SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, ETC.

A note to the reader. Regarding the phrase "Survival of the Fittest," there is a lingering controversy as to what exactly Spenser and Darwin meant by these words. I suspect that some of this controversy has been caused by the desire to reconcile this phrase with the dictates of political correctness. In my opinion, it is silly to say that each of them meant "this" (politically correct), and not "that" (politically incorrect). Both Spenser and Darwin were native English speakers, they were also erudite men, and they both were surely aware of the deeper subtleties of the English words they were using. I even think that they enjoyed their ambiguities. In my approach to this world-famous phrase, I am motivated not by a psychoanalysis of its source, but by the fact that its interpretation is fair play, on the condition that it is not entirely out of the ballpark, and that the points made while using it are intellectually worth making.

Homo Homini Lupus Est.
Implicitly acknowledging the ‘preexisting condition’ of rottenness of the human race in the classic Plautian dictum “Homo homini lupus est,” the late Soviet Moral Code of the Builder of Communism used to claim that under the Soviet system the wolf had been transformed into “a friend, a comrade, and a brother.”
Here is a hopeless bit of wishful thinking, although a very nice try. It is always encouraging to know what the society expects from you, not what it thinks of you. Besides, after God created Adam and Eve, He “saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) Which means that, all their blemishes notwithstanding, Adam and Eve were good… Well, so was the wolf!
As I have observed elsewhere, and on several occasions, it is the freedom of choice, a bonum in itself, that generates evil, as, out of basically two alternative choices, we either make the right one, which is good, or else, the wrong one, which is bad, by definition. In other words, evil is the wrong choice.
From this follows that, consistently with the Bible, man’s nature cannot possibly be “evil,” as it is rooted in God’s Creation, “and, behold, it was very good.” And yet, we are talking of “homo homini lupus est” (after Plautus) or of war being the natural state of Man (after Hobbes). What is it then, after all? Is Man’s nature really good, but his natural state evil, thus creating a perennial conflict between man’s nature and his natural state? Or if there is no conflict between them is the natural state of Man peace which is good, or if war it is, can it be possible that war is good?
First things first. Considering how mercilessly and relentlessly the Christian Church has been attacking the human nature throughout the ages (this has been most ostensibly evident in the practice of the mortification of the flesh), the animal nature of man (as opposed to God’s breath of His own likeness into man’s nostrils) must have been responsible for Adam’s fall, as well as for his subsequent natural state, which means that, in moral terms, man’s nature and man’s natural state are virtually indistinguishable, and therefore, any further discussion of their difference now becomes meaningless. Although I could still argue with the basic premise of this conclusion quite relentlessly, suggesting that God Himself found nothing wrong with that proverbial culprit, animal nature, when He created it, blessed it, and saw that “it was good” (Genesis 1:25). Thus, in defending the goodness of the animal nature I am on the side of God and… Nietzsche, and if this puts me in conflict with any of the Church doctrines, so be it. Furthermore I have my own version of the genesis of evil as a byproduct of the freedom of choice, and it has nothing to do with animal nature, but everything with the nature of freedom at whose ‘light feet’ I am summarily laying the blame. (Once again I am tempted to quote Pascal’s “What will happen to you, man, if with the help of your natural reason you will try to find your true condition?” I find this famous question of his extremely relevant to the general direction of our discussion.)
Having concluded that, for all intents and purposes, there is no point in trying to disassociate ‘man’s nature’ from his ‘natural state,’ or ‘status naturalis,’ let us continue with the discussion of what that status is.
Immanuel Kant puts it in simple terms: “With men, the status naturalis is not a state of peace, but a state of war.” There is an uncanny similarity here to my own thinking, since times immemorial, that the natural state of man is war, while ‘peace’ is only a very valuable commodity, to be purchased on a daily basis. The word commodity here carries an ironic allusion to what I have sarcastically called ‘the religion of economics.’
However, in Book II of his Thoughts Marcus Aurelius says that “To act against one another is contrary to nature.” Now, what is this supposed to mean, what nature, whose nature? In the spirit of our argument, here is yet one more extract, this time from Thomas Hobbes’s early work Elements, 1-14-11:
“Seeing, then, to the offensiveness of man’s nature one to another, there is added a right of every man to every thing, whereby one man invades with right, and another with right resists; and men live thereby in perpetual diffidence, and study how to preoccupy each other; the estate of men in this natural liberty is the estate of war. For war is nothing else but that time when the will and intention of contending by force is either by words or actions sufficiently declared; and the time which is not war is peace.”
