After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche

The below found:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/10-4

by Chris Hedges

It is hard to muster much sympathy over the implosion of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations or Jewish synagogues. These institutions were passive as the Christian right, which peddles magical thinking and a Jesus-as-warrior philosophy, hijacked the language and iconography of traditional Christianity. They have busied themselves with the boutique activism of the culture wars. They have failed to unequivocally denounce unfettered capitalism, globalization and pre-emptive war. The obsession with personal piety and “How-is-it-with-me?” spirituality that permeates most congregations is undiluted narcissism. And while the Protestant church and reformed Judaism have not replicated the perfidiousness of the Catholic bishops, who protect child-molesting priests, they have little to say in an age when we desperately need moral guidance.

I grew up in the church and graduated from a seminary. It is an institution whose cruelty, inflicted on my father, who was a Presbyterian minister, I know intimately. I do not attend church. The cloying, feel-your-pain language of the average clergy member makes me run for the door. The debates in most churches—whether revolving around homosexuality or biblical interpretation—are a waste of energy. I have no desire to belong to any organization, religious or otherwise, which discriminates, nor will I spend my time trying to convince someone that the raw anti-Semitism in the Gospel of John might not be the word of God. It makes no difference to me if Jesus existed or not. There is no historical evidence that he did. Fairy tales about heaven and hell, angels, miracles, saints, divine intervention and God’s beneficent plan for us are repeatedly mocked in the brutality and indiscriminate killing in war zones, where I witnessed children murdered for sport and psychopathic gangsters elevated to demigods. The Bible works only as metaphor.

The institutional church, when it does speak, mutters pious non-statements that mean nothing. “Given the complexity of factors involved, many of which understandably remain confidential, it is altogether appropriate for members of our armed forces to presume the integrity of our leadership and its judgments, and therefore to carry out their military duties in good conscience,” Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, wrote about the Iraq war. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the eve of the invasion, told believers that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a menace, and that reasonable people could disagree about the necessity of using force to overthrow him. It assured those who supported the war that God would not object.

B’nai B’rith supported a congressional resolution to authorize the 2003 attack on Iraq. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents Reform Judaism, agreed it would back unilateral action, as long as Congress approved and the president sought support from other nations. The National Council of Churches, which represents 36 different faith groups, in a typical bromide, urged President George W. Bush to “do all possible” to avoid war with Iraq and to stop “demonizing adversaries or enemies” with good-versus-evil rhetoric, but, like the other liberal religious institutions, did not condemn the war.

A Gallup poll in 2006 found that “the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake.” Given that Jesus was a pacifist, and given that all of us who graduated from seminary rigorously studied Just War doctrine, which was flagrantly violated by the invasion of Iraq, this is a rather startling statistic.

But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.

There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions. The essential teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma, hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion. These teachings helped create the concept of the individual. The belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that can defy the clamor of the nation is one of the gifts of religious thought. This call for individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast.

We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience was the starting point of the great ethical systems of all civilizations. Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-criticism. They initiated the separation of individual responsibility from the demands of the state. They taught that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious and moral life required us to often oppose and challenge those in authority, even at great personal cost. Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Socratic ideal and the Christian Gospels.

The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and Destiny ruled human fate-a belief that, when challenged by Socrates, saw him condemned to death. They challenged the power of the tribe, the closed society. They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstance and human weakness, could shape and give direction to society and their own lives. These religious thinkers were our first ethicists. And it is perhaps not accidental that the current pope, as well as the last one, drove out of the Catholic Church thousands of clergy and religious leaders who embodied these qualities, elevating the dregs to positions of leadership and leaving the pedophiles to run the Sunday schools.

These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They are ruled by moral and intellectual trolls. They have become arrogant and self-absorbed. Their sins are many. They protected criminals. They pandered to the lowest common denominator and illusions of personal fulfillment and surrendered their moral authority. They did not fight the corporate tyrants who have impoverished us. They refused to denounce a caste of Christian heretics embodied by the Christian right and have, for their cowardice, been usurped by bizarre proto-fascists clutching the Christian cross. They have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it. But don't think the world will be a better place for their demise.

