The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
747.
Society, to-day, is full of consideration, tact, and reticence, and of good-natured respect for other people's rights--even for the exactions of strangers. To an even greater degree is there a certain charitable and instinctive depreciation of the worth of man as shown by all manner of trustful habits. Respect for men, and not only for the most virtuous, is perhaps the real parting of the ways between us and the Christian mythologists also have our good share of irony even when listening to moral sermons. He who preaches morality to us debases himself in our eyes and becomes almost comical. Liberal-mindedness regarding morality is one of the best signs of our age. In cases where it is most distinctly wanting, we regard it as a sign of a morbid condition (the case of Carlyle in England, of Ibsen in Norway, and Schopenhauer's pessimism throughout Europe). If there is anything which can reconcile us to our own age, it is precisely the amount of immorality which it allows itself without falling in its own estimation--very much the reverse! In what, then, does the superiority of culture over the want of culture consist--of the Renaissance, for instance, over the Middle Ages? In this alone: the greater quantity of acknowledged immorality. From this it necessarily follows that the very _zenith_ of human development _must_ be regarded by the moral fanatic as the _non plus ultra_ of corruption (in this connection let us recall Savonarola's judgment of Florence, Plato's indictment of Athens under Pericles, Luther's condemnation of Rome, Rousseau's anathemas against the society of Voltaire, and Germany's hostility to Goethe).
A little more fresh air, for Heaven's sake! This ridiculous condition of Europe _must_ not last any longer. Is there a single idea behind this bovine nationalism? What possible value can there be in encouraging this arrogant self-conceit when everything to-day points to greater and more common interests?--at a moment when the spiritual dependence and denationalisation, which are obvious to all, are paving the way for the reciprocal _rapprochements_ and fertilisations which make up the real value and sense of present-day culture! ... And it is precisely now that "the new German Empire" has been founded upon the most thread-bare and discredited of ideas--universal suffrage and equal right for all. Think of all this struggling for advantage among conditions which are in every way degenerate: of this culture of big cities, of newspapers, of hurry and scurry, and of "aimlessness"! The economic unity of Europe must necessarily come--and with it, as a reaction, the pacivist movement. A pacivist party, free from all sentimentality, which forbids its children to wage war; which forbids recourse to courts of justice; which forswears all fighting, all contradiction, and all persecution: for a while the party of the oppressed, and later the powerful party:--this party would be opposed to everything in the shape of revenge and resentment. There will also be a war party, exercising the same thoroughness and severity towards itself, which will proceed in precisely the opposite direction.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.