Why don’t the two of them, Marcus Aurelius and Thomas Hobbes, get together to discuss their maybe not-so-irreconcilable differences? Hobbes, himself, happens to be more than a little confused on this subject of nature. On the one hand, he never fails to mention that man’s state of nature is “war of every man against every man” (perhaps, his most celebrated phrase!) and that the only possible way of overcoming this ‘state of war’ is by entering into a binding covenant made binding only by allowing a sovereign to rule over you, but, on the other hand, his appeal to the all-different realm of reason confuses him about the application of the same term “nature” to both sides of man’s dual nature.
Here is the famous opening line of Hobbes’s Leviathan: "Nature (the art whereby God has made and governs the world) is by the art of man imitated, so that it can make an artificial animal." Now, if God’s Nature is the art whereby God has made and governs the world, then the creation of an artificial animal by the art of man has something to do with man’s nature, and this particular nature is different from that state of nature which is “war of every man against every man.”
Thus, once again, the solution to the puzzle of ambiguity and inconsistency is that we are dealing not with one, but with two objects here, revealing the duality of human nature.
I understand, of course, what Marcus Aurelius is saying in the earlier quote, but he himself never makes this distinction clear enough, and at least some part of his habitual confusion and incoherence could perhaps be attributed to his failure to make it clear, above all, to himself.
In conclusion of this necessarily half-baked query into the nature of human nature (a much longer essay is eventually to be written, to do this intriguing subject some justice), let me reiterate the previous points, but with some additional “beastly” imagery, not for my own desire to overburden the metaphor, but to comply with the imagery in an important Biblical passage.
Homo homini lupus est is a condemnation of the darker side of human nature, just as homo homini amicus est is an appeal for bringing out the lighter, ‘better’ side. The question is about our moral judgment on the state of Nature, wherein the beasts of prey devour their victims. Is such animal nature good or bad? I may be contradicted, that the homo homini part means that unlike all beasts of prey man alone acts as “wolf” to his own kind. To which I reply that such an argument shows glaring ignorance of reality inside the animal kingdom. Animal cruelty to their own is a fact of nature, and it is a well-known story how lions habitually kill the lion cubs from different prides than their own; how they kill their prospective mate’s own cubs, in order to be able to mate with the lioness; and how cannibalism is quite widespread in nature in general.
This status quo in nature thus provides a failing argument toward our moral condemnation of all violence and cruelty, even if I would very much wish that such an outright condemnation had indeed been the case. But, on the other hand, the story told in the Bible reveals the shocking paradox of how the goodness of all creation turned sour by eliciting man’s wickedness through the goodness of freedom, and how God, seeing the evil outcome of His Creation in man, regretted His great design and was even ready to take revenge on the dumb beasts, overcome with His revulsion: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (that is, that man’s freedom of choice was being misused by him for all the wrong choices!). And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” (Genesis 6: 5-8)
It is difficult if not impossible to accept these lines literally, as God’s frustration with His failure, and then experiencing a change of heart on account of one person who just happened to be around at that particular time. But philosophically, that is, allegorically, this passage makes a lot of sense, exposing the ugly side of freedom, yet placing its redeeming singular value above the overwhelmingly plural downside.
The question remains, though, why that part of the animal world which was originally created by God as a carnivorous bunch, could not have been designed as all-vegetarian? My answer will be that, at least in that particular aspect, Nature has been a mirror for our imperfect world, rather than a beacon for the better one. For the latter, we have Isaiah’s glorious New Creation, where “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock; and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt, nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.” (Isaiah 65:25)
Let this not serve as a boost to the relativists, who have asserted the relativity of good and evil. Goodness is not what was, is, or will be, or may be, depending on the circumstances. Goodness, by my strict definition, is God’s Will, and it is as Absolute as He is. (Do not confuse this point as my defense of predestination. As I said earlier, evil is man’s wrong choice in his exercise of free will, and free will assumes that God’s Will can be contradicted by man, and also, that all that happens is not God’s Will!)
Meanwhile, it follows that the essence of good and evil must necessarily remain an inscrutable mystery.

Survival Of The Sheepest.
There is a hidden irony in this wretched word “survival.” To begin with, the “survivor” instinct is, perhaps, the most ignominious of all affects, to guide human existence. Self-preservation at all costs, what a way to live! You suppress your best instincts, including the will to freedom (incidentally, is Schopenhauer’s Wille conditionally the same as the more conventional term instinct?), dissimulate, lie, cheat, hurt, and even kill, all in the good cause of survival! Wouldn’t it be “nobler” to do all of the above as an affirmation of one’s will to power, or in pursuit of one’s particular idea of a Heldenleben? Consider the following passage from Nietzsche’s Jenseits (13):
Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength -- life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results… In short, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles, one of which is the self-preservation instinct.
