Chris Hedges’ 2008 book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, was not a book I planned on reading. It wasn’t in my ever-growing pile of “to-read” books but was something I found in a different sort of pile: a stack of discarded books someone had placed beside the recycling dumpster in my building’s garbage room. Naturally, I flipped through its pages and what I found were a number of striking passages its previous owner had highlighted in bright yellow: “America has become a façade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions”; “At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real”; and: “This endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance.”

I was intrigued. And given how often one hears of the number of Americans described as “divorced from reality” (not to mention all the Nietzsche I’ve been reading), I knew this was something I had to read.

Hedges breaks his book into five chapters. While the first, “The Illusion of Literacy,” does touch on the disturbing percentage of both Americans and Canadians who are functionally illiterate, or who are literate but choose not to read, the real focus of this chapter is the variety of false narratives that inundate American culture as illustrated in the fantasy worlds of professional wrestling, celebrity culture, reality television, and the American entertainment complex as a whole. For Hedges, professional wrestling, with its unambiguous cast of “good guys” and “bad guys,” is popular among America’s working class and poor precisely because the fictional biographies of the wrestlers with their emotionally wrecked lives not only mirror those of the audience but the theatrical storyline, both in an out of the ring, also plays on the fears, xenophobia, and political distrust of those who fill the stands or watch on TV. In this world, “It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others.” It is, what Hedges calls, “the cult of victimhood”—a striking and insightful phrase that in the thirteen years since the book’s publication aptly captures our present cultural moment in which everyone seems to be a victim.

Celebrity worship, Hedges writes, similarly banishes reality as it appeals not only to our “yearning to see ourselves in those we worship” but also offers the false promise that anyone can think of him- or herself as a potential celebrity who possesses “unique if unacknowledged gifts.” For Hedges, the effect of all this is that it creates a “culture of narcissism,” and that “faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality.” It is a message that is reiterated in “popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation, and self-definition,” all of which argue that we are all unique, special, and entitled. Religious platitudes, such as “Jesus loves you,” the false notion that “you can do anything you set your mind to,” or the numerous workshops, seminars, and master classes that promise that “you too” can be a famous writer, actor, chef, or what-have-you all send the message that “we are all entitled to everything,” a message that becomes all the more entrenched in a culture that values individual rights and freedoms above all else. The effect of this, Hedges writes, is that reality is shunned—reality becomes the lie. “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring.” The vast scope of the entertainment industry and the celebrity worship it produces, he argues, has robbed “us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children.” As a recent story on CBC Radio’s As It Happens illustrates, a new study found that what makes conspiracy theories so paradoxically convincing for so many people is directly related to how entertaining they are.

In the chapters that follow Hedges examines the role fantasy plays in other aspects of American life. “The Illusion of Love” is an extremely disturbing look at the porn industry and the utter dehumanization, objectification, and commodification of the women who work in that industry and the crippling effects it has on its male viewers.

In “The Illusion of Wisdom,” Hedges looks at how corporatism has infiltrated American universities, especially among the Ivy League. These schools, he argues, “do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think”; in fact, “they disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is, by nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive.” For Hedges, these universities are little more than vocational institutions that, instead of building minds, build careers, especially with their emphasis on STEM programs, business, and athletics. They have become a means by which one can create an impressive resume and establish important connections. As a result, these universities churn out “stunted men and women,” who are not capable of examining or questioning the system in which they operate but who in fact support it. In a passage that largely echoes Nietzsche, Hedges writes: “A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

Dovetailing on the role that corporatism plays in the American university system, “The Illusion of Happiness,” examines the pernicious effects that positive psychology has, particularly as it is used in “the corporate state,” and the illusion that “the only route to personal fulfillment and salvation” is through the corporation. Positive psychology, Hedges writes, charms by conditioning us to believe that all we need is a positive outlook and anything is possible. However, “like all the other illusions peddled in the culture, [it] encourages people to flee from reality when reality is frightening or depressing.” If we are not happy, the underlying message suggests, there must be something wrong with us; we are to blame; and, in so doing, positive psychology becomes very effective “in keeping people from questioning the structures around them that are responsible for their misery.” However, when it is employed in large corporations, particularly in corporate retreats, workshops, and meetings, its real purpose is to “manipulate people to do what you want”; for to question, criticize, or challenge is seen as “being negative” or “counterproductive”; it suggests one is not a team player. What positive psychology promotes instead is social harmony, and herein lies the danger. Hedges writes:

The promotion of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders.

All oppressive systems of power, Hedges observes, have used social harmony as their ostensible raison d’être but what lies underneath is in fact coercion; it is a control mechanism that suggests happiness can be found in conformity through which the seeds of totalitarianism are sown.

In the last chapter, “The Illusion of America,” Hedges describes the threat that America faces as a result of the many illusions it has created. America, he writes, is entirely founded on the illusion that it purports to celebrate freedom and democracy but in reality is a country that has been taken over by a small privileged group of corporate and political elites. It’s a country he describes as “inverted totalitarianism” in which the anonymity of the corporate state manipulates its “internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions.” (Doesn’t the recent news regarding Facebook’s deliberately divisive use of algorithms report just that?) Like great civilizations of the past, Hedges writes, America too is now in its decline, and its belief in illusions—its sheer disregard for reality—is not just fueling it but accelerating it. He writes:

The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip, and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying society.

Published in 2008, Hedges book is both damning in its examination of the role illusion plays in the American cultural and political landscape and prescient in anticipating the conditions that paved the way for a demagogue like Donald Trump—himself a peddler of illusions—to become president. Although social media was not as pervasive then as it is today, Hedges also accurately predicted that advantages in technology and science, rather than obliterating myth, have actually enhanced its power to deceive, as we clearly see today in in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories online. Even more far-seeing are the writers that Hedges turned to in his research, writers like John Ralston Saul and Daniel J. Boorstin, the latter in particular recognized the danger that lay in America’s addiction to entertainment in his 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (another book I’ve now added to my “to-read” pile). However, if one were look even further into the past for a Cassandra of our present crisis, one need only turn to Nietzsche. For the German philosopher, the various illusions that have taken over the West are the product of the death of the God and the “long shadow” this would cast on society. Although Nietzsche was vehemently opposed to Christianity, as a narrative it provided the rock upon which all truth and morality stood, even if that morality was psychologically pernicious and “anti-life” in its effects. But in the absence of that myth, truth and fiction have now become interchangeable and we now stand on the cusp of nihilism. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, “‘Without the Christian faith,’ Pascal thought, ‘you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos.’” Although Nietzsche often employs Pascal as a foil for his own philosophy, to Pascal’s point Nietzsche concedes: “This prophecy we have fulfilled, after the feeble-optimistic eighteenth century had prettified and rationalized man (WP §83).

