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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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I think if we're talking about the classical antecedents of modern leftism -- the anarchism of Proudhon, or the work of Marx and Engels -- I don't think that stuff can be described as anti-natalist or anti-life. I think the humanist tendencies in Marxism are generally underestimated and underappreciated by critics of Marxism. But it's clear that now, today, there's a strong link between anti-natalism and leftism: you can't have kids because it's destroying the environment, you can't have kids because it's racist and colonialist, etc.

It's harder to think of examples of anti-life attitudes on the right. Maybe you could talk about the sorts of Gnostic and neo-Platonist Christian sects that were popular in late antiquity and the early middle ages: you must abhor the flesh, abhor reproduction, abhor pleasure. But were they really "rightist" just because they were religious? Does religion automatically make you a rightist? Or is the left/right spectrum inadequate to describe their views?

And then there is Nietzsche [...] he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.

Nietzsche was by most accounts what we would call, in modern parlance, a "weirdo autist". His few romantic advances towards women were rejected. (Famously, a woman named Lou Salomé spurned him in favor of their mutual friend Paul Rée.) Allegedly he was once alone with a prostitute and he fled from the room when she exposed her genitalia, although that story may be apocryphal. In his later years he seems to have consigned himself to the fact that he wasn't marriage material:

"Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition."

In the opening pages of Twilight of the Idols, he addresses your central question directly:

"You really have to stretch out your fingers and make a concerted attempt to grasp this amazing piece of subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, who are an interested party, a bone of contention, even, and not judges; not by the dead for other reasons. - It is an objection to a philosopher if he sees a problem with the value of life, it is a question mark on his wisdom, an un-wisdom.