Whatever else one may, or may not, think about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche one cannot deny that he had a gift for finding an apt turn of phrase. One that springs to mind is ‘transvaluing all values’ – that traditional values are no longer of help to modern man, who stands, bewildered, on the verge of a changed world: a ‘Transfigured Night’ (another apt phrase). The quest for a new value system was a central preoccupation of Nietzsche, who saw a kindred spirit in Zarathustra, that enigmatic primordial prophet of religious consciousness and cosmic morality, who stood at the very dawn of civilisation. If Nietzsche glimpsed the end of the whole cycle of civilisation – the Twilight of the Idols – he had a sufficient sense of irony to advise any new prophets to think of prospective disciples in terms of zeros: religious movements have had their day. Instead, he was content that each should be ‘the artist of his own life’ confecting a ‘self-mastery morality’ (Herrenmoral).
With the bar of personal responsibility set so high it is little wonder that most baulked at the challenge, or chose to deliberately misunderstand him, as they joined the Gadarene rush into the cataclysm that was the Great War (even with his books packed in their knapsacks).
Nietzsche mocked, ‘the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil’ These thoughts were prompted by the call of David Cameron to the nation to ‘actively stand up and defend’ the ‘values and moral code’ of the Bible.
Speaking at a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, he pointed out that, ‘We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so.’ After all, it was the values and morals of the Bible that helped to make Britain what it is today. Beset, as we are, by a tsunami of problems that threaten to overwhelm us – problems largely of our own making – it is not surprising that a call should be made to look back from these twilight hours of national conviction about anything to more halcyon times. But is it helpful, or simply a siren call that draws us further onto the fatal reefs of self-destruction?
Nietzsche, for one, would have been in no doubt as to the answer: he derided the ‘English flatheads’ (in Twilight of the Idols) who cannot quite grasp that the underlying convictions of modern man have shifted.
As it was, ‘Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together’ which is predicated on a belief in God, who alone knows what is good and evil, and presupposes that ‘man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him.’ It is this that now makes traditional morality (and identity) problematic. Instead, David Cameron reveals himself as standing in that long English tradition of pragmatism, boldly standing up for moral precepts that have been inherited without quite being able to recognise that the foundations have crumbled. If, for whatever reason, ‘We don’t do God’, as Tony Blair once surmised, it is difficult to argue for the traditional values that go with this belief – including the sense of Divine election or ‘chosenness’ that has been such an integral part of national identity since Bede wrote his History of the English Church and Nation. Unless, of course, as Nietzsche mocked, ‘the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil.’ So this is the place we have come to: we are not too happy where we are, and we may not be too sure about how we got into the mess we are in, but one thing we are even more fearful about is what lies before us. This is how moral vacuums open up, and not for the first time. Nor is David Cameron alone in confronting such a situation or in seeking solutions from the past. In Russia, as Vladimir Putin has sought to rein in the anarchy that followed the collapse of Communism, old fashioned nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy has its appeal and uses. In China, where the official ideology of Communism survives but has been hopelessly compromised by consumer capitalism and corruption, the authorities are once again increasingly keen to promote traditional Confucian values of respectful harmony. In the Middle East, as societies seek to free themselves from sclerotic, compromised autocrats, the appeal is to traditional Muslim values based on uncompromising Koranic teachings. But it is, no doubt, in the USA that Mr Cameron’s call would find closest resonance, with the Republicans demanding a return to the clearly founded biblical values of the past in the fight against a demonised liberalism.
In all these cases the moral vacuum that has opened up takes its shape from a particular historic experience that precedes it, but which also suggests its own resolution – also from the past. And therein lies the danger: it was the pathways from the past that brought us to the very impasse whose resolution now Moral Vacuums and How to Fill Them Dominic Kirkham argues that siren calls from the past are no guide to the future. clearly escapes us. Take Russia. When the Nazis were at the gates of Moscow, Stalin retreated to his dacha in depression, saying to members of the Politburo gathered there, ‘Lenin gave us the plan and we have screwed it up.’ Of course what he should have said is not ‘we’ but ‘he’ screwed it up – through paranoia and relentless brutality. In the end it was these things, together with economic incompetence, which brought the whole system crashing down, just as it had the Czarist regime before it. When the Marquis de Custine toured Russia in 1839 he noted an ‘absolute monarchy moderated by murder’: this vicious autocracy, deaf to pleas for reform, characterised by a vengeful nationalism, vindictive to minorities but convinced of a holy Orthodoxy, is exactly what seems to be on offer to Russia today. Plus ca change?
