The exotic ideas I sometimes criticize are not just the fancies of our managerial and opinion-forming classes, as we might like to think.  I posted recently – but without explanation, a fault I will rectify now -- that ordinary people who decry the lunacy of our times often accept humdrum versions of the same delusions, even while denying their implications.

I notice, for example, that moderates and conservatives who protest lunatic versions of “marriage” such as polyamory quite often believe that cohabitation without vows and with freedom to change partners is equivalent to marriage.  Again, moderates and conservatives who would consider it totalitarian to forbid women to stay at home to raise their children commonly view women who do choose that way of life as dim bulbs.  And vast numbers of moderates and conservatives who find the ideas I criticize crazy try not to think so because they have internalized the crazy idea that making any judgment about craziness is intolerant.

This is one of the reasons why insanity can make way so rapidly, for the knife of the premises has already been slipped quietly between our ribs – and we have slipped it there ourselves.  And this is why, even though many of the outré symptoms which ordinary people find so ridiculous, offensive, or baffling – such as men in women’s locker rooms -- will eventually fade, the underlying fallacies are likely to outlive them and produce new symptoms, perhaps equally outré.

All too often what we mean in calling ourselves moderate is that we are only moderately lunatic; all too often what we mean in calling ourselves conservative is that although we complain about new craziness, we want to conserve the craziness we have swallowed already.

I have had five conversations with the renowned Dr. Peter Kreeft of Boston College on his EWTN podcast, "The Philosophers' Bench," and you can listen to them all:

The Differences Between Men and Women

The Natural Law

Human Conscience and its Sources

The Virtue of Tolerance

The Nature of Human Happiness

The entire Philosophers’ Bench series can be found here, and I've added a link to our five conversations to this website's Talks page.

BY THE WAY:

I'm told that First Things is migrating its archives to a new server.  For this reason, many of the links to the older First Things articles and book reviews on my Articles page don't function.  Sometime this spring, the problem should be corrected.

As you may have noticed, neither the social media links, the "likes" indicator, nor the RSS feed on my website work either.  I'm sorry, but I'm not tech-savvy enough to fix them.  Some day maybe I will be able to have a new website designed.

Query:

I've been reading some books about Nietzsche and Nietzschean virtues.  Since you're a nihilist-turned-Thomist, how do you now evaluate Nietzsche's list of virtues and his overall concept of virtue?  I'm interested in how Thomism can dialogue with Nietzsche on virtue.  Also, what were some of the major shifts that you had to make in your own thinking about virtue as you moved from Nietzsche to Christianity and then Catholicism?

Reply:

I'm glad to answer, but I’m afraid that Nietzsche doesn’t have a list of virtues, and people who tell you that he does are blowing smoke.  What he actually says is that each people has its own “table of values,” its own list of admired qualities:  For example, the ancient Persians admired telling the truth and shooting arrows straight.  To be sure, Nietzsche himself admires some characteristics, such as strength.  But he doesn’t think that there is any objective validity to any of these lists of qualities.  If by a virtue one means a quality of character it is objectively good to have, then he doesn’t believe that there are any virtues.

In fact, he denies objective truth not only in the moral realm, but in every realm.  To him, every doctrine of how things are is a conquest brought about by sheer power, because there is no “how things are.”  He claims that thought is only a relation among our drives, that rationality is only a kind of thought we cannot get free of, that conscious intentions are only a kind of symptomology, and that we at in at our best when we are in some sense unconscious.

Needless to say, if this were true, then it couldn’t be true.  Not even the statement “There is no objective truth” would have objective truth.

Dialogue is conversation in mutual pursuit of truth.  For someone who doesn’t believe in objective truth, every time we open our mouths we are uttering nonsense, and dialogue is nonsense squared.  Thus dialogue with Nietzsche is literally impossible, and there is no point in attempting it.

You ask what shifts I had to make in my own thinking about virtue as I emerged from the dark night of nihilism.  I would say that the biggest shift was believing again that there can be thinking.  The second biggest – though this took longer -- was learning to think again.

His reply:

Thank you!  That was my hunch.  What then do you suppose is the source and motive for the way writers like those I mentioned read Nietzsche?  Are they pointing to things that aren't really there?  Are they trying to make Nietzsche more palatable by rendering him seem more moderate?  Was Nietzsche just inconsistent?  Or all of the above?

My further response:

Since Nietzsche is so incoherent, it’s easy to read all sorts of things into him.  Some people might do that by accident, whether because they don’t read carefully or because they just can’t believe Nietzsche could be as crazy as he is.  But careless reading can also be highly motivated.  Nihilism thrills a lot of people, who may want Nietzsche to seem less crazy so that they can embrace some version of his lunacy. 

I’ve written from time to time that if we read Nietzsche at all, we should do so for the same reason we culture diphtheria or dissect hookworms:  To study cures.  The problem is that some Nietzscheans are engaged in gain-of-function research.

The recent barrage of executive orders has put some conservatives in a triumphalist frame of mind.  From reverse racism, to gender madness, to the cancerous growth of the administrative state, to the arrest of pro-lifers and the intimidation of people of faith, I keep hearing “The election changed all that.  It’s all coming to an end.”

No, it isn't.  Exhilaration is good, hope is necessary, but triumphalism is naïve.

Don’t misunderstand me:  The new executive orders ameliorate some of the most grievous excesses of the previous administration, and I have been delighted to see them.  They are also being rolled out with great cleverness.  The generals seem to realize that there is no need to begin with new legislation, because so many of the odious things the agencies do are not backed by any law whatsoever.  First, carefully strip the agencies of all these unauthorized functions; this builds a constituency for further change.  Then repeal or amend the law itself, something much more difficult and time consuming.  I might wish that our legislature weren’t so feckless, but it is.  If it weren’t, the agencies couldn’t have got away with all these things in the first place.

This is obviously a well-planned war.

But unless there is a change in how people think about these matters, the next administration could reverse the reversal.  Even now, too many people either don’t grasp what has been going on, or remain in denial.  Keep in mind that many of these executive orders merely reverse lunatic executive actions of so-called progressive administrations.  In another four years, conservative shock and awe could be succeeded by new shock and awe waged by yet another wave of lunatic progressives.

After all, promoters of the various lunacies are deeply entrenched.  Many of those who remain in the federal bureaucracies will quietly resist.  Those who do leave federal government will find plenty of other opportunities to go on doing what they do, whether in state government or the vast ecosystem of non-governmental organizations and pressure groups.  The craziest people continue to be attracted disproportionately to the places in which they can do the most harm, including the public schools, and they still dominate most of our other opinion-forming institutions.  And everything could be derailed by the courts.

In the meantime, the lunacies themselves persist, and this is especially true of gender, sexual, and identity lunacies.  Rampant sexual dysphoria among adolescents and young adults is fueled more by social media than by federal policy.  An executive order declaring that there are only two sexes won’t end “What are your pronouns?” exercises in local public schools.  If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people "gender-affirming care," don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood -- about God and man, men and women, adults and children – and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this:  Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too.  They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions.  They want the poison apple, without the worm.

The culture wars didn’t begin overnight, and they won’t end overnight.  The lunatics are in for the long haul, and those who don’t fancy lunacy had better be in for it too.

Good afternoon, everyone.  I’ve just posted links to two new essays of mine to the Articles page.

“How Happiness Studies Lets Us Down,” which appeared yesterday in the online edition of First Things.

”Why Is There Something and Not Rather Nothing? Hey, Whatever,” which appeared yesterday in the Cambridge blog Fifteen Eighty Four.

Coming up in Monday’s post:  “Triumphalism.”  Keep your eyes peeled.