Nietzsche inspires mass murder? Oh please…

There’s nothing like pointing to a biased selection of the fans of a given writer to make the writer responsible for the fans’ mistakes and ill deeds. The various authors of the gospels of the Bible have undoubtedly been attributed responsibility for some pretty heinous deeds, not all of which I think they would support. Bombing abortion clinics I would think rates a mention – as gory as The Good Book^tm can get, I think it somewhat of a stretch to draw biblical support for the practice (although feel free to show me I’m wrong.)

Marx copped the same. Somehow the Soviet Union and every other communist regime is the perfect exemplar of what Marx intended. No matter that precisely none of these regimes went through a late-capitalist stage as Marx projected.

Not that I’m shilling for Marx or the various authors (and subsequent editors and re-writers) of The Bible. It’s just an easy thing to do and sloppy thinking. The ad hoc or post hoc references to any given author seeking justification for a deed, don’t make the author responsible for the deed.

It’s true for Marx and the ad hoc Bolshevist arguments. It’s true for The Bible and a heap of right-wing Christian literalism. It’s true for von Hayek and many libertarian right fundamentalists. It’s true for Charles Darwin and the social Darwinists who appropriate his name.

It’s also true for Nietzsche and many the various lunatics who have cited him as justification for their lunacy. But that doesn’t stop people trying to make the mud stick.

Enter Katherine Ramsland, Ph. D. Graduate of the private, exclusive, Catholic DeSales University, founded by the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, who base their teachings on the theology of the said saint.

St. Francis de Sales is said to have received divine inspiration from his sword falling from his horse and forming a cross (so?), apparently a message from God. He also believed that whatever God had in plan for him (or anyone), it was God for by definition, God is love. I wish de Sales had travelled to the Amazon. Nothing says love like a candiru, I guess.

In any case, de Sales was a slave moralist extraordinaire and it follows that the University baring his name would inherit this at least in part. Nietzsche couldn’t have been viewed favourably in their philosophy courses and maybe not even Kierkegaard.

This however, only informs us in part of Ramsland’s cultural background and motives. It doesn’t mean that she or anyone else from her institution have treated Nietzsche in bad faith.

So what does she actually say?

“Close friends with homosexual leanings, they had an odd relationship. Leopold worshipped Loeb, who had no conscience and who liked to push the social envelope, no matter the cost. He appreciated Leopold’s devotion and vulnerability. It was useful. Together, they were dangerous… Leopold was an avid reader of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and was especially taken with the idea that superior men are not bound by social moral codes… Leopold did not have to work hard to persuade Loeb that they were among those exceptional beings and could prove it by committing the perfect crime.”

(Katherine Ramsland, 2008)

Ramsland calls her article “Existential Murder: The Nietzsche Syndrome” and claims that “Nietzsche inspired Hitler and other killers.”

What the homosexuality of Leopold and Loeb have to do with anything is beyond me (although it does break with slave morality (and apparently homosexuality is a serious threat to humanity according to the current Pope.) Furthermore, ad hoc and post hoc references do not constitute inspiration. Nobody (with a brain) buys the “Devil made me do it” line in court, and the same standard applies here.

Ramsland tells us that Leopold didn’t have to work hard to sell his version of Nietzsche to Loeb, which rather strongly suggests a prior motive, which of course Ramsland alludes to when she talks about the pair being raised in a privileged area of Chicago. The crimes of Leopold and Loeb aren’t down to Nietzsche.

Then Ramsland drags out Tulloch and Parker, Tulloch being the megalomanic, psychopath leading the teenage duo. Tulloch, of course, read Nietzsche and naturally read what he wanted to of it.

Ramsland has the gall to ask “But just what did Nietzsche actually say?”, as if she is interested in the question.

Now here’s the catch, which Ramsland doesn’t disclose. If what Tulloch took from Nietzsche was consistent with Nietzsche’s philosophy, Nietzsche has some part to play. If it’s a laboured parsing, picking the parts one likes and ignoring the greater context, the clearly Tulloch would be selecting from Nietzsche according to some pre-existing criteria. If the latter, then Nietzsche didn’t inspire the murders.

After an in parts too-literal treatment of an in parts rhetorical Nietzsche, an overly simplistic (and arguably wrong if you take it to represent a dichotomy) rendition of master-slave morality,  Ramsland takes a flying leap breaking right through Godwin’s Law.

Hitler liked Nietzsche. So what? Hitler also liked Catholic integralism.

It doesn’t mean a thing if it’s post hoc. Hitler’s use of positive Christianity was only ever a use of a resource that was there. Hitler didn’t just get up one morning, consider Chistianity and arrive at the notion that Germany should invade Poland. He and his goons had pre-existing objectives and then they cherry picked parts of Christianity they felt would work well together.

