Lady Miss Kier's Wager

A few years ago I was manning the grill in our backyard on the day of the Preakness Stakes, run quite literally across the street at Pimlico. As I tended to the burgers, frankfurters and BBQ chicken I was buffeted by a blast of noise from the sky that was immediately distinct from the single engine props tugging their advertisements for surprisingly affordable auto insurance and no recovery-no fee legal representation. I looked up in time to see a trio of warcraft in formation, including a vintage WWII fighter and, ominously, a B-2 Stealth Bomber. Given my pedigree as the son of two peace activists, as well as the pro-peace positions I had clearly staked out in high stakes debates with the Republican wing of my personal coterie, one might have expected me to react, if not with the bout of actual (i.e. not existential ) nausea that my father succumbed to on the night of Ronald Reagan’s decisive 1980 election, then at least with a pause to consider the fates of all those on the receiving end of the Stealth Bomber’s payload in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. (Just how many have been killed by the Stealth’s delivery of over 1.5 million pounds of munitions, we may never know, though the dead do include several staff from the Chinese embassy mistakenly targeted in the Kosovo operations in 1999. Other “mistaken” targets lack the clout to merit inclusion on Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit ) Instead, I ran around the backyard, in the presence of my wife, her cousin Jason, and my three daughters whooping and hollering as if UNC hoops had just beaten Duke at the buzzer. I was, for the brief duration of the flyover and its immediate sonic aftermath, alive.

Power’s hook is all in the feeling. As the shadow of the Stealth Bomber touched my kith and kin I exalted in the visceral sense that since this was America’s plane it was also my plane, one that might drop bombs on homes far, far away, but never on mine. The strangest thing about the American empire is that we are a really existing democracy, making all of us voting taxpayers into little emperors. My “Yee-Haww!” as the planes flew over may have sounded like Bo and Luke Duke jumping over yet another creek in their politically incorrect Dodge Charger, but was actually a direct translation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “I’m the king of the world!”

Power seduces. Much more importantly, it is all that seduces. This was Nietzsche’s great insight:

“--do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?--This world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!”

At first blush, Nietzsche’s diagnosis is cause for nothing but despair, at least for the believers among us, seemingly aligning with his more famous but much less consequential proclamation that “God is dead.” Inconsequential because, as I will hope to demonstrate in a moment, these two concepts, the will to power and the death of God, are mutually exclusive. (Strange, the jokes one remembers. I can remember approximately three, one of which was delivered by a long forgotten stand-up comic on cable TV in the early nineties, when, upon moving to New Jersey, my parents finally got cable, enabling me to spend my first summer home from boarding school, when I was still too young to work at McDonald’s, watching Yo! MTV Raps and, apparently, stand-up comics. The joke went: “Jews for Jesus. That’s like vegetarians for meat.” Funny, though not remarkably so. Nevertheless, I will carry “vegetarians for meat” with me to the grave. It is my archetype for the mutually exclusive. Because few things give me greater pleasure than apologizing, I almost tacked on a “with apologies to any actual Jews for Jesus” after that sentence, although I must say it would make extending such an apology a lot easier if everyone connected to Jesus, “Jewish” or otherwise, would just leave the Jews alone…awkward pause…except when marrying them… and agreeing to raise the kids Jewish….)

But before turning to fun with metaphysics, a few thoughts on how the left is constantly shooting itself in the foot in its distaste for the realities of Nietzsche’s will to power. The first way, of course, is in the cloying insistence on alternative, non-hierarchical social structures. The best way to find a really hierarchical left-leaning non-profit is to find one that touts itself as non-hierarchical, as anyone knows who’s ever worked in one. I would note that the givenness of will to power and the inevitability of hierarchy make my job as a democratic socialist harder, but not impossible. Hierarchical democratic socialists are not vegetarians for meat. Instead, to describe hierarchical democratic socialists I would borrow Tina Fey’s line that “Bitches get stuff done,” except that in the case of hierarchical democratic socialism, “Bitches get stuff done for everyone.”

