Thoughts on a declining culture:
…it’s hard to find a children’s cartoon or movie that doesn’t tell kids that they need to look inside themselves for moral guidance. Indeed, there’s a riot of Rousseauian claptrap out there that says children are born with rightly ordered consciences. And why not? As Mr. Rogers told us, “You are the most important person in the whole wide world and you hardly even know you.” Hillary Clinton is even worse. In her book It Takes a Village, she claims that some of the best theologians she’s ever met have been five-year-olds (which might be true when compared with a certain homicidal Ukrainian priest).
Such saccharine codswallop overturns millennia of moral teaching. It takes the idea that we must apply reason to nature and our consciences in order to discover what is moral and replaces it with the idea that if it feels right, just do it, baby. Which, by the by, is exactly how Lex Luthor sees the world. Übermenschy passion is now everyone’s lodestar. As Reese Witherspoon says in Legally Blonde, “On our very first day at Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle: ‘The law is reason free from passion.’ Well, no offense to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law — and of life.” Well, that solves that. Nietzsche-Witherspoon 1, Aristotle 0.
According to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the death of God and the coming of the übermensch was going to require the new kind of inner-directed hero to become his own god. As a result, anything society did to inconvenience the heroic individual was morally suspect, a backdoor attempt by The Man to impose conformity. This is pretty much exactly what Robin Williams teaches in Dead Poets Society. But that ethos has traveled a long way from Mork. When Barack Obama was asked by a minister to define “sin,” he confidently answered that “sin” just means being “out of alignment with my values.” Taken literally, this would mean that Hannibal Lecter is being sinful when he abstains from human flesh in favor of a Waldorf salad. As you can see, when you take the modern definition of integrity all the way to the horizon, suddenly “integrity” can be understood only as a firm commitment to one’s own principles — because one’s own principles are the only legitimate principles. Heck, if you are a god, then doing what you want is God’s will.
This won’t end well.
Remember that song in “South Pacific”? I never liked that. You don’t have to be taught to hate. Kids are naturally oblivious, uncaring, and downright mean. They demand attention, stomp on bugs, and form cliques to ostracize those who “don’t belong”. You have to be taught to behave like a civilized person.
While much of that is unobjectionable, I do wish Goldberg (and conservatives self-identified in general) would stop going on about Nietzsche.
They inevitably – and understandably, given that the ones so-doing are not philosophical scholars – get him seriously wrong.
(Oh, it’s not that he didn’t call for abandoning God and Christianity; he did. It’s the idea that he’d countenance “whatever makes me immediately happy or soothes my mind is the Good” as the high end of moral reasoning that is utterly untenable.
My suspicion is that all the anti-Christianity and talk of smashing values confuses them into thinking he’s a mere nihilist. Which is, admittedly, easy to do, since the man was terrible at expressing himself clearly.
But I’m not sure anyone who’s read him critically and soberly – especially in a decent translation like Kaufman’s – could have the idea that Progressive-style moral relativism-but-not-really was Nietzschean.)
You ought to use one of the links in his articles to send him an e-mail and politely set him straight. I did that a couple of years ago, and I was astonished when he actually sent me a brief response.
It takes the idea that we must apply reason to nature and our consciences in order to discover what is moral and replaces it with the idea that if it feels right, just do it, baby
The Enlightenment is over, killed by a mob of bad ideas.
They’re not looking within. Pop culture approves of getting your ideals from the local crowd. Disagree with the crowd and you can expect to be verbally lynched.
…one’s own principles are the only legitimate principles. Heck, if you are a god, then doing what you want is God’s will.
Satan (the liar) said to Eve, “For God knows that in the very day you eat from [the tree of knowledge,] your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.”
As Aleister Crowley preached, “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”.
Truly inspired……
….(by Satan?)
Meh. D&D “chaotic good” alignment. This is breaking news from 1974. Jonah usually does good work, but this cooks down to “you kids get off my lawn.”
Nosing around in the FBI’s UCR data tool and doing a bit of math, I find that the per capita rate of violent crimes in the US was 1 in 133 in 1992 and 1 in 258 in 2012 – that is, cut in half.
Jonah Goldberg can say less in more words than any other writer on earth. He is the dictionary definition of TLDR…