As much as I enjoyed Hedges’ book, however, what all discussions that claim to speak from the position of reality fail to acknowledge is their presuppositions on the nature of reality and, therefore, truth. And this too is something that Nietzsche understood, for insofar as our culture claims to value truth, Nietzsche says that it is untruth that constitutes the necessary condition of human life and the preservation of the species (GS §107). Illusion, in other words, is life-sustaining. For Nietzsche, the very fabric of our being rests on illusion; and Christianity, with its metaphysics of punishment and reward, is only one example. Consider as well the countless lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, our inflated or undervalued egos, the “curated” image we project of ourselves on social media or on dating apps—indeed, are not the concepts of faith, hope, and optimism little more than lies to help us get out of bed in the morning? And is it possible to speak of “reality” and still be a regular churchgoer? As well as a journalist, Hedges is also a Presbyterian minister, yet the role religion plays in the “Empire of Illusion” is largely absent from his discussion. For Nietzsche, though—and this key—it is less important whether something is true than whether we believe it to be true (WP §507); for if we knew the truth—about ourselves, about metaphysical questions—it “would lead to nausea and suicide” (GS §107). Nietzsche claims that there are no truths, only “perspectives”; indeed, “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (“Truth and Lie in a Non-moral Sense”). Although this is an admittedly simplistic discussion of Nietzsche’s ideas of truth, the point here—and what Hedges’ book so powerfully illustrates—is that when the metaphysical “truths” that have held society together cease to be valid, and truth and fiction are up for grabs, our entire culture falls into decline.

Since the pandemic began, I’ve dedicated much of my reading to slowly going through the works of Nietzsche, plus occasionally taking in an academic text on his philosophy along the way. Of the latter, no other book has had a more eye-opening impact on my understanding of the German philosopher than Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. What Deleuze offers is in no way the usual summation of Nietzsche’s key concepts typically found in books aimed at either lay readers like myself or undergraduate students. Instead, Deleuze offers a unique and exciting interpretation that is equal parts Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Deleuze’s own brand of philosophy. I wish to focus here on one aspect of Deleuze’s book and that is his interpretation of the eternal return.

For myself, I’ve always understood Nietzsche’s eternal return along the two usual lines of thought: (i) the literal return of the whole of human history in all its tedious sameness, a cyclical process that has been repeating itself an infinite number of times; and (ii) as a thought experiment constituting something of a revision of Kant’s categorical imperative as a determiner of ethical behaviour.

Regarding the former, Deleuze completely rejects this interpretation. Drawing heavily from The Will to Power and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Deleuze argues that, rather than seeing the eternal return as a metaphorical hourglass that endlessly turns over every time the last grains of sand fall through its neck, the return is something that happens continuously, ceaselessly, with the slippage of the present moment into the past and the future into the present. As Zarathustra’s animals say: “In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity” (“The Convalescent” §2; my emphasis).

Understood this way, as the above quote illustrates, the eternal return is inseparable from how we conceive of identity, of being, within this endless cycle.  Deleuze writes:

We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same”. It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. (48)

Within this endless cycle of repetition there is always something new—difference—and therefore there can be no being as such, no equilibrium or stasis, no final resting state, let alone perfection, but only becoming, and becoming is a product of affirmation. As a result, the eternal return must be conceived as a “synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming” (48). This affirmation is inextricable from the will to power (a whole other discussion best left for another time). Understood in this way, Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return is redolent of §26 in The Gay Science, which I quote here in full:

What is life?—Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak—and not only about us. Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer?—And yet old Moses said: “Those shalt not kill.”

In Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, the eternal return is also closely tied to the dice throw, that is to say, the element of chance that lies within that gap of difference in the return. Enormous potentiality and terrifying, exciting, even liberating uncertainty lie in this gap; for the dice throw, Deleuze writes, “affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming” (25). In the section entitled “Before Sunrise,” Zarathustra says, “‘By Chance’—that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under Purpose. This freedom and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like an azure bell when I taught that over them and through them no ‘eternal will” wills.” For Zarathustra, there is no “spider web of reason”; rather, the universe is a “divine table for divine dice and dice players.” What Zarathustra implicitly condemns here is the teleological notion inherent in Christian theology of divine purpose, a notion that, even among some atheists, still retains its superstitious hold: that “everything happens for a reason.” For the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, chance—“this realm of the incalculable”—was called Moira, “and set it around their gods as the horizon beyond which they could neither see nor exert influence” (§130), while Christianity, on the other hand, eliminated chance and called it instead “God’s will” (§130).

For Deleuze, “Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation” (26), and failure to affirm the results of the dice throw is not only demonstrative of not knowing how to play but is also a manifestation of negation, a manifestation of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment—or the spirit of revenge inherent in Christian theology. To play correctly is to celebrate the dice throw and is an intrinsic part of Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati.

Regarding the second aspect of the eternal return, Deleuze writes that as a thought, the eternal return “gives the will a practical rule … as rigorous as the Kantian one” (68). Quoting from the Will to Power, Deleuze adds, “Whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return. ‘If, in all that you will you begin by asking yourself: is it certain that I will to do it an infinite number of times? This should be your most solid centre of gravity.’” (68). Deleuze adds that it is the thought of the eternal return that “eliminates from willing everything which falls outside the eternal return, it makes willing a creation, it brings about the equation ‘willing = creating.’” As a thought experiment, the eternal return is a powerful motor, particularly when it comes to those crossroads in our lives that can determine not only ethical behavior but also the elimination of regret. As only the confident (or fool) can say when looking back on his or her life: “I’d do it all over again if I had to.”

*

Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return is fascinating to consider, and its practical manifestations can be seen all around us. Time-lapse photography depicting, say, the sped-up emergence of a seedling from the ground into a flowering plant over a given number of days is one way of visualizing it. What remains the same in each frame, in every passing moment? What is different? Even the plant itself: what minute differences does it exhibit from other plants of the same species? And how has the species itself evolved over the millennia? And wherever there is difference within this cycle of repetition lies the assertion of something new, an act of creation: the product of the will to power.

Imagine as well the Olympic diver or the concert pianist, both of whom have practiced their moves countless times, yet no two performances are ever the same. For the diver, the multiple spins and final splash will always be slightly different; for the pianist there is always the chance of the discordant note—and it is this element of chance and the enormous potential for the unexpected, for error, that makes the diving competition or the piano concert a thrill to watch.

But of course, that’s to view the eternal return in terms of specific actions that by definition involve repetition, for we need not look any further than our own lives to understand Deleuze’s interpretation. For myself, reading Deleuze’s book coincided with the 15th anniversary of the death of my partner in Korea, and to mark the occasion I went through old photo albums of my time there. What struck me as I gazed at those old pictures was how everything in them, and not just my partner, is now dead. Who I was then is not the person I am today—that person is long gone. And much of what I had once affirmed in myself—my interests and preoccupations, my desires, my Korean language skills, my beliefs, semi-closeted identity during those years—I no longer affirm, or those that I do are of a different quantity, a different quality, different directions. Even my body is not the same. I have aged. Even the children (my partner’s niece and nephew) who sit on our shoulders in one photo in particular, no longer exist; that is to say, who they are today is a mystery to me and would no doubt be unrecognizable if I were to pass them on the street. The city of Seoul, too, the entire ethos of the place, is no longer the same. The world of the early 2000s, the world prior to social media and smart phones, prior to Trump, to pandemics, a world in which the US was about to invade Iraq and all that that unleashed, may as well be ancient history. As the cliché goes, photos capture an instant in time, but when considered in terms of Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return, photos also offer a vivisection of the multiplicity of forces at play, both conscious and unconscious, positive and negative, internal and external, active and reactive; forces that the subject is capable of willing, of affirming, and forces that act upon the subject (my semi-closeted life at the time; the cancer that, perhaps even then, had taken root in my partner’s body and slowly began to assert its dominance)—forces, in short, that are far too complex and many to fully appreciate in all their breadth. But what hit me like a thunderbolt as I gazed at those photos after having read Deleuze’s book was discovering why I sometimes find it impossible to reply to emails from old friends and acquaintances from that time who have reached out: they wouldn’t know me. I am no longer the person they remember, and neither is my correspondent; we cannot return to the past, to the beings we once were in that moment in time in that never-ending process of becoming.

And all at once I understood what it was that drives all those who flout social-distancing rules, who party with their friends, who get on airplanes to vacation in sunny climes: it’s an expression of the will to life—at least that’s what it pretends to be on the surface: an adamant refusal to abandon all vestiges of what we believe is our free will. I say “vestiges of free will” not only because of the many can’ts that constitute our current lockdown but also because the notion of “free will” that we moderns treasure so highly, according to Nietzsche, is actually a misnomer. We have no free will, he argues, or very little of it, as so much of our lives is constrained by convention, laws, rules, social pressures, and of course, morality as it’s evolved through the influence of Christianity. Indeed, the moral and social principles governing modern democratic societies demand the sacrifice of free will in exchange for the fetters inherent in a full-time job, a mortgage, car payments, children. We are a slave to our credit cards, to our so-called possessions, not to mention any number of addictions, including that most subtle and insidious one: social media. Even good manners are a reflection of the suppression of the will. And so, to flirt with danger, to secretly break the rules and party with friends, to fly down to the Caribbean with the family for a few weeks offers the delicious, tingling sensation of being alive, the illusion of freedom—in short, a bold assertion of the will. But that’s all it can be, an assertion of the will. Given the rising numbers of covid-19, the record number of deaths, the rapid spread of even more infectious variants, such actions are anything but life-preserving; rather, they are what Nietzsche would deem as nihilistic. “So many people just don’t care until it happens to them,” is something I often hear said about those who display a cavalier attitude in the face of the pandemic. But the fact is that they do care, only what they care about is avoiding the deadening feeling of seeing a ghost of themselves in a closet full of unworn clothes, a refusal, in other words to abandon the will, even if it is as the cost of their own lives or the lives of others. It’s the thesis of the third essay in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: that “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”

What is interesting, too, is that it at last took something like this—as opposed to all the other countless other infractions—for many, even some from within his own party, to at last call for Trump to be forcibly removed from office. His first impeachment obviously went nowhere in trying to accomplish that, but what has struck me as remarkable was that there was no similar call for his removal when—which example to choose from?—he encouraged his supporters this past summer to vote by mail and in-person (a felony that barely made a blip in the news and would have seen any other Western leader out of a job); nor was there any call for his immediate removal after the recording of his conversation with a state official in Georgia urging him to find another 11,780 votes were released. There was no call for his immediate removal after the violent suppression of Black Lives Matter protestors this past summer in order for Trump to proceed with a photo-op. Not even his complete mismanagement and response to the pandemic, which has resulted in the deaths of some 400,000 Americans and counting, rouse calls for him to be forcibly removed from office. What it took, in other words, was the siege of the Capitol Building, which, like many things of late, reminded me of Nietzsche.

In section 10 of the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that as a community grows in strength and confidence in its own power, it ceases to take individual transgressions as seriously because they don’t pose a threat to the community. But with any weakening or imperilling of the community, he says, comes harsh punishment that is often incommensurate with the crime. Take North Korea for example: a country so completely lacking in confidence in itself that the smallest perceived threat to the regime will land three generations of the offender’s family in a labour camp. Recall, too, the kind of swift and massive mobilization, lockdown, and all-out, high-tech manhunt that resulted when two kids in their twenties blew up a bomb in Boston in 2013: a sharp contrast to the almost indifferent, disorganized, half-hearted response by the administration to the far more deadlier threat of the coronavirus. A terrorist attack: Unthinkable! We’ll never stand for it! But a pandemic: Oh well, whachagonna do? But again, as long as the offence doesn’t pose a threat to the institutions of the community, outrage is far more muted.

