In July’s post (2013) we considered Nietzsche’s Prophecy concerning the Transvaluation of
Values—the period of the Great Unlearning that would cast its dismaying pall
over the West, and which Nietzsche foresaw as the unavoidable roadmap of the
West. In his prescience, Nietzsche grasped that this time of moral Unlearning, this
Nihilism,
which is nothing less than the general disintegration of moral values and
therefore of the cohesiveness of moral belief, must necessarily come about 1) because the West has been Christianized
for 2000 years, and 2) because the influence
of the Christian ethical tradition would necessarily and inexorably diminish among
the Peoples of the Western world as the Christian “Story” became less and less philosophically
plausible.
As
an aside—the mainstream intellectual interpretation attributes the “decline” of
Christianity to the “rise” of Science and the attendant philosophical Belief in
perpetual human progress. Charles Taylor, however, provides the more
philosophically interesting, and therefore mainstream defying, account of this deconstruction
of Christianized man in the secular age, in his eponymously titled book.
Now
for we Moderns this disintegration of moral values into moral chaos and anarchy
may seem fairly obvious, simply because the evidence of it saturates the
headlines of all our morning newspapers; but for Nietzsche to “see” this coming
from the remoteness of his 19th century, is both a judicious prediction
as well as philosophically insightful. This Nihilism –this, from Nietzsche’s
perspective, yet future moral disintegration—would be the direct result of the failure of precisely those very moral
valuations [temptation, sin, redemption, et al], which have been used to
interpret human existence from the earliest Judeo-Christian period up to the present
(from the Nachlass aus der
achtizigerjahre, Bk. I, European Nihilism, #28, spring-fall 1887).
By way of illustrating Nietzsche’s
prediction about moral nihilism, let us suppose for a moment that everyone
around us believes, like the youngsters of my generation, that the moon is made of green cheese. Now we must remember that it is not
so much a question of whether or not the moon is really made of green cheese—of whether this Belief is grounded in a
factum (science) rather than a factoid (myth), although this also will be a
question of obvious philosophical and archeological interest at some point in
the Greater Conversation. Rather, the important piece of this culture-puzzle
for Nietzsche is that pretty much everyone
everywhere, from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting, pays lip service to
the Belief, which means that the cultural “empire” is inhabited by a culturally
homogenous group of individuals – a People in fact. In this type of morally
homogenized, green-cheese world that we are imagining, we each understand one
another: our fellow citizens are predictable in thought and action because we have,
all of us, grown up to understand how our neighbor will think in the normal
situations of life. We share common points of reference. This morally green-cheesy type of world, this kosmos,
is familiar to us, and while there may indeed be some erstwhile rebels in our
midst, there is no true moral “Other,” no “Outsider” to disturb our cultural
homogeneity – our moral peace of mind.
Now
to whatever degree all the citizens of
this moral kosmos share in the same felicitous frame of mind, in this Belief
about the green cheesiness of the moon, there will be very few if any true ethical
divergences in our fair utopia. However, what happens when we allow Outsiders
into our Belief Space, when we tolerate into our little corner of the world, an
immigration of “others” who may conceptualize, articulate, and respond to
reality differently from us? Instead of accepting the moon’s green cheese reality
as We have always seen it from our culturally homogenous point of view, eventually
these newcomers, these Outsiders, will challenge, tentatively at first
and then ever more boldly, our (obviously) True Belief
about our satellite. That this should occur is absolutely predictable for
those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Some,
for example, might hold that moon cheese is really not quite altogether green,
but has rather a slightly yellow cast, or that it is bright and silvery,
or even orange like a nicely aged Gouda; others might argue that, with its
pocks and dips it actually looks like, and therefore must be like Emmental or Swiss cheese—“bendy” and full of holes and always
in danger of being stolen by some wayward critter (a mouse for Walt Disney, a squabbling
Corbeau and Renard for Jean de la Fontaine). Still others might find that our
cheesy moon seems much more like a round, uneven Camembert, and that it must
therefore be creamy and delicious and desperately in need of a nicely chambered
red wine. Yet again there will be others who see in the shadows on the surface
of the moon a reality more akin to the blue in a Gorgonzola or Auvergne cheese.
And
then, inevitably, along will come some bright, modern incarnation of Anaxagoras
(c. 500-428 BCE) who will suggest to us that the moon “is” not made of any sort
of cheese, but just only “looks” that way – that in reality it “is” a rock-like
sort of thing. And, of course, our new young A. will meet a fate similar to the
old A., who, when he suggested to the Athenians that the sun was a fiery rock,
was charged with impiety and sentenced to death by the Athenian court. The old
A. spent the remainder of his life in exile from Athens; the destiny of our
young A. will at least be symbolically, if not materially equivalent.
