Societal Change, Self-Destruction & the Danger of Revolution | Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History III

History is the record of human failure, in many respects, including moral failure. We know too well the aberrations of chattel slavery, legalized discrimination, colonization, empirialsism etc. Indeed, it seems popular media outlets and universities do nothing by criticize and demonize history.

Of course, this is sometimes necessary. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche goes so far as argue that every past is worthy to be condemned, because every past was fallible. Humans always fall short, make mistakes, and do morally wrong things.

However, Nietzsche also says that it is very, very dangerous to criticize the past, which is a warning that is left out of our modern discourse, and one that we desperately need.

Nietzsche argues that criticizing our history and our systems is a kind of self-destructive behavior—to condemn the past is to condemn ourselves—although those who criticize history are often unaware of this. They see themselves as distinct from the events of the past. They are like Oedipus who kills his own father without knowing who he is and goes on to pledge that he will punish the patricidal criminal who incurred the plague of Thebes without realizing it he himself is the criminal. Or you might compare them to Pip from great expectations whose advantages in life, unbeknownst to him at first, come from the labors of a convict.

In this essay I identify two main dangers of this self-destructive criticism: mental danger and ‘physical danger.’

Mentally speaking, being too critical of the past leads to a kind of existential self-loathing among modern people that is just one of the subliminal reasons why we are so heavily medicated, so anxious and depressed, especially when it comes to the middle and upper class educated elites who’ve become such snowflakes. I’m compelled by arguments from cognitive behavioral therapists, pioneers like David Burns, M.D. who say that depression is fundamentally not a chemical imbalance but a result of how we think. They link Depression to certain thought patterns, which cause mental unease, and mental weakness. And when we look at media, journalism, and universities, we find that the same thought patterns that cause depression in individuals, are used to think about and evaluate our historical past.

Physically speaking, it’s often pointed out that revolutions inevitably eat their own children. Critical movements consume themselves. It must be so. For as Nietzsche says, we originate from the aberrations and crimes of that past which we seek to reform. Revolutions accuse their own countries of a crime, but in order to do this, in order to accuse the present system of wickedness, you must unwittingly implicate yourself. You cannot change the fact that you are a product of the present system. That makes you complicit. Although you may not be aware of your complicity today, you can be sure someone else will recognize it. Today Danton goes to the guillotine as an enemy of the revolution, but tomorrow or the day after that, it will be Robespierre.

Such iconoclasm and reformation, even with the best intents, is never but a few steps from disaster. For even with the most unjust and damaging institutions we have the benefit of at least knowing how bad they are. When we set about to destroy or change them, especially by means of novel innovation, do not know how bad it may yet become: it may become much worse. However bad or oppressive the reign of Louis XVI may have been, the Reign of Terror under the Committee of Public Safety was far worse.

To avoid these dangers, we need to be slow reformers, as Edmund Burke argued. Or, as Nietzsche seems to suggest, we should focus on cultivating the new, more than destroying the old.

“The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.”

#Nietzsche #History #Politics