Which brings me to the language that is frequented invoked in the case of last week’s storming of the Capitol Building. An “attack on the temple of democracy” is how Biden and others have described it, its most “sacred of institutions.” As mentioned in an earlier post regarding the morality of mores, because so much of the American political system is deeply entrenched in tradition, that which is traditional invariably becomes imbued with religion and, therefore, morality. Consequently, an attack against those institutions is an attack on the ancestors who have not only established them but over the course of time have become deified; it’s the greatest sin, to extend the religious metaphor, and will result in the greatest indignation, the loudest outcry, and the strongest response. If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s become obvious just how dangerous Trump is, and what it took was the storming of the Capitol Building for many to at last realize it. Let’s hope that this week’s events will see Trump removed from office and prevented from ever running for office again.

I bring all this up because I find it troubling how often I hear this collective condemnation of 2020. Don’t get me wrong; yes, 2020 was a year of tremendous suffering for many people: more than 15,000 Canadians lost their lives as a result of covid-19, half a million Canadians contracted the virus, a million others lost jobs, numerous businesses went bankrupt, and life, for most of us, became challenging in various ways. 2020 was also a year that saw large protests and tremendous violence around the world, especially so in the United States. But when I hear people like Justin Trudeau and newscasters—influential voices in society, in other words—saying how they can’t wait to bid goodbye to 2020, I find such blanket statements both discomfiting in their simplicity and naïve in their implied optimism for the future.

For one thing, such generalizations obviously can’t be true for everyone, and when our political leaders speak in such simplistic terms—as is increasingly the style for political leaders to speak—it only encourages a collective, herd-style nodding of heads that precludes any “varying shades” of broader truths, to rehash the language of Nietzsche. After all, not everyone experienced hardship—or only hardship. Just like in times of war, while some suffer, others profit. Apart from the obvious tech giants whose profits soared this past year, numerous entrepreneurs found a niche market that they were able to profit from. There were also stories of those who collected CERB and were earning more a month than they did when employed! And what’s often overlooked is that for many people, it’s precisely because of the pandemic that they discovered joy in things they ordinarily wouldn’t have, like reading, cooking, connecting with family (even if through Zoom), outdoor exercise, volunteerism, or political activism, and sometimes even alongside whatever hardships were imposed on their lives. Many of us, I think it might be fair to say, found strengths they didn’t know they had. And let’s not forget this past year saw Donald Trump defeated in the US election—that alone is cause for celebration!—something no one saw coming a year ago, and it took a pandemic to make happen.

But this habit of positing years as either “good” or “bad” also contains an element of the metaphysical in it that also makes me uneasy, something that was made bizarrely palpable recently in—where else?—New York’s Times Square on “Good Riddance Day.” Apparently, it’s been an annual tradition since 2007, in which every December 28th passersby are invited to write down their grievances of the past year (“Outstanding bills”; “Lost my job”) and put them in a paper shredder or to smash piñatas with the soon-to-end year inscribed on them. In his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that man must find meaning for his suffering in order for it to made tolerable; and religion, Nietzsche says, has always provided us with that meaning: we suffer because the gods must be angry with us; we suffer because it is a test of our faith; that those who suffer are the blessed ones, the chosen ones; and that our suffering will be relieved in the afterlife. For what is more intolerable than suffering itself, Nietzsche says, what is more frightening is what he calls the “fearful void” of nothingness, that there is no reason or meaning for our suffering, that there is no divine punishment or karmic balance or the wiles of fate. It just is. (It’s what the eponymous protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych realizes by the end of the novella.) And what is all but completely forgotten nowadays—and one cannot underestimate how prevalent this concept was right up until the turn of the last century—was the accepted belief that the whole point of life was to suffer; and again, for the Christian church, we will find relief for our suffering in heaven. But as religious faith began to fade, so too did this belief. Even the church has abandoned this notion. (For Nietzsche, incidentally, suffering is meaningful; for him it’s “ennobling”, we learn from it, we become better people as a result of it, great art emerges from it. As Nietzsche famously wrote in aphorism 8 in Twilight of the Idols: “What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”)

Nowadays, though, suffering is seen as useless, to be avoided at all cost, yet the metaphysical drive to find meaning for it, as “Good Riddance Day” demonstrates, hasn’t diminished. Ah yes! It must be the year itself that’s to blame. Sheer bad luck! And so we see this bizarre reversion to something atavistic in the way people shred their grievances and smash piñatas, in the way we annually gather with friends and family, in the chorus of voices counting down the final seconds till the New Year, the burst of fireworks and clinking of glasses, the kisses and embraces—practices, we have come to believe, that are necessary in order to ring in a beneficent new year.

And again, while I don’t wish to discredit the fact that a great many people have suffered deeply as a result of this pandemic, it seems that the ones who are doing the loudest complaining are those who are just inconvenienced by the whole thing, that what I’m hearing is a lot of collective whining. “My child is going to be permanently mentally scarred by all this!” I remember one woman called in to CBC’s noon-hour call-in radio show during the first lockdown to complain about her kid not being able to go to school. Yes, education is going to suffer as a result of this pandemic, but the nature of her plaint pales in comparison to those who are languishing, many of whom for years on end, in refugee camps in Turkey or Lebanon or Bangladesh or in the notorious detention centres on Nauru or Christmas Islands. And given that some countries like Syria have had one “bad” year after another, it seems that this herd-like condemnation of 2020 is something that only rich Western countries can utter, not having suffered very much until now. As my 80-year-old aunt recently put it, a woman who lived through World War II in Europe and experienced, first-hand, hunger, poverty and forced migration: “This? Ach! This is nothing!”

