Postmodern Radicalism

1. Postmodern Radicalism The Ethics of Extremism

2. Nietzsche’s “Last Man” • What unites all of these readings is something like the contempt for “modern” man Nietzsche expresses here. What is that contempt? What is the last man? • If one wanted to combat the last man politically, what would be necessary? • Nietzsche’s argument does not call for radical politics, but it sets the stage for radical politics. Given the contemptibility of “modern” man, any kind of political state that would produce a different type of man is preferable.

3. The Doctrine of Fascism • Fascism begins from a rejection of modern liberalism. Modern liberalism had begun from men’s individual natural rights and conceived of politics as the securing of those individual natural rights. Fascism rejects this individualistic basis of the state in favor of a collectivist basis in which the individual subsumes himself into his state. • “The man of fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within a duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lives.” • “The Fascist disdains the “comfortable” life.” In the fascists’ eyes, it is the lowly and base comfortable life that is the true object of modern liberalism. • Fascism celebrates the individual integration into the state and “conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it behooves man to conquer for himself that life truly worthy of him.”

4. Quasi-Religious Doctrine • “Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.” • Fascism begins from contempt for the secular materialism of modern men and seeks a new kind of politics that transcends that materialism in favor of something more “life-affirming”, i.e. devotion to the state. • “Fight Club” parallels.

5. Islamic Fundamentalism • Berman includes current Islamic Fundamentalism within the radical political movements of the twentieth-century, Nazism, Fascism, and Shintoism. • It’s similar to these movements because it begins with disgust and contempt at Western society and seeks a political solution that overcomes Western society. • “Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol, and existentialism.” • In beginning from contempt and disgust with modern society, it is not correct to see its hatred as rooted in Islam itself. It is instead rooted in postmodernism.

6. Such Contempt Permits Destruction of Modern Life • Given the contempt of these movements for modern materialism, believers in these movements feel morally permitted and even morally righteous if they destroy modern life in any way they can. • Thus, the contempt for modern men mixed with their radical political alternatives produces the radical political violence of the twentieth-century. • How do we combat such movements? Do we need to?