In this final day of 2008, Friedrich Nietzsche provides the thought for the day, and a reminder of the ambiguities that may plague the year to come:
Nietzsche suggests both the connection between love and fear, as well as between the internal and external constitution of community. Much of what has passed for international legal structuring since the second world war has focused on the domestication of the relations between communities--to make what had once been the dangerous drives of the world order before 1939 into something much better ordered. After the structure of a global society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. It is that moral valuation--something internal to communities, and externalized now through a global legal regime that combines values ethics morals and process--that increasingly serves as the idiom through which the old contests for control and domination are voiced. The dangerous drives--essential to the formation of community, and the protection of that community form external threats--are now reconstituted both illegal and immoral.
In both the recent fussing among Israeli's and Palestinians, and the Russians and the peoples on their periphery, and in the reaction of the global community to both are these aspects of Nietzsche's insights much in evidence. Russia Ukraine Gas Talks Collapse, BBC News Online December 31, 2008 ("Gazprom said gas supplies to Ukraine would be cut on Thursday but that Russia would do its best to guarantee supplies to Europe. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier said that Ukraine would block supplies to Europe if no deal was done. "). UN Holds Gaza Crisis Discussion, BBC News Online, Jan. 1, 2009 ("The UN Security Council has discussed a draft resolution calling for an immediate cease fire to halt the Israeli-Palestinian violence. But the meeting failed to vote on the Libyan draft after ambassadors from the US and UK said it contained nothing about Palestinian attacks on Israel. The draft condemned Israel's military action and called on it to cease. Earlier, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert rejected calls for a 48-hour truce to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.").
The policy of states is now grounded in an an elaborate system meant to abolish fear. "Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts--the imperative of herd timidity: "we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!" Some day--throughout Europe, the will and the way to this day is now called progress." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Walter Kaufman, trans. & ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1966) (1886) at Paragraph 201. But the global community will continue to have trouble domesticating relations among communities within systems of morals that presuppose a communion among peoples--a common morality expressed in legal relations. And so violence is now experienced as doubly dangerous, "since the channels to divert them are lacking, and step upon step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander." And in their place, the management of the irreconcilable, and the hope that, in exhaustion, one or the other side will collapse. In the meantime, the contests among them are played out in an increasingly domesticating framework. And so for the coming year "fear is again the mother of morals," (Id.) and morals is the progenitor of law.
"In the last analysis, 'love of the neighbor' is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor. After the structure of a society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain string and dangerous drives, like an enterprising spirit, foolhardiness, vengefulness, craftiness, rapacity, and the lust to rule, which had so far not merely been honored insofar as they were socially useful--under different names, to be sure, from those chosen here--but had to be trained and cultivated to make them great (because one constantly needed them in view of the dangers to the whole community, against the enemies of the community), are now experienced as doubly dangerous, since the chanels to divert them are lacking, and step upon step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander."Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Walter Kaufman, trans. & ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1966) (1886) at Paragraph 201.
Nietzsche suggests both the connection between love and fear, as well as between the internal and external constitution of community. Much of what has passed for international legal structuring since the second world war has focused on the domestication of the relations between communities--to make what had once been the dangerous drives of the world order before 1939 into something much better ordered. After the structure of a global society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. It is that moral valuation--something internal to communities, and externalized now through a global legal regime that combines values ethics morals and process--that increasingly serves as the idiom through which the old contests for control and domination are voiced. The dangerous drives--essential to the formation of community, and the protection of that community form external threats--are now reconstituted both illegal and immoral.
In both the recent fussing among Israeli's and Palestinians, and the Russians and the peoples on their periphery, and in the reaction of the global community to both are these aspects of Nietzsche's insights much in evidence. Russia Ukraine Gas Talks Collapse, BBC News Online December 31, 2008 ("Gazprom said gas supplies to Ukraine would be cut on Thursday but that Russia would do its best to guarantee supplies to Europe. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier said that Ukraine would block supplies to Europe if no deal was done. "). UN Holds Gaza Crisis Discussion, BBC News Online, Jan. 1, 2009 ("The UN Security Council has discussed a draft resolution calling for an immediate cease fire to halt the Israeli-Palestinian violence. But the meeting failed to vote on the Libyan draft after ambassadors from the US and UK said it contained nothing about Palestinian attacks on Israel. The draft condemned Israel's military action and called on it to cease. Earlier, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert rejected calls for a 48-hour truce to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.").
The policy of states is now grounded in an an elaborate system meant to abolish fear. "Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts--the imperative of herd timidity: "we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!" Some day--throughout Europe, the will and the way to this day is now called progress." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Walter Kaufman, trans. & ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1966) (1886) at Paragraph 201. But the global community will continue to have trouble domesticating relations among communities within systems of morals that presuppose a communion among peoples--a common morality expressed in legal relations. And so violence is now experienced as doubly dangerous, "since the channels to divert them are lacking, and step upon step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander." And in their place, the management of the irreconcilable, and the hope that, in exhaustion, one or the other side will collapse. In the meantime, the contests among them are played out in an increasingly domesticating framework. And so for the coming year "fear is again the mother of morals," (Id.) and morals is the progenitor of law.
1 comment:
brinkka2011 says: Remarkably! Thanks!
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