In this time of the Great Unlearning, the Christian center
that has traditionally buoyed up our moral values, because it has ceased being culturally ubiquitous, has collapsed. We
have been unceremoniously deposited onto the threshold of a next evolution,
which is of a moral order, in the course of which it will be our task to come
up with new moral rules. So at this present time of moral nihilism, which is necessarily
morally if not actually post-Christian,
we are discovering in and for ourselves the philosophical disposition to transvalue
long-held values. In this moment of Great Unlearning we are called upon to
rethink our Old Beliefs about morality, among which is the idea that there is some
kind of essential rapport between the Moral and Ethical Life of the individual,
and Belief in a Higher Power or a God.
The God/s,
of all religions combined, derive their being from a Notion of Power. This is
the story of all the sacred literatures of the world. This is not to dispute Their
existence, but only to grasp, finally, that the God/s are, and always have
been, fundamentally power conceptualizations; and that They are now, as They
have always been, uninterested in the personal moral or ethical life of the
human animal. Belief in a God is not a necessary constituent of the moral and ethical
life of Man. The atheist can be a saint as the religious man can be a
scoundrel. So come now, and let us reason together about God/s and the possibilities of a Godless Ethic.
As
a first and very simple idea, we should keep in mind that there is a fruitful
distinction to be made between ethics and morals. In
common usage, “ethics” has come to speak about the individual in his public
persona. Thus, there are ethics panels, codes of ethics, business ethics,
medical ethics, etc., which speak about the public man, about the actions of
the individual in the public arena. Morals, on the other hand, have come to refer
to the individual in his personal space, his personal motivations, and his personal/private
actions.
That
said, though, this distinction between the two terms, while handy for clarity
of thought, is actually quite artificial. Because the term “ethics,” which derives
from the Greek word ethos, means “customs
and manners,” while “morals” derives from the Latin word, mos/moris, and also means
“customs and manners.” So while both words are identical in terms of their
original meaning (Cicero is actually blamed for translating the Greek ethikos with the Latin moralis), it seems clear that at some
point these two words came to a fork in the road of common usage. More the
better.
As
a second and bit more complex idea, I have reflected elsewhere on the American church pastor who, in public university debate,
assured me that it was impossible to be a moral mortal without
believing in God. My response at that time was dismay; so I set out a course of
reflection and reasoning, and determined that the Christian God was Himself an
Immoral Idea:
We have […] morally neutered this
new-world God, making Him, finally, immoral.
There is no moral accountability that we attach to this Creature-Idea we have
named God; so “It” can use all the resources of knowledge, the unfathomable
power of the world and all the planetary systems, to move and manipulate the
world of men without giving Itself away. Unlimited power and no need to render
accounts, and still It neither indicates clearly to Men what It wishes to
achieve with all the Sound and the Fury unchained on this planet, nor what the
more general game plan is for Men and this their world. In this respect, the
new-world God is significantly inferior, both conceptually and morally, to the
old-world pagan conception of God and the Gods.
So, because there are legitimate historical, biblical, and
philosophical reservations concerning whether the Gods are Themselves moral in
nature, the only reasonable conclusion for us common mortals is to use our insights
and intelligence to determine how best to conduct ourselves in this, our Garden of Eden.
As a third idea, I am mindful that the Jesus Movement
started without any particular or precise code of ethics! Go figure. Imagine,
just for a moment, that I actually find it reasonable to accept the belief that
1) I inherit some sort of blame for being born into the world of men; that 2) a
God Dying can somehow modify (atone for) the culpability I inherit by virtue of
my humanness; and that 3) a very human Jesus is in fact the dying-resurrecting
God in question. Now I appreciate that there are some logical quirks embedded
in these assumptions – e.g., that the fully human (per the Nicene creed) Jesus
is somehow exempt from the culpability of his/our inherited humanness; that the
death of one innocent in the place of a whole lot of guilty is somehow
reflective of any sort of comprehensible idea of justice. However, let us
nonetheless imagine that I find it plausible to believe these things: does my
belief in these “fact-ideas” carry with it any sort of necessary ethical response?
Are there any specific actions, (because ethics has to do with acts and actions),
that my belief in these particular things necessarily requires of me? Not in
the least.
And this
was precisely the philosophical dilemma facing the early Jesus Movement, except
for the fact that the Movement was comprised predominately of Pharisaic Jews.
So the earliest believers in the Messianic and very-Jewish Jesus already had a
culturally inherited code of ethics –the Jewish Law, which gained further
incidental prestige precisely because of the Jewishness of the Founder.
It was
against the very Jewishness of the Jesus story, though, that the Apostle Paul
railed. And it was to be Paul, the Greek educated citizen of Rome, who helped
to transition the Christian Belief away from the Jewish Jesus of Galilee, and to
the Cosmic Christ. Paul took Jesus global by bucking against the Jewish framing
of the early Jesus Movement, which held that Messianic believers should abstain
from eating pork, become circumcised, and generally hold to the Law (Acts
21:18ff). Although a Pharisaic Jew himself, Paul wanted to take the Jesus story
out of the world of Jewish geography, and to introduce that story to Non-Jews
and other Greeks, who would in turn interpret the Jesus event (the res Christi) through the lens of their
ambient ethical traditions, which, given the time and place, happened to derive
from Greek Stoic philosophy. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke narrates the
history of this dramatic and painful shift in the ethical focus of the early
Jesus Movement, as it sacrificed its Jewish law-and-order trappings in order to
put on the toga of Greek philosophy.
So beyond the serendipitous ethical framing provided by the
Law of Moses in that particular geographical corner of the world, belief in the
ideas of the Jesus Movement carried with it no inherent or necessary ethical
component. What then was a Christian to
do in his life, how was he to act in terms of his belief in the death and
resurrection of Jesus? Predictably, Jewish believers remained fairly close to
the Law embedded in their ambient Hebraic culture; Greek believers continued to
value the elements of Stoic and Hellenistic virtue that were culturally
familiar to them, elements which are also quite common in the writings of the
Apostle Paul himself; and later Christians, those who were to enter into the
faith in the later generations of the Jesus Movement as it expanded outward
from its geographical center in Palestine, would inherit a mish-mashed fusion
of these various ethical frameworks and influences.
The need
for some type of ethical expression for the Christian Faith would be
consistently reconfirmed in the Christian thought tradition by the regular adoption
of spiritual exercises among believers, a need perhaps most famously articulated
(very late) by Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), who founded the Society of Jesus.
The Spiritual Exercises of this first Jesuit, while undeniably framed around the
Christian metaphysical worldview, are
structured, ethically, around the
basic tenets of Stoic philosophical virtue, such as was exemplified by the
Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. This
active practice of the philosophical
life involved a variety of specific exercises, including regular self-examination,
a contemplation of death to create a sense of proportionality about life, self-conquest,
and reflection on problems and solutions in our everyday life. This idea of the
active philosophical life, by the way, continues to blossom in some areas of our
Western thinking, notably in the application of ancient health care ideas
to holistic approaches to the Healthy Life.
So Ignatius
of Loyola, taking as his springboard the metaphysical credo of the Jesus belief
(see his opening Annotations), creates a self-help guidebook for ethical
conduct, where the believer can act-out his Christian faith daily through
reflection, meditation, and deliberate self-improvement, all of which could
have been plagiarized from the Stoic ethical practices of Marcus Aurelius.
The
accuracy of this historical précis and analysis is born out by Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher who, in his work on Ancient Philosophy, draws a straight spiritual and practical line from
Hellenistic philosophy, which influenced the Church Fathers from Origin to Augustine,
through the rise of the monastic tradition, and up to and beyond the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of
Loyola.
As a fourth and final idea about the God/s and the Ethical
Life, the primary ethical lesson that religious men of the West seem to have
retained from contact with their Gods, is a love of blood and domination. There
is, of course, the blood-lust inherited from the bloody-mindedness of the Jewish God, Yahweh, who was
relentless in terms of “other gods.” Sixty-four times in the Hebrew Bible there
is mention of Israel’s inclination to pursue other gods, and each time the
Deity reserves His bloody judgment for all concerned. It is this same Yahweh who
is later to emerge in the fusion-persona of the “loving” God of the Christians,
Who finds nothing better to do than to execute His own innocent Son, and whose
followers will foist upon the Western world, in a moment of stunning injustice
and philosophical irrationality, the rather curious but tremendously influential non-idea
that the death of an innocent can somehow “pay” for whatever crimes have been
committed by the guilty.
But this Judeo-Christian fusion God is not alone in His
bloody world; there is also the Western religious man’s general love of
spiritual and political domination. There is, for example, the bloodlust
associated with the on-again off-again spirit of conquest and jihad domination that
has historically inspired the soldiers of Islam in their spread around the
Mediterranean basin and beyond, a spirit that is once again burning itself
across the face of the West. Another example from Islam of political domination
by a religious authority is quite explicit, in the various fundamentalist
communities and their attempts to control how women dress in public.
In
Christianity there is also a principle of domination, which is roundly
condemned in Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity in the Antichrist. Perhaps the most well known of all of Jesus’ commands
is the Great Commission, which is the charge to go and conquer the minds of all men—Christian
proselytizing or propagandizing,
the goal of which is to bring the whole world under the domination of a single
idea, belongs to the earliest ideas of the Jesus Movement.
The Great Commission
is still very much alive and well in America, where believers continue to try
to impose on the greater public consciousness recognition of an archaic
religious text with its out-of-date and for the most part culturally irrelevant
ethical codes. Equally, current headlines are full of the unchained Christian
Right in American, which demands of all Americans and consistently works to
translate into law, in the public arena, compliance to the ethical tyranny of a
Jewish Law-code almost 3000 years old. Yet, this is the very Law that was
fulfilled, supposedly, and thereby made redundant by the coming of the
turn-the-other-cheek Messiah of the original Jesus Movement. Irrationalities
abound.
On the road of the Great Unlearning in this our world-come-of-age, a journey that was sign-posted
by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, it is past time that
we make our peace with the idea that, although the stage lights are still on in
the theatre, Elvis has (really and truly) left the building. Let this be Day One of a godless
Ethic in the world of men.
