Why a Bronze Age restoration falls short.
The new print issue of National Review features an essay of mine on “Bronze Age Pervert,” Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy, and the inner resources of the present. Here’s how it opens:
I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in a used-book store. Nietzsche glared in angry profile on the cover. His gaze drilled into the surface of reality, and a walrus-like mustache covered his mouth. The publisher’s blurb on the back said that Nietzsche had “produced a devastating diagnosis of the worthlessness of contemporary existence.” Sold.
It was 1998 in the Massachusetts suburbs — basically, Ground Zero for the end of history. Reading Nietzsche was like sticking a fork in an electric socket. A jagged current raced through the prose. This “philosophy of the future” was about daring, transgression, experimentation — life.
The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, live-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding.
For Nietzsche, philosophy was not about abstract arguments — spiderwebs of pseudo-mathematical symbols — but about the marrow of living. Every work of philosophy had been “a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” that revealed the inner pressures of the philosopher. A phenom of classical philology laid to waste by ill health, Nietzsche saw 19th-century Europe as mired in decadence. His most famous philosophical character, the prophet Zarathustra, warns of the blinking, diminished last men and points toward some future renewal as the Overman takes the stage.
Over the course of a year, I gobbled down his books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Gay Science, Ecce Homo. Nietzsche was so obviously smart. And well read. And imaginative. And clever. And funny. He is maybe the perfect gateway drug to philosophy. Even if you understand him on the shallowest level (as I almost certainly did), you still get some payoff. Yes, I found his dismissal of Christianity unpersuasive. But reading him was like witnessing a lion on the savanna: The muscles rippling under the flesh could not be denied.
Costin Alamariu also had a teenage turn toward Nietzsche. “My obsession with Nietzsche started when I was sixteen years old,” he writes in the preface to Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, the published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation. At the core of his argument is that both philosophy and tyranny are essentially criminal — both call for the overthrow of convention and celebrate strength. Many have reported that Alamariu is “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), the pseudonymous Nietzschean epigone who has many readers on the further edges of the political Right — including many Trump White House staffers. Alamariu has never denied that he is BAP, and Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy offers a theoretical infrastructure for many of the central tenets of BAP’s best-selling Bronze Age Mindset. The reworked dissertation itself became one of the top-selling books on Amazon shortly after its release….
The commentary on Nietzsche becomes a springboard for a discussion of Alamariu’s dissertation on philosophy and tyranny as well as for a broader reflection on the “Bronze Age Pervert” project.
I think “res ipsa loquitur” (“the thing speaks for itself”) is often the best motto for essays like this. I won’t say too much more about it right now (other than to invite you to read the whole thing! I’m very excited to see it in print), but I’ll extend a few points here.
A deeper sense of dissatisfaction is perhaps one of the reasons why Bronze Age Pervert’s work has gotten the hearing that it has in many corners, including among many up-and-coming staffers in Washington, DC. As I was writing as far back as 2015, populism has in part been inspired by the spectacle of elite ineptness and divisiveness. Moreover, modernity has certain trade-offs, frustrations, and disappointments—fodder for the sociological analysis of Max Weber, the fiction of Kafka, and the poetry of T. S. Eliot.
In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. (From Eliot’s The Waste Land)
In this setting, radical critique is a tempting enterprise. Intellectual and political ambitions probably only add to the sheen of that temptation.
Yet I think that project of radical critique has at least two major flaws: It could lead to undesirable practical outcomes (burn down the tainted house! often does), and it could also be blind to some of the virtues of the present. The conservative theorist Yuval Levin has said that one of the major traits of the conservative tradition is gratitude, which comes from the recognition of good things. And I think it’s possible to show gratitude without at the same time embracing complacency.
As I suggest in my National Review piece, a lot of “vitalist” politics speaks to an understandable frustration, but the vitalist celebration of strength and power might not be much of an escape from modernity. In fact, it might instead be the escalation of the modern obsession with power—the ultimate extension of Rene Descartes’s claim that we should become the masters and possessors of nature. A version of “liberalism” that reduces politics merely to the preservation of “bare life” and a vitalism that reduces politics to “bare strength” might be two sides of the same coin of the currency of modernity distorted.
But I think there are alternatives that remain beyond “bare life” and “bare strength”—and those alternatives remain open to us in the present. Our contemporary moment has more resources than some declinists admit.
I think of Leo Strauss’s 1941 lecture on German nihilism.
I believe that Nietzsche is substantially correct in asserting that the German tradition is very critical of the ideals of modern civilization, and those ideals are of English origin. He forgets however to add that the English almost always had the very un-German prudence and moderation not to throw out the baby with the bath, i.e. the prudence to conceive of the modem ideals as a reasonable adaptation of the old and eternal ideal of decency, of rule of law, and of that liberty which is not license, to changed circumstances. This taking things easy, this muddling through, this crossing the bridge when one comes to it, may have done some harm to the radicalism of English thought; but it proved to be a blessing to English life; the English never indulged in those radical breaks with traditions which played such a role on the continent. Whatever may be wrong with the peculiarly modern ideal: the very Englishmen who originated it, were at the same time versed in the classical tradition, and the English always kept in store a substantial amount of the necessary counterpoise. While the English originated the modern ideal the pre-modern ideal, the classical ideal of humanity, was nowhere better preserved than in Oxford and Cambridge.
While I would draw a distinction between American and English traditions, Strauss does here sketch a kind of third way of sanity, one that fuses the classical and the modern. I might push this even further by saying that the weird diversity of American life has the ability to tap into a range of traditions—and by adding that it’s easy to overestimate the value of radicalism in thought. That radicalism might not always be daring but a kind of myopia. Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater might be perspective. It might even be wisdom.
Though the spectacle of contemporary decadence is hard to deny, I can’t avoid being struck even more by the virtues of what endures. These are the virtues of private life—love, marriage, children, friendship, faith, and so forth. These are works of art still charged with wonder.
As I set to work on this, I got the news that the literary critic Helen Vendler had died. This interview affords a good introduction to her intellectual approach. One of the great themes of her work is the sustained thoughtfulness of modern poetry—the intellectual (and emotional!) drama of language. There’s still a lot of good stuff out there; the counsel of alienation is limited.
I’ll close with a quotation from near the end of Matthew McIntosh’s 2017 novel, theMystery.doc, a work that testifies to the endurance of literary ambition:
And I loved—I loved talking with these people, because they—they never lost their idealism…that Spain at one time was a great country. See? And they always, always had it in the back of their mind that their country was a great country. Even though—
M: That it was going to be again, or that it still was?
That it was going to be again……That it was going to be again…
The reaching hand of the ellipsis—as some future greatness waits.
A range of other write-ups of Bronze Age Mindset or Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy:
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