Nietzsche believed that the long tradition of “unfreedom” characterizing
dogmatic Christianity—its insistence that everything be explained within the
confines of a single, coherent metaphysical theory — was a necessary precondition
for the emergence of the disciplined but free modern mind. As he stated in Beyond Good and Evil:
"The
long bondage of The Spirit … the persistent spiritual will to interpret
everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and in every
occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident: — all
this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness, has
proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has attained
its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that
much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated and
spoiled in the process."
For
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, Freedom — even the ability to act — requires
constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the
dogma of the Church. The Individual must be constrained, moulded — even brought
close to destruction — by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before
he or she can act freely and competently. Dostoevsky, with his great generosity
of spirit, granted to The Church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of
mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that the spirit of Christ, the
world-engendering Logos, had historically and might still find its resting
place — even its sovereignty — within that dogmatic structure.
If
a Father disciplines His Son properly, he obviously interferes with his freedom,
particularly in the here-and-now. He put limits on the voluntary expression of
his son’s Being. forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of the
world. Such a Father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down
a singly pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be
considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous
plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. But if The Father does
not take such action, he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy,
King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland. That is not a
morally acceptable alternative.
The
dogma of the Church was undermined by the spirit of truth strongly developed by
the Church itself. That undermining culminated in the death of God. But the
dogmatic structure of the Church was a necessary disciplinary structure. A long
period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary
for the development of a free mind. Christian dogma provided that unfreedom.
But the dogma is dead, at least to the modern Western mind. It perished along
with God. What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue
of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never
alive, even in the past: nihilism, as
well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas.
It was in the aftermath of God’s death that the great collective horrors of
Communism and Fascism sprang forth (as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche predicted
they would). Nietzsche, for his part, posited that individual human beings
would have to invent their own values in the aftermath of God’s death. But this
is the element of his thinking that appears weakest, psychologically: we cannot invent our own values, because we
cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls. This was Carl Jung’s
great discovery—made in no little part because of his intense study of the
problems posed by Nietzsche.
We
rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot
merely order myself to action, and neither can you. “I will stop
procrastinating,” I say, but I don’t. “I will eat properly,” I say, but I don’t.
“I will end my drunken misbehavior,” I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make
myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that
intellect is possessed by an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so
do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making
peace with ourselves. What is it, that we most truly are? What is it that we
could most truly become, knowing who we most truly are? We must get to the very
bottom of things before such questions can be truly answered.
Doubt, Past Mere Nihilism
Three
hundred years before Nietzsche, the great French philosopher René Descartes set
out on an intellectual mission to take his doubt seriously, to break things
apart, to get to what was essential—to see if he could establish, or discover,
a single proposition impervious to his skepticism. He was searching for the
foundation stone on which proper Being could be established. Descartes found
it, as far as he was concerned, in the “I” who thinks—the “I” who was aware—as
expressed in his famous dictum, cogito
ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). But that “I” had been conceptualized
long before. Thousands of years ago, the aware “I” was the all-seeing eye of
Horus, the great Egyptian son-and-sun-god, who renewed the state by attending
to and then confronting its inevitable corruption. Before that, it was the
creator-God Marduk of the Mesopotamians, whose eyes encircled his head and who
spoke forth words of world-engendering magic. During the Christian epoch, the “I”
transformed into the Logos, the Word that speaks order into Being at the beginning
of time. It might be said that Descartes merely secularized the Logos, turning
it, more explicitly, into “that which is aware and thinks.” That’s the modern
self, simply put. