Thanks for the fascinating article. I don't think the right do reject overarching principles in a lot of ways- they are not relativists after all. It's just the principles which they now espouse (ethnic and racial forms of citizenship, radically remaking the state, and limiting democratic input) are what you and many others (like myself) to be quite bad principles. The way they act them out makes it even worse as it tends to camouflage what those principles are. Their 'vibes-based' programme is a useful social veneer on top of a deeply unpleasant programme of changes they're bringing along.
I do think the collapse of overarching morality seeing everything subjectively via lived experience is a massive problem though. I had this in a seminar last week where I interrogated a student who proclaimed 'I do not know what is right, merely my own preference'. So, I asked about scenarios such as a serial killer. She began by arguing that it's simply a preference. Eventually, after a bit of back and forth, we boiled it down to there are scenarios which invoke a higher law of something being universally wrong.
Where Hariri is really wrong is that just because something is a story or imagined doesn't mean it's not true. This is similar to Benedict Anderson's 'imagined communities'. Anderson says communities are 'imagined' but that they remain just as real as anything else. They are not merely made up or figments but the product of technology, geography, and our willpower to find a collective purpose and community. This is how I would see human rights. They are not nonsense on stilts, even if the universalism is needing high hells to clear the bar of subjectivity.
This was a great read, thank you. I haven't read much of BAP, so I don't know if it would be unfair to point out another apparent inconsistency in the way he lauds Stroessner--the failure to notice, or perhaps the choice to ignore, ordinary causality and clear dependency? It seems that, in addition to the principles at work which the New Right would rather we not notice, as you carefully note, the valorization of Stroessner is additionally contingent on our overlooking what was actually happening in the world. Bronze Aged he might be, but this was the post-war order.
As you wrote, after all, the withdrawal of US support eventually brought the whole thing crashing down. If Stroessner was a "great" and "free" man, a "warrior," it's curious that his greatness, freedom and ferocity were only achieved in alliance with a nation founded on the very principles, restrictions and limitations BAP apparently spurns. Remove the US from the picture and, well, he eventually came down. One could say the same about many of the purportedly great men of history, whose greatness was ultimately subordinate to the messy work of institutions and the embarrassing ideals of aspirational democracies
If I were more perverse, one might even note that some men who think themselves great are in fact simply prominent because they have manipulated a system that otherwise generated great wealth; should they come to power in such a system, they would be unable to sustain it, let alone extend it, and given enough time and absent enough resistance, bring the whole edifice down. I think it was in Simon Montefiore's recent work The World in which I read a description of Emperor Trajan's unique qualities of leadership: vision, acumen, resources. But where do these resources come from, I suppose, is the question nobody wants to answer
Agree 100%. The very idea of dependence is inimical, I think, to the Superman. Yet Nietzsche himself was able to thrive thanks to the German welfare state and the warm Italian weather. In other words, he needed the nurture of home in order to live. Where do the resources come from? indeed
I think that the attraction of Nietzsche (and maybe also of Stoicism) lies in the idea that you can save yourself, that you can survive without supports. Because many people actually lack supports.
So I studied philosophy at NYU; at the time, the department was not very keen on the continental tradition -- there was a course on Nietzsche, but he was paired with Hegel and Schopenhauer. Long way of saying, this next bit is purely anecdotal, grounded in the experience of an undergrad in New York City at the turn of the millennium, which is hardly representative
Still, my experience has been quite the opposite, which makes your comment all the more intriguing. In my case, I found that Nietzsche most excited men who had quite a lot of privilege but were more interested in pretending to accomplishment than actually doing what it takes to build anything, maybe because they feared they would be, at best, mid (as the kids like to say these days)
But what's so bad about mid?