Secondly, the left is constantly digging its own political grave by making people feel less powerful, rather than more. The perfect example is the left’s response to the insane rate at which Americans are offing one another with guns. Just today, while watching the 12:00 news in the office cafeteria I learned of yet another school shooting, this one in a middle school in New Mexico, as well as the case of a retired cop who shot and killed someone for a violation of movie theater etiquette (texting during the previews). The left’s response, of course, is to take away all of the guns, which makes sense if the people have genuine fealty to you as a benevolent despot, but in a democracy whose very life blood is fear only makes Americans feel more threatened, i.e. less powerful, and actually ends up contributing to the vicious cycle of a) isolated mass shooting incident, b)mass media circus, c) leftist calls for gun control , d) citizens who fear their countrymen (who might kill them) and their government (which might take away the only means of protection they believe in) in equal measure, and e) increased gun sales.

If the left ever hopes to achieve its vision of peace and justice it needs to take its cue from unexpected quarters. My very first compact disc was Deee Lite’s World Clique, which included their breakout hit “Groove is in the Heart.” But my favorite Deee Lite number was always “Power of Love” (not to be confused with Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love,” which easily slots into the top ten all time movie soundtrack songs somewhere behind Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky,)” which is a unanimous #1). Lady Miss Kier opens “Power of Love” by stating and restating her belief in the power of love six times, six, perhaps not incoincidentally, being the Kabbalistic number for love. (www.voxxthepsychic.com/kabb-numerologyynbr6.html ) Having established her power of love bona fides, her very next line, “Feel the power,” may well prove the three most insightful words uttered about love since Shakespeare’s “Love is blind.”

Just as Friedrich Nietzsche was the first properly Darwinian philosopher, Lady Miss Kier is the first truly Nietzschean lover. Her enjoinder to feel the power of love is the light at the end of the tunnel we’ve been crawling through since natural selection begat the will to power. Lady Miss Kier’s great gamble is that feeling the power of love is the most powerful feeling of all. It is the inverse of Pascal’s Wager re: belief in the existence of God, where “if you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing.” With Lady Miss Kier’s Wager we may still gain all, but if we lose we lose the world to a will to power forever unredeemed; we lose the world to the Stealth Bomber.

If the wager is won, Lady Miss Kier is proven right, and Nietzsche is proven both right and wrong. Right in that the will to power is with us forevermore. In which case “Come on Feel,” to borrow a line from the vastly underrated Lemonheads (“It’s a Shame About Ray” is the shiznitt, if you will), becomes the left’s trump card in its new project to make people feel more powerful, rather than less. Wrong in that reports of God’s death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Because if the wager is won, Nietzsche can’t have it both ways. If the wager is won, “This world is the will to power--and nothing besides!,” is nothing other than “A Love Supreme.”

Of course, one can’t tout universal love in a discussion of Nietzsche without reckoning with his theory of master-slave morality. While never explicitly endorsing “master moraility,” Nietzsche reserved his fiercest criticisms for “slave morality,” the Judeo-Christian moral calculus he understood to be the weapon of the weak in the struggle against their powerful overlords, or masters:

“As master morality originates in the strong, slave morality originates in the weak. Because slave morality is a reaction to oppression, it villainizes its oppressors. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism. Slave morality is created in opposition to what master morality values as 'good'. Slave morality does not aim at exerting one's will by strength but by careful subversion. It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. The essence of slave morality is utility: the good is what is most useful for the whole community, not the strong.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality )

What if Nietzsche is correct, and we turn to love not out of love but simply in order to beat back our oppressors? Might we still not find, like Alexander Fleming mistakenly leaving out a petri dish of Staphylococcus and, voila, discovering penicillin, that we had, with our “slave morality,” won not merely a round in the never ending war of all against all, but instead, and quite miraculously, uncovered the singular instrument that could win the peace once and for all, for “slave” and “master” alike?

But if feeling the power of love is so potent, to the point where as one approaches pure love one comes equally close to omnipotence, then why are Americans using handguns to shoot each other in movie theatres and drones to kill brown people in what can no longer justly be called the theatre of war (just as the Global War on Terror cannot justly be called a war unless we recognize it as what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed “The war against nothing.”)? The answer has everything to do with fear and its management.

