Friedrich Nietzsche was a brilliant
philosophical psychologist, one of my favorite thinkers, but it seems
to me that his philosophical edifice, and also that of his
post-modern acolytes (and modern hyper-libertarians), falls with the sociobiological discovery of the
biological origin of altruism and social behavior. Nietzsche's individualism depends on
the philosophical destruction of morality based on altruism.
Group-behavior, group-selection,
understood as the primary unit of selection in human evolution,
created the messy balance/imbalance of human nature, between
individualism, kin selection, and group selection, which in any case
helped to create human civilization. That human nature, developed
mainly in hunter-gatherer times, remains with us today, helping to
direct our behavior.
The moral checks and balances on
individual passions, disparaged by Nietzsche, are as natural as
passions themselves; this allowed social behavior to conquer the
world, as recently affirmed by E.O.Wilson, another of my favorite
thinkers. Even conservatism can be affirmed in biologically natural altruism,
seen at the creation of social traditions and institutions, as long as it
includes the changes of material evolution, which it doesn't always
include.
The question becomes not whether to
develop individual geniuses (such as Nietzsche) or not, but how to
distinguish (and encourage) socially responsible and not socially
destructive geniuses, which another one of my favorite thinkers,
Raymond Cattell, dealt with in his social psychology.
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