Friedrich Nietzsche and the limits of meritocracy

On 'Homer's Contest', and the conflict between international and intranational competition

From childhood, every Greek felt the burning desire within him to be an instrument of bringing salvation to his city in the contest between cities: in this, his selfishness was lit, as well as curbed and restricted. For that reason, the individuals in antiquity were freer, because their aims were nearer and easier to achieve. Modern man, on the other hand, is crossed everywhere by infinity, like swift-footed Achilles in the parable of Zeno of Elea: infinity impedes him, he cannot even overtake the tortoise.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Homer’s Contest’ (1873)

Whether Nietzsche even has a political philosophy is itself disputed by his modern interpreters in the halls of contemporary academia. Martha Nussbaum, a notable contemporary political philosopher — to get an idea of what kind of political philosopher this woman is, take a look at her philpeople page — argues that Nietzsche lacks a political philosophy because he fails to systematically address such issues as ‘gender and the family’ and ‘justice between nations’, thus concluding that ‘…serious political theory… needs to forget about Nietzsche and turn to those thinkers he found so boring — the liberal Enlightenment thinkers’ (Nussbaum 1997). Brian Leiter, arguably the pope of contemporary Anglophone Nietzsche scholarship, goes even further than Nussbaum. He argues that not only did Nietzsche lack a political philosophy, but also that Nietzsche never claimed any of his work was political in the first place (Leiter 2002).

This article will primarily be about the Indian H-1B visa debate that has been raging on the American Right over the past month, but a subsidiary aim will be to show that Nietzsche does have a political philosophy, even if it is mostly contained in essays he wrote in his late twenties, essays which Leiter dismisses due to the fact they were never published. The unpublished essay in particular that I will explore is ‘Homer’s Contest’, wherein a sensitive young Nietzsche discusses the role of competition amongst the ancient Greeks. I will use this essay as a stepping stone to give a Nietzschean critique of the kind of unbridled, open borders ‘meritocracy’ that the Silicon Valley-adjacent Right advocate for.

For Nietzsche, there are two forms of struggle amongst the Hellenes: the horrific bloodbath that characterises the pre-Homeric world, where ‘cruelty of the victory is the pinnacle of life’s jubilation’; and the organised competitions that characterised much of life within the bounds of the Greek polis, ‘the Agon’. Different goddesses preside over these two spheres of struggle, goddesses which Nietzsche sees in Hesiod: the elder Eris, and the younger Eris. The elder Eris is the detestable instigator of war, whom man is of necessity subjected to; the younger Eris the praiseworthy promoter of envy, placed on earth as a gift to man by Zeus. This younger Eris promotes jealousy and grudges between potters, minstrels, and carpenters, and thereby drives men to hone their skills. For the Hellene, envy was a boon and the catalyst of their greatness. In Nietzsche’s view, then, what made the Greeks great was that they had perfected the art of cultivating the kind of struggle that the younger Eris presided over. From athletics to poetry, the Greeks were constantly competing amongst each other.

I have been calling the kind of struggle presided over by the younger Eris ‘the contest’, ‘the competition’, and ‘the Agon’, and I would hereby like to dub the kind of struggle overseen by the elder Eris as ‘the Chaos’. The Chaos is inherently anarchic and unmoderated, brutal and violent; the Agon, on the other hand, is sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful, but always formalised, subject to rules. I believe it is through this latter concept, the Agon, that us moderns should evaluate meritocracy, and for Nietzsche, this kind of competition is certainly not an ‘anything goes’ affair.

To give one explicit example — one that Nietzsche himself gives — it was legitimate for the Greeks to ostracise those who were so dominant in a given contest that they risked killing off the competition itself. He quotes a little-discussed fragment of Heraclitus in which Heraclitus denounces his fellow Ephesians for banishing a man named Hermodoros due to his domination of the Agon:

The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodoros, the best man among them, saying, ‘We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.’