But, looking at it from a different angle, when taken in the Darwinian sense, the word survival takes on an entirely different meaning. We consider “the fittest” to denote the best and the strongest of the species, and there is nothing revolting in their “survival,” except that the word still stinks!
Leaving my contempt for the word survival aside, do I agree with Nietzsche’s take on the self-preservation instinct, or with Charles Darwin’s glorification of it, and with his scientific equation of survival with fitness, in the process?
Perhaps, both are right, but might they differ in the object of their application? There is the hero, and to him survival is a dirty word. Heroes don’t live very long, you know. They burn, and they get burned out fast. A hero’s life transcends the ages not in its physical duration, but only in myth, and in people’s memory.
A hero may be and usually is extremely physically fit, but his is not the Darwinian kind of fitness needed to survive as a species. Even if the Nietzschean hero is prolific and sensuous, and somewhat amoral, ready to seek women outside the institution of marriage, and therefore, despite his short lifespan, compensating this deficiency by his proficient promiscuity, his relationships are fleeting and random. He is far removed in his thoughts from the task of the continuation of the species.
It is not the hero, but the sheep of the species who ought to be considered the fittest for survival. No tongue can ever turn out the phrase survival of the heroes: such a phrase would sound too obscene even for a dirty mind on a quest to win an offensiveness contest. It is the survival of the sheep, or rather, the sheepest, that Darwin is talking about, when we apply his evolutionary theory to the evolution of the human race.
A nation of heroes, one on an ascending line, in Nietzsche’s words, is not in a state of an evolution, but in a state of a revolution. When the heroes take their nation to the top, the nation becomes tired of them as it gets tired of heroic revolutions and continues its gloriously, but briefly, interrupted evolutionary process, toward the survival of the fittest for the survival mission, the descending line. It is up to the remaining unfulfilled heroes, to commit national arson, setting the nation on fire again and again, like it has been done on more than a few occasions in Russia, in order to reverse the pitiful descent, and to remount the ascending line, not by contributing to their people’s precious well-being, but by mounting and multiplying their miseries again, and again, so as to generate as many heroes out of the multitude of sheep as necessary in order to rejuvenate the species.
For, survival for survival’s sake means an inevitable descent, a degeneration of the species...
Do I suddenly sound heartlessly cruel, above all, to myself? Perhaps, I may have taken this argument too far into the merciless world of Nietzsche’s ascending hero, the blond beast. Perhaps, Nietzsche’s veneration of brutal strength is unfair to the weaker part of humanity (by weaker part, I clearly, do not imply the “weaker sex”). Not all are born heroes, not all are made heroes, even by living in the times when heroism is a virtue, and weakness is a vice.
Going even further, perhaps, a genuine compassion for the weaknesses of the weak is something which can make the strong better. Perhaps, social tolerance for the handicapped and otherwise disadvantaged can get the obliging extension into a tolerance for others being different, such as smarter, gentler, better. But alas, it does not appear to transfer. As in the depiction of the Sopranos mobsters, their kindness to animals may be nothing more than a psychological compensation for general brutality toward their fellow men.

Master And Slave As The Chicken And The Egg.
As an afterthought to everything said in the previous entry, I would like to keep on going on the subject of Nietzsche’s master and slave moralities, which he discusses first in his Menschliches (45), then in Jenseits (260), and later at length throughout his Genealogie, and elsewhere. (I have made a few comments on this dual morality of the rulers and the ruled, distributed among a few pertinent sections. These comments may be used for further reference, but for the purposes of the present entry the knowledge of Nietzsche’s theory is assumed, and no additional summary of it is deemed necessary.)
Here is another interesting variation on the master-slave dichotomy. I wonder if Nietzsche ever considered the synchronic versus diachronic question of causal coincidence or precedence of the two moralities? Can ‘slave morality’ be considered just as inborn as ‘master morality,’ boiling down to the distinction between the strong and the weak, both of which are to be seen as synchronously normal forms of human existence? In that case, strong and weak are like tall and strong, or dark and blond, nothing more than two alternative variants of the species, and the difference between their respective moralities, even if it is as pronounced as our friend Nietzsche would like us to believe, is purely coincidental, or even existential, in case morality is seen as an existential mode determined by the congenital qualities of strength or weakness.
Should we however wish to subscribe to the Darwinian survival of the fittest theory, while understanding by the term fittest a natural selection of the strongest members of the human race, the coincidence of weakness could be characterized merely as the least viable byproduct of human civilization, which in such a case will legitimize the enduring persistence of human weakness, but only by presenting weakness as a recurring birth defect, in which case, slave morality is no longer one of the two alternative norms, but a totally derivative type of morality, connoting a mental readjustment of the dominant master morality to a life with that birth defect.
