Sic venit, sic transit the glory,
but the folly stays…
(This entry in the Nietzsche section was written almost a
decade ago, and the present version is only slightly updated. Needless to say,
I am an enemy of all rigid ideologies, which become substitutes of established
great religions and undermine the moral foundations of the latter, while easily
eroding the clear-cut distinction between “church” and state, taking us back to the dark ages. The entry
reflects my view of both yesterday and today that the American ideology of
neoconservatism, inextricably connected to the highly questionable doctrine of
globalism, is harmful to American interest and to the future of international
relations, where its natural antagonist, the forces of nationalism, have long
and predictably acquired extreme and militant forms.)
***
Paraphrasing Dickens, these
are the best of traits, these are the worst of traits, or, as I keep
reminding the reader, the very same thing appears very differently, when seen
from different angles. People’s convictions are to be admired when we contrast
them to opportunism and dissimulation. But, from time to time, or quite
frequently, to tell the truth, history shows us convictions driven to dangerous
excess, when they become synonymous with fanaticism, bigotry,
narrow-mindedness. When such convictions become a person’s ideology, terrible
things may be expected to happen, whether that person is in a position of
enormous power, like the leader of a great nation, or an otherwise powerless
maniac in possession of a deadly weapon. How readily would we, then, prefer
people of no principles to the principled kind!
In Menschliches, Nietzsche
points out a very special quality of such unquestioning, unthinking convictions
being the worst enemies of truth:
(483). Enemies of truth . Convictions are more
dangerous enemies of truth than lies. In (511) he develops this short
dictum a little further: Loyal to their
convictions. The man who has a lot to do usually keeps his general views and
opinions almost unchanged; as does each person who works in the service of an
idea… He will never test the idea itself anymore; he no longer has time for it.
Indeed, it is contrary to his interest even to think it possible to discuss it.
In (630)
he elaborates on this further still: Conviction
is the belief that in some point of knowledge one possesses absolute truth.
Such a belief presumes, then, that absolute truths exist; likewise, that the
perfect methods for arriving at them have been found, and, finally, that every
man who has convictions makes use of these perfect methods. All three
assertions prove at once that the man of convictions is not the man of
scientific thinking; he stands before us still in the age of theoretical
innocence a child, however grownup he might be otherwise. But throughout
thousands of years, people have lived in such childlike assumptions, and from
out of them mankind’s mightiest sources of power have flowed. The countless
people who sacrificed themselves for their convictions thought they were doing
this for absolute truth. All of them were wrong: probably no man has ever
sacrificed himself for truth; at least, the dogmatic expression of his belief
will have been unscientific or half-scientific. But actually one wanted to be
right as one thought he had to be right. To allow his belief to be torn from
him meant to put his eternal happiness in question. With a matter of this
extreme importance the “will” was all too audibly the intellect’s prompter.
Every believer assumed he could not be refuted; if the counterarguments proved
very strong, he could still always malign reason in general, and perhaps even
raise as a banner of extreme fanaticism the credo quia absurdum est. It is not
the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the
struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions. If only
those people who thought so highly of their conviction, who sacrificed all
sorts of things to it and spared neither honor, nor body, nor life in its
service, had devoted half of their strength to investigating by what right they
clung to this or that conviction, how they had arrived at it,--- how peaceable
the history of mankind would appear! How much more would be known! All the
cruel scenes during the persecution of heretics would have been spared us for
two reasons: first, because the inquisitors would above all have inquired
within themselves, and got beyond the arrogant idea that they were defending
the absolute truth; and secondly, because the heretics themselves would not
have granted such poorly established tenets as those of all the sectarians and
the “orthodox” any further attention, once they had investigated them.
In his
later work Antichrist (54), Nietzsche posits skepticism as a remedy
against the poison of convictions driven to excess: Do not let yourself be deceived: Great intellects are
skeptical. The strength, the freedom, which proceed from intellectual power,
from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as skepticism.
Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is
fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners.
How timely, how urgently
relevant! How many lives could have been saved if instead of pretending to read
“Camus,” a certain American politician of recent memory would have been
receiving his daily briefings on Nietzsche… Today he may be gone from
public office, but the folly of his convictions proves too deep-rooted to ever be
uprooted. Perhaps we should all, both the voters and the elected, be receiving
regular reminders of Nietzsche’s immortal gem: “Men of convictions are prisoners,” as well as-- yes!-- Camus’ cautionary
retelling of the ancient Greek myth about Sisyphus, warning us about certain
absurdities of life…
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