—Heraclitus, Fragment 121

If we understand meritocracy as the idea that those who succeed in the competition should retain their status, then the Greeks did not believe in meritocracy unconditionally: meritocracy was itself subordinated to the Agon. Those individuals who were so meritorious that competition dried up were to be ejected.

But the more important point that I would like to make, once again using ‘Homer’s Contest’, is that there ought to be another rule for certain forms of competition: namely, only true members of the polis should be allowed to compete. This is not a point Nietzsche himself explicitly makes, and he seems to acknowledge both inter-city-state competition as well as intra-city-state competition, but I want to use Nietzsche’s dichotomy of struggle to make the case for the aforementioned limitation on meritocracy. I am myself, like most Pimlico Journal readers, a fan of meritocracy, because it (generally) promotes the Agon. The Agon itself is of both instrumental and intrinsic value: the Agon inherently makes those involved more virtuous, and societies which are more Agonistic are healthier and better overall.

I interpret Nietzsche as implying that the Chaos had not fully subsided by the time of the post-Homeric Greeks; rather, it seemed to still linger in war between city-states: the elder Eris must have still been at work in much of the brutality of the Peloponnesian War. The same unorganised clawing for supremacy still occurs in the international system of today, in spite of ‘international law’ and its contemporary priesthood. To put it in the terms of modern international relations theory: we live under international anarchy, and this shapes how nation-states relate to each other (Nietzsche, given his praise of Machiavelli and Thucydides in Twilight of the Idols, chapter X §2, was most likely — using modern terminology — a ‘realist’ in international relations theory himself).

Nation-states, like the Greek polities of old, inevitably struggle against each other for power, and the nation-states that lose these struggles sacrifice their existential security. Nietzsche characterises the elder Eris as presiding specifically over a struggle to the death, but it is uncommon nowadays for the winners of international conflict to genocide the losers, so Nietzsche would maybe have rejected the identification of the modern international system with the Chaos of the elder Eris. Nevertheless, even if this is not the Chaos in Nietzsche’s precise sense, I hope the reader will accept that this is still analogous to it, and not the same as the Agonic formal contests between athletes at the Olympic Games.

Given that the international struggle is a Chaotic, anarchic one, what implications does this have for the intra-national struggle, the modern Agon? As stated previously, the Agon is valuable both intrinsically and instrumentally, and said instrumental value lies in large part in the fact that the more Agonistic polities are better capable of prevailing in the international Chaos. To quote from Nietzsche:

For the ancients, the aim of Agonistic education was the well-being of the whole, of state society. For example, every Athenian was to develop himself, through the contest, to the degree to which this self was of most use to Athens and would cause least damage.

Now, our new friends in Silicon Valley could skim ‘Homer’s Contest’ and see it as a confirmation of their beliefs about the H-1B visa: ‘We need to beat the Chinese by letting in tons of Indians to compete with Americans for “tech” jobs, that shit’s Nietzschean yo, call me an h/acc for “Homeric Accelerationist”, bro.’ This, however, would be to make a grave error.

For the sake of the argument, I am going to assume that all of the people that our dear friend from Silicon Valley would want to import would be genuinely meritorious individuals — high-IQ, well-qualified, industrious, et cetera — nothing like the average Boriswaver living across the Atlantic, who got into Britain by overstaying his student visa after studying ‘business’ at the University of Hertfordshire. Should these meritorious foreigners be allowed to participate in the American intra-national Agon alongside Americans for high-paying jobs, including many which would grant them significant power within America? As these people establish themselves within America, gain citizenship, start families, and so on, will we be able to rely on them to work towards American national interests? Will they stand on the American side of the Chaos, or will they have one foot — or possibly even two — elsewhere?

