation, which runs the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, is not amused. It has a message for all these potential visitors: do not expect a warm welcome.
“Those people who do arrive, we don’t really have a process for them other than letting them know that they are at the pole, that this is a U.S. station, and we’re not able to provide them with any amenities,” said Peter West of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
Yes, there is a small gift shop — make that, “commissary” — where people can buy T-shirts and the like, and visitors can drop off letters that will get a South Pole postmark. But the research station is “really not set up for tourism,” said Evan Bloom of the State Department. “We want other governments to get the word out that people should not simply show up at the South Pole.”
Most of the time, visitors will be spread across Antarctica. The biggest ski race, the one set up by Extreme World Races, will take place far away from the routes taken by Scott and Amundsen, approaching from the opposite side of the continent. Fifty-one competitors, in teams of three, will ski to the pole, said Tony Martin, founder of the company. Training for the race, which includes jumping into ice holes and learning to negotiate crevasses, will take place at a camp in Norway; space is still available.
“We don’t give cash prizes or cars,” said Mr. Martin, in an interview by satellite phone from Antarctica, where he was in a truck setting a course for the race. He described his clients as “just ordinary people” who wanted to “push themselves psychologically and physically.” Each will wear a GPS device, and airplanes will be on call in case someone needs to be evacuated.
Among other adventure travelers, Henry Worsley, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, may have the best historical pedigree. He is distantly related to Frank Worsley, the captain of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. He is staging his own race to the pole in two teams of three men.
“The intention is to rerun the Scott-Amundsen race from the two start points,” he said. “I’m leading the Norwegian route up the Axel Heiberg glacier from the Bay of Whales, and a friend of mine is going to do the Scott route, which I did a few years ago.”
Some people are trying to play down the competitive angle and play up the historical one. Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, plans to be at the pole the day Amundsen reached it, part of a four-man team that will re-enact Amundsen’s journey then fly home in time for Christmas. On the British side, Ben Saunders, a 33-year-old London resident, who is a long-distance skier and motivational speaker, plans to follow in the footsteps of Scott — and to complete the return trip that Scott could not finish.
David Wilson, a great-nephew of Edward Wilson, the naturalist and sketch artist who marched to the pole with Scott and died beside him, will join other descendants of Scott’s polar party in Antarctica next Jan. 17 in the vicinity of the tent, where they will hold a memorial service.
He echoes the Scott party line: that the British expedition went to Antarctica to do science, not to race to the pole. The people planning competitions are “completely misunderstanding what happened 100 years ago,” Dr. Wilson said.
Despite the potential circus atmosphere, some veterans insist that Antarctica is not for novices.
“It’s a place that wants you dead,” said Robert Swan, an environmentalist who walked Scott’s route to the South Pole in 1985. “Scott found that out 100 years ago.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Here's something that could end up very badly - lots of novices, tourists and the curious heading to the South Pole to commemorate the centenary of Admunsen's ski trip to the pole. Of course Scott and party perished after reaching the same spot just weeks later. Apparently people are ponying up to pay tens of thousands of dollars to live the experience, some skiing (or attempting to) all, or part, of the way, like this one Briton in the NYTimes article who has never x-country skied before and doesn't like cold weather! Are you serious? This is like Everest - one bad stretch of weather, and at the South Pole this is the norm, like on Everest - and there will be dead and/or missing peoplel all over, I'm afraid. The Times does specialize in the adventures of the effete and underinformed, so we will have to see how it turns out .... Read at your own peril.
Tourists Mimic Polar Pioneers, Except With Planes and Blogs
Extreme World Races
Participants in a previous race sponsored by Extreme World Races.
By JENNIFER A. KINGSON
Published: January 15, 2011
Recommend
Send To Phone
Reprints
Share
CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that he had been beaten there by Roald Amundsen and his team of Norwegians, he was despondent. “Great God! This is an awful place,” he lamented in his diary.
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Robert F. Scott, standing center, with his 1912 polar expedition. A Norwegian team arrived first, and Scott’s group perished.
Enlarge This Image
Amundsen Omega 3
The flags of the signers of the Antarctic Treaty are planted near the geographic pole.
Awful as it may be, it is about to get a lot of foot traffic. Hundreds of people — tourists, adventurers and history buffs — are lining up to visit the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversaries of Amundsen’s arrival (on Dec. 14, 1911) and Scott’s (Jan. 17, 1912). The preparations are already speeding along.
Some people intend to ski the exact routes of Amundsen and Scott, reading the explorers’ diaries daily and blogging about the experience. Others will drive to the pole by truck. For those seeking less exertion, there will be catered flights to the pole, including several that will let passengers off a few miles away so they can ski the remaining stretch and feel the thrill of victory.
One of the many tour operators trying to cash in on the fervor is Polar Explorers, a company in suburban Chicago that is charging $40,500 for a flight to the pole on either anniversary (weather permitting). People who want to be dropped off a degree or two away so they can ski in will pay up to $57,500.
“We’re going to have lots of Champagne toasts and take a lot of pictures, and you can call home to your loved ones from the pole,” said Annie Aggens of Polar Explorers. “It’s super exciting just to walk in the footsteps of these early explorers.”
