From Homer to the Unabomber: Declinists Across the Ages
Article Summary
There have always been prophets of decline, as Arthur Herman notes in his survey of pessimists, but they have not always been wrong. Nietzsche, a declinist, identified the hallmark of mass culture: the erosion of individual authenticity.
Artists and intellectuals being by nature driven to seek fame, the inevitable obscurity of most of them generates vast amounts of disappointment, readily projected as pessimistic assessments of countries, races, eras, or whole civilizations. Herman dutifully collates many such cases, although to merit inclusion in his book all of these embittered failures must finally have achieved at least a modicum of fame, if only after their deaths.
A TRANSITIONAL SPECIES
Herman is less persuasive, and finally entirely unconvincing, because of his assumption, implicit in the search for an explanation, that all pessimistic predictions are simply wrong. He does not seem to recognize that farsighted thinkers can warn of a future less than wholly bright, or even terrible, for perfectly good reasons that owe nothing to their own physical decay, bitterness at personal failure, or simplistic projections of the lifecycle onto cultures and civilizations. He himself cites Friedrich von Schlegel's contemporary warning that the French Revolution had inaugurated a terrible new era of "unselfish crimes," in which "love of virtue" and belief in the perfectibility of man and society would inspire atrocities far worse than those of any conquering horde. Yet Herman writes as if unaware of how accurate von Schlegel's prediction has turned out to be, down to the Khmer Rouge -- so far. One strand of German Romanticism found its most degraded expression in the death camps, but another tried all along to avert that evil, along with Stalin's and Mao's, with urgent, solidly argued, and utterly lucid warnings, all of which a progress-intoxicated world rejected as too pessimistic.
Likewise, in surveying the nineteenth-century German racial pessimists, Herman is efficient as always in summarizing the views of Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who promoted Darwinism in Germany and was the founding father of "ecology" (his coinage), without recognizing Haeckel's wider insights. Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe (1899), transcending its roots in biology, progresses by a series of simple yet profound arguments to show that the sharp disequilibrium between the technological progress of contemporary European civilization and its moral primitivism amid dogmatic religion, unhinged individualism, and assorted superstitions and taboos must lead to a political catastrophe. Only the revelation that humans are merely evolving vertebrates rather than nature's masters and owners as "the image of God" can open the way to a new equilibrium with the natural world and all its living beings -- the conventional wisdom of today's Democrats and Republicans alike and of a growing proportion of humanity everywhere, from Swedish dentists to Thai farmers. But for Herman, Haeckel is simply a bad guy, partly because of his loathing for religion (actually, Haeckel merely detested the infernal certitudes of monotheistic religions) and partly because of his honorary chairmanship of the Society for Racial Hygiene, which advocated eugenics and euthanasia but which was not anti- Semitic. (Haeckel, as Herman acknowledges, contemptuously dismissed the racism of Wagner's English son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain.) For the society's founder Alfred Ploetz, all that mattered was that Jews and Aryans were physiologically identical.
THE OPTIMISTIC DECLINIST
That Herman has trouble with his Germans becomes evident in his factually accurate yet fundamentally misguided treatment of Nietzsche, perhaps the most optimistic of the declinists. Because many of Herman's subsequent declinists, including Adorno, Foucault, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Sartre, as well as battalions of American cultural critics down to the Unabomber, derived their better ideas directly or indirectly from Nietzsche, Herman's misconception is consequential for much of the book. Characteristically, Herman attributes
Nietzsche's "loathing for the military" to a tumble off a caisson during his compulsory service as a student reserve officer in the Prussian army's field artillery. Yet Herman reproduces enough of Nietzsche's thought to show that the philosopher would have fiercely opposed the slavishness militarism demands, and its destructive consequences at the collective level, even if his military training had gone splendidly, with medals won for dashing charges and admiring young ladies swept off their feet.
The failure-revenge explanation does not apply in Nietzsche's case. The product of what was then the world's finest education, in 1869, at the astoundingly young age of 24, Nietzsche went straight from his studies at the University of Bonn and Leipzig to the philology chair at Basel to teach what was then the most important subject in the humanities, at a time and in a place when university professor was a most prestigious occupation, and not badly paid either. It was therefore as a recognized prodigy, a worldly success, and a popular lecturer to boot that Nietzsche set out on his quest.
At the level of the individual, Nietzsche saw authenticity of feeling and expression drowned by the routine insincerity, moralistic claptrap, and acquisitive compulsions of mass society under capitalism (and he never had the experience of being "networked" 1990s-style at casual social gatherings). But socialism was no better -- just as materialistic and even more reliant on the state's enslaving mechanisms. And Nietzsche was far too realistic to accept Rousseau's "return to nature," which could only mean a peasant's life of squalid poverty.