As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. We are becoming objects, consumer products and marketable commodities. We have no intrinsic value. We are obsessed with self-presentation. We must remain youthful. We must achieve notoriety and money or the illusion of it. And it does not matter what we do to get there. Success, as Goldman Sachs illustrates, is its own morality. Other people's humiliation, pain and weakness become the fodder for popular entertainment. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing see contestants disappeared from any reality television show or laughed out of any Wall Street firm.

We live in the age of the "Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. We worship the "will to power" and think we have gone "beyond good and evil." We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code. The high priests of our new religion run Wall Street, the Pentagon and the corporate state. They flood our airwaves with the tawdry and the salacious. They, too, promise a utopia. They redefine truth, beauty, morality, desire and goodness. And we imbibe their poison as blind followers once imbibed the poison of the medieval church.

Nietzsche had his doubts. He suspected that this new secular faith might prefigure an endless middle-class charade. Nietzsche feared the deadening effects of the constant search for material possessions and personal hedonism. Science and technology might rather bring about a new, distorted character Nietzsche called "the Last Man." The Last Man, Nietzsche feared, would engage in the worst kinds of provincialism, believing he had nothing to learn from history. The Last Man would wallow and revel in his ignorance and quest for personal fulfillment. He would be satisfied with everything that he had done and become, and would seek to become nothing more. He would be intellectually and morally stagnant, incapable of growth, and become part of an easily manipulated herd. The Last Man would mistake cynicism for knowledge.

"The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars," Nietzsche wrote about the Last Man in the prologue of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." "Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself."

"They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery." The Last Men indulge in "their little pleasure for the day, and their little pleasure for the night."

The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has turned us into what Chalmers Johnson calls a "consumerist Sparta." The immigrants and the poor, all but invisible to us, work as serfs in this new temple of greed and imperialism. Curtis White in "The Middle Mind" argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects they do not care. They don't want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain Last Men. And the death of religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and greed, the one that justifies our ruthless callousness toward the weak and the poor.

© 2010 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Nietzsche
Nie·tzsche (nch, -ch), Friedrich Wilhelm 1844-1900.

German philosopher who reasoned that Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife makes its believers less able to cope with earthly life. He argued that the ideal human, the Übermensch, would be able to channel passions creatively instead of suppressing them. His written works include Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1892).

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Chris Hedges' Hangup on Religion
By David Swanson (about the author)

opednews.com Permalink

Chris Hedges is one of the best, one of the most morally useful, writers we have. He's free of loyalty to political party or dogma. He knows war first hand and describes it without flinching. He's an almost ideal gadfly to our corporatocracy. But he has a hangup on religion that holds him back.

Hedges will tell you that he has no use for fantasies about life after death. He'll profess no interest in gods or prayer or a divine plan or anything of the sort. He's perfectly aware of what lies on the negative side of the balance sheet for religion (or what he would call institutional religion), how it trains blind obedience, how it diminishes the value of life before death, how it shifts responsibility from people to imaginary beings, how it divides groups of people who kill in its name. But when you ask what, then, lies on the positive side of the account for religion that justifies supporting it, Hedges' answers range from slim to silly.

One answer he gave me was that there are mysteries in the world, including emotions like love. Well, of course there are. But, I told him, I make no claim to having plumbed the depths of every emotion and having perfectly understood it, I just have no use for god or heaven. Does one have to claim omniscience to be an atheist? I thought only God claimed that!

But Hedges will tell you that it's wiser to be an agnostic than an atheist because you just don't know. But, of course, no one who says this means it quite that simply. If I were to be "agnostic" on whether the world is secretly run by demons dwelling in the livers of antelopes and every other imaginable lunacy, I wouldn't have time to do any substantive being of an agnostic. I could just say "I'm an agnostic on all fantastical BS" and leave it at that. But when it comes to whatever it is that Hedges and others reluctant to fully part with religion mean by "religion," they want to see some agnostical activity going on, specifically lamentation of the passing of religion. I don't think engaging in such activity tends to make one more or less arrogant or humble.

Hedges' latest article is called "After Religion Fizzles, We're Stuck with Nietzsche." He opens with five good paragraphs on damage done, both by major religious institutions and by religiosity in general. Then he writes:

"But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche's Übermensch, or "Superman" -- our secular religion -- is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking."

Setting aside the dubious idea that U.S. culture today is driven by anything resembling Nietzsche's Übermensch, how in the world did we leap from the collapse of religion to "faith in reason, science, and technology"? Of course, we have too much of that as well, but it's not all we have or all we could have. We aren't limited to religion or THAT. And it's not the central explanation of the oil spill or the wars, given that a majority of us oppose the policies that have led to both. We have allowed our "leaders" to act against our interests, as if they knew best, a habit encouraged by religion, not science.

Of course, we need to be respectful of nature. Of course, we need to be humble in the face of ecosystems (and emotions) that we do not begin to understand. Of course, we need to stop trying to conquer the world and behaving as if we were its gods. We need to outgrow "faith in reason, science, and technology" just as we need to outgrow faith in religion. And we are doing so. Suggesting that we must choose one catastrophic course or the other, religion or scientific domination, does not help our progress. I'm not making an argument about whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic -- I think either, in so far as it distracts from action, is morally inexcusable. I'm suggesting that if we want to progress or even survive it will be through overcoming both religion and faith in technology.

In his final address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr., said:

"There is nothing wrong with power, if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."

I imagine Hedges agrees with that. But he should notice that King is suggesting a choice other than science or religion, one just as available to an atheist as to an agnostic or to a religious believer like King. All being agreed on the wisdom of such a course, the question of whether or not to keep dragging the vestiges of religion down through the centuries becomes a separate question, to be decided based on whether religion does more harm or good.

Hedges goes on to say that there are "religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world" and that they "remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by [religious] institutions." What values? Hedges lists "individual responsibility" and "compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast." But, of course, most people who have been responsible and compassionate have been religious for the same reason that most people who have been servile and cruel have been religious: most people, period, have been religious. In fact, polling on political questions at least begins to suggest that the most responsible and compassionate Americans today, on average, are atheists. We're less likely to support injustices like wars and torture. Whether we're more responsible and compassionate through all aspects of our lives, I do not know, but I haven't seen any evidence that we're less so -- just antiquated fearmongering about how morality will disappear if religion does.

Hedges continues his effort to equate the loss of religion with moral decline:

"We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. . . . The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. . . . [R]eligious thinkers were our first ethicists. . . . These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. . . . But don't think the world will be a better place for their demise. As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. . . . We live in the age of the Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. We worship the 'will to power' and think we have gone 'beyond good and evil.' We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code."

And here is where religion holds Hedges back. We must, of course, find the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code to address our own moral circumstances. We will find most of that wisdom in lessons from the past, of course, and most of it from past religious observers. But we will be hindered by keeping alive almost anything we meaningfully refer to as religion, anything suggesting deference to a greater authority than the accumulated wisdom of humanity. We must be free of that if we are to envision what we need to become. For all of his failings, this is what Neitzsche attempted to do, and to some degree succeeded in doing. Hedges knows that Nietzsche condemned all the undesirable traits of modern culture that Hedges himself laments. But Hedges lays the blame, nonetheless, at Neitzsche's doorstep as an enemy of religion.

And there's something wrong with the timing of Hedges' tale of woe. The cultural damage he describes is all current, while the loss of religion that he fears will cause it is substantially in the future. The vast majority of Americans today are more religious than Hedges himself is. We can't fix their shortcomings by making them religious. Instead, we have to make them -- and ourselves -- more responsible and compassionate in a way that, indeed, moves beyond existing ways of thinking.

Without religious beliefs, we might still have violence, but Germans would not have made the worst of Nietzsche in Nazism. Without religious beliefs we might still have oil drilling, but we wouldn't have senators telling us they don't care because it is the next life that matters. And if Afghans and Iraqis did not belong to a different religion than most Americans, we wouldn't bomb them and burn their babies with fire bombs and white phosphorous. Whether you agree with the views of the religious "extremists" or not, you have a moral choice: will you condemn the basis of their thinking or provide respectable cover for it?

David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by (more...)

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This blogger's latest pet peeve:
http://starkravingviking.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-fire-your-lawyer.html

Why fire your lawyer?

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