They need not even have their feet in enemy territory to be subversive to the American side of our pseudo-pre-Homeric international struggle. Although Indian-American relations have never been simple, on the whole India seems to be geopolitically aligned with America in Asia, principally because it is a regional rival of (and has territorial disputes with) China, the main external threat to the United States. However, it is still another country, and sometimes even your allies can undermine you: just look at how America has undermined Britain in recent years on the international stage. Would these new Indians support the interests of America unconditionally, or would they support their own ethnic interests first (and the interests of their pseudo-ethnostate in Asia)? Would they engage in nepotism to enshrine themselves as an elite group above Americans? Would they support the anti-American goals of the Democrat party in their new home, and the BJP’s Hindu nationalism in their old one? Will they support DEI and affirmative action, bolster the many narratives that demonise America, support censorship of those outside the good graces of the Woke, an ideology which would seemingly grant high moral status to Indians as victims of British imperialism?

I am not going to try to provide answers to these questions — others will be able to do that better than I can. I am primarily interested in old books. Still, the point is this: the great American Agon, to the extent to which it still exists, is justified in large part by the instrumental value it has in allowing America to succeed in that greater struggle, the struggle between civilisations on the world stage. It is possible, even likely, that the American Agon loses this instrumental value if we invite a potential fifth-column to participate in it, since it ceases to be an Agon justified because it promotes American national interests. If we assume (a) there is a large pool of meritorious Indians who would move to America under an even more liberal H-1B visa scheme, and (b) the beneficiaries would promote their own ethnic interests at the expense of Americans through an alliance with Woke, broadly defined, then the value of the American Agon would be diminished. Of course, the Agon would not lack any value — it still retains its intrinsic value from earlier, but succeeding in the international struggle for power has intrinsic value too.

Unbridled meritocracy faces problems, like the problem of individual dominance that Nietzsche sees ancient ostracism as a precaution against, a precaution against the decadence that comes when competition dries up. What I am arguing, with Nietzsche’s help, is that it faces an additional problem that the ‘tech’ Right ought to recognise; namely, that placing no restrictions on who can compete in the Agon in the first place allows your collective to be subverted and the Agon to lose value. Meritocracy is great, and the Right should champion it against a Left which believes the weak should be artificially propelled into positions of power, but meritocracy gains its value from the struggle it promotes, and the fact that said struggle gives us an advantage in the greater struggle of the international arena. This is why the ‘tech’ Right are wrong to accuse their opponents of supporting ‘DEI for Heritage Americans’: DEI is illegitimate because it restricts the ability of ‘Heritage Americans’ to engage in the intra-national Agon. Refraining from giving visas to Gujarati programmers is not illegitimate if said Gujaratis would not be true members of the polis, and therefore admitting them into the Agon would undermine one of the greatest reasons for why we have the Agon in the first place.

If the ‘tech’ Right genuinely value meritocracy über alles, then fine — you are welcome to have your civilisational decline if you think it’s the price worth paying so that Indians can go head-to-head with Idahoans for new software engineer openings at Alphabet. Those new arrivals may not share your enthusiasm for unconditional meritocracy, however, given that they come from a country with a literal caste system. Americans would then have something in common with the H-1B Indians, given that we too uphold different values and different virtues; values and virtues that cause us to see the strengths and the limits of meritocracy:

What is good? —Everything that enhances people's feeling of power, will to power, power itself.

What is bad? —Everything stemming from weakness.

What is happiness? —The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome.

—Nietzsche, The Antichrist, aphorism 2

If there is anyone on the ‘tech’ Right reading this, I appreciate that in parts of this article I may have come across as condescending, but I don’t really want to alienate you. I hope you have at the very least come to recognise the potential states of affairs under which you might be wrong, and I hope that you come to investigate whether those states of affairs are actual. To be able to change one’s mind is the prerogative of all men of intellectual integrity, and it is a prerogative that I myself have made great use of throughout the years — and if any of you decide to make use of said prerogative, my hand will be stretched out towards yours.

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Image credits: RickyBennison, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

This article was written by Alfred Ryle, a regular Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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