Glover Chapter 2 – Nietzsche’s Challenge
To start, I hate Nietzsche and think all Nietzschean schools of thought should fade into obscurity where they belong. Good, now that’s out of the way; Glover genuinely surprised me with this chapter. I was expecting some type of Gran Turismo swerve as is normally the case when it comes to Nietzsche to avoid the unpalatable parts of his work. Many who find something inspiring in his work tend to swerve around the ruthlessness and egoism admired by Nietzsche to salvage the shaky self-creation message of his philosophy…like pulling all the toppings off a slice of a deluxe pizza before eating it and still tossing out the crust. Thankfully, however, Glover didn’t entirely disappoint, instead choosing to knock it out of the park with “If such a world is really the result of Nietzsche’s thought, it seems a nightmare.”.
Unfortunately, however, Glover does also attempt to swerve somewhere around the end of the chapter, and he fails because the truth is that you cannot swerve around the problematic aspects of Nietzsche and still call the parts left Nietzsche. Taking the pizza analogy again, you can hardly call a deluxe pizza ‘deluxe’ once you’ve pulled off all the toppings; with Nietzsche, you cannot pull off the misogyny, ableism, racism, and classism ingredients from the Nietzsche pizza because then it’s just not a Nietzsche pizza anymore. You cannot have unrestrained self-creation without an opposing measure to that self-creation. If there is a strong, then there is a weak in which that strong transformed from, therefore, it stands to reason that there still exists weak opposing measures out there, and in the Nietzschean mind, those weak opposing measures to self-creation are women, disabled people, poor people, and radicalized people.
And if you decide to eat the Nietzschean pizza as it comes? Well then, you’ve accepted justification for the consequences of the fully Nietzschean recipe; consequences relative to human security such as rape culture, extreme poverty, systemic racism, and eugenics…or, philosophical food poisoning, if you will.
Glover Chapter 3/4 – Self-Interest as Restraint / The Moral Resources
Keeping on with Glover, we finally set aside the burnt Nietzschean pizza and get into the meat of why collective society isn’t purely awful all the time. The concept of self-interest as restraint, and when that fails, the moral resources—revulsion and admiration, respectively, powered by the human responses of respect for humanity and sympathy — of the collective society keeping the lot in check is, in my opinion, the most reasonable measure to not only ensure collective morality (and by extension, human security), but to ensure accountability and justice in the face of abject cruelty. And while I am certain that you’re sick of hearing it, I will use the ongoing genocide in Gaza as an example, but specifically the Canadian New Democratic Party’s permanent ceasefire and arms embargo with Israel that passed this Sunday.
See? Shaming works. Okay, sure, not completely because Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly pulled a ‘gotcher-nose’ by refusing to revoke existing permits for military goods to Israel; but I digress…baby steps.
Jokes aside, while tens of thousands in Gaza have been effectively exterminated by Israel with the aid of Canadian arms and Canadian-Israeli soldiers, victims which include Palestinian-Canadians trapped there; the Canadian Government’s decision to continuously support Israel, sitting steadfast like a trained dog at the heels of the U.S. becomes a perplexing one. That said, it is only the efforts of collective Canadian citizens who have protested week after week since October 7th, through the bitter cold of winter, repulsed by the actions of their government, that dissent has even reached Ottawa.
I believe, to a certain degree, that a government is only as strong as its people allow for and that a country’s leadership should reflect its people. So, when the people start boycotting businesses, clogging up the streets, and interrupting Prime Minister Trudeau’s dinner at a restaurant to demand accountability and change, they do so by utilizing those moral resources for the benefit of human security.
References
Glover, J. (2000). Humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century. Yale University Press.
ma guarda quante stelle nel cielo 