When Mr Cameron makes his appeal to the Bible and a Christian past, it gives the impression of a shared, consensual past that has now been lost.
Nothing could be further from the truth when we look at the detail. The very origin of the King James Bible is a case in point, as an attempt to impose some order on a chaotic state of religious turmoil. The Reformation had usurped the established moral authority of the Catholic Church, which had reigned unchallenged for over a millennium. In its place it appealed to the Bible, sola scriptura, as the supreme arbiter of moral affairs, a challenge that the Catholic Church vigorously contended: it was not for nothing that its early translators and proponents of the Bible were burnt at the stake as heretics. It was a controversy which reduced much of Europe to war-torn desolation in the seventeenth century and within a generation of his publication King James’s son would have his head on a block, in the hands of disputatious Puritan zealots. Curiously, one thing that spurred these zealots was the sense that a moral vacuum had opened up in the country and that, according to Thomas Hooker, ‘God is going from England’, thanks to the resurgence of Catholic practices! the establishment found the Bible a useful tool not only in imposing their authority but shoring up privilege Violent controversy rumbled on across the eighteenth century, as various states vied to impose their own version of moral authority, cuius regio eius religio. In doing so, the aristocracy and establishment found the Bible to be a useful tool not only in imposing their authority but shoring up privilege: there seemed no conflict then between Biblical morality and, for example, the most appalling trade in human slavery ever organised by man for the most obscene, selfish profit.
If a Christian country could countenance such a trade, then it is not immediately obvious why the Bible should be a useful tool now to challenge the obscene profits of commercial bankers trading on human misery. Similarly, if we are going to appeal to Biblical authority, will that include, as in the USA, the denial of evolution, or, as in some African states, homophobic legislation which criminalises consensual human relationships? As Mr Cameron always likes to be very clear about things, we need to be very clear about this also.
On closer inspection one soon realises what a siren call this appeal to Biblical morality really is and how soon controversy – such as that which has riven the Church of England – opens up. Yet, as a sign of just how difficult the alternative has been to digest, or even understand, when Bishop John Robinson made passing reference to such changes in Honest To God it caused a national uproar. Another fifty years on and his statement of the (to him) obvious: ‘Above all, confidence has gone in the type of supernaturalistic ontology to which Christian theology in its classical presentations has been attached.’ – is still not at all obvious to many. The fear remains of an inevitable moral vacuum opening up once traditional beliefs are abandoned and the suspicion that once again, ‘God is going from England.’ By the nineteenth century, another voice had entered into the controversy: that of secularism. This had the temerity to assert that morality and values were not necessarily dependent on a religious context: that books and blocks of stone did not fall from heaven inscribed with moral commands but were in fact the human creations of all too human prophets. If the conceit of human inventiveness and imagination was in reality the ‘truth’ from the past, then why not new, similarly imaginative prophets for the present? It was for failing to grasp the implications of this that Nietzsche berated the ‘English flatheads’. But in doing George Eliot ‘exploring the nature of a new naturalistic basis of morality’ so he was unfairly dismissive of genuinely seminal writers like George Eliot, who were exploring the nature of a new naturalistic basis of morality, which had very different foundations to the previous religious, heteronomous morality of old. It was the achievement of thinkers such as Durkheim and the founders of sociology to show that moral rules are shaped by society, under the pressure of collective needs. The problem was how, in the wake of extinguished consensual beliefs, to prevent society collapsing into anomic disorder under the weight of conflicting individual demands.