But the argument does not end there. In the animal kingdom, where the most basic type of the survival of the fittest rules, yet where from the outset there are the predators and the prey, the coyotes and the rabbits, the wolves and the lambs, the ones ‘discharging their strength’ and motivated by their aggression, and the others… what? Do rabbits and all those animals who are not carnivores, and have been born to be hunted by other beasts, have some kind of innate instinct of self-preservation, which allows them to stay alive as a species, and not to be eaten in toto off the face of the earth?
Now, if the life purpose of the victims, such as rabbits, is to perpetuate their species as food for the beasts of prey, and in order to fulfill this purpose they have been endowed with a greater than average proclivity for procreation, how is this excessive fertility talent to be justified, or forcibly restrained, under Isaiah 65:25? (“The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock… They shall not hurt, nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.”)
Transposing Isaiah’s vision from the animals to the world of human strengths or weaknesses, as pertinent to our discussion, it is possible to visualize the strong acting “like weak” in the Isaiahan creation. I am curious, however, as to how this act of willpower affects their master morality, that is, whether their “new morality” now becomes something else (I cannot even imagine the “like-weak” by choice to adopt the slave morality of the weak by necessity!). By the same token, how does the new world affect the morality of the weak? It is not possible for the weak to become strong in the new creation as, in that case, the strength or the weakness are only a matter of choice, and slave morality is an instrument of dissimulation, which reduces the morality of the weak to a reprehensible vice, rather than allowing it to perpetuate as an alternative type of acceptable morality. I can compare this to Isaiah’s lamb, who does not turn himself into a lion, nor stops being a lamb, but carries on his old role, this time, however, without the urge to flee from the wolf, that is, without fear.
Here, in this absence of fear, is probably the answer. The lamb has no more fear of the wolf not because of his sudden and independent change of attitude, but as a result of the change in the attitude of the wolf which has been made demonstrable and convincing to the lamb.
Considering that generally speaking, the strong instill fear, while the weak are fear’s victims, the absence of fear changes the equation quite radically and both the master morality of the strong and the slave morality of the weak are to undergo a substantial change, resulting from the removal of the fear factor.
Furthermore, taking into account the fact that the above-described change did not make the strong weaker, nor the weak, stronger, but that the removal of fear was dependent on the actively changing attitude of the strong, and the changing attitude of the weak was in this case demonstrably reactive, we can conclude that slave morality is derivative from master morality, which solves the case of the chicken and the egg… Or is it a case of non sequitur? Let us ask this question out of curiosity, but without a rush to get it answered right away.

Submission From Strength.
This intriguing journey into the rugged border area between political philosophy and social psychology is by no means exhaustive, or even meaningfully investigative, on this first try. It is rather a mental excursion, a short intellectual pleasure trip into a mystery yet to be delved into. Not that our subject matter here is too terribly complicated, but it certainly has to be revisited and further explored.
Continuing our conversation from the previous entry, we have, hopefully, determined that all modifications in social morality of the strong and the weak, the masters and the slaves, are produced by the willful action of the strong, followed by the derivative reaction of the weak.
How does that work in real life? For Isaiah’s lion to lie down with a lamb (the lion has to be the initiator, of course), a new creation is required. Yet, even in our everyday life within the constraints of an imperfect and sinful old creation, we find the lion “lying down” all the time. Consider this insightful comment from Jean de la Bruyère’s Charactères:
“In society the man of sense always yields first. Thus, the wisest are led by the most foolish and bizarre. We study their foibles, their humors, and their caprices. We adapt ourselves to them, and avoid knocking our heads against them.”
This is what I would call a voluntary submission from strength, as opposed to the necessitated submission from weakness, which defines the vanquished and the slaves. Once again, the strong is the actor, while the weak is the reactor.
The next question is the relationship between the strong and weak wills, on the one hand, and the free and unfree wills, on the other. Can we assert that a free will is but a strong will, while an unfree will is the will of the weak?
How many excuses will weakness of character call to her defense? Nietzsche is certainly right when he says that “the unfree will is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.” (Jenseits, 21).)
And now, here is the big question. It is almost obvious that “free will” only means a strong will; but can it be true, or is it just another one of Nietzsche’s special idiosyncrasies that “unfree will” only means a weak will, that is to say, that a strong will, even if it wills so, cannot will itself into the state of unfreedom, kind of voluntary slavery? In other words, if the will is both strong and free, is it possible that it may will away its freedom?
This is of course all leading toward the crucial point of political philosophy: how free people could willfully make themselves unfree merely out of preference for law and order, which are always to be associated with considerable restraints on individual and even on collective freedoms. Mind you, I am not talking here only about the commonplace distinction between the leaders and the followers, the latter exhibiting weaker wills, consistently with Nietzsche. But what if the strongest of the strong are somehow willing to submit their wills to an idea, which is bound to exact a huge toll on their personal freedom?
