The German Genius

preoccupation with the “inner self” that leaves us having to create our own ideals and values “from within our chests…We cannot read the meaning of the world in the results of its investigation, no matter how perfect, but must instead be in a position to create that meaning ourselves…therefore the highest ideals, which move us most powerfully, are worked out for all time only in struggle with other ideals, which are just as sacred as ours are to us.” 19 Only in the West, he said, has mankind developed the idea of understanding himself in a universal way, in other words on principles that apply to all human beings at all times—this is essentially what science aims at. In other cultures, people do not have this aim, they are content to explain themselves to themselves as they are, at their particular point in history and location in the world. Why should the West be so concerned about it, and doesn’t it condemn us to an empty, cold existence? The result, he said, for many—for most—people was that the only meaning in life was the pursuit of pleasure, entertainment, self-gratification, or money. In America, he said, capitalism, devoid of any religious or ethical meaning, had acquired the character of sport, and this had replaced the search for salvation. We are burdened by a surfeit of knowledge that doesn’t tell us how to live or what living is for.
    The final nail in the coffin that is modern culture was for Weber the fact that most people worked too hard and too long, so that they had no time—and no inclination after a day’s work—to come to grips with the modern condition and sort out, for themselves, how best to experience the world, to address the question, “What Comes Next?” 20
    There is clearly a heavy overlap between Weber and Nietzsche. Each had a common core of things to say about the terrors built into the modern world, and each amplified what the other was saying. Weber was, if anything, marginally less pessimistic than his near contemporary. His way of writing implied that the modern world could at least be renounced, whereas Nietzsche, by and large, thought there was nothing to be done. Heidegger’s concepts of “submitting” to the world as it is, or “caring” for it, rather than controlling it, take up Weber’s challenge, as did Marcuse and his idea of “the great refusal.”
    But it should now be plain to what extent we are indeed living in a post-Nietzschean, post-Weberian nihilistic world—for example, in the realm of contemporary high art, where the only criteria by which it is now judged is by newness, where the big auctions have all the qualities of a game, and collecting has become for so many a form of salvation. The world of fashion, where again the defining criterion is sheer newness, is another nihilistic aspect of the modern world. In all these realms, money is a prominent feature.
    But, in a sense, these are peripheral. To what extent, we may ask, were the terrible brutalities of the twentieth century carried out by nihilists who, since they could see no moral purpose to the world, could see no objections to the cruelties they inflicted? Hannah Arendt said that terror lay at the root of totalitarianism, and nihilism is surely the greatest terror there is.
    Furthermore, beyond the nihilistic horrors of Fascism and Stalinism and Maoism, there is another way our lives have been affected—and are still affected—by the cold, empty, bleak landscape Nietzsche and Weber identified. This takes us back again to Freud. The vast majority of people have almost certainly never read Nietzsche or Weber. But, just as Alfred Kazin said that people who had never heard of Freud had nevertheless been influenced by him, so the same is true of those who have never heard of Nietzsche or Weber.
    Despite the great economic earthquake that took place in the late summer and early autumn of 2008, we still live in a world of unprecedented prosperity and comfort—at least, many of us do in the West. Even the worst off in the developed world are cushioned from absolute material degradation by a welfare state. And yet—and it is revealing that it is a commonplace to say so—we are surrounded by criminal violence, drug abuse, child abuse, high-school massacres, gangland vendettas, piracy on the high seas, organized prostitution, and sexual slavery. There are more people in prison and in mental hospitals than ever before, vandalism is widespread, and alcoholism is rampant. It is