The real nihilism....

A few days ago, my wife was perusing Facebook and came across a story about a waiter in Texas who heroically asked a family to leave his restaurant because they were complaining about a child with mental disabilities.  The story went that, a family with a young child that is mentally challenged, was at the restaurant to eat, and another family began complaining about the behavior of the child.  The waiter told the complainers that he would not be able to serve them.  Bravo.

I reiterate this story, not because it is a feel good story of a man behaving virtuously, but because of some of the comments that were left after the fact on the Facebook page.  There were a number of posts that read to the like of "These mongoloids are dragging down our species," "This is why Hitler had his eugenics right. No one should have to put up with these apes."  "Maybe I should bring my chimp to restaurants with me, I garuantee they are more intelligent than this child that these people had to put up with."  They were, quite frankly, some of the most offensive things I've read in a long time.  It angered me because of the injustice of it, but it shows you where the intellectual trajectory of our culture has gone post Darwin; nihilistic atheism.

As I tried to root out the philosophy that would praise Hitler, as disgusting as that is, my thought turned to Nietzsche as well as the introlocuter Thrasymachus, who makes his appearance in the first book of Plato's Republic.  Will to power is an intriguing philosophy, and it has tricked minds for millennia. It perhaps was never so well articulated as it was by Nietzsche, but we shall in the future check on a) Whether it is fair to say Nietzsche is the represtantive of modern culture, and b) after showing this we will challenge his thinking with the aid of classical philosophy.  In my mind, the whole debate comes down to Aquinas vs Nietzsche. Whose philosophy is more commensurate with reality?  Aquinas is the fulfillment, or the last great page in the classical tradition, and Nietzsche, unlike most modern philosophers was actually a philosopher.  I read geniuses like Hegel, or Kant, and think of them as creative geniuses, not interpretive ones.  Nietzsche, like Aquinas, was more of an interpreter of reality, i.e. more of a philosopher than a poet.  But the question comes down to, whose philosophy explains reality better?  We'll put them up against each other regularly here.

So what is this truly nihilistic philosophy we face with the downgoers, the arguers for non-human dignity?  Nietzsche accused the "ascetic ideal" as a nihilism of his day; he accused Judaism, and the Cross, of being Europe's disease; its nihilism.  This imagined nihilism has given way to a real bloody nihilism, in an age that is everything Nietzsche envisioned, one of a will to power ethic, where justice is what Thrasymachus called it, "justice is simply what is good for the stronger."  These eugenics proponents, are just the voice of a nihilistic relativism that destroys humanity; drugs women to eliminate children; murders children; chooses the barren desert of homosexuality; experiments on human beings; de-humanizes women and children; in short, a bloody philosophy, an ideology of evil that tends to nothingness - which is the essence of evil!

The eugenicists may question the idea that they are Nietzscheans. They may say that I am unfairly classifying them.  But in stating that we have to destroy mentally challenged human beings, they bury themselves deep in the will to power ethic.  And, if they are going to be consistent in such an ideology, they must accept all of the precepts laid down by Nietzsche.  Basically, if the eugenicists want to be at their best philosophically, they need to be in the Nietzschean catalogue.  In fact, if we parsed it out, we could place them firmly there.  I'd be happy to have that conversation with them.

My first question for the nihilists who threw epithets at this defenseless child, would be, "where do we define human dignity, according to you?  At what point is the threshold?  Where is the line in the sand?"  Obviously, according to them, being mentally challenged is below the threshold of holding intrinsic worth as a human being, although, we might ask them to define human being; I'm not sure you can define a mentally challenged person as anything other than human. If we look to "science", we will be given a definition that will lead us to human being. Ultimately, a biological human can only be defined as a human being, and ought to be afforded the dignity of intrinsic worth.

What if, we decided, the eugenicists themselves were below the threshold, say, for being too short, or being too fat, or being too tall, or having the wrong color eyes, or wrong color skin, or wrong religion, etc.  Suddenly, the idea that justice is what is good for the stronger does not look so appealing. Suddenly, like lightening the natural law strikes at the heart; bursting onto the scene is the inevitable self-preservation.  Those who would define the human based on mental capacity, ought to be ready if they were ever the weaker, to accept the same conclusions.  The fact is, they never consider themselves the weaker.  These same haters are probably the first to shun racism or sexism (rightly so), but based on their eugenic principles they cannot define a proper threshold except that which those in power make it.  As such, do not shun sexism or racism if you like eugenics, because arguments can, and have been made for women or certain races to be less human.  Simply put, the principle of justice being what is good for the stronger, means hoping that you are always in the class of the stronger, which at bottom means you really don't trust your principles.

These folks, praising Hitler, are your neighbors; your godless neighbors; your nihilistic neighbors.  What they miss in their eugenics is that power is the outcome of justice; the political, military, and economic strength of the West has been the result of the recognition of human dignity. Our great inheritance from Greek philosophy, and upgraded to infinite levels through Christ, is that every human being has dignity.  That one idea has given rise to the idea of natural rights, to natural justice, to national democracy.  That one idea was a gift from heaven, a gift that Christianity gave to the socio-political world; a gift that the human dignity deniers use to defeat human dignity.  After all, their opinion wouldn't matter if we did not think human beings were willed for their own sake.  See the contradiction?  They affirm human dignity in one breath, and deny it in the other if they are held to their principles. Affirm it for themselves based on self-preservation, but deny it for others.  Seems like a check-mate, except that Nietzsche says that existence is contradiction.  So to be contradictory in statements is ok.  You can't argue with someone who denies non-contradiction, but you need to decide if you can live with the idea that there is no truth, that everything you argue for is simply a chimera in a cosmic game.  Do you have an opinion on something? Well, on Nietzsche's philosophy that is nothing but a mask for a will to power.  Can you live with the idea that all of your thoughts are meaningless, that opinions are meaningless, that arguing is meaningless?  Then you can be Nietzschean.  I would like to ask Nietzsche why arguments at all?  A biological process for survival?  Ok, then why do thought processes help us survive?  Why does reality correspond to our thought?  Perhaps truth is layered in reality?  Herr Nietzsche, why did you spend so much time arguing if they are pointless?  Ultimately, the question  we face is, truth or no?  Nietzsche or Aquinas?

Socrates does well in defeating the arguments of Thrasymachus and shows that, no matter outcomes, to be just means to do good to those under your power.  The just soul is the happy soul.  We need really to question the dominant thought process of our culture, which is a will to power relativism that leaves tyrants in charge of us.  The failed pagan ideas that we are reinventing in the guise of secularism, will of course destroy the good thing we've had going, where the rule of law reigned triumphant.  We will suffer through it, remake the bloody mistakes, come back to God, and then fade away again.  The slaves already rule the herd; the nihilists are everywhere in their anti-God psuedo-sophistication. We could hope these eugenicists return to reason, but to do so would mean returning to God. Unfortunately, to understand God's power, we have to experience His absence.  We are a sickly bunch.