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Having just watched the latest depressing news out of Libya, I can only send a message of sympathy and solidarity to my friend, the London-based freelance journalist and blog editor, Nahla Al-Ageli. She had high hopes of the Arab Spring and for a post-Gadaffi Libya. Indeed, despite the armed gangs of militiamen and the rising threat posed by Al-Qaeda, she still has what we might term revolutionary faith.
For better or for worse, this is something I lost long ago, thanks to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche encourages his readers to reject notions of political redemption and belief in great events. Instead, he advocates a politics of pure resistance based upon opposition to all forms of idolatry (including state idolatry) and a refusal to trust those who promise salvation. By learning how to laugh at our own seriousness and ambition - as well as those who hold positions of leadership and authority - we may be able to offer at least a temporary defense against the desire for some kind of final solution to life's complexity, or the dream of a New Jerusalem.
In an interesting passage of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche warns against revolutionaries who, in an attempt to garner public support, "transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities in order that they might paint them on the wall" [I. 8. 438]. He also argues that whilst political violence can be the source of stimulation via the resurrection of the most savage energies, it can do no more than this. For change of a truly important nature requires something else; not something bigger or more extreme, but, on the contrary, small doses of difference administered homeopathically. Nietzsche writes:
"If a change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time! Can what is great be created at a single stroke? So let us take care not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed for a new evaluation of things head over heels and amid acts of violence ..." [Daybreak, V. 534].
This crucially important passage concludes with a series of remarks on the French Revolution, but which might just as easily be read in relation to the recent upheavals in Libya and elsewhere:
"It is now ... beginning to become apparent that the most recent attempt at a great change in evaluations, and that in a political field – the ‘Great Revolution’ – was nothing more than a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery which knew how, through the production of sudden crises, to inspire ... the hope of a sudden recovery – and which therewith made all political invalids up to the present moment impatient and dangerous." [Ibid.]
As Voltaire reminds us: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu. And this is particularly true when large sections of the public are infected not only with political idealism, but religious mania.
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