It says here that love is omnipotent precisely because true love is fearless; if God is love, then the presence of God is simply the absence of fear. It gets confusing because aggression, in both the threat and the use of force, feels powerful. The seeming paradox is that the aggressor doesn’t feel afraid at all (I certainly didn’t feel an ounce of fear as the Stealth Bomber flexed its muscles on my behalf), even as the use or threat of force is rooted deeply in fear. To explain the pseudo-fearlessness of aggression it will help to define a relatively obscure Kleinian psychoanalytic term, projective identification:

“Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein to describe the process whereby - in a close relationship, as between mother/child, lovers, therapist/patient - parts of the self may in unconscious phantasy be thought of as being forced into the other person.
While based on Freud's concept of psychological projection, projective identification represents a step beyond it: in Laing's words, ‘The one person does not use the other merely as a hook to hang projections on. He strives to find in the other, or to induce the other to become, the very embodiment of projection.’ Feelings which cannot be consciously accessed by the one person are defensively projected in such a way as to evoke in the recipient precisely the thoughts or feelings projected.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_identification )

An “example can be seen in a person who doubts his/her own intelligence level and attempts to manipulate others’ perceptions/opinions by discourse with ‘elevated airs’ or by referring to themselves as having a high IQ or implied superior knowledge /expertise. They attempt to lead others to feel unintelligent by their complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage, due to their own doubts about their own intelligence,” ( http://guiltedgirls.tripod.com/id9.html ) (… second awkward pause… this example has nothing to do with this blog, which is clearly just a vehicle for my artistic self expression… we now return to the regularly scheduled complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage…)

What does projective identification have to do with handguns, drones, and Stealth Bombers? At the risk of engaging in what my favorite British public intellectual Terry Eagleton likes to call New Age claptrap (a risk which is admittedly immaterial given that Blogspot.com lists but one follower for this blog, who is much more likely my mother than Terry Eagleton), I am going to suggest that projective identification isn’t confined to interpersonal relations between homo sapiens. In fact, I am going to suggest that it isn’t even confined to relations between what we typically think of as sentient beings, e.g. between a man and his dog, as in the case of my yelling at Sy the Dog for once again pooping in the house, which is really my attempt to make Sy the Dog carry around the shame I feel for some relatively prolonged bed wetting and once pooping my pants at choir practice in 4th grade (might have been 5th, but 4th feels just slightly less shameful).

The New Age claptrap I am suggesting is that human beings can engage in projective identification with inanimate objects. In the grand tradition of New Age speculations, I am going to utilize both the word “energy” and reference advanced physics without really understanding the physics involved. Here goes: According to Wikipedia, it is a true fact that matter and energy are one and the same, mass simply being a highly concentrated form of energy. See E=MCsquared. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence )And, as anyone who has spent 5 minutes in the New Age section at Barnes and Noble can attest, consciousness is energy. (What the hell, here’s a link to a New Age site explaining exactly how to recognize energy as consciousness: http://m.wikihow.com/Recognize-Energy-as-Consciousness ) The upshot of all this, none of which, all joking aside, seems stranger to me than the materialist notion that consciousness is a chance byproduct of matter, is that projective identification between people and material objects is a process occurring between two energy systems, just as it is when it occurs between two human beings. In fact, there is an entire tradition within western philosophy, panpsychism, which holds that all entities in the universe, from the soup of the animate to the nuts of the inanimate, have some kind of mental life. Being a panpsychist, which I am, (which makes me a panpsychist hierarchical democratic socialist, which I think has great potential as a conversation starter at parties) makes this whole projective-identification-with-weapons thing easier to swallow.

Because the fear at the heart of aggression gets projected right into all the varieties of ordnance: guns, bombs, ammo, bazookas, Stealth Bombers, etc. This, advanced physics notwithstanding, is how all weapons work; they are nothing other than projections of fear, each explosion a detonation of disowned terror. The historic advance in weaponry, right up to The Bomb itself, is representative of the fact that we have a) become technical savants, and b) cultivated enough fear to blow up the world five times over. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/do-we-really-need-to-blow_b_491367.html ) Not feeling it? Neither am I, which is the whole point. We’ve projected our fears into our warheads and their magnificently expensive delivery systems (weaponry is an expensive anesthetic- one Stealth Bomber costs 2.1 billion dollars) so that we don’t have to feel a thing.