Rather than do the hard, rigorous, grinding and superficially modest, deplorable because common (as in, widespread--I don't mean that pejoratively!) work of building a life - getting married, settling down, buying a house, pursuing a career, or contributing to a community, acting one's age, living within means, serving others, dedicating oneself to a cause that demands personal sacrifice, etc., why not dream of ubermensch? To commit would be to admit oneself no different from the vast majority of people, which was intolerable
This absolved many of these so attracted, the not(yet)mensch I guess, of having to make clear, irrevocable choices, living a kind of an endless childhood, where fantasy stands in for reality, where pretending at superiority makes up for ... I wouldn't call it mediocrity, really. I'd call it a species of timidity
Which is why I'd love to know how you've experienced (or witnessed) the attraction to Nietzsche, which once included me. Really who among us has not wanted to be Nietzsche; like, damn, philosophy with a hammer, that's awesome, but also because I didn't know how to use a hammer for anything useful
For me, the spell broke because of the religious spaces I moved in, where I was constantly told to examine the space between what I claimed rhetorically, what I might have stood for ideologically, and who I was existentially and substantively and therefore potentially eternally. That gap is frightening but also motivating: Here is where work has to be done
When I looked more closely at many of the folks I once idolized or was at least intrigued by, I started to become concerned, then repelled. Did I really want to be that kind of person? Was wisdom found in logic, syllogism, argument and expression? Or was it in mastery of self and construction of character? Which brings up another point -- I see Stoicism and Nietzsche as quite different, though I might be wrong (this is just me asking you to correct me, instruct me, and/or point me where else to read/look/etc)
No one can escape the law because no one can escape the world. They cannot escape the world because they cannot escape them selves.
Nietzsche was a separatist for whom emotionally stunted teenagers keen on comic book superheroes read their wish-fulfilment into. Violence is the incel trying to chad their way out of being a simp. They flaunt their separatism unaware they suck on sour grapes. This is bad worldbuilding, bad worlding, bad selfing. For the narcissist and the psychopath the self= the world.
A real human goes to meetings, and by doing so becomes ever more human. We are uniquely ordinary, that is how we make the world in which law cannot be escaped. Your examples prove this to be the case.
Meetings make us human, and whether you call that the market or parliament or mass or a meal makes no difference.
"I am not convinced that anyone I’ve quoted above is truly aware of what it means to reject the reality of any overarching principle, any superior law, and to act in a completely sovereign, beyond-good-and-evil fashion. They seem more like violent gestures or smug self-promotion. "
It's always tempting to question whether someone who rejects some cherished belief of yours is "truly aware" of what she's rejecting. How can anyone blithely disbelieve something you believe so strongly? When you find yourself saying something like that, know that your polemical work has only just begun. If you can't figure out why a certain view might seem plausible to someone arguing in good faith, you probably can't debate it very effectively.
Legal positivists (probably the majority of legal theorists today) don't believe in a "superior law" that is above all human laws. Some human laws are above others; some, like the UN Charter of the US Constitution, are supreme in their domains. Legal positivists certainly recognize that there may be occasions when someone may feel justified in violating even these supreme laws -- no law can cover every imaginable future circumstance. That person may feel that another law -- religious, tribal, national -- trumps the supreme law in her case, and we are bound to hear her out. She can appeal to the whole moral and legal history of humankind to justify her exception. If we (the judges) agree, then the law may be changed. If not, she pays the penalty.
As for "beyond-good-and-evil," I don't know that Nietzsche ever made clear, even dimly, just what the Superwoman should feel justified in doing in defiance of all democratic norms. It's clear that she should despise them as the creation of the weak for their safety and comfort. Actually, I would very much like a Superwoman to come along and smash the American private equity industry and the fossil fuel industry and the plastics industry. But alas, I don't think that's what either Nietzsche or BAP has in mind.
But are you sure those are Christian values? In 2024, 63 percent of Protestants and 54 percent of Catholics voted for Trump -- who, I hope you'll agree, is the Antichrist.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I would say yes, for the simple fact that Christian values are not democratically determined. They are authoritatively given by a king, the King of Kings. If no Christian in the world followed them, still Christ’s words would remain Christ’s words.
