The Nietzschean Wager

"Fascism and the Sexual Revolution"

One does not normally look to car bumper stickers for serious moral insight, but one such came to my attention recently, which said, "If you're living as though God doesn't exist, you'd better be right" To compound my surprise, before I came to this room, I visited the toilet downstairs, where some crouching sage had inscibed the words, "There must be life before death". Fortuitously, these are both examples - though from different points of view - of the dilemma raised by what I have called the Nietzschean wager. But before I move to an explanation of what I mean by the Nietzschean wager, let me recall an earlier related coinage. The seventeenth century mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal formulated an argument which is now known as Pascal's wager. The argument runs like this: If I live as though God exists and I have an immortal soul, and it turns out to be true, I will have gained eternal life; if not, I will at least have lived a virtuous life. What Pascal is saying is that it is a safe bet to live a religious and moral life. What I mean by the Nietzschean wager - and as far as I know, this term has not been used before - is the complete inversion of the logic of this argument. It goes something like this: If I live a virtuous life based upon the empty promises of religion, I will miss the chance to enjoy this life, the only life that I have. Needless to say, this is a position which many people in our modern secular society have bet their future - that this is all there is to life, so we had better enjoy it.

Western society has shown perodic swings between times of religious fervour and times of hedonistic abandon. I remember also from my times as a student that life was lived between self-indulgence and the quest for meaning in life. It is not my intention here to unconditionally support Pascal's argument. His view of the religious life is certainly open to criticism, and Pascal was notorious for his self-neglect, and died at the age of 39. My intention is, rather, to argue that some of the most destructive forces in the modern world have been unleashed by the Nietzschean wager.

Some of you may have been surprised, fascinated or even infuriated by the sub-title of my talk "Fascism and the Sexual Revolution". In most people's minds no two forces could represent such opposite poles of human historical experience: fascism as the epitome of fanatical hatred, totalitarianism and genocide; the sexual revolution as a liberating movement for love, peace and pleasure. However , I shall argue that they are linked philosophically through drawing inspiration upon the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (from whose name the title of my talk has been chosen) and historically throught their roots in a nineteenth century racist ideology and cultural movement. Though the rise of fascism and the sexual revolution are separated by a generation, they draw upon a common pool of ideas outside the mainstream of Western religious and moral traditions - ideas exemplifying what I have called the Nietzschean wager - interpreted in light of different political and economic circumstances.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche deplored Christian morality, which he described as slave morality, and declared that 'God is dead'. In its place he resurrected the morality of the pre-Christian heroic age of the ancient Greeks, the morality of 'the will-to-power' (Will zum Macht), and raised up the idea of the 'superman' (Übermensch) as one who lives beyond good and evil. Nietzsche represented at a philosophical level a revival of pre-Christian pagan mythology. He compared two outlooks on life that he called the Apollonian and the Dionysian (after the greek gods Apollo and Dionysius), which represented respectively the rational and the sensual. Nietzshe rejected the apollonian values as stultifying and a fetter to the life force, and embraced the dionysian values of impulsiveness and immediacy. Thus, through a selective interpretation of myth Nietzshe became an advocate of irrationalism and hedonism. He called for a programme of the transvaluation of all values, meaning essentially the rejection of Christian ethics and its replacement by the pursuit of iconoclastic lifestyles. Nietzshe contracted siphyllis as a student, endured periods of madness during his adult life and died in an asylum for the insane.

If I have painted a somewhat negative picture of Nietzsche and his ideas, I do not hesitate to say that it is because I believe that his influence upon contemporary culture, and the intervening period, has been indubitably pernicious. This is not, however, to deny his importance, for, excepting Karl Marx, he is the philosopher who has exerted the most influence on the 20th century, though his influence is largely invisible. Nietzshe's nihilism and romanticism found expression in the work of Martin Heidegger, one of the giants of 20th century philosophy, whose ideas have been taken up successively in the contemporary schools of phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism and post-modernism. Considering the place which these schools hold in the contemporary debates over politics, society, education, morality and the arts, we can see why, several generations removed, Nietzsche's ideas continue to exert a powerful influence today.

The intellectual foundation of racist ideologies in the twentieth century come from the Eugenics movement. Eugenics comes from the greek words meaning "good breeding". It developed in the late 19th century in England, out of the Victorian concerns with class and empire, where these coincided with social Darwinism and thw widespread interest in animal breeding programmes. The Eugenics movement was founded by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and a committed Darwinist, and quickly became widespread troughout America and Europe. Its aim was to improve the intellectual, moral and physical stock of the human race. Two strategies developed. One was to stop people with undesirable traits from reproducing, so-called negative eugenics. The other was to encourage people with good traits to reproduce, naturally enough referred to as positive eugenics. Negative eugenics was employed in the United States until the time of the Second World War, and in Sweden (and to a lesser extent in Norway) until the mid-1970's. It involved compulsory sterilization of certain groups within those societies deemed to have undesirable traits. Positive eugenics was practiced principally in Britain. Even today high profile academics, such as Nobel Prize winners, are encouraged to donate to sperm banks, on the presumption that they are contributing to the improvement of the human race.

The demise of negative eugenics occured - understandably enough - through its appropriation to Hitler's programme of racial purification. Here it coincided with, and gave spurious theoretical support to, the idea of the Superman. The fatalism, nihilism and will-to-power of Nietzsche's philosophy harnessed German nationalism, sense of inferiority and resentment to the conquest of other countries. Once Hitler's National Socialists had consolidated their power they began the systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other undesirables. Thus Fascist ideology and practice represented the cross-breeding and monstrous mutation of Nietzschen philosophy and eugenics. In an interesting footnote, Martin Heidegger joined the National Socialists in the mid-1930's, and was given a political appointment as Rektor of Heidelberg University, although he later renounced this affiliation. The supposition is that Heidegger's o