Come to think of it, the ideal nation-state can only be built around a powerful nation-idea, and, yes, it can be done by the common consent of the strong to willingly surrender their precious freedoms to an enslavement by a symbolic master. Plato’s Politeia is being constructed that way, and the Hobbesian idea of a Covenant (I would further specify it as the Covenant of the strong with the tacit consent of the weak) takes on a novel meaning here.
It is probably easy for anyone who has followed my thinking throughout this section to catch my drift. I am interested in the philosophical feasibility of an ultimate implementation of the totalitarian ideal. (Yes, here we do go again!) Can a perfect nation-state, built upon a conspiracy of the strong to forfeit their freedom to their newly-created “artificial animal,” to use Hobbes’s famous phrase, withstand the double-shock of the strong abdicating their mastery and the weak swept up to prominence by an emancipation from a previously institutionalized submission to the strong. Even if the strong can make themselves a master, in the person of the nation-state, by the sheer strength of their will, can the weak recognize a master in a symbol, rather than keep creating for themselves new idols, worshipping a strong-arm dictator, while giving only the lip service to whatever slogans they are required to promote.
On the other hand, the weak are not to be required to philosophize over symbols. Like the newly-converted pagans of the recently Christianized Roman Empire, they will gladly start calling their old idols new names, as long as they are allowed to keep those idols. The ideal nation-state will be built on the nation-idea of the strong, with no active (but only reactive, via consent) participation of the weak. End of story... for now.

Follow The Leader.
Noble may be the sacrifice of the strong, as they lay down their freedom in the service of an idea. But dire may be the consequences of such “nobility,” as the gravity center of power in the nation now shifts toward the weak, who thus become the unwitting and incompetent deciders by default of their nation’s fate.
A master-turned-slave is still a master, even if only of himself. But the slave-turned-master is still the same slave at heart. Uncomfortable with his new role, demanding from him a sense of social responsibility, which has a hollow ring to the ear of his consciousness, he may be playing an entêté et sot (or samodur in Russian) for a while, but eventually he gets bored and inevitably reverts to the familiar game, which is the closest to his heart and mind, namely, follow the leader.
That’s how the totalitarian ideal always degenerates into leader-worship, also called personality cult. That explains the initial intellectual attractiveness of the totalitarian ideal to a Hegel or a Gentile, followed by a deep disappointment in every case whenever the idea has been implemented into practice.
Follow The Leader is a particularly dangerous game in a free society, which has its equal share of masters and slaves with its totalitarian counterpart, because such is the essence of the distribution of human nature types on the broad social scale, and the actual type of government has absolutely nothing to do with it. The particular danger to free societies in this case is in their illusory self-perception of “free-no-matter-what.” In a totalitarian society the absence of freedom is always realized, and the public awareness of its limitations serves as a counterbalance against further excesses. In free societies there exists a certain complacency of self-perception, which acts like an anesthetic on a hospital patient who has lost sensitivity to pain and can easily get badly hurt, just because his sensory defenses are numb and down.
In a free society, the follow the leader game is an open invitation to the tyranny of a manipulative group of cynical scoundrels who thrive on public fears and insecurities, in a conspiracy to take control, even if only temporarily, of society. This is where public education becomes indispensable in fighting back, and woe to them whose education is lacking.

L’État C’est… Nous.
On a lighter note, the famous dictum of Louis XIV identifying himself with the State is usefully paraphrased in the title of this entry to provide the philosophical essence of the totalitarian ideal (not to be confused with totalitarian practice). The ‘nous’ in this sentence are the citizens of the State. After all, there must be at least some attraction in the idea itself, otherwise it would never have succeeded in being implemented, and, for a time, even admired, both on a massive scale and by countless brilliant good-intentioned intellectuals.
…L’état c’est nous… There is actually nothing wrong with this idea… I can see the attraction...


Justice As War And Peace.
Continuing with the theme of the strong and the weak, let us now project our discussion from a society of men to a society of nations. Can our conclusions regarding the individual human nature be transferred to a collective human nature? This provocative question is not about to be followed by an in-depth probe right away, as the present entry is just a blueprint for future constructions. But for the purposes of this entry, we may safely assume that inasmuch as societies consist of people, and weaker nations have an equal share of strong men with the stronger nations, a tension of the bow (Nietzsche’s powerful metaphor) has been thus created, and a conflict is about to break out. Whereas within the society of individuals the weak submit to the strong, within a society of nations there is an expectation of submission on the part of the strong men of the strong nations toward the weak, but there is no such intention on the part of the strong men of the weak nations toward the strong.