If Nietzsche was so different, why the purging from German universities of philosophers who interpreted Nietzsche, not in keeping with the party line?

Of course, it’s easy to bag Nietzsche given the way his last years were spent. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Will to Power and The Anti-Christ, and their harsh critiques speak all the more loudly that Nietzsche didn’t get to undertake his re-evaluation of the very values he critiqued. There is no guarantee, nor arguably is it likely that what he would have come up with would have matched Hitler or Tulloch. Tulloch was a psychopathic teenager and Hitler wasn’t exactly an intellectual par excellence as was Nietzsche.

Ramsland goes on to note:

“William Shirir writes in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that while Nietzsche was never anti-Semitic, Hitler basically saw what he wanted to see in Nietzsche’s writings. “Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and published his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man.”"

(Katherine Ramsland, 2008)

She acknowledges that Hitler saw in Nietzsche’s work, what he wanted. In order to see what you want, you have to have pre-existing motivations. Hence Ramsland must realise that this doesn’t constitute inspiration. How does she follow up on this point?

“Thus, regardless of what he hoped for, Nietzsche offered grounds for the reprehensible Nazi ideology of a superior race exercising its will to power as it saw fit. Hitler was living out what Nietzsche had envisioned, trying to prove himself to be the Übermensch and the precursor of the Master race.”

(Katherine Ramsland, 2008)

Um. So Hitler selectively quoted Nietzsche, taking him out of context and yet Nietzsche is responsible? And as for what Nietzsche envisioned of the Übermensch, that’s extremely contentious. There is no consensus that Nietzsche’s Übermensch is in any way grounded in biology. There is no consensus as to if there is one singular Übermensch as a goal for humanity, or the transition of all of humanity to Übermenschen, or a part thereof. There is no consensus as to how important the Übermensch is to Nietzsche. Is the journey toward the Übermensch more important than the arrival of Übermensch itself?

These and more are all popular points of contention, hence one can not barely assert that Hitler’s actions were a living out of Nietzsche’s vision. And yet, Ramsland should realise this.

“It’s unlikely he would have viewed a petty, dysfunctional and tyrannical little man like Hitler as the Übermensch that would usher in a new age of self-realization and cultural achievement. Yet Hitler was indeed a “monster filled with joy” with the “conscience of a beast of prey,” as Nietzsche described. Vague phrasing provided a certain flexibility of interpretation.”

(Katherine Ramsland, 2008)

Flexibility of interpretation that Ramsland is exploiting in much the same way, although rather than to endorse Hitler with Nietzsche, to smear the latter with the former.

What Ramsland is telling us is that if your work can be taken out of context and appear to support evil deeds, then your work truly does inspire evil deeds. What hope then for The Bible (or indeed, anything a theist has published – consider the Pope’s recent homosexuality-is-a-threat-to-humanity trope for example: NAZIs did kill gays as well)?

Rafay and Burns, Baranyi and Anderson, both pairs of killers Ramsland uses for evidence, suffer the same post hoc symptom as Leopold and Loeb and thus can be disregarded as far as their relationship to the work of Nietzsche goes. Ad nauseum is a fallacy after all. Ian Brady can be disregarded as an examplar of the Nietzschian for the same reasons Hitler can be overlooked. Again, Ramsland’s use of Brady is an Ad nauseum fallacy.

Maybe I should have called this blog entry Ramsland: Ad Nauseum²?

No. Perhaps not. With Carl Panzram, someone who probably didn’t read much, much less Nietzsche, Ramsland, taking advantage of “flexibility of interpretation” and channelling Ian Brady’s odious (and for Ramsland, convenient) interpretation,  just asserts that his behaviour is in line with what Nietzsche proposes. Saying of Panzram at his trial:

“Then he said, “There’s something else you ought to know. While you were trying me here, I was trying all of you, too. I’ve found you guilty. Some of you, I’ve executed. If I live, I’ll execute more of you. I hate the whole human race. Now I’ve done my duty, you do yours.” That sounds like someone who appreciates the moral relativity that Nietzsche proposed.”

(Katherine Ramsland, 2008)

I await Ramsland’s selection of the most violent interpretation of Christian scripture as exemplary, and her publication through de Sales University of a critique of how Jesus and the Pope inspire pogroms and mass murders. *

She has that degree of academic freedom, doesn’t she?

All the same, I’m thinking this line of un-reasoning from Ramsland, this desperate smearing of Nietzsche, smells of the angst and nihilism of some of the worst post-Death of God, ultra-traditional theism I’ve ever caught a wiff of.

~ Bruce

* No, seriously I don’t. What I do expect is more pop-psychology pap.