(Edit: Like Abraham of old, we are sometimes required by the Lord or His messengers to do utterly immoral things. In other words, sometimes we have an obligation to act immorally. This post is aimed at explaining why this sounds like a contradiction in terms to our modern ears.)<\/p>\n
Democracy is horrible and Aristocracy is fantastic. While there is much to disagree with in this claim of Nietzsche\u2019s (he has nothing but condemnation to say regarding all forms of inter-personal obligations and authority), there is also a great deal of truth that we Mormons would do well to address. After all, the secular world clearly exalts the values and morality of the former while the church is quite obviously an Aristocracy (of sorts) that repeatedly insists that it is not a democracy in which \u201cthe people\u201d rule. What are the tensions between these two moralities and to what extent to these tension manifest themselves within the modern, Mormon mind?<\/p>\n
Nietzsche sees stratification as a normal and health aspect of life which Democrats, Moderns, Utilitarians, Kantians, Socialists, Classical Liberals, Capitalists, Proletariats, Materialists, Christians and a whole slew of others conspire against. Whereas Kierkegaard objected to the ways in which these various movements where making faith cheap, easy and weak, Nietzsche rejects them since they make life itself cheap, easy and weak. Both of these men had nothing but contempt for \u201cthe world\u201d and it just so happened that \u201cthe world\u201d at their time was largely Christian. When framed in these terms, that Mormons might also harbor a similar contempt for the now less-Christian world that we see around us.<\/p>\n
The modern morality that Nietzsche objects to seeks to minimize suffering as much as possible, goals which he thought to be trite, vulgar and base. Greatness cannot be reduced to any quantity or quality of suffering. Indeed, it is only through suffering – sometimes enormous suffering – that greatness can ever be achieved. (This is not to say, however, that all<\/em> suffering produces greatest or is morally justified.) It is in this sense that Aristocrats\/Nobles\/Masters have continually striven and fought to rise above and distinguish themselves from the \u201crabble\u201d of mediocrity, aka \u201cthe world\u201d. The more stratified a community is, the higher its nobles are, by very definition, able to soar! The world, in turn, responds by resenting this stratification by devaluating or, in some cases, actively demonizing these accomplishments and the distance that they have created between the two groups. The world has thus<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization \u2013 out of the resentment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth\u2026 Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honorable pride in himself and his equals \u2013 for the pathos of distance\u2026 The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls.\u201d (The Anti-Christ, 43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is absolutely central to Nietzsche that any type of other-worldly greatness was a mere disguise for a resentment aimed at those who were great within this mortal life. Mormons, however, find themselves in a unique position to take (rather massive) liberties with Nietzsche\u2019s own views by extending \u201cthis life\u201d to include pre- and post-mortal existences that, according to Joseph Smith, are supposed to be very similar to this life. (Quite obviously, Nietzsche despised the idea of an afterlife.) In other words, pain and suffering are almost certainly not limited to this (not so) \u201cwretched\u201d existence. The greater the similarity between this and the afterlife, the more enthusiastically we proclaim \u201cyes!\u201d to both; and the more we proclaim \u201cyes!\u201d, the more we too must confront the strong tensions between the Aristocratic and Democratic values that organize both lives.<\/p>\n A historical overview of the movements and people that Nietzsche loved and hated gives us a better feel for the tensions that he sees between the two moralities:<\/p>\n It is this last, Moral\/Bourgeois Society that I wish to honed in upon, it being the morality that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had both loathed so much. To illustrate, Nietzsche\u2019s Germany had very recently been unified, becoming the first modern welfare-state which both created a strong spirit of nationalism that Nietzsche hated and (more to the point) created an enormous demand for well-educated administrators and professionals. This increased demand in education forced the very<\/em> highly renowned German education system to open its doors to and be flooded with middle-class students who were totally ignorant to and uninterested in the Aristocratic subjects and tastes that had, up to that point, defined those elite institutions. This influx of middle-class students had the following effects: 1) It created a leveling effect within the school curriculum as the \u201cpublish-or-perish\u201d dictum diluted the literature with mediocre work, which 2) created a market for the popularization<\/em> (a worse insult from Nietzsche could hardly be imagined) of science, literature and philosophy, which 3) shifted the Mandarin academics of Germany to the political right in direct and intentional opposition to all nearly all the groups mentioned above.<\/p>\n The lesson to be taken from this phenomenon was as follows:<\/p>\n The number of people to which any speaker\/leader\/noble must justify himself is the degree to which we undermine and constrain their potential greatness.<\/em><\/p>\n In was in this sense that Socrates was able to make his noble interlocutors look so ignorant and stupid \u2013 they had never felt compelled to justify their actions before, let alone to a commoner. This is exactly what Nietzsche saw wrong in the Enlightenment rise of debating clubs, serial journals (Nietzsche often makes fun of newspaper readers), lodges, the Republic of Letters, the Encyclopedie<\/em> and everything else that Habermas would include under the label \u201cthe public sphere<\/a>\u201d. Gouldner\u2019s account of the rise of the Culture of Critical Discourse in his The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology<\/em> tells a very similar tale.<\/p>\n It should be noted that these are the exact same associations, practices and mechanisms by which intellectuals still attempt to constrain and subvert Priesthood authorities within the church. They are a clear manifestation of the tensions between Aristocracy and Democracy that occupy Nietzsche\u2019s attention. When my last post provided<\/a> a Nietzschean argument for not forcing our living prophets to answer to the judgements of dead prophets or modern morality, this is exactly what I had in mind.\u00a0 Compare the way in which Bloggernacle participants try to force their priesthood leaders to answer to an ever-larger audience with Nietzsche\u2019s depiction of the priests of slave-morality:<\/p>\n “[They] know no other way to protect themselves against their bad conscience than to pose as the executors of more ancient or higher commands (of ancestors, the constitution, of right, the laws, or even of God). Or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd\u2019s way of thinking, such as \u2018first servants of their people\u2019 or \u2018instrument of the common weal.'” (Genealogy of Morals, 199)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n