Let us consider the other case of
so-called morality, the
case of
breeding a particular race and kind. The most
magnificent example of this is furnished by
Indian
morality,
sanctioned as religion in the form of "
the Law of Manu."
Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at
once: one
priestly, one
warlike, one for trade and
agriculture, and finally a race of
servants, the
Sudras.
Obviously, we are here no longer among
animal tamers: a kind
of man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is
the condition for even conceiving such a plan of
breeding.
One heaves a sigh of relief at leaving the
Christian
atmosphere of
disease and dungeons for this healthier,
higher, and wider world. How wretched is the
New Testament
compared to
Manu, how foul it smells! Yet this organization
too found it necessary to be terrible -- this time not in the
struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the
unbred man, the
mish-mash man, the
chandala. And again it
had no other means for keeping him from being dangerous, for
making him weak, than to make him sick -- it was the fight
with the "great number." Perhaps there is nothing that
contradicts our feeling more than these protective measures
of
Indian
morality. The third
edict, for example
(
Avadana-
Shastra I), "on impure
vegetables," ordains that
the only nourishment permitted to the
chandala shall be
garlic and
onions, seeing that the holy
scripture prohibits
giving them
grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire.
The same
edict orders that the water they need may not be
taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from
the approaches to
swamps and from holes made by the
footsteps of animals. They are also prohibited from washing
their laundry and from washing themselves, since the water
they are conceded as an act of grace may be used only to
quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that
Sudra women may
not assist
chandala women in childbirth, and a
prohibition
that the latter may not assist each other in this condition.
The success of such
sanitary police measures was inevitable:
murderous epidemics,
ghastly venereal diseases, and
thereupon again "the law of the knife", ordaining
circumcision for male children and the removal of the
internal
labia for female children.
Manu himself says: "The
chandalas are the fruit of
adultery,
incest, and crime
(these, the necessary consequences of the concept of
breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from
corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron;
for divine services, only
evil spirits. They shall wander
without rest from place to place. They are prohibited from
writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in
writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right
is reserved for the
virtuous, for the people of race."
from The Twilight of the Idols (1888) by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by H.L. Mencken, who took this gibberish seriously.
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