Having been examining the concept of international justice, and taking into account my thoughts in those entries, where I am agreeing with Nietzsche’s definition of “justice as trade between two equally powerful parties” (for more on this, see my separate entry Justice As Trade in the Wishful Thinking Section), I also need to consider this interesting Jewish wisdom: “Where there is peace, there is no justice; where there is justice, there is no peace.”
Consequently, in paving the way for further exploration, I have come up with the following epigram of my own: “The justice of the strong is peace; The justice of the weak is war.” This seeming paradox works not only in abstract philosophical contemplation, but in all applications, even when applied to actual wars in a straightforward historical manner.
Consistently with history, when the strong start wars, these are usually wars of aggression, and injustice is then being committed. But whenever the weaker side starts wars, these are riots, insurgencies, revolutions, struggles for liberation from oppression. And this is justice! This does not necessarily go with the letter of Nietzsche’s definition, but I am sure that he would agree with such an expansion of his term, which in his case covers only the justice of the strong, to cover the justice of the weak, as well...
In the meantime, my epigram above is an appropriate tribute to the historical reality of our time, but, then, how do we move from such a recognition to the development of the concept of international justice, so that our historical experience does not stand in the way of progress by justifying all wars waged by the weak as the “justice” of the weak? This still remains to be seen.

And Deliver Us From… Heroes?
Having been preoccupied in the first few sections of my book mostly with long, heavy, ponderous entries, I am relishing again the short aphoristic gems that will be sparkling in much larger numbers in the sections to follow, and, particularly, in the special Apte Dictum collection. Here is one of them, which should not be tampered with any further, as an expansion will only proportionately decrease its laconic value. Hopefully, as a result of my stage-three process, many more small entries like this will be able to reemerge.
Once again, I am turning to Nietzsche’s great aphorism from Jenseits (150): “Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy.” Compare this to Bertolt Brecht’s “Happy is the nation that has no heroes.” A perfect match. One aphorism complements and explains the other. But, on the other hand, what kind of happiness is there, without a tragedy? A nation without heroes is much worse off than a nation of shopkeepers in the original pejorative sense given to it by Adam Smith. It is a nation without a past, without tradition, without culture, without a future. And, finally, let me add the last word. Wretched is the nation that in its pursuit of happiness disowns her tragic heroes.

War Is Good?!!
World War II is almost nostalgically remembered in America as “the last good war,” and its soldiers have been called “the greatest generation.” Compared to the current infamy of Iraq, the disgraceful bombing of Serbia under President Clinton, the farcical invasion of Grenada under President Reagan, not to mention the earlier colossal nightmare of Vietnam, and the never-finished war in Korea, World War II appears to be the only one in the last sixty years or so that was fought for a good cause. It was also the last war in American national memory, that had the entire nation behind it, united as one.
Still, is it right to call any war “a good war”? At least, not as a “manly sport,” a kind of duel of honor on a massive scale, as some war-intoxicated enthusiasts used to suggest before the age of political correctness. I cannot imagine anyone today subscribing to this gallant lunacy! Homer, in the Iliad, says that “men would rather have their fill of sleep, love, singing and dancing, than of war,” which ought to put the sport of war in some perspective. (But even with this fairly mild disparagement of war, as a matter of lesser preference than the usual peacetime activities, Homer seems to enjoy his own depictions of war with a relish, while to the gods in his epics wars are always good, wholesome entertainment, festivals, to be exact.) And then, to Horace, “bella detestata matribus” (although he would never dare to say “bella detestata patribus!”). But others, while never disputing such war-disparaging claims, insist that without a good war society is bound to degenerate into, well, “sleep, love, singing, and dancing,” and become ripe for the fall. To Hegel, war is a historical necessity, elevating mature societies to yet greater heights in the upward spiral of progress. To Dostoyevsky, it is a social necessity, to purify the otherwise stagnant and decaying nation in a baptism of fire. As if echoing Dostoyevsky’s Writer’s Diary, or, perhaps, even directly impressed by it, the renowned German historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote just before his death in 1896: “God will see to it that war shall always recur, as a drastic medicine for ailing humanity.” And in 1911 Friedrich von Bernhardi went one step further calling war a “biological necessity of the first importance.”
I must, however, emphasize a difference in principle between Dostoyevsky’s defensive war against foreign invaders, and the German idea of aggressive war for Lebensraum or for national self-assertion, rather than for defensive purposes. Thus certainly differing in this important principle, all of them are, nevertheless, in agreement on the fundamental assertion that war is good.