“I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love, Let them call me naïve, But I still believe”

Oh Lord, It’s Hard to be Humble

Nietzche’s infamous challenge to belief, “God is dead,” along with his impassioned arguments against Christianity, has always lurked around the edges of my faith. I have always felt that an encounter with Nietzsche, perhaps the Judeo-Christian tradition’s greatest critic, was inevitable. What value faith if it can’t withstand Nietzsche’ penetrating scrutiny? A layman rather than a Nietzsche scholar, I have turned for help in my encounter to Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken (killing two birds with one stone, as I had never before read Mencken, one of my adopted home town’s literary giants) . Mencken penned The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a remarkable summation of Nietzsche’s thought, recently republished and thankfully available at the local biblioteque. (It is important to note that, like Nietzsche, Mencken was a gifted thinker and writer, but also, like Nietzsche, fell into the trap of racial determinism. Put more bluntly, Mencken was an overt racist, as exhibited in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche when Mencken touts the inherent superiority of European Americans to their African American countrymen. We shall return to the shadow cast by Nietzsche’s philosophy, a darkness which haunted Mencken’s thought and continues to trouble humanity today, but this caveat should be noted from the start, as warranted by the worst chapters of our recent human history.)

Because Nietzsche’s thought has the breadth and depth befitting a great philosopher, it will serve our purposes here to simply jump in where Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity goes off the tracks (for a proper overview of Nietzsche see Mencken). Mencken captures the core of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity: “Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no… efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence. The beatitudes require, he says, that instead of trying to do so, the Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give no thought to himself.” This reading of Christianity leads to the necessary conclusion that if a man were to follow Christianity’s urging, then (again here Mencken interpreting Nietzsche) “his activity is restricted to one of two things: standing perfectly still or deliberately making himself inferior.” Mencken provides Nietzsche’s own words to clarify this stance, with Christianity understood as “the tendency hostile to life”, and that which “thwarts the law of development , of evolution, of the survival of the fittest.”

Nietzsche was philosophy’s first great Darwinian. His rejection of Christianity is the necessary counterpart to his embrace of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Per Mencken, Nietzsche “proposed, then, that before it was too late, humanity should reject Christianity, as the ‘greatest of all imaginable corruptions,’ and admit freely and fully, that the law of natural selection was universal and that the only way to make real progress was to conform to it.”

Nietzsche has misunderstood both Christianity and humanity’s relationship to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in one fell swoop. It is necessary first to treat of Darwin’s reductionist views on Darwinian theory. For Nietzsche, as seen above, Nietzsche’s theory of natural selection, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest, applies to humanity in the exact same fashion as it does to every other variety of flora and fauna. Per Mencken, “Nietzsche says that the thing which best differentiates man from the other animals is his capacity for making and keeping a promise.” I would argue that, instead, the most important difference between humanity and other animals is that, unlike animals, we humans are capable of destroying the world right along with ourselves. It is this crucial difference between humans and other animals, one that is overlooked by Nietzsche, which creates a separate framework for our relationship to evolution.

It is in this separate framework in which the teachings of the world’s great faith traditions, including Christianity, attain to heights of wisdom unavailable to Nietzsche in his reductionist stance of equating humans with all other creatures. But before we go any further, it is important to correct Nietzsche’s key misunderstanding of Christian teaching. While the gospels are replete with Christ’s insistence that his followers become less obsessed with their daily welfare, by, for example, pointing out how well cared for are the lilies in the field, these are primarily teachings to reframe his followers understanding of creation as a place of abundance. Of course, it is no mystery that even in the most abundant of settings one must still put in the requisite labor to reap the bounty, and I don’t believe that Jesus’ basic teaching that God will provide in any way denies the need for the labor required to access those provisions. Nietzsche would argue that a good Christian would be too busy looking after his neighbor to put in the necessary labor. In making this argument Nietzsche has misread the second in the pair of central commandments on which all of Christianity rests; this commandment states “Love your neighbor as yourself,” not “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.” The central point here, and one lost on Nietzsche, is that in order to do a good job of loving your neighbor you must be loving yourself an equal amount. And, if I am not mistaken, the love of neighbor will grow out of an abundance of love for one’s self, such that there will never be an inadequacy of love for self that might prevent one from reasonably seeing to one’s own welfare in the normal every day ways that no one else can provide. There is work that one can only do for one’s self. Part of loving your neighbor is letting her do this work while you take care of your own business. (The first in the pair of central commandments, to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” {Matthew 22: 37) is simply a translation of the greatest gift of Nietzsche’s philosophy, his “Yes to life!”)

