Month: April 2006

Another item: think-tanks essentially bribed to promote special interests.

I had no idea how many readers are Nietzsche readers. Here’s another:

"Based on that article on Richard Neuhaus in TNR, it seems like the man could be a perfect caricature for everything Nietzsche saw as wrong with modern Christianity. Here’s a quote from The Gay Science:

"The less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely – a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience… for fanaticism is the only ‘strength of will’ that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant."

Neuhaus’ desire for certainty and authority seem to be the exact opposite of what could make for a pure faith that does more than simply project our personal deficiencies. Nietzsche thought no such thing was possible, and Neuhaus’ bizarre idea of faith as fetishism of authority only works to prove Nietzsche’s side of the argument."

This, alas, is an age longing for authority, when what it really needs is nerve.

A British reader writes:

"As for the date thing not happening for another 1000 or 100 years – well they’re both wrong. As you know, it’ll actually happen next month –  4th of May  – as unlike your American friends we in the UK put the date the correct way round. Please feel free to correct the cousins."

Just one of life’s little lessons: open a package before you buy it off the street. (Hat tip: Jack Lewis.)

You know it’s bad for the GOP when National Review and Instapundit barely mention the big news of the day. Tom DeLay’s resignation from elective politics, barely a year and a half after the triumphant Republican re-election campaign of 2004, is a remarkable fall from grace. It happened because the bankruptcy of contemporary Republicanism is increasingly unmissable. And it happened because of obvious corruption, sleaze and a complete lack of broad public appeal. DeLay’s skills were not retail; they were back-door: the schemes and deals and handshakes that are inextricable from effective government but not pretty in daylight. DeLay took that ruthlessness too far, got exposed, and now fairly taints the GOP’s broad national image. It’s probably good news for the Republicans in the short term. They get some time to distance themselves from the architect of their Congressional hegemony. But he was the architect, as integral to contemporary Republicanism as Karl Rove; and the product of the same Southern/Texan Christianist movement that has turned the Republican party into a religious sect, with some business interests along for the ride. Should DeLay have an epitaph? I think so. Let it be his astonishing speech of merely a week ago to a Christianist conference in Washington DC:

"Sides are being chosen, and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will … It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ."

In the end, even the Republican candidate from the Congressional district of Galilee couldn’t save him.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty)

"Not all Republicans are xenophobic haters. Many of them could learn a thing or two from Jeb Bush," – Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos.

There is a world in Nietzsche. And he foresaw the theocons. In the same work, he wrote about the attempt to reverse what has evolved in Western consciousness:

"Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern "progress"). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more."

And which of these options best describe Richard John Neuhaus? One suspects the latter.

I take an hour to go over the last edit of the book and I get dozens of emails rightly informing me that the millennial moment referred to below occurs every hundred years, not every thousand. I’ll still sleep through it. But thanks.

A reader informs me that on Wednesday of next week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. It will not happen again for a thousand years. I think I’ll sleep through it.

A reader sends me the following quote from Nietzsche about what he regarded as the collapse of marriage as an institution over a century ago. What strikes me is how theoconservative he sounds to a contemporary ear. His rhetoric is very close to that of Stanley Kurtz and other anti-modernists on the far right. The loathing of Western Europe, the elevating of more primitive, patriarchal forms of marriage, the celebration of manliness, the defense of torture, the insistence on marital procreation: all these are now integral parts of theo-conservatism, which, in so many ways, is an attempt to resurrect Aquinas in the light of Nietzsche. Here’s a quote that could well have come from Stanley Kurtz, as expressed in Nietzsche’s "Twilight of the Idols":

"Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage – that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage – that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse.

With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on "love" – it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast – physiologically too – to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning – consequently one abolishes it."

Or reinvents it, as we have in the West – and long before gays sought to join it. I’m much more at home in modernity than Nietzsche was. In fact, I celebrate many aspects of it. And in that celebration of modernity lies the faultline in current conservatism. I’m for it, with multiple qualifications. They’re against it – with varying degrees of regret.