It should be noted that I am not getting into a discussion of good wars versus bad wars here, that is, which wars can be justified by their necessity (cf. Machiavelli: “The war is just which is necessary,” for instance, or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “My brother, are war and battle evil? - Necessary, however, is the evil!”), and which cannot. Necessity is often used as an elastic word, and whenever the term necessary war is stretched too thin, it loses all meaning. Nor shall I venture any further to dissect the particular German glorification of an aggressive war, which I find quite reprehensible. (Having already observed on a number of occasions how profoundly Martin Luther has influenced German thinking, it is extremely ironic to find his personal attitude to war so unexpectedly strongly expressed in the following passage in his Table-Talk: “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families… Any scourge is preferable to it.” Considering, however, Luther’s historical record of brutal warmongering, his sincerity in the above passage becomes suspect, or at least an equivocality of his mind can be suggested in explanation. Doubly ironic is the fact that Russia’s brutal Great Fatherland War against Hitler’s Germany would achieve all the opposite effects to Luther’s disparaging conjecture, for the Russians.)
Without any affectation of squeamishness, my question would concern the moral valuation of war an-Sich. Any war is, of course, a great tragedy. So are earthquakes and hurricanes that bring death and destruction, so is any premature death, so is any death as such! We may try to distinguish an act of God from an act of Man, as much as we want, but, once we have identified the evil of war with death and suffering, how does the tragedy of death and suffering in man-made wars differ in its ethical essence from the tragedy of death and suffering in natural disasters, both equally horrifying and emotionally and ethically unacceptable?
There is a remarkable sentence in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Matthew 6:34) Without questioning the goodness of the day that the Lord hath made, we must admit that good and evil both have their share in the day. Our day does not automatically become evil just because its actuality has evil abiding in it. By the same token, human existence must not be condemned as evil for the same reason.
The question is whether, granted the ubiquitous presence of evil, we can still discern the goodness element in the Universe. When we say “every cloud has a silver lining,” we are basically acknowledging the truth of this argument. Let us not miss the sparkling nuggets of goodness in the pitch-black ore of God’s mine! We may cringe at calling any war a good war, but there is no denying that a war can do good.
With this last sentence I might have concluded this entry, and perhaps I should have done so. The closing paragraphs below are strictly provisional, awaiting my final determination with regard to their usefulness. It will be easier for me next time to revise them or cut them out completely, rather than delete them right away before I am fully prepared to do it.
Finally, what does the Bible have to say about war, particularly a good war? To the question whether such a thing is possible, the Bible replies with a resounding Yes!:
John the Baptist says about Jesus: “He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” (Matthew 3:11) Should anyone disagree with equating a baptism with fire with a hard effect of war, here is a more explicit statement. These words belong to none other than Jesus Himself: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) The opposite of peace is war, and a sword is its symbol. To any Christian, a war which Jesus sends must be a good war… As long as it is not waged in His name only, in which case such a war becomes an unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit…
And now, here is my last quote, from The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy, with which I wish to conclude my present recourse to the Scriptures: “This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a good warfare.” (1 Tim. 1:18.)
At the risk of sounding overly preachy, I am adding this next somewhat square and declarative paragraph as the ultimately final, and only partially moralistic, statement on the subject:
As a great human tragedy, no war ought to be taken lightly. All defensive wars against foreign aggression and occupation are justified. But all other wars must be scrupulously scrutinized in advance, and fought as the last resort only, since most of them, when they break out, expose their initiators as the criminal culprits. But, otherwise, a just war is a good war. Such a war unites the nation, purifies it from its internal diseases, and gives rise to the nation’s heroes, in all which senses, it is a blessing, even if coming at a terrible price. And, of course, to be thus beneficial, such a war must be a total national war, conducted and supported by every citizen and all. Any public approval poll taken over it will be ridiculous, as 100% has to be taken for granted…

Fear Thy Neighbor.
A healthy nation under the conditions of war, particularly as a victim of aggression, or any kind of foreign occupation, consolidates; its citizens bonding together, in a reaffirmation of the nationalist (“totalitarian”) ideal. At no time better than at war does the phrase Love Thy Neighbor acquire a genuine meaningfulness. At no other time do all become one, like in wartime. It may be safe to say that when it happens, the nation is fighting a “good” war, but when it does not happen, the war has to be a travesty.
The national bond loosens in peacetime, or in the absence of an effective unifying cause. A general feeling of complacency permeating the society now, changes the social attitude from Love Thy Neighbor to virtual indifference, where the domestic crime rate is low, or to Fear Thy Neighbor, where such crime is a serious factor. Ironically, the domestic fear factor serves as a reinforcement of the social contract, legitimizing the role of government and of collective social institutions, while the social attitude of indifference leads to an erosion of the rationale for the existence of the commonwealth as such.
