~by David Aiken~
– …il caso è il grande ordinatore dei fatti
umani…
La vita è l’imprevisto.
Luigi
Natoli (I Beati Paoli)
§ Great Unlearning I – You can be moral without believing in
God.
In another essay,
entitled “The Great Unlearning. Nietzsche’s Prophecy (2013)” we
considered Nietzsche’s prediction concerning the Transvaluation of Values: that
the period of the Great Unlearning would inevitably come and cast its dismaying
pall over the West. In his prescience, Nietzsche grasped that this time of Unlearning,
this Nihilism,
which corresponds to the pervasive 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 moral tradition would necessarily and inexorably diminish as
the Christian “Story” became less and less philosophically plausible among the Peoples
of the Western world.
As
an aside—the mainstream intellectual interpretation of this “decline” of
Christianity comes complete with the concomitant “rise” of Science and the
attendant philosophical Belief in perpetual human progress. Charles Taylor,
however, provides the more philosophically interesting, and therefore
challenging, account of this descent of Christianized man into the secular
society, in his eponymously titled book.
Now
for we Moderns, this disintegration of moral values 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, which have been used to interpret
human existence from the earliest 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 in our supposition 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 geneal-archeological
interest at some point in the Greater Conversation. Rather, the important piece
of this 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 empire” is composed of 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, or Belief, about
the green cheesiness of the moon, there will be very few if any true moral
divergences in our fair Worldview. 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 and articulate 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 our (obviously) True Belief about our satellite, tentatively at first and then ever more boldly. 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 be at least symbolically, if not materially, equivalent.
In this time of the Great Unlearning, which is the task that
is presently falling to our generation in the West, the Christian center
that has traditionally buoyed up our moral values, because it has ceased being culturally ubiquitous, has collapsed. We
are now being transmogrified into a next evolution, which is of a moral sort. So
at this time, which is at least morally 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 Life of the individual and Belief in 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, however, but only to grasp, finally, that the God/s are and
always have fundamentally been, power conceptualizations, and that They are now,
as they have always been, uninterested in the personal Moral Life of the human
animal. Belief in a God is not a necessary component of the Moral Life. 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 Moral Life.
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 want to speak about the public man, about the
actions of the individual in the public arena. Morals, on the other hand, 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 fruitful to clarity
of thought, is actually quite artificial. Because the term “ethics” derives
from the Greek word ethos, which
means “the customs and habits of a people,” while “morals” derives from the
Latin word, mors/mores, which also means “the customs and habits of a people.” So,
while both words are identical in terms of their original meaning, it seems
clear that at some point they came to a fork in the road of common usage.
As
a second and bit more complex idea, I have reflected elsewhere on the American church pastor who, in public debate, assured me that it
was impossible to have morals, or a moral life, without believing in god. My
response at that time was dismay, and it still has not changed; so I set out a
course of reflection and reasoning, and concluded the following:
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 one to whom render an account, 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 and actual
reservations concerning whether the Gods are Themselves moral, the only
reasonable conclusion is for us common mortals to use our insights and intelligence
to determine best how to conduct ourselves in this, our rather worn-out Garden of Eden.
As a third idea, I am mindful that the Jesus Movement
started without any particular or unique code of ethics! Imagine for a moment that one should actually
think it reasonable to believe 1) that one inherits some sort of blame for
being born into the world of men; that 2) a God Dying can somehow modify (atone
for) the culpability that each one of us inherits by virtue of our humanness;
and that 3) a very human Jesus is in fact the Dying God in question. Now we can
appreciate that there are some logical quirks embedded in these assumptions –
e.g., that the very human Jesus is somehow exempt from the culpability of
humanness; that the death of an innocent in the place of a guilty is somehow
reflective of any sort of justice. However, let us imagine nonetheless that it
is reasonable to believe these things: does our belief in these ideas carry with
it any sort of necessary moral response? Are there any specific actions,
because ethics and morality have to do with acts and actions, that our belief
necessarily requires of us? Not in the least.
And this
was precisely the problem that should have faced the Jesus Movement, which
defined itself around belief in these very things, except for the fact that the
early Jesus Movement was comprised predominately of Jews, and especially those
of the Pharisee persuasion. These earliest believers in the Messianic and very
Jewish Jesus already had a code of ethics –the Jewish Law, which was also
redeemed by virtue of the Jewishness of Jesus. This, though, was precisely the
problem raised by the Apostle Paul, who went against the Jewishness of the
early movement, which held that Messianic believers should abstain from eating
pork, should become circumcised, and should generally hold to the Law. Although
a Pharisaic Jew himself, Paul went against the Jewishness of the Jesus Movement
in order to take the Jesus story to Non-Jews and other Greeks, who would
interpret the Jesus belief through the lens of the ambient stoic ethic. This
dramatic shift in the ethical and moral focus of the early Jesus movement, from
a Jewish to a non-Jewish ethical framing, constitutes in fact the story
recorded in the NT book of Acts.
So, beyond the serendipitous ethical framing provided by the
Law of Moses in that particular geographical corner of the world, belief in the
Jesus Movement carried with it no inherent or necessary ethical component…
Well, what then was a Christian to do,
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 virtue that were culturally familiar to them; and later Christians,
those coming in the later generations of the Jewish Movement as it moved out
from its geographical center in Palestine, inherited a mish-mashed fusion of
the two ethical frameworks.
This
interpretation seems to be confirmed by the need for spiritual exercises, which
were articulated much later by Ignatius of Loyola, because these exercises, and
the presuppositions that are made explicit in the opening Annotations, are
structured around the basic tenets of Stoic ethical practice. Taking as its
springboard the Jesus belief, Ignatius of Loyola creates a self-help guidebook,
where the believer can act-out his Christian faith daily through reflection and
meditation, and deliberate self-improvement. And the accuracy of this historical analysis
is born out by Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher, who, in his studies of the
spiritual exercises among the Greek philosophers, draws a straight line from
Hellenistic philosophy, which influenced the Church Fathers from Origin to Augustine,
through the rise of the monastic tradition, and up to 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.
(Reprised from an essay originally published on Phrontisterion
on 1 August, 2013)
Further Phrontisterion readings:
