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‘God,” Friedrich
Nietzsche famously declared, “is dead.”
God, it has been noted, made a similar yet more lasting pronouncement
about Nietzsche. - Jonah Goldberg
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But before the German philosopher departed this mortal coil, he had
some interesting things to say. Nietzsche argued that one of the most
powerful forces in society was “ressentiment.” Similar to the everyday
word “resentment,” ressentiment lay at the heart of new kinds of
morality. In ancient times, nobility was associated with power. The
downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the enslaved were ignoble.
Today
it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone
other than the ‘privileged’ feel uncomfortable.
The masses of have-nots, to use a more modern language, resented their
plight for understandable reasons. But they were too weak to launch a
real, armed revolution. Instead, the powerless resorted to a moral
revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness, and morality
and rendering them evil in the popular imagination.
[...]
In 2015, our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment.
Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make
anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or
otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or
concepts.
The University of California recently issued a set of guidelines about
the terrible danger of “microaggressions” — small, usually unintended
slights that allegedly hurt the feelings of the newly anointed classes
of victims. One must no longer say that America is a “melting pot,” for
to do so is to suggest that minorities should “assimilate to the
dominant culture,” according to the new moralists at the University of
California.
And one mustn’t say anything that advances “the Myth of Meritocracy.”
Saying “America is the land of opportunity” or “everyone can succeed in
this society if they work hard enough” is now a form of bigotry. Of
course, the surest way to guarantee that America is not a meritocracy
is to teach young people not only that it isn’t one, but that it’s evil
to say it is, or should be, one.
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on ...