The solution to social erosion, caused by citizen indifference, can be twofold. On the one hand, all socialist nations, such as the modern nations of Europe, perpetuate the legitimacy of their existence by adhering to those socialist principles of social organization, which require continuous functioning of the welfare state. On the other hand, a nation consciously pursuing the capitalist ideology, like the United States (there is no such thing, of course, as a consummately capitalist nation, therefore this distinction between ideology and practice becomes important), perpetuates the state not so much by its welfare rationale or its law and order rationale, as by a national security rationale, maintaining a collective fear of the external enemy, and even creating it out of lesser fears, on occasion, whenever the actual sources of fear are deemed insufficient.
Unfortunately and tragically, this compulsion to perpetuate the external threat may easily metastasize into a paranoid fear of the external enemy among us, which struck the United States in the early years of the cold war in the form of McCarthyism, but was quickly overcome then, only to return in its present morbid form, under the Bush Administration, this time inoculated against this nation’s natural defensive reflexes by the augmented fears of 9/11. In that particular sense, the AlQaeda attack on America in 2001 may have struck a paralyzing blow to the best achievement of Western democracy, its will to personal freedom.
It has also struck a great blow to the sense of loving your neighbor, to the extent that it could have existed here before, to the extent that neighborly love may exist in practice within a civilized society. Alas, unlike the odi et amo of Catullus, timeo et amo is a contradiction in terms, for, as Aristotle says, no one can love the man he fears (Rhetoric, Book II), and, unlike hatred, fear is certainly incompatible with love.

Democracy And Freedom.
This entry was written during the time when the words in the title were profusely circulated and cheapened. That situation has considerably changed in the past few years, but the entry’s message still remains current.
Among the worst-abused terms in the political lexicon of modern society are democracy and freedom. The staple of all populist demagoguery and the battle cry of modern neo-conservative imperialism in America, they have been mindlessly interchangeable, and in the process, have lost all their meaning, to the point of even sounding offensive. They could be still useful, though, in some contemporary remake of Get Smart as a satirical password and the countersign.
To get serious, however, the concept of freedom poses exactly the same sort of difficulty that the concept of democracy does: where do we draw the line between good freedom and bad freedom: the freedom we love, and promote, and the freedom we find objectionable, and suppress through law enforcement, and such. Not a simple question, not an easy answer. But look at all the Bacchanalia of freedom-loving sloganeering and propaganda-mongering around us! It leaves no place for serious thinking; just join the chorus, and cheer!
What is obvious is that our Washington cheerleaders today have been a bit confused, or rather, deliberately confusing, about these things: democracy and freedom. The latter is, of course, a natural force, an instinct, (as in Nietzsche’s instinct for freedom), and Hobbes, in his formal definition of freedom as “the absence of external impediments,” points to the existence of the same natural law, or law of nature, from which all our instincts must have been derived.
The state of natural freedom is naturally unsustainable in the social milieu (that is why condicio eremitarum used to hold such an attraction for many in those times when it was socially feasible), instantly erupting in a “war of all against all,” and, for this reason, individuals would come together to form a mutually acceptable compromise, a covenant government, to rule over them all.
Democracy is, of course, very different from freedom. First and foremost, it is not an “instinct” of any kind, but a form of government, plain and simple. All philosophers agree that every man, at all times, wishes to impose his will on the will of others, which means that he has no intention of being left out of the political process. But his will to power does not imply a will to power-sharing. The social contract, or covenant, to use Hobbesian language, of any kind, is drawn up for this very reason, to prevent individuals from striving for the same object, leaving them in a perpetual state of war. Peace is, therefore, bought at the price of every man’s (except for the absolute ruler’s) deprivation of liberty. Thus, war becomes a natural outlet for man’s aspiration of freedom,--- and peace, an “external impediment” to it.
Accordingly, any social contract is drawn to restrain man’s natural freedom, but it does not follow from this that, having been volens-nolens curtailed in his freedom anyway, he should prefer popular democracy over a strong one-man’s rule. Instead of power-sharing with his obnoxious, stupid, and otherwise contemptible peers, our model citizen may well prefer to give his support (not always wholeheartedly, but in recognition of the absence of any other acceptable options) to a single competent ruler, whom he will at least be able to respect. The doubters of such an inference ought to be sent back to the history books: it is, perhaps, not too late for them yet, to learn!
In summary, freedom is the most “natural” thing in the world, yet a psychological phantom and a political chimera. Whereas democracy is an artificial (in the Hobbesian sense) construct, like one of those unstable man-made chemical elements with atomic numbers over ninety-four, which can be obtained in the lab, but have no chance to endure outside the lab, unless they mutate into something else.