Nietzsche was a master wordsmith, and so he effectively projected a bad boy image of himself up on our culture’s screen, an image calculated to make all his maiden Lutheran aunts shudder, and perhaps weep a little. But inside, that man was Burns’ mouse beneath the harrow — a wee timorous beastie. Now this is not said on the basis of an ad hom analysis of his fear of women, or how he ended his life in madness, and so forth. Such biographical analysis is perfectly legit, and would add to this discussion greatly, but this particular point can be made simply on the basis of looking squarely at and deconstructing his projected fantasy world, where all the women were fair and all the men were brave. And he was the bravest, and the fairest was going home with him tonight. “Take that, all ye who made fun of me in junior high!” Outside, teeming in the streets, were the great unwashed, the hoi polloi. And yes, I know, hoi is the article in Greek, and so I just said “the the many,” but it sounds pretentious to say “the great unwashed, hoi polloi.” Where was I?
Nietzsche is often credited, rightly in my view, with being the father of postmodernism, falsely so-called. Of course, postmodernism isn’t post anything, and is every bit the shuck n’ jive sham-meister that Nietzsche was. This can be seen in various ways . . . Where was I? It is only a rambling post if you have to ask that three times.
Okay, then, one marked feature of our contemporary culture is the pronounced tendency of the liberal mentality to make a royal nuisance of itself to others, and then, when the inevitable results of such a policy come home to roost, to retreat into self-appointed victim status, and to hold a pity party that looks like High Tea at Buckingham Palace. Just as homosexuals deep in the closet can heap all kinds of scorn on other expressions of homosexuality, so also and for very similar reasons sentimentalists deep in the closet (like our man Nietzsche) present themselves to the world as ardent foes of the sentimental. But the trick is an elementary one — just because you have altered the objects of your sentiment does not mean that you are functioning in a different way. There is a great difference between a sentimentalist who merely shifts his loyalties and a sentimentalist who stops being one. Have you really repented of sentimentalism because you switched channels and are now weeping over a completely different soap opera?
Who cannot see at a glance that Nietzsche’s world is a cartoon, and that a warrior princess could not really have a cinched-up bosom like that and further, if she did, she would be worthless with a bow and arrow?
And this brings me to my final point. The subtext in virtually all of the sexual clashes in our culture wars is this one — maudlin self-pity and heroism on the cheap. It doesn’t take much to be heroic in this sentimentalist world. One form of heroism, a current favorite, is having to submit to some hard heart somewhere recognizing what an idiot you were being. Another is to sin yourself into a bad jam, and then walk away from it kinda, preferably using twelve steps. This one is just plain weird. The prodigal son was right to repent, but he was not a hero for having done so. Another is to ask for medals for doing the hard work of reaping what you have sown.
Many staunch Christians in the culture wars don’t really understand the real undercurrent driving all this madness. They know that homosexual marriage is wrong, that envy-driven, government-mandated theft of private property is wrong, that our massive cultural inversion of ethical standards is wrong, but they don’t know that Nietzsche in his self-loathing did succeed in naming the real enemy — ressentiment. We just need to start holding up that scriptural mirror again, the one Nietzsche was looking at the day he turned white, afterwards commanding all his heirs and assigns to never look in that magic mirror again. For when you look in it, you don’t see the heroic victim you desperately need to see. You just see a sullen punk, and the effect is not nearly so striking or edifying.