I'll offer another take, from what I think was my first AAQC over at the old motte, a further interpretation of Master/Slave Morality, the Perks of Being a Wallflower theory, the Jocks vs the Emo Kids, from my review of the Abercrombie and Fitch documentary White Hot from Netflix. I'm going to quote the old comment, then expand on it in the context of SA's essay here.
How do you read an interview headlined "youth, sex and casual superiority” with quotes like "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” And not think of Nietzche. How do you look at the displays of beefcake male nudes and hear Bruce Weber talk about restoring the aesthetic glory of Classical Greece, and not think of Friedrich’s modern interpreter BAP? A&F’s aesthetic was to sell the image of the Blonde Beast, in the literal and philosophical senses. They sold the fantasy of youth, strength, vigor, and total lack of self-reflection; a total spontaneity of desire and the satisfaction of that desire through action. Their marketing tried to use Nietzche’s idea of the natural tendency of the healthy and beautiful and vigorous to self-determine what is cool, by creating an artificial Aristocracy of models and images, then hiring cool local kids as representatives, which then co-opted the locals. And how do you watch the haters without thinking “pure ressentiment all the way down.” The grand narrative is of an upper class which set its own standards, and a lower class which sought to eliminate the right of the upper class to set its own values if it excluded the lower class.
...
Overall, it was a fascinating piece, especially the coverage of the aesthetic of beauty and sex that they built. The core question for me is this: Was the feeling that people got from buying and wearing the clothing worth the costs, both economic and moral, that we paid for them? By creating the brand and the feeling, A&F provided value. One talking head on the doc, who would later be a plaintiff suing A&F for discrimination, said she had one A&F shirt which she wore as often as she could to every party. Clearly that had some value for her, and it was created by the very brand-building discrimination she herself would later decry. Is that value redeeming, or is it bad in and of itself, a false happiness that must of necessity lead to more suffering than it is worth?
Not that I'd expect Scott to think about Abercrombie and Fitch a lot, but I think this provides a frame that is a lot more understandable to a modern American or American-adjacent: rather than Master/Slave morality, think of it as Preppy Jock vs Emo Kid conceptions of what is cool. Like ol' Freddy Nietzche we are dealing in archetypes not actualities, these are myths which, like all myths, deal in an imagined past not in our own present.
The archetypal Preppy Jock likes things that he likes, that his friends like, and thinks those things are cool because he and his friends like them. Sports are cool, he's good at them and his friends are good at them, and if some other person is good at them then that person must be cool too. Being rich is cool, having money lets you do cool things. Hooking up with pretty girls is cool. He, and his friends, and the pretty girls he wants to hook up with, all wear A&F, so A&F must be cool. Wanting to be strong and beautiful and admired and have a pretty partner are basic human traits, these desires are inherently humanistic.
The archetypal Emo Kid isn't good at sports, isn't rich, and can't get the pretty girls to make out with him. So he creates his own version of cool where every aspect of the Preppy Jock system is inverted. Sportsball is stupid, jocks are dumb, they'll be working for us nerds some day!. Rich kids are arrogant and cruel, and because they have everything handed to them they don't really build character or know the real world. He obviously lusts after the pretty girls too, but they aren't into him, and the entire corpus of Emo love songs is largely built around the fantasy that he, the Nice Guy, would be a better partner than the Jock who actually gets her; hooking up with pretty girls is lame, having deep unfulfilled longing for them which is finally sanctified when consummated in a mega-deep way that the dumb Jocks and Players will never get, the Pretty Girl will finally realize that she really wanted the Emo Kid all along. The Preppy Jocks wear A&F, so A&F is for lame, arrogant, idiots, who pay for overpriced T Shirts. His values are built on negating the values of his bullies.
This example illustrates how it interacts with the classic Barber Pole of fashion to produce some of the contradictions re:Christianity that different commenters have noted. Master morality is what masters like, and it is possible to change what they like, which will then become master morality. A&F was able to get hot teenagers in their clothing, other hot teenagers realized it was the hot teenager thing to do, and without overly self examining purchased A&F. There's nothing inherent to being a jock about wearing loose or tight (or now loose again) jeans from a certain mall brand, but they naturally become part of the story. ((Though I will argue that for aesthetic reasons all WASPy people with decently athletic bodies look best in trad ivy fashions))
Christianity was a religion of slaves, until it became the religion of the masters. At that point, Christianity became master morality. There is a Marxian Base/Superstructure aspect to it. To return to our high school, there is more master morality in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes than in the Wiccan Club, even if the members of the Wiccan Club can successfully offer a lecture about Master Vs Slave Morality in Nietzche and the FCA kids can't.
Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality. It is the effort to negate the values of your bullies, to claim that your own values are higher and finer and better than those that oppress you. This goes back to Nietzsche himself, of course. But also stays true in the ACX comment section: the incomparable Walt Bismarck, annoyed at being derided as cruel and weird, proceeded to prove how cruel and weird he was, with his yass-ified AI avatar just being so ridiculous that I can never take anyone who would do that seriously. The kind of people that talk about Master Morality are using the concept as a Slave Morality, as a cope to deal with how downtrodden they actually are. They aren't natural Achilles types, reveling in their own dominance. They are sad losers, talking about the grand conspiracy against them, about how if it weren't for the "Longhouse Ethics" of the world they coulda been a contenda.