Which brings me to another bone of contention, the phrases: “When this is over” and “When things get back to normal” (phrases that are redolent of what people, thankfully, no longer seriously ask anymore, the idea of the US getting “back to normal” once Trump leaves office). It seems naïve to think that things will ever “get back to normal”—whatever exactly that means. For one thing, as long as the virus continues to mutate and new variants emerge; as long as vaccine hesitancy is present; as long as vaccines remain out of reach for poor countries; as long as mass-inoculation remains slow, disorganized, and administered experimentally (there have been a number of reports in the last few days of administering half-doses, extended waiting periods between shots, even offering the second dose from a different manufacturer: all of which ventures into uncharted territory), it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll ever truly defeat this virus and get “back to normal”—that third and fourth waves seem likely. This idea of “normalcy” also implies that the pandemic is an anomaly, a one-off, and, most arrogantly, that the worst is over! (This mindset eerily recalls those early assumptions when World War I broke out and many predicted that fighting would end in a matter of weeks.) For what also seems immanent, but is seldom spoken of, are the other pandemics that are bound to happen, and sooner rather than later. We now know that deforestation and the destruction of the natural habitats that otherwise acted as a barrier between wildlife and human-life is responsible for the current coronavirus to make the leap from animal to human and its subsequent global spread. So if getting back to normal means a resumption of our pursuit of material wealth and the unimpeded environmental devastation that accompanies it, then it’s almost certain that other, possibly deadlier, pandemics will follow. If one considers, too, rising global temperatures, more and more extreme weather events, not to mention a volatile political situation in the US, it seems foolish to contemplate ever returning to anything resembling “normal” at all, that in fact what we’re currently experiencing is very much within the range of “normal” when it comes to cause and effect. And so, instead of this wholesale condemnation of an arbitrary unit of time with its weirdly metaphysical connotations, instead of this blind optimism that things will “get back to normal once this is over,” it seems to me that not only have we have failed to place the blame squarely on ourselves for our current mess, but that such practices preclude any notion of gratitude for what we still have, for what is still “normal”—something we ought to keep in mind given the precariousness of the future.

A couple days ago, while listening to the news, I heard a journalist interviewing Americans at Reagan International Airport in Washington who were travelling for the holidays. While many of them were well aware of the risks associated with travel at this time, they felt compelled to do so because they couldn’t imagine spending Christmas apart from their families. As one interviewee said, “I don’t know… It would be somehow wrong not to go.”

This brought to mind, as many things these days do, Nietzsche and his ideas on what he calls the “morality of custom” or the “morality of mores.” For Nietzsche, the deeper something is entrenched in tradition or custom, the greater is its moral power. In section 9 of Daybreak, he writes that “Morality is nothing other … than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating.” And, further down, he adds this significant idea:

What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands. What distinguishes this feeling in the presence of tradition from the feeling of fear in general? It is fear in the presence of a higher intellect which here commands, of an incomprehensible, indefinite power, of something more than personal—there is superstition in this fear.

As the interviewee noted, while there was no practical need for him to fly out at this time, the commanding voice outweighed his concerns for safety and health, a voice so strong that to disobey it would weigh on his conscience; it would be “wrong,” as he said.

Nietzsche’s idea of the morality of custom is a fascinating idea, and we can see countless other examples in our lives, including the irony behind the widespread resistance to mask-wearing in Western countries (we have no tradition for wearing it, unlike many Asian countries), yet we think nothing of laws that enforce the wearing of seat-belts or the banning of smoking in restaurants or movie theatres, practices that only carry greater moral weight with the passage of time. (Who can imagine that it was once commonplace to smoke in restaurants and movie theatres, that there was a time when cars didn’t have seatbelts?) I am also reminded of the years I spent in Korea, a time that was also governed by its own unique “morality of customs.” There was, for instance, the traditional imperative of never wearing shoes indoors, for to do so one risked not only being personally condemned as boorish but also brought condemnation to all Westerners as well. I remember, too, the shock of once seeing a white man (obviously newly landed in the country) jogging shirtless down a crowded street—you just don’t do that in Korea! And then there was the time I was waiting for the light to change at a pedestrian crosswalk on one of the few occasions when no traffic was coming, yet having to repress the Westerner in me from jaywalking. Why? Because I felt compelled to obey the command of Korean custom.

But the morality of mores is something that also operates on the larger political level, as the recent US election has so clearly demonstrated. For not even a pandemic, with all its obvious health risks, could prevent the election from happening as it always does, every four years and right on schedule. There is also the tradition of America’s two-party system, a tradition so deeply rooted that it is practically impossible for a third party to emerge, let alone survive. And then of course there are all those traditional allegiances to either one party or the other, allegiances that are so deep that they are often passed down from generation to generation, which, in turn, leads to all those many American states that are regarded as either “traditionally” red or blue, a situation that relies on those “traditional swing states”—a relatively small proportion of the population—to determine the winner of any election. And yet, to break from any of these traditions is inconceivable for many Americans, who then go on speak of the “wisdom of our founding fathers”, illustrating yet another insight of Nietzsche’s: that when our ancestors, the originators of those customs, become deified, and any break with tradition is to incur the wrath of those gods. It’s no wonder then that many commentators have said that it would take nothing less than a civil war to effect real political reform in the US—or, viewed another way, a civil war would be a manifestation of the wrath of those same gods for having broached the customs they instituted.

But to return to the traditions associated with the holidays: I would, under ordinary circumstances, end this post by saying Merry Christmas—after all, the morality of mores demands we do so. Yet I can’t help feeling that a larger irony is being ignored here: that there is so much talk of “celebrating the holidays” with loved ones, but almost no discussion of mourning. With nearly 15,000 Canadians and 300,000 Americans dead due to covid-19 (not to mention the rising case count in Ontario), have we not yet reached the point where we all know someone who has tested positive or who has died from the virus? Or are there still people for whom the virus seems faraway and unreal, the way it did in the summer? The other day on CBC radio I heard a tearful nurse call in to the station begging people to just stay home. “It’s just one Christmas,” he begged, which got me choked up listening to him. But of course, tradition issues its command, and we in turn must obey, something I was reminded of this morning when I popped in at Shoppers and I overheard one cashier say to another that she was travelling somewhere to spend Christmas Eve with one group of people and travelling somewhere else tomorrow to spend Christmas Day with her parents.

“Not spend Christmas with my parents?” she said. “You kidding me? No one’s gonna stop me from going to see them.”