Needless to say, people will not want to replicate Scott’s entire expedition. He and his men died in a blizzard during the 800-mile trek back from the pole, huddled in a tent that was, famously, just 11 miles from a vital cache of supplies.
Instead, many people plan to ski to the pole, then fly back. One of them is Matt Elliott, a 28-year-old Briton, who will compete in a 440-mile ski race, pulling 200 pounds of gear the whole way. A resident of Windsor, he works for his family’s paper wholesaling business and calls himself “a complete polar novice.”
He has never tried cross-country skiing, and he is not a big fan of cold weather, but he has been practicing by dragging two car tires on a rope for several hours at a time.
“I want to know how far, physically, I can go,” said Mr. Elliott, who is paying about $95,000 to enter the competition, sponsored by a London-based company called Extreme World Races. “It would be great to get there first and run the Union Jack at the South Pole before the Norwegians get there,” he said.
Davis Nelsen, who is 52 and runs a steel manufacturing company in Chicago, will have a less stressful trip. He plans to be on one of the Amundsen flights run by Polar Explorers, in honor of his Norwegian heritage. This will be his second polar adventure: in 2009, he flew to the North Pole to mark the centenary of Robert Peary’s expedition.
In polar travel, “you have to be prepared to be uncomfortable,” said Mr. Nelsen, who plans to ski the last 30 or so miles.
The crowds going to the South Pole are not expected to amount to more than a blip in overall tourism numbers to Antarctica, which peaked at 46,000 in the 2007-8 season and have dropped off because of the global recession. But because most people who visit Antarctica go by cruise ship and do not venture beyond the coast, a spike in tourism to the pole itself is expected.
The National Science Foundation, which runs the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, is not amused. It has a message for all these potential visitors: do not expect a warm welcome.
“Those people who do arrive, we don’t really have a process for them other than letting them know that they are at the pole, that this is a U.S. station, and we’re not able to provide them with any amenities,” said Peter West of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
Yes, there is a small gift shop — make that, “commissary” — where people can buy T-shirts and the like, and visitors can drop off letters that will get a South Pole postmark. But the research station is “really not set up for tourism,” said Evan Bloom of the State Department. “We want other governments to get the word out that people should not simply show up at the South Pole.”
Most of the time, visitors will be spread across Antarctica. The biggest ski race, the one set up by Extreme World Races, will take place far away from the routes taken by Scott and Amundsen, approaching from the opposite side of the continent. Fifty-one competitors, in teams of three, will ski to the pole, said Tony Martin, founder of the company. Training for the race, which includes jumping into ice holes and learning to negotiate crevasses, will take place at a camp in Norway; space is still available.
“We don’t give cash prizes or cars,” said Mr. Martin, in an interview by satellite phone from Antarctica, where he was in a truck setting a course for the race. He described his clients as “just ordinary people” who wanted to “push themselves psychologically and physically.” Each will wear a GPS device, and airplanes will be on call in case someone needs to be evacuated.
Among other adventure travelers, Henry Worsley, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, may have the best historical pedigree. He is distantly related to Frank Worsley, the captain of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. He is staging his own race to the pole in two teams of three men.
“The intention is to rerun the Scott-Amundsen race from the two start points,” he said. “I’m leading the Norwegian route up the Axel Heiberg glacier from the Bay of Whales, and a friend of mine is going to do the Scott route, which I did a few years ago.”
Some people are trying to play down the competitive angle and play up the historical one. Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, plans to be at the pole the day Amundsen reached it, part of a four-man team that will re-enact Amundsen’s journey then fly home in time for Christmas. On the British side, Ben Saunders, a 33-year-old London resident, who is a long-distance skier and motivational speaker, plans to follow in the footsteps of Scott — and to complete the return trip that Scott could not finish.
David Wilson, a great-nephew of Edward Wilson, the naturalist and sketch artist who marched to the pole with Scott and died beside him, will join other descendants of Scott’s polar party in Antarctica next Jan. 17 in the vicinity of the tent, where they will hold a memorial service.
He echoes the Scott party line: that the British expedition went to Antarctica to do science, not to race to the pole. The people planning competitions are “completely misunderstanding what happened 100 years ago,” Dr. Wilson said.
Despite the potential circus atmosphere, some veterans insist that Antarctica is not for novices.
“It’s a place that wants you dead,” said Robert Swan, an environmentalist who walked Scott’s route to the South Pole in 1985. “Scott found that out 100 years ago.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tibet after the Dalai Lama
Interesting read about the Dalai Lama in The Economist, and speculation - well a little - on what lies in store for the Tibetan cause with the 14th Dalai Lama now 76. The Karmapa Lama may come into play as the next Dalai Lama will be young, and there will be a regency for 15 - 20 years once he is located. Here's the link:
http://www.economist.com/node/17851411
Also posting a publication by Human Rights watch on the wide scale repression and abuse in Tibet since the 2008 Lhasa uprising. As usual it makes for grim, but necessary reading. The real extent of Chinese atrocities may never be known.
http://www.hrw.org/node/91850
http://www.economist.com/node/17851411
Also posting a publication by Human Rights watch on the wide scale repression and abuse in Tibet since the 2008 Lhasa uprising. As usual it makes for grim, but necessary reading. The real extent of Chinese atrocities may never be known.
http://www.hrw.org/node/91850
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)