‘I Am A God’: On Becoming More Than Human
David Birch compares the attitudes of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kanye West.
Do you, reader, sympathise with Nietzsche’s wish for a species revolution? Do you see some fundamental defect in humanity? If there were a referendum on human nature, would you vote to leave? How would you even describe human nature? Are there words elastic enough to encompass us all? Is there a common thread? A shared bond?
Of course: Cue all of the moral, political, philosophical and religious objectivists. One by one they will inform you of precisely what has to be done to revolutionize society so that all defects give way to their very own One True Path. To what? To whatever they need it to be, to whatever they insist others must subscribe to in turn.
On the other hand, for some of them, there are folks of the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexual orientation or the wrong religion or the wrong...whatever. They are excluded because
inherently they are just not [and can never be] "one of us". They simply embrace one or another dogmatic assessment of "biological imperatives", permitting them [and only them] to determine behaviors deemed either to be Natural or Unnatural.
For Nietzsche, our bond is our sickness, and our sickness is a state he called nihilism. In short, a hatred of life.
Then cue all those who insist that is not at all how one should interpret Nietzsche. Yes, there are aspects of moral nihilism which, in a No God universe, can precipitate "the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty". What, perhaps, Kierkegaard called a "sickness unto death"? Then those sociopaths who rationalized any and all behaviors because, in a No God world, everything revolved around me, myself and I.
Nietzsche believed that to be human was to belong to a species-wide endeavour to stunt growth, enervate power, deaden vitality, limit strength, and poison joy; an endeavour impelled by so-called ‘reactive’ attitudes such as envy and the urge to avenge ourselves against the strong and vigorous.
Of course, something along these lines is going to be professed by those in power who fancy themselves to be among the...Ubermensch? Then things like religion
and political collectivism that become the true opiates of the people.
And although for Nietzsche there have been great ages – history is punctuated by glorious deviations from the norm – sooner or later the overwhelming weight of nihilism drags us back into the gutter. Greek culture was corrupted by the philosophers; Roman values by the morality of Judaism; Christ’s teachings by St Paul; and Napoleonic aristocracy by democratic ideals. This nihilism ensures that, contra Darwin, the strong and vital will always be defeated by the weak and envious.
That is one way to think about it. But there are plenty of other ways as well. From my own frame of mind "here and now", amoral nihilism revolves largely around the global capitalists for whom almost everything eventually comes back around to "show me the money". And while there was once a time when socialism appeared to be challenging all this, that all collapsed in both the Soviet Union and China. Now, it appears, state capitalism is challenging crony capitalism to "run the world".