I couldn’t help but chime in.

“Oh, you’re lucky you can see your parents,” I said.

“Oh, you can’t…?”

“Thirty-two people have tested positive at my father’s nursing home,” I said, “including ten staff. So he’s going to be spending the next 14 days quarantined in his room.”

The moment naturally turned awkward, but nevertheless, as tradition would have it, we still somehow managed to wish each other a Merry Christmas.

Apart from the exhilaration (along with the potential terrors) that comes with beginning a new story, I love how those initial stages of creation become something that dominates my thoughts instead of the usual petty concerns, worries, and gripes that tend to take front and centre. The same can be said, I’ve discovered, when it comes to reading Nietzsche (which, admittedly, I’ve become weirdly obsessed about over the last half year or so), as I find myself devoting a lot of those in-between moments to ruminating over his ideas, making connections to our present historical moment, and trying to find the answers to the numerous questions that come to mind. As Michael Tanner very aptly puts it in his excellent book Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction: “All good aphoristic writing is tiring to read, because one has to do so much of the writer’s work for him. [Nietzsche] supplies a sentence, the reader turns it into a paragraph.”

And so it is that I return yet again to the question of those who refuse to wear masks or otherwise abide by social distancing guidelines. Instead of allowing their cause to “simply” aggravate me, to say the least, reading Nietzsche has provided a kind of lens through which I can interpret not just their actions but also the times in which we live in such a way that, for me at any rate, is much more constructive and healthier: Nietzsche provides the sentence; now I’m turning it into paragraphs. (And again, I want to stress, that what I’m doing here is just a working out of ideas, as I’ve been doing all along in my posts on his work; I’m just a student as far as Nietzsche is concerned.)

So, to pick up from where I left off, while on one hand I feel confident that Nietzsche would look at the anti-maskers’ agenda and say what it really illustrates is an expression of herd (or slave) morality, on the other hand I’m less sure that Nietzsche would be entirely “pro-mask” either. The argument favouring mask-wearing (and all other related restrictions) is that it is for the “common good,” but Nietzsche’s response to the “common good” gives me pause. In section 43 of Beyond Good and Evil, he writes: “And how should there be a ‘common good’! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value.” While it may be advisable not to take Nietzsche too literally here, especially when he likes to indulge in word play, it does underscore his disdain for the “common man” and the threat he saw with rising egalitarianism integral to democratic societies, something he addresses repeatedly in both Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. (This is such a juicy topic I want to explore it further another time.) For Nietzsche, the “common man” (or “herd man,” “herd animal,” or “the rabble” as he also likes to say), is the product of Christian morality that, by design, breeds obedience and mediocrity. Christianity, as he saw it, negates this life, this world, and even the body, in favour of a promised afterlife. And while Nietzsche may have vehemently opposed Christianity for these reasons, he also conceded that it did offer an entire system upon which our morals and truths rested. So when the growth of sciences eroded religious faith (“the death of God,” as he famously said), the foundation upon which our morals are based similarly crumbled. Quoting from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (which is a couple books down on my to-read list), Tanner draws our attention to the following:

 When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God who alone knows it. Christianity is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.

As a result, our morals today rest on hollow ground, on habit, without anything solid to replace divine sanction and decree. In this absence, our laws over the past century have increasingly moved in a direction that places more and more value on individual rights and freedoms over that of the community, and what has suddenly become so glaringly obvious to me now (I’m not sure why I didn’t see it earlier) is that the issue of enforced mask wearing and tighter restrictions is a uniquely moral issue for our time, for nothing is more antithetical to contemporary liberal democratic values than to ask its citizenry to temporarily suspend its narcissistic obsession with the individual and all the “self-entitlement” it has has fostered in favour of the community. And unlike countries like China, for whom authoritarian measures are their own justification, unless there was evidence of malicious intent, there is no solid ground to justify stricter measures, enforcement, and punishment because we’ve painted ourselves into a moral corner that privileges “freedom” over human lives.

“Why should I?” is the response frequently offered by those who are requested to wear masks or not travel during the holidays or not attend large gatherings, followed by the argument that “we live in a free and democratic society.” As I said in an earlier post, Nietzsche illustrates that the notion of “freedom of the will” is an illusion, for whenever the will exerts itself, something else must obey, which can sometimes lead, as we are presently seeing, to deadly consequences. And it’s no wonder, therefore, that many liberal democratic nations can only be “weak-willed” in their response to a crisis of this nature—something Nietzsche understood was the Achilles heel of democracy and its concomitant emphasis on equality. (Again, this is subject for another time.)

And so, to return to the question I asked myself several posts ago concerning whether the anti-mask movement, by virtue of defying the “herd” mentality of blindly following government recommendations, was somehow Nietzschean in its approach, I can now see that I was both naïve and had missed the point entirely. For not only does their agenda demonstrate a slave morality, but the fact that we’ve gotten ourselves to this point at all—large anti-mask demonstrations; church leaders and their congregants disobeying government orders banning large gatherings; chiefs-of-police in California refusing to enforce stay-at-home orders; political leaders and others privileging “freedom” and the economy over human lives—in short, a complete inversion of our values and beliefs—seems symptomatic of what Nietzsche foresaw as the consequence of the death of God and what he feared would be its inevitable outcome: nihilism. For when the question “Why should I?” cannot be adequately countered—or rather, can only be countered with possibilities and cautious advice—it eerily recalls the opening pages of Nietzsche’s Will to Power in which he writes: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”

As I said elsewhere, one thing I admire about Nietzsche’s philosophy is that he exhorts us to strive to “overcome” what is “human, all too human,” to rise above mediocrity, to defy conformity, and to re-examine all that we consider “true” and irrefutable. What I also admire is the relevance, even vatic quality, of much of what he says. As I pointed out in previous posts, Nietzsche’s theories—particularly when it comes to power—are just as incredibly insightful today as they were a century ago.

However, since I started reading Beyond Good and Evil, I’ve been bogged down by a question that, until yesterday, I couldn’t answer satisfactorily. And the question is this: Given Nietzsche’s emphasis on re-examining our truths and values, as well as his disparagement of the “herd animal,” would it be fair to say that the growing anti-mask movement is in keeping with the spirit of Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially given his two assertions that a) there is no objective truth and b) our misguided sense of privileging “truth” over “deception.”

