The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Mob and Its Conceits

This is the H. L. Mencken translation. I don’t know how well it captures Nietzsche’s native style; but it certainly captures Mencken’s. I think Mencken’s introduction alone is worth the price of admission. While it distorts Nietzsche as much as any “outraged Mississippi Methodist,” it summarises rather well Mencken’s genius and his utter derangement. Profound insights are mixed with trivial absurdities in about equal measure. The former include his observations about democracy; the latter his hatred of Judaism as a culture.

Mencken’s understanding of democracy is inseparable from his understanding of revolution, from the American and French to the Russian. They are brought about by mobs. Mobs don’t not learn. Mobs reinforce their own delusions and pursue them more ruthlessly and guiltlessly than any tyrant. The mob has leaders who emerge spontaneously from within itself because they are seen to be ‘one of us.’ The mob has no rules of behaviour other than to maintain loyalty to the mob. The mob has no conscience because it is sovereign, responsible only to itself and only as long as it remains in existence. When the mob disperses, it’s history effectively disappears and survivors are left with a mess to be cleaned up by those who would never join a mob.

Mencken was essentially right about democracy. It does promote the worst political environment for human survival. The difference between a mob and a democratic electorate is paper thin. Recent political events - in the United States, in Russia, in the Philippines, in India, and in Brazil to name only a few places - suggest that the mob has become the electorate. Just like any mob, each of the relevant electorates is motivated by some common but diffuse fear. As is traditional in mob activity, each is promoted and defended by religious practice and authority as a sort of cleansing of society. And, of course, the mob does not compromise; it gets what it wants or it destroys its opposition, and has no hesitation in fomenting revolution in the process.

The singular advantage of democracy, according to Mencken, is that popular anti-semitism will ensure that Jews can never attain to the ruling plutocracy. I don’t know where in his background this anti-semitism originates. To attribute it, in 1918, to a prevailing cultural norm would imply that Mencken was as much influenced by popular nonsense as the mob. To suggest that he had some particularly disappointing experience with individual Jews, would imply that he had a rather pronounced logical difficulty in his generalisations. In any case, his anti-semitism goes a long way in undermining his intellectual snobbery and his conclusions about the mob.

The most disturbing thing about Mencken’s anti-semitism is that it was neither casual nor superficial. Despite his reported remarks in the late 1930’s about the shame of the de-humanisation of Jews in Germany, the rationale for his hatred was identical to that of Hitler: Jews had invented the unnatural and irrational idea of caring for the less able and less well-off in the community. They had infected the Western world with this social malaise. And this is something Nietzsche had failed to take into account fully. The problem that both Mencken and Nietzsche (and Hitler) had with Christianity was at root a problem of Judaism. Judaism perverted the course of human evolution and therefore needed to be eliminated.

Both Nietzsche and Mencken wrote in a way that was intended to shock. Each overstated and exaggerated for effect. But Nietzsche was a philosopher and Mencken was a forerunner of America’s AM radio hosts. Nietzsche never wanted or expected wide-spread acceptance; Mencken lived for it in his books and editorials. Nietzsche analysed; Mencken sensationalised. Ultimately Nietzsche provokes reflection; Mencken merely revulsion at his own self-promotion. Nietzsche refused to join a mob; Mencken was a closet mobster of the first order.

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