It might help here to consider another wisdom tradition. I once went to a conference about working with troubled youth at which one of the speakers (see reclaiming .org for the speaker’s website) described his youth program’s approach as based on a central tenet of a particular American Indian tribe’s wisdom tradition. This tradition held that all individuals require four basic opportunities to prosper. The opportunity to experience, respectively, achievement , autonomy, altruism, and attachment; they are easy to remember when you name them the “Four A’s”. You would naturally pair the more individualistic pursuits of achievement and autonomy, and also pair the more communal elements of altruism and attachment. Jesus’ teaching of “Love your neighbor as yourself” is simply a pithy phrasing of how to achieve a life affirming balance of the Four A’s. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, is but the exclusive emphasis of achievement and autonomy, and a complete denial of the need to balance them with altruism and attachment. Perhaps, in the long history of Christian influence on western civilization, altruism and attachment were emphasized as spiritual virtues more-so than their counterparts of achievement and autonomy. To the extent that they were, than Nietzsche’s contribution can be seen as reawakening us to the need for achievement and autonomy in a healthy human individual. But mistaking Nietzsche for a prophet of truth rather than knowing him as a balancing corrective, is to invite disaster. One need look no further than the co-optation of Nietzche’s philosophy by the Nazi party to witness the dangers of misunderstanding Nietzsche’s contribution.

But a Christianity informed by Nietzsche would be a reinvigorated force for good. When Christianity loses its balance and overemphasizes attachment and altruism, when it does teach “Love your neighbor more than yourself,” it’s values are warped. An example of this is the Christian value of humility. A Christianity uncorrected by Nietzsche, skewing towards attachment and altruism, elevates humility to an end unto itself; one is to practice humility simply because it is good to be humble. But humility understood as an end unto itself is warped beyond repair. I’ve never liked Ralph Lauren Polo garments, largely because of the Polo logo affixed prominently to the left breast of every Polo shirt. My distaste for the Polo logo is based on my contempt for the act of wearing the Polo logo as an expression of socioeconomic status. But my refusal to don Ralph Lauren is an act of neurotic humility, because by refusing to wear Polo, based on my judgment that people who wear Polo are snobs, I necessarily conceive of myself as superior to the Polo consumer because of my humility. When humility becomes an end unto itself then all acts of humility based on this value are just another way of being better than other people, thereby rendering this warped form of humility neurotic. (Speaking of neurosis, after reading Nietzsche I realize that the father of all things neurotic, Sigmund Freud, was just a Nietzchean. Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillment and his theory of guilt as the aggressive drive pointed inward both appear first in Nietzsche. Nietzsche also wrote eloquently about the unconscious, a concept with which Freud built the entire edifice of psychoanalysis.)

The true, non-neurotic function of humility comes into focus when Christianity is balanced by Nietzsche’s reemphasis of achievement and autonomy. When achievement and autonomy are as important as attachment and altruism, there must needs be a mediator between the individualistic and the communal elements of human life. Humility is that mediator. This function of humility is seen clearly in the old cliché “keep your feet on the ground while you reach for the stars,” i.e. the only way to stay grounded while you strive for the heights of individual excellence is through displays of humility. We display humility not because it is important to be humble in order to be “good people”, but because humility allows us to maintain attachment, often by way of altruism, while we pursue achievement and autonomy. Humility strikes the necessary balance for us to keep the commandment of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

In closing it is important to return to the crucial difference between humanity and the rest of creation, which is nothing other than our ability to destroy all life on the planet. Unlike all that came before us, which evolved according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, humanity is that which must evolve to the state of loving our neighbors as ourselves, if we are to survive. We must temper our Nietzschean need for achievement and autonomy, our will to power, with equal consideration for attachment and altruism. Doing so is the only true way to say “Yes to life!”; not doing so will end all life as we know it. I would say that this is the true meaning of Jesus’ promise of eternal life for all those who follow him. Humanity can choose to follow the teachings of our great sages by loving our neighbors as ourselves, or not. Whether humanity lives on eternally depends precisely on this choice.