Thanks for the fascinating article. I don't think the right do reject overarching principles in a lot of ways- they are not relativists after all. It's just the principles which they now espouse (ethnic and racial forms of citizenship, radically remaking the state, and limiting democratic input) are what you and many others (like myself) to be quite bad principles. The way they act them out makes it even worse as it tends to camouflage what those principles are. Their 'vibes-based' programme is a useful social veneer on top of a deeply unpleasant programme of changes they're bringing along.
I do think the collapse of overarching morality seeing everything subjectively via lived experience is a massive problem though. I had this in a seminar last week where I interrogated a student who proclaimed 'I do not know what is right, merely my own preference'. So, I asked about scenarios such as a serial killer. She began by arguing that it's simply a preference. Eventually, after a bit of back and forth, we boiled it down to there are scenarios which invoke a higher law of something being universally wrong.
Where Hariri is really wrong is that just because something is a story or imagined doesn't mean it's not true. This is similar to Benedict Anderson's 'imagined communities'. Anderson says communities are 'imagined' but that they remain just as real as anything else. They are not merely made up or figments but the product of technology, geography, and our willpower to find a collective purpose and community. This is how I would see human rights. They are not nonsense on stilts, even if the universalism is needing high hells to clear the bar of subjectivity.
This was a great read, thank you. I haven't read much of BAP, so I don't know if it would be unfair to point out another apparent inconsistency in the way he lauds Stroessner--the failure to notice, or perhaps the choice to ignore, ordinary causality and clear dependency? It seems that, in addition to the principles at work which the New Right would rather we not notice, as you carefully note, the valorization of Stroessner is additionally contingent on our overlooking what was actually happening in the world. Bronze Aged he might be, but this was the post-war order.
As you wrote, after all, the withdrawal of US support eventually brought the whole thing crashing down. If Stroessner was a "great" and "free" man, a "warrior," it's curious that his greatness, freedom and ferocity were only achieved in alliance with a nation founded on the very principles, restrictions and limitations BAP apparently spurns. Remove the US from the picture and, well, he eventually came down. One could say the same about many of the purportedly great men of history, whose greatness was ultimately subordinate to the messy work of institutions and the embarrassing ideals of aspirational democracies
If I were more perverse, one might even note that some men who think themselves great are in fact simply prominent because they have manipulated a system that otherwise generated great wealth; should they come to power in such a system, they would be unable to sustain it, let alone extend it, and given enough time and absent enough resistance, bring the whole edifice down. I think it was in Simon Montefiore's recent work The World in which I read a description of Emperor Trajan's unique qualities of leadership: vision, acumen, resources. But where do these resources come from, I suppose, is the question nobody wants to answer
Agree 100%. The very idea of dependence is inimical, I think, to the Superman. Yet Nietzsche himself was able to thrive thanks to the German welfare state and the warm Italian weather. In other words, he needed the nurture of home in order to live. Where do the resources come from? indeed
I think that the attraction of Nietzsche (and maybe also of Stoicism) lies in the idea that you can save yourself, that you can survive without supports. Because many people actually lack supports.
So I studied philosophy at NYU; at the time, the department was not very keen on the continental tradition -- there was a course on Nietzsche, but he was paired with Hegel and Schopenhauer. Long way of saying, this next bit is purely anecdotal, grounded in the experience of an undergrad in New York City at the turn of the millennium, which is hardly representative
Still, my experience has been quite the opposite, which makes your comment all the more intriguing. In my case, I found that Nietzsche most excited men who had quite a lot of privilege but were more interested in pretending to accomplishment than actually doing what it takes to build anything, maybe because they feared they would be, at best, mid (as the kids like to say these days)
But what's so bad about mid?