“Civil religion” is a surprising place for social justice to end up. Gay pride started at Stonewall as a giant fuck-you to civil society. Homeless people, addicts, and sex workers told the police where they could shove their respectable values.
But there was another major world religion that started with beggars, lepers, and prostitutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Pharisees where to shove their respectable values. One whose founder got in trouble with the cops of his time. One that told its followers to leave their families, quit their jobs, give away all their possessions, and welcome execution at the hands of the secular authorities.
The new faith burst into a world dominated by the religio Romana, the civil religion par excellence. Emperor Augustus had just finished moral reforms promoting all the best values: chastity, family, tradition, patriotism, martial valor. Lavishly dressed procurators and proconsuls were building beautiful marble temples across the known world, spreading the rites with all the pomp and dignity befitting history’s greatest empire.
The problem was, nobody really believed religio Romana anymore. Everyone believed it was important to have all the best values, like chastity and military valor and so on. But nobody took Jupiter very seriously, or thought the Emperor was legitimate in some kind of sacred way.
When the new religion of beggars and lepers encountered the old religion of emperors and philosophers, the latter crumbled. But as Christianity expanded to the upper classes, it started looking, well, upper-class. It started promoting all the best values. Chastity, family, tradition, patriotism, martial valor. You knew the Pope was a good Christian because he lived in a giant palace and wore a golden tiara. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to love prostitutes, but Pope Sixtus V did pass a law instituting the death penalty for prostitution, in Jesus’ name. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to preach peace, but they did fight an awful lot of holy wars.
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Notes -
I'll offer another take, from what I think was my first AAQC over at the old motte, a further interpretation of Master/Slave Morality, the Perks of Being a Wallflower theory, the Jocks vs the Emo Kids, from my review of the Abercrombie and Fitch documentary White Hot from Netflix. I'm going to quote the old comment, then expand on it in the context of SA's essay here.
...
Not that I'd expect Scott to think about Abercrombie and Fitch a lot, but I think this provides a frame that is a lot more understandable to a modern American or American-adjacent: rather than Master/Slave morality, think of it as Preppy Jock vs Emo Kid conceptions of what is cool. Like ol' Freddy Nietzche we are dealing in archetypes not actualities, these are myths which, like all myths, deal in an imagined past not in our own present.
The archetypal Preppy Jock likes things that he likes, that his friends like, and thinks those things are cool because he and his friends like them. Sports are cool, he's good at them and his friends are good at them, and if some other person is good at them then that person must be cool too. Being rich is cool, having money lets you do cool things. Hooking up with pretty girls is cool. He, and his friends, and the pretty girls he wants to hook up with, all wear A&F, so A&F must be cool. Wanting to be strong and beautiful and admired and have a pretty partner are basic human traits, these desires are inherently humanistic.
The archetypal Emo Kid isn't good at sports, isn't rich, and can't get the pretty girls to make out with him. So he creates his own version of cool where every aspect of the Preppy Jock system is inverted. Sportsball is stupid, jocks are dumb, they'll be working for us nerds some day!. Rich kids are arrogant and cruel, and because they have everything handed to them they don't really build character or know the real world. He obviously lusts after the pretty girls too, but they aren't into him, and the entire corpus of Emo love songs is largely built around the fantasy that he, the Nice Guy, would be a better partner than the Jock who actually gets her; hooking up with pretty girls is lame, having deep unfulfilled longing for them which is finally sanctified when consummated in a mega-deep way that the dumb Jocks and Players will never get, the Pretty Girl will finally realize that she really wanted the Emo Kid all along. The Preppy Jocks wear A&F, so A&F is for lame, arrogant, idiots, who pay for overpriced T Shirts. His values are built on negating the values of his bullies.
This example illustrates how it interacts with the classic Barber Pole of fashion to produce some of the contradictions re:Christianity that different commenters have noted. Master morality is what masters like, and it is possible to change what they like, which will then become master morality. A&F was able to get hot teenagers in their clothing, other hot teenagers realized it was the hot teenager thing to do, and without overly self examining purchased A&F. There's nothing inherent to being a jock about wearing loose or tight (or now loose again) jeans from a certain mall brand, but they naturally become part of the story. ((Though I will argue that for aesthetic reasons all WASPy people with decently athletic bodies look best in trad ivy fashions))
Christianity was a religion of slaves, until it became the religion of the masters. At that point, Christianity became master morality. There is a Marxian Base/Superstructure aspect to it. To return to our high school, there is more master morality in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes than in the Wiccan Club, even if the members of the Wiccan Club can successfully offer a lecture about Master Vs Slave Morality in Nietzche and the FCA kids can't.
Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality. It is the effort to negate the values of your bullies, to claim that your own values are higher and finer and better than those that oppress you. This goes back to Nietzsche himself, of course. But also stays true in the ACX comment section: the incomparable Walt Bismarck, annoyed at being derided as cruel and weird, proceeded to prove how cruel and weird he was, with his yass-ified AI avatar just being so ridiculous that I can never take anyone who would do that seriously. The kind of people that talk about Master Morality are using the concept as a Slave Morality, as a cope to deal with how downtrodden they actually are. They aren't natural Achilles types, reveling in their own dominance. They are sad losers, talking about the grand conspiracy against them, about how if it weren't for the "Longhouse Ethics" of the world they coulda been a contenda.
Touching on another of Scott's posts I've mentioned several times on here.
Good pick!
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