 On the surface, this would appear to be the case, regardless of how much I may disagree with the anti-mask campaign. And to be fair, it does seem a little weird when we look around and see so many people wearing masks just because the government told us to. But in the eyes of anti-maskers, those of us who comply are being “manipulated” by the government (although to what end, I’m unsure) and that we are all sheep, lacking in will (and, therefore, precisely the kind of herd animal that Nietzsche excoriated). Laws enforcing mask-wearing, they argue, are an infringement of their rights and freedoms. To take it a step further, it would also seem that their choice to disobey such policies is in keeping with the kind of “free spirits” that Nietzsche lauded.

But according to Walter Kaufmann, who points to the example of the Nazis and others, Nietzsche is notoriously easy to misinterpret, and given the degree to which Nietzsche vituperates against, well, just about everything, I also didn’t think he would be on board with the movement, though I couldn’t really come up with a good argument until last night when I began reading Part IX of Beyond Good and Evil. In “What is Noble,” the final part of the book, Nietzsche introduces his concept of master and slave morality (which, Kaufmann explains in the footnotes, will be later developed in Nietzsche’s subsequent book On the Genealogy of Morals). But, to put this as briefly as possible, if the ruling group has historically always had the power to determine what is “good” and “true” (hence, “master morality”), those who are ruled (i.e., slaves) would see those same values in an opposite light. In other words, what the master proclaims to be “good” and “true,” the slave interprets as “evil” and “false.” In section 260, Nietzsche writes: “The slave’s eye is not favourable to the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious, subtly suspicious, of all the ‘good’ that is honored there.” Further down he adds that this longing to be free (“the freedom to choose,” as the anti-maskers like to shout) is, in itself, indicative of a slave morality inspired by the fear that those in power can (and, according to Nietzsche, ought to) invoke. Reading this brought to mind something Nietzsche wrote in section 40: “Whatever is profound loves masks.” At the time I didn’t entirely understand this comment, but in light of his master and slave morality, it makes so much more sense. In other words, while the anti-mask campaign calls for “freedom, it is they who, in a hilariously ironic way, are the ones wearing masks—metaphorical masks that proclaim “truth” but in fact cover up what is at heart a slave morality brought on by fear, weakness, distrust, and a lack of power; no different, really, than those recent post-election, pro-Trump rallies in which its marchers similarly felt not an infringement of freedom but an infringement of power. Finally, just to add, in Part VI (“We Scholars”), Nietzsche writes at length about skepticism, voicing great disdain for certain aspects of it, while praising others. It’s a very obfuscating part of the book that Kaufmann acknowledges in his footnotes, but, again, it seems so much clearer now: that insofar as Nietzsche advocates for a skeptical examination of our values—a kind of skepticism upon which science is founded on—the variety that he censures, I now understand, is that of the “herd animal” whose distrust of all mouthpieces of power is making alarming inroads in society, especially so in the US where a significant portion of the population distrusts those three big institutions of power: government, media, and science. So in answer to the question I posed at the beginning, inasmuch as the anti-mask movement may have the superficial appearance of a Nitzschean approach to a contemporary issue, it would be inaccurate to conceive of it as such because what it really boils down to (as it does with everything for Nitezsche) is a confrontation between “master” and “slave” moralities, a manifestation in other words of the will to power and who, ultimately, gets to determine what is “true” and “good.”

In section 19 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche posits the eye-opening idea that “freedom of the will” is not as free (or as innocuous) as many of us would like to believe. Nietzsche writes: “‘Freedom of the will’ is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: ‘I am free, “he” must obey’.” In other words, every act of will requires a corresponding act of obedience, even if that obedience means little more than “putting into motion our arms and legs,” as he writes. The notion that there is “freedom” at all, Nietzsche argues, is a falsehood; it is simply the domination of one will over another, which, of course, is a manifestation of the will to power. To put it yet another way, every act of will comes at a cost. “In all willing,” Nietzsche writes in the same aphorism, “it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many ‘souls’.”

Reading this brings to mind two concrete examples, one of which is the entrenched notion in American society of the freedom (or right) to bear arms. As we’ve seen again and again across the United States, that “freedom of the will” comes at the very real cost of those who end up obeying with their lives. Or, maybe a better example is the anti-mask movement. Mandatory mask-wearing, they argue, is an infringement of their rights and freedoms, their liberties. “My body, my choice” is their spurious argument and what’s often seen on placards at their protest rallies. But here again, the imposition of the “freedom of the will” (the “freedom to choose,” as they generally phrase it) results in very real, very tragic consequences upon those within their vicinity who also end up “obeying” with their lives.

As I said in my previous post, I feel a deep need to write something in response to all the Nietzsche I’ve been reading lately, yet it is impossible to write something resembling a book review (not that I’m very good at writing book reviews) that would somehow encapsulate his ideas in a few paragraphs or pages. There are too many ideas, too many new and truly thought-provoking concepts that come up in his work that I think the only way I can “exorcise” them is by now and again writing about some idea that’s been dogging me—and there certainly have been a lot of them lately. But I also want to be careful not to claim any kind of authoritative interpretation here. I’m obviously a dilletante when it comes to Nietzsche; this is just my way of “working out” a lot of what I’ve been reading.

