Nietzsche laid out a full-fledged assault on the basis of fundamentalism and called for the reevaluation of everything that we would think of as moral and right. And a similar reevaluation is totally called for thanks to eight years of abuse of power by the Bush administration, the cumulation of forces interested only in appropriating wealth and power to themselves at the expense of the common person.
Nietzsche dissects morality into two categories -- master and slave morality. The first is similar to the Greek/Homeric/Humanistic ideal of man as the measure of all things. Goodness is equated to nobility, strength, and power while weakness is cowardliness and timidity. By contrast, what he calls slave morality is skepticism, slavery, and subversion of the ideals of the master morality. Slave morality is the inherent enemy of master morality and seeks nothing else but to make the master the slave as well.
Nietzsche sets himself in opposition to utilitarianism, saying that the problem is that what is good for the strong must be good. The problem with slave morality, as he sees it, is the collective degeneration of man. But the problem is that if we were to take his world-view and put it into practice, we would not be much different than the right-wingers in many regards. We would extend Bush's tax cuts on the rich, for instance, if we were to decide that wealth equals achievement.
He sees what he calls slave morality as nothing more than a crass attempt by the slaves to create worth for themselves, while condemning themselves and all of humanity to mediocrity. People preach love and charity, yet Christians take more joy in preaching at others rather than in doing what is good and right. This line of thinking is eerily relevant as the Dobsons and Falwells of the world have purported to be all about Christian love and charity, yet their "moral majority" movement has been nothing but preaching against the sins of the unbelievers and a peeping tom act, snooping on peoples' personal private lives.
And yet we see living examples of Nietzsche's call on people to break their chains and assert themselves on the world. Muhammed Ali, for instance, echoed Homer with his declaration that he had no quarrel with the Vietcong and that no Vietcong ever called him "nigger." He understood these concepts perfectly and lived them out throughout his boxing career. He could take a punch better than any person alive, and he was a master of letting his opponents wear themselves down so that he could knock them out in the end.
He was also ahead of his time in saying that modern science was making Christianity less and less relevant in the world today. Our own founding was a rejecting of the kind of formalism that he decries, a collective revolt against the slaves of fundamentalism, and a breaking of the chains of oppression. The movement to end slavery was a continuation of this, as was the Women's Sufferage Movement as well as the Civil Rights Movement and the other movements in this country to achieve equal rights.
For instance, it used to be that there were always supernatural explanations for the events of the world. But around 700 BC, Thales, the father of Greek philosophy, focused on more natural explanations for the world around us. Ever since then, there has always been more and more naturalistic explanations for phenomena in the world, and less and less room for the supernatural in general. The Big Bang is one of the last refuges of the theist, yet who knows -- maybe there will be scientific explanations that make perfect sense for that as well. Or take the concept of punishment -- the fundies yell and scream as loud as possible about the sins of the world, yet God never sees fit to rain down thunder and lightning to kill his enemies. Or take the concept of miracles in this world -- why are there none today? Were the people who Jesus healed somehow more worthy than solders today who are wounded in Iraq and then spend their hours in perfect consciousness, totally paralyzed, and unable to do the things that they once used to do?
Rather than a God who could reasonably seen as capricious, arbitrary, jealous, and unjust, Nietzsche suggests instead that humanity create the Ubermensch. One of his main problems with fundamentalism is the fact that slave morality creates punishment for the master class and has to create other worlds because of their unhappiness of their own. Given the unjust and capricious track record of God, his morality is intrinsicly meaningless -- we all know the divine commands by rote -- love your neighbor; love God; do good works. But what does that mean when God lets the wicked prosper and the good perish? Are there any laws of action and consequence here?
Since the end result of all this is nihilism according to Neitzsche, the Ubermensch has to step in and set his or her own values and morals so that it can fill the vacuum. The new values that the Ubermensch has to create have to be life-affirming and creative and focused on this world as opposed to the escapism of other philosophies. In fact, he argues that the Ubermensch has to move beyond any notion that has currently been thought up by man. That would include anything that we would think of as "progressive."
My first criticism of this would be the fact that it contradicts what has already been observed. For instace, if the concept of the Ubermensch were true, then Michael Jordan would have won the NBA title his rookie year. But in fact, he did not become an NBA champion until he got a strong supporting cast and learned to become more of a team player. The Celtics became NBA champions this year because they were team-oriented and everybody was ready to come in and play at any given time.
Ditto for the Spurs, last year's champions. So, we simply can't throw away the concept of collectivism, because of the fact that it works. It does not create mediocrity, as Nietzsche would have claimed, because teamwork/collectivism makes everyone better. As an example, chessgames.com routinely has strong masters play against a collective group of users, and the rest of the world wins every single time. And take the example of Kos, where our collective wisdom is always better than an individual reporter's.
And the concept of the Ubermensch can be used to justify right-wing policies like Bush's tax cuts. We must be able to reward achievement, so the story goes. But the fact of the matter is that we did not create sustainable prosperity for all until we created high taxes for the wealthy and used the revenues to win World War II and create strong social programs. Bill Clinton, who set the upper bracket in the 40's, created millions of jobs and erased the national deficit and created record surpluses. And if Al Gore had become President, then he could have used these surpluses to jumpstart the economy any time there was a recession.
And another problem with that is the fact that one might decide that they were too good for the rest of the herd and decide that only their needs and wants mattered. Ralph Nader would be a perfect example of this, deciding that he was too good for the likes of Gore or Kerry. But the problem is that rather than creating a progressive political movement for change, he wound up alienating himself from millions of people who might have otherwise supported him and listened to his ideas. People like that are more like voices crying in the wilderness of irrelevance than Ubermensches of change.
And yet, when injustice is rampant, the voice of the Ubermensch is necessary to break the chains. Sheehan gave the Democrats political cover to oppose Iraq, and now the debate has been settled in our favor. Ali gave people like King the political cover they needed to call for the end of segregation and Jim Crow.