The new naturalistic or secular moral experiments have not been without their limitations. In her account of life in Stalin’s work camps in the frozen wastes of Siberia, Evgenyia Ginzburg relates an incident when the camp commander lined up his zeks and asked them to feel free to express what they really thought about the new order of things. After some hesitation one haggard old man, a former professor of history, had the temerity to speak out, saying that never in history had such a mendacious and brutal regime ever been devised by man. The response, typically, was a bullet in the head. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, the Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz, reflecting on the fate of his countrymen, in The Captive Mind, first under the jack boot of Nazism – which saw a previously civilised people eking out a hunter-gatherer existence in the forests as scavenging bands – and then in the iron grip of the Soviets, he summarised ‘the fate of twentieth century man as identical with that of a cave man living in the midst of powerful monsters.’ Welcome to the new Stone Age of secularism, many may conclude.
Yet, curiously, it is in those ancient caves that the glimmerings of an answer to the problem of our moral vacuums is to be found. In the hundreds of thousands of years that constituted the Stone Age, survival depended on being part of a group. It was over these countless millennia – so palaeo-anthropologists tell us – that the social bonds, which alone enabled human survival, were imprinted deep within our psyche: cooperation, sharing, fairness, care for the infirm, respect for nature – these are the moral sentiments that underpin all human activity. Even when overridden by ‘civilised’ ambitions, they remain as a challenging ‘conscience’. It is just such traits which also enabled people to survive even the most ruthless of regimes and brutal times of modern civilisation. It is therefore no surprise that when the collapse came it was precisely as result of the cumulative force of sentiments expressed by such movements as 'Solidarnosc’ (Solidarity), or in the vast throngs in Wenceslas Square jangling their keys and calling time on the discredited regime of deception, corruption, and brutality, which favoured only the privileged few. It was into the moral vacuum that had opened up at the heart of modernity that new leaders spoke. ‘Love, friendship, mercy, humility and forgiveness lost their depth and dimension,’ proclaimed Vaclav Havel when he articulated a revolutionary form of non-violent opposition called ‘living in truth’ – as also did Lech Walesa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ‘We have learned not to believe in anything, not to care about one another,’ he told his compatriots. In this we hear the voice of the natural values that are embedded in humanity and which not only pre-exist any ideological or religious context, even civilisation itself, but also pronounce judgement upon them.
It is the nature of a democracy that things are arranged by consensual agreement. As in politics, so it is with morality: there is no reason not to believe that mature humans are intelligent enough to devise ways of living suited to their needs and arrived at by consensus, rather than by a constant infantile need to appeal to past authority. Such pragmatism is the basis, for example, of Richard Rorty’s social hope.
Regardless of our particular society, political tradition or intellectual heritage, ‘In the end, pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark.’ Our hope is not necessarily in getting things ‘right’ but our participation in fallible and transitory human projects: for these, ‘obedience’ to permanent, inhuman constraints is not necessary. It is a view one would have thought would appeal to a pragmatist like David Cameron. If there is to be hope, Rorty believes, it lies in the imagination, ‘in people describing a future in terms which the past did not use.’ By this he is referring to the need for horizontal relationships between individuals and groups – characterised by the ongoing description and redescription of relationships – rather than the vertical relationship of master and subject, of overpowering metaphysical ‘superstructures’, which bear down on the defenceless individual.
To some this may appear as a recipe for chaos and anarchy, a vacuum: of all things human, it is this that still seems most subversive and objectionable to those who claim power over humanity. Yet, as scientists now tell us, vacuums are never empty – just full of what we do not properly understand: they too take on the features of their environment and allow for new possibilities. So it is with moral vacuums – they are full of those deep human instincts which give rise to the world in which we live. Their structures come and go, and it was perhaps the greatest failing of a thinker like Nietzsche to focus too much on the solitary individual – like himself – and the individual creative endeavour, rather than the field of play that binds us all together: mastering our own life does not necessarily entail mastering everyone else’s – this is how the ‘superman’ came to be contorted into a monster. The antidote is the ancient, ingrained values of humanity, that can exercise a cohesive force. One of the few seemingly genuine teachings that have come down to us from Zarathustra is the exhortation to ‘good thoughts, good words, good deeds.’ It is this that lay at the heart of his moral revolution, even if later smothered by ritual and hierarchical accretions: it is this that can still fill our moral vacuums.
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of the SOF movement who, being now redundant, has more time to think about the issues involved.