A student in my seminar this week asked his classmates to decide whether Gandhi or Donald Trump more closely embodied Nietzsche’s celebrated superman. Unsurprisingly, they plumped for Trump, as the one who made his own values, compelling others to interpret the world in his terms. He is certainly untainted by asceticism or Christian meekness. It is one of the ironies of the present time that the liberal intelligentsia, which has so embraced Nietzsche’s idea that there is no objective truth or reason, is now faced with their dark doppelgänger in Trump and his alternative facts. Arguments about bias, which had formerly been used as critiques of patriarchal or colonial ideas of truth, are now employed by a cheerful misogynist who would like to rid the United States of undesirable immigrants.
How are we to respond? Does the Trump phenomenon reveal a need to return to utopian Enlightenment ideals? Ideals with rationality as the common currency of a universal Oxbridge high table in the sky? Another of the wry paradoxes of our time is that, while physicists in a quantum age have quite an agnostic, provisional and even mystical approach to the nature of reality, biologists are as breezily positivist in their belief in raw facts as they were in the nineteenth century. I recall a distinguished scientist back at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in the summer being reluctant to call ideas real at all, since they are non-material.
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