What I like most about Nietzsche’s philosophy is that he exhorts us to be our best selves, to rise up above the herd, to not settle for mediocrity, to defy conformity, and to question everything, including all those things we consider to be unassailable truths. Nietzsche begins Beyond Good and Evil by doing precisely this. Why should good and evil, he asks, be considered opposites? Could it be possible, he goes on to say, that doing so is really a reflection of moral prejudice (one influenced by Christianity) and a habit of grammar? Could it be possible that these seemingly opposite values are really one in essence? Nietzsche proposes that what is considered to be “good” or what is considered “evil” depends entirely on who (or what) has power; or, put another way, it depends on the dominant moral belief system governing society at any one time. It’s an idea that’s so vast in scope with regard to culture and history and habit that it’s difficult to escape it and look beyond it. But then again, within many of our own lifetimes, we’ve seen such issues as access to abortion, same-sex marriage, and doctor-assisted suicide go from being crimes to now receiving sanction within our legal system, to go, in short, from “bad” to “good.” But Nietzsche even takes it a step further, by saying that the presence of both so-called “good” and “evil” is essential for the propagation of the species, for human survival. If we were to eradicate “evil” (which is impossible), humans would be somnambulant, indolent creatures (which we largely are anyways). Evil can, in other words, rouse us to be our best selves, to be defenders of “good”, to rise up for “justice.” Think, for example, of how the recent US election campaign wakened, more than ever before, a largely indifferent electorate into political activism. A record number of women, women of colour, LGBTQ people and others—many of whom lacking in political experience—ran for office of one sort or another, many intent on tipping political power in a different direction from that of the current administration.

And for Nietzsche, power—the Will to Power—is what lies behind all our actions, not just political or military power, but all our desires and relationships are governed by it. (But maybe further discussion of this might be best saved for another time.)

What I really want to get at, though, for today at any rate, is that Nietzsche doesn’t stop at challenging our habit of pitting good against evil; all antipodes, he says, especially those that carry a moral value, including the concepts of “truth” and “deception,” are worth re-examining. For Nietzsche, there is no such thing as objective truth, only varying degrees, which again, is intrinsically related to who or what has power. A mother, for example, punishes her child based on her notion of what is right and wrong, her notion of truth, and in accordance to her notion of justice—things that another mother may disregard, overlook, or respond to in a completely different manner.

 But to look again at the more salient example of the recent US election: for a significant segment of the American population, including its president, the official results of that election are impugned—as was seen especially strongly last weekend by the large pro-Trump rally in Washington. One woman at the rally was quoted as saying: “I don’t know why they’re feeding us this garbage. We all know who really won the election.” Many of us (particularly the left leaning) gazed on, baffled and perplexed. How is it that so many people can deny what is so evidentially true? Are they motivated by the will to ignorance (Nietzsche has some interesting things to say about that), or are they motivated by the will to truth? Like all conspiracy theorists, what they ostensibly seek is the will to truth (This is what’s really going on, is what their message is. Listen to me and together we can overturn the system.) But again, Nietzsche would attribute their actions as an expression of the will to power. After all, who is doing the protesting? It’s not so much the powerless inasmuch as those who feel their power is being threatened or undermined in light of recent economic and cultural changes in society. And by protesting, by being seen and heard, by not feeling ashamed for their beliefs and identity, is, by its nature, empowering. And as long as the one who continues to sit in power refuses to concede defeat, as long as he continues to tweet “I won the election,” so it shall remain true, both for him and a great many other Americans. Nor would he be entirely wrong either: in many ways Trump has won, because what he has succeeded in doing is sowing the seeds of doubt in many of his supporters, solidifying in their minds that the election has been stolen from them, regardless of whatever evidence to the contrary there may be. He has also single-handedly destabilized democracy, not only in the US but also globally, all of which, again, underscores what Nietzsche says: that when it comes to truth we can only “assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different ‘values,’ to use the language of painters.”

Every one in a while, one comes upon a book that changes one’s life. Reading Proust a few years ago was one such experience for me. And earlier this year I had another, one that came from what at first glance seemed like a very unlikely source. When the world turned upside down with the pandemic back in March, I wasn’t able to read or write. The idea of fiction—reading it, writing it—seemed impossible. Fiction, I suddenly understood, belonged to the realm of leisure. So when we went into lockdown, and panic and uncertainty reigned, who could afford such leisure? Every book I turned to and tried to read (I had to do something in the evenings) seemed so utterly irrelevant, dissatisfying, even frivolous. So I turned to a book of non-fiction that had been sitting in my “to-read” pile, a book I’d ordered in 2018 after reading a good review of it in The Atlantic but never got beyond cracking back the cover: John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are.

Not only was I able to suddenly focus on something, but the book was the exactly what I needed. In times of uncertainty, worry, and fear, it offered what I (and probably all of us) really need: philosophy—a window onto the world. I don’t want to go into the particulars of Kaag’s book here and now (after all, I’d read it eight months ago), except to say that it’s one of a number of books in a sub-genre that have become popular in recent years, that is to say that book is part-memoir and part-philosophy primer. The greater effect the book had on me was that it launched me onto a different path—a new and exciting path—as far as my reading life goes. Kaag’s book introduced me not only to the ideas of Nietzsche but also to the work of Hermann Hesse, who was hugely influenced by Nietzsche, and I’ve since gone on to read five of his novels: Demian (which I adored), Steppenwolf, Beneath the Wheel, Siddhartha, and Narziss and Goldmund. Kaag also got me interested in the Existentialists, whose philosophy was also indebted to Nietzsche, and I soon read Camus’ The Plague (very apt pandemic reading) and his most famous novel The Outsider (L’Éstranger), and Gordan Marino’s own part-memoir, part-philosophy primer: The Existentialist’s Survival Guide. But as I said, Kaag’s book got me interested in the work of Nietzsche. I’ve since gone on to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and I recently finished Walter Kaufmann’s seminal exegesis: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Walter Kauffman, I’ve since learned, is largely responsible for rescuing Nietzsche from obscurity after the Nazis appropriated and deliberately misinterpreted his philosophy for their own purposes, and pretty much any English translation of Nietzsche that you’ll come across will likely have been translated by Kaufmann. After finishing his tome-like study, I once again found myself in a position of being unable to concentrate on fiction, and right now I’m reading Nietzsche’s follow-up to Zarathustra: Beyond Good and Evil—and it’s very, very good.

I’ve often wanted to sit down and write something here in response to what I’ve been reading, but apart from the usual time constraints I also didn’t know where to begin or how to sum up these enormous ideas. And yet at the same time I’m also bursting with ideas. All I can really say for now is that these books—and Nietzsche in particular—have opened up a window for me, a way of seeing the world and making sense of it. And like I said above, it made me realize that maybe what we all need right now—especially in a world in which science and technology have largely supplanted religious faith (Nietzsche’s famous proclamation, “God is dead”)—is a little philosophy.