it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on "The Use And Abuse Of History" by Friedrich Nietzsche:
Everyone now understands that nothing in the past was what it should have been. No one in the past, none of those whose names are still remembered, measured up, fully measured up, to what we today understand are the standards all decent, right thinking people should meet. Washington and Jefferson, all the others who were once given credit for their commitment to the cause of freedom, either owned slaves themselves or did nothing to bring slavery to an end. History, especially American history, the history that was taught to children in schools and to everyone else in Fourth of July orations, was, if not a conscious lie, a failure to see things as they really were.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
What everyone now understands, what everyone now thinks he knows, is not, surprising as it may seem, a new discovery, an original insightful of the present age; it is what Friedrich Nietzsche went to war against a hundred fifty years ago. In "The Use And Abuse Of History," the second of four essays known collectively as Thoughts Out Of Season, Nietzsche complained about “unreflective people who write as historians in the naive faith that, according to all popular opinions, their age is right, and that to write in conformity with this age amounts to exactly the same thing as being just.” It is worse than that; the historians want more than to criticize, they want to condemn. “Measuring past opinions and deeds according to the widespread opinions of the present moment is what these naive historians call ‘objectivity.’ It is there that they discover the cannons of all truth; their aim is to force the past to fit the mold of their fashionable triviality.” And as to the worth of these historians, the worth, we must add, of our own over-confident historians, he remarks, “every man’s vanity is directly proportional to his lack of intelligence.” They believe, mistakenly, that, in the present, they stand higher than those in the past, when, instead, they “merely come after them.”
The belief that the present is in all important respects superior to the past would once have been thought a mark of ignorance. The Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, spoke, if in different ways, of a golden age, a time in the past from which there had been, not just a decline, but a departure so great that, looking back, the loss was nothing less than tragic, and history, if it was worth reading at all, nothing more than failed attempts to recapture, reclaim, something of what had once been achieved. The Roman historian, Tacitus, writing in the second century about the sequence of Roman emperors from the death of Augustus to the death of the last of the Caesars, remarked that in the rebellions and civil wars that had taken place the actual course of events was more often than not “dictated by chance,” as if this were a fact too obvious to require any further explanation.
The belief in the superiority of the past, that what was older was better, that what was most ancient deserved not only respect but reverence, first began to be doubted in the seventeenth century when Thomas Hobbes, in a sentence that has become as famous, and perhaps even more famous, than anything written by Greek or Roman writers, described the earliest human beings as living no better than beasts, their lives, “nasty, brutish, solitary and short.” A century later, Rousseau, insisted that, instead of an unchanging nature, man was able to become what he wanted to be, that the human being was perfectible. The French Revolution, inspired by what Rousseau had written, seemed to prove that what he had written was true. Everyone, or almost everyone, now agreed that the rights of man, the equal right to life and liberty, were the basis of legitimate government and the only praiseworthy way of life. The perfectibility of man had been achieved.
But if that were true, Hegel argued at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the past had been nothing more than stages of development. The suffering, the wars, the conflicts and violence, the rise and fall of empires, were nothing but the means by which the human race could, finally, obtain knowledge of itself, and everyone could live in freedom, protected by a powerful but benevolent state. History had reached its long sought end, because, with Hegel, history now understood itself. Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, thought this nothing short of insanity. History had with Hegel become “a compendium of factual immorality,” in which the development of the world is seen “as occurring for the everyday utility of the modern human being.” Worse yet, with Darwin following Hegel, “the history of humanity is merely the continuation of the history of animals and plants.” Taught all this, modern man looks “with amazement on the miracle” of “the distance traveled,” and tells himself: “We have reached our goal; we are the goal; we are nature perfected. Overproud Europeans of the nineteenth century you are stark raving mad!”
Nietzsche was serious. It was madness to believe, as much of the world believed, and still believes, that the present is the desired culmination of everything that has happened in the past. “In truth, the belief that one is the late born offspring of prior ages is paralyzing and upsetting, but it must seem horrible and destructive when one day, in a brazen inversion, such a belief deifies this late born offspring as the true meaning and purpose of all previous historical events; when his knowing wretchedness is identified with the culmination of world history.”