Rather than do the hard, rigorous, grinding and superficially modest, deplorable because common (as in, widespread--I don't mean that pejoratively!) work of building a life - getting married, settling down, buying a house, pursuing a career, or contributing to a community, acting one's age, living within means, serving others, dedicating oneself to a cause that demands personal sacrifice, etc., why not dream of ubermensch? To commit would be to admit oneself no different from the vast majority of people, which was intolerable
This absolved many of these so attracted, the not(yet)mensch I guess, of having to make clear, irrevocable choices, living a kind of an endless childhood, where fantasy stands in for reality, where pretending at superiority makes up for ... I wouldn't call it mediocrity, really. I'd call it a species of timidity
Which is why I'd love to know how you've experienced (or witnessed) the attraction to Nietzsche, which once included me. Really who among us has not wanted to be Nietzsche; like, damn, philosophy with a hammer, that's awesome, but also because I didn't know how to use a hammer for anything useful
For me, the spell broke because of the religious spaces I moved in, where I was constantly told to examine the space between what I claimed rhetorically, what I might have stood for ideologically, and who I was existentially and substantively and therefore potentially eternally. That gap is frightening but also motivating: Here is where work has to be done
When I looked more closely at many of the folks I once idolized or was at least intrigued by, I started to become concerned, then repelled. Did I really want to be that kind of person? Was wisdom found in logic, syllogism, argument and expression? Or was it in mastery of self and construction of character? Which brings up another point -- I see Stoicism and Nietzsche as quite different, though I might be wrong (this is just me asking you to correct me, instruct me, and/or point me where else to read/look/etc)
No one can escape the law because no one can escape the world. They cannot escape the world because they cannot escape them selves.
Nietzsche was a separatist for whom emotionally stunted teenagers keen on comic book superheroes read their wish-fulfilment into. Violence is the incel trying to chad their way out of being a simp. They flaunt their separatism unaware they suck on sour grapes. This is bad worldbuilding, bad worlding, bad selfing. For the narcissist and the psychopath the self= the world.
A real human goes to meetings, and by doing so becomes ever more human. We are uniquely ordinary, that is how we make the world in which law cannot be escaped. Your examples prove this to be the case.
Meetings make us human, and whether you call that the market or parliament or mass or a meal makes no difference.
"I am not convinced that anyone I’ve quoted above is truly aware of what it means to reject the reality of any overarching principle, any superior law, and to act in a completely sovereign, beyond-good-and-evil fashion. They seem more like violent gestures or smug self-promotion. "
It's always tempting to question whether someone who rejects some cherished belief of yours is "truly aware" of what she's rejecting. How can anyone blithely disbelieve something you believe so strongly? When you find yourself saying something like that, know that your polemical work has only just begun. If you can't figure out why a certain view might seem plausible to someone arguing in good faith, you probably can't debate it very effectively.
Legal positivists (probably the majority of legal theorists today) don't believe in a "superior law" that is above all human laws. Some human laws are above others; some, like the UN Charter of the US Constitution, are supreme in their domains. Legal positivists certainly recognize that there may be occasions when someone may feel justified in violating even these supreme laws -- no law can cover every imaginable future circumstance. That person may feel that another law -- religious, tribal, national -- trumps the supreme law in her case, and we are bound to hear her out. She can appeal to the whole moral and legal history of humankind to justify her exception. If we (the judges) agree, then the law may be changed. If not, she pays the penalty.
As for "beyond-good-and-evil," I don't know that Nietzsche ever made clear, even dimly, just what the Superwoman should feel justified in doing in defiance of all democratic norms. It's clear that she should despise them as the creation of the weak for their safety and comfort. Actually, I would very much like a Superwoman to come along and smash the American private equity industry and the fossil fuel industry and the plastics industry. But alas, I don't think that's what either Nietzsche or BAP has in mind.
So you want a Superwoman who acts according to Christian values (ie, supports the poor against the strong).
Yes, of course. A whole flock of them.
But are you sure those are Christian values? In 2024, 63 percent of Protestants and 54 percent of Catholics voted for Trump -- who, I hope you'll agree, is the Antichrist.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I would say yes, for the simple fact that Christian values are not democratically determined. They are authoritatively given by a king, the King of Kings. If no Christian in the world followed them, still Christ’s words would remain Christ’s words.