Stranger on Earth

Perhaps the biggest surprise to the 21 st century reader of Twilight of the Idols , assuming he has not read its predecessors, is its aggressive attack on ideas he holds dear and never thinks of challenging. Nietzsche never had an appreciation for liberal politics. This is expressed in clear and therefore philosophically atypical language in Section 38 “My Conception of Freedom.” Of liberal institutions, Nietzsche opines that they “cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions” (103). The reason why Nietzsche distrusts liberalism is consistent with his philosophy: liberal ideas “undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time” (103). Since liberalism preaches equality, harmony, and attempts to erase dissonance, it is seen by Nietzsche, who...

Almost half a lifetime went by between the compositions of “When You Are Old” and “Politics,” and yet it is startlingly clear from the diction of both poems that their writer, whose focus might have shifted from the personal to the political, was as preoccupied with the subject of (lost) youth in his last days as when he was in his thirties.   When You Are Old (from The Rose , 1893) When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. In “When You Are Old,” the speaker is addressing a wo...

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult-film Donnie Darko reminded me of one important lesson. When Darko is asked by a pesky gym teacher to make a moral choice during an empowerment exercise, he refuses to do so and says that one cannot simply divide the world into two categories – the black and the white. That is because the world is a much more complex place, and sometimes individuals are compelled to make morally ambiguous choices. If the young across the world were to understand this one single message, we would at least be on our way to solving existing social problems rather than bickering among ourselves as to who is morally superior.  Left-wing vs Right-wing. Environmentalists vs Industrialists. Socialists vs Capitalists. Liberals vs Conservatives. Believers vs Doubters. A man who calls for a stop to immigration and advocates harsher penalties for criminals is immediately labelled a “Hitler”; a parent who believes in corporeal punishment in child-rearing is seen as a “mons...

Just because nationalism is an alien concept to the multi-cultural me, it does not mean it is so to the rest of the world. When someone displays nationalist sentiments (“One should be proud of one’s culture,” “Never forget one’s cultural roots,” “We must uphold our national language and values.”), I am more than intrigued. I am threatened – by the unashamed, self-righteous fervour and derailment of logic. To assert that one should blindly embrace one’s national language or culture may win you brownie points among your fellow countrymen, but it is about as logical as claiming we should be proud of being earthlings in a universe full of diverse civilisations. This “provincial” line of thinking, more often than not championed by peoples of marginal cultures, is a defence mechanism; it promotes unity and bestows a(n) (undeserved) sense of exclusivity upon a people whose cultural identity and security could be easily shaken. It is a misguided sentiment, an insidious one that ...