Nietzsche Might Have Something to Say about Politics Today

“The right has clearly learned how to deploy the language of values, while recognizing that we have entered an era where blatantly contradictory positions can be a strength rather than a weakness.”

Introduction

“Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different ‘values’, to use the language of painters?”

–Friedrich Nietzsche

Almost a century and a half ago, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that we were moving from a society that believed in truth, to one that adhered to values. Individuals, no longer able to articulate why they believed in this principle or that one, would gradually come to feel that the mere fact that they believed in a principle was sufficient to establish its credibility. Value talk, in other words, would come to take the place of discussions about moral truth and objectivity.  He also felt that the advance of liberalism and new media, with the rights to free expression realizing itself in the advancement of a growing plurality of agendas, would only deepen this trend. We were moving from a world that believed in truth to one that believed in the values affiliated with our given identities. This is one characteristic of what I have elsewhere called the “post-modern epoch.”

Earlier in the 20th century, many progressives welcomed the emergence of this new post-modern era of values taking the place of truth. We felt that this ideological shift would open the space for new voices to participate in what were once monopolized civic conversations. Many felt that the belief in universal and timeless truths had led Western states to adeptly and dangerously arrogant policies, which they sought to export across the globe through militarism and imperialism. Better by far to drop such hubris and adopt a perspectival stance where each individual’s values and feelings were to be their own prerogative.  Unfortunately, this often mutated into a simultaneous distrust of all opinions that didn’t gel with our own perspectives. Conservative and centrist thinkers who we didn’t approve of were scorned and turned away. Rather than learning from our political opponents, we chose to embrace only those who adhered to our own values.  We self-righteously thought that by silencing those who sought to perpetuate the inequalities of the past that we could prevent new dangers from emerging in the future.  This movement towards what has been vaguely caricatured as political correctness has had such disastrous and unexpected consequences for the movement of progress.