Thursday, August 1, 2013

August's Post_Elvis has Left the Building, or, Thinking About Living in an Empty Theater. Great Unlearning I.



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.

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