What, precisely, is the reason - if there is a reason - for the “wretchedness” of the “late born offspring,” i.e. the contemporary man, what Nietzsche would later call “the last man?” He has become an abstraction, his instincts expelled by history, history as taught by Hegel and the historians who came after him, history that “takes the great drives of the masses to be what is important and paramount,” and views all great men “merely as their clearest expression, as if they were bubbles that become visible on the surface of the flood.” The result is that everyone disguises himself behind a mask of the cultivated man, “the scholar, the poet, the statesman,” all of them together “anxiously disguised universal human beings.” There is reason to doubt whether they are human beings at all, or only “merely machines who think, write, and speak,” spectators with an “acquired knowledge that has no outward effect, of learning that fails to become life.” Everyone exists in a state of universal haste and a “universal addiction tocomfort.” We moderns “have nothing that we have drawn from ourselves alone; we become something worthy of attention - namely, walking encyclopedias….”
The remedy, the way to escape the “paralyzing education spell cast upon the present age,” is to study the history, and write the history, of “great men,” what Nietzsche calls “monumental history.” Unlike antiquarian history, which finds everything, even the smallest details, interesting about the past; or critical history, which condemns everything that does not meet the standards, however misinformed, of the present; monumental history is concerned with what is great: the life, the “beautiful life,” of those fortunate few who did not believe that simply staying alive was the most important thing. This is the kind of history that should be read by those who need teachers and examples that cannot be found among their contemporaries or in the present age. Nietzsche himself can be explained - he explains himself - as having found what he needed in what had been done, and what had been written, in the past, the very distant past: “it is only to the extent that I am a student of more ancient times - above all, of ancient Greece - that I, as child of our times have had such unfashionable experiences.”
The study of ancient times, the study of Greek history and Greek philosophy, makes it possible - and is perhaps the only thing that can do this - to break with the present and all its false assumptions. Instead of the last man who believes that the highest level of civilization is physical comfort and something to entertain him in the arid emptiness of his meaningless existence - the last man who, Nietzsche insists, is contemptible precisely because he does not know how contemptible he has become - the example of men and women who did great things in the past will cause at least a few others to attempt something great themselves. “With a hundred such unmodernly educated human beings - that is, human beings who have matured and grown accustomed to the heroic - the entire noisy sham cultivation of this age could now be silenced once and for all. -” It has happened before, a rebirth of ancient learning, and with it, a return to the ancient understanding of what human excellence really means. “Suppose someone believed that no more than one hundred productive human beings, educated and working in the same spirit, would be needed to put an end to the cultivatedness that has just now become fashionable in Germany; would he not be strengthened by the recognition that the culture of the Renaissance was borne on the shoulders of just such a band of one hundred men?”
The serious study of history, the history of what great men have done, proves for Nietzsche that men can do great things again. History proves that history has not come to an end; history proves Hegel wrong. But if history does not end with Hegel, neither does it end with Darwin. For Hegel, and the historians who followed him, everything is derived from what went before and becomes, in its turn, the basis for everything that comes after; everything in the past is provisional. Marx, following Hegel, agreed that history comes to an end. Man becomes what he called the ‘species’ animal, able to do, and to be, everything - a hunter for a fisherman in the afternoon, a literary critic in the evening. This is Nietzsche’s last man, the human being with no aspirations to anything higher than himself, content with what he is, convinced that there is nothing beyond himself. Hegel and Marx trace human history from the earliest human beings, unprotected in a state of nature, to the civilization of the industrial age. Darwin traced the development of the human being from its origin as a species. But anyone who takes Darwin seriously has to admit that by its own logic evolution does not stop with the human being. There has to be something higher than the human being, something beyond the last man, something Nietzsche called the “superman.” The last man is not last after all; he is only a brief transition, whose only importance is as the material from which the superman, who has both the knowledge and the will, will create something better.
This was Nietzsche’s hope, a hope based on what from his unsurpassed understanding of Greek philosophy he believed human beings could become again, a hope that vanished when he, and the world around him, descended into madness. The last man now dreams of an even more comfortable existence, spared from all effort by the thoughtless guidance of an artificial intelligence that does not, because it cannot, recognize either human excellence or the mystery of human existence. The need for monumental history has never been more urgent.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man.
--Marshal Zeringue
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