FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 646 26 August 2015 NIETZSCHE & THE MIGRANTS

WHAT WOULD THE PHILOSOPHER NIETZSCHE THINK OF THE MIGRANTS SEEKING TO ENTER EUROPE?
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Pity. Compassion. Sympathy. Feelings the sight of masses of distressed people pressing at the gates of Europe might arouse in most Europeans. Germany, the most generous EU nation (unlike stingy Britain), proposes to take a whopping 800.000 of them. A famous German, the philosopher Fred Nietzsche, would not agree.

Nietzsche treats compassion (mitleid in German) as despicable. An anti-virtue. Indeed, a vice. A dangerous weakness to be spurned. Much in contrast to his early master, Schopenhauer. The latter thinker built his ethics on the notion of pity. As existence is essentially suffering and pain, the correct disposition is to feel pity for the suffering of all sentient beings. Not for humanity only but also for animals, insects, nature, the whole.

Thus Schopenhauer would agree that the Middle East and African migrants seeking to escape war, persecution and starvation deserve compassion. (Along indeed with any living creature, because to be born is itself the greatest misery.) Whether he would warmly have invited them into his native Germany is a matter for speculation…

Nietzsche would have none of that. Schopenhauer’s doctrine was fundamentally mystic and ascetic. An ethics of renunciation. A hatred of life. For Fred life must not be denied but affirmed. Physical health, the body, strength, the instincts, exuberance, the will to power – those are the key virtues.

Compassion, a fellow feeling for others, like refugees, is a mistake. A trick, a sleight of hand which the weak, the downtrodden, the bungled and the botched have perpetrated on the strong and the healthy. Hence, ‘to a higher man pity says nothing whatever’, Nietzsche contends. ‘A man loses power when he pities…Sympathy for the weak is the profoundest immorality’, he holds.

A paradoxical and perverse view? Remember that Nietzsche redefines the meanings of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In his book, Beyond Good and Evil, he sets out to show that what Christian civilisation and morality call ‘good’ is really evil – and vice-versa. War, for example, is good. Peace, by contrast, is bad. Fred’s ultra-notorious ‘superman’ is good because he prefers war to peace. I guess Fred would feel that Katie Hopkins, the feisty lady who advocated sending gunships to repel migrants as alien invaders, is a superwoman after his own heart.

Is it conceivable Nietzsche might see migrants in a positive light? Perhaps if he thought of them as the new ‘barbarians’. The word had bad connotations in English – the Caliphate boys who blow up ancient monuments and chop up and dismember archaeologists are current examples. The old barbarians however were largely savage Germanic tribes bursting into the confines of the dying Roman Empire and conquering it. Franks, Goths, and Vandals did cause tremendous havoc but they also injected new, fresh and vigorous blood into the effete Roman race. So our philosopher in Will to Power speaks of ‘a dominating race’ that can emerge out of terrible and violent beginnings. ‘Where are the barbarians’ of our time’, he wonders? Could they be…the migrants? Is that possible?

There appear to be plenty of sturdy-looking, energetic young men amongst the incoming ‘swarm’ (only quoting the British PM!). They come from agricultural, pre-industrial societies you could perhaps conceive as less feeble than over-civilised Europe. But they are also fleeing people. Not fierce fighters like jihadis but victims escaping civil wars or simply folks in search of a better life. And they do not come in triumph, bearing weapons like a conquering race. Instead, they beg (somewhat forcefully, true) to be allowed in. Not quite like the ferocious Vandal warriors of old.

The plot thickens. The spectacles of crying women and weeping babies TV cameras deliberately harp on naturally suggest vulnerability, weakness and pain. They evoke sentiments of sympathy and compassion, which Fred would regard as contemptible, the marks of a lower nature. If, however, you focus rather on the smiling and exulting folks coming off some of the Mediterranean boats and making the ‘V’ sign, you may encourage populist and right-wing voices speaking of ‘aliens’ and ‘a threat’. Huh!

Furthermore, most of the migrants are Muslims. That worries some Europeans, although few have the courage to state it openly. Are many migrants a fifth column sent by ISIS in order to prepare the way for future invasions? Would that please Nietzsche? I doubt he ever met a single Muslim or knew much about Islam. In Will to Power he castigates the religion of the Crescent because of its use of belief in life beyond the grave as ‘an instrument of punishment’. Then he praises ‘Mohammedanism’ as ‘a religion for me’, in contrast to Christianity, ‘a woman’s religion’, filled with sentimentality and mendaciousness’! An appraisal of Islam not all Muslims would share.

Nietzsche’s hysterical attack on Christ is at the heart of the matter. In his ‘Antichrist’ he denounces Jesus as neither the Messiah nor a Prophet, neither a genius nor a hero.’ Christ’s advice, ‘Resist not evil’, Fred repudiates as a disgusting manifestation of weakness. The compassion the Son of Man displays towards the poor and the suffering is something his Superman comes in order to destroy. ‘The bungled and the botched shall perish’, he exults. That says it all.

The philosopher’s view of Christ was warped. So was his idea of Christian ethics. Because, as Bertrand Russell observes, compassion and pity are compatible with ‘uprightness, pride and self-assertion’. The priest would add: if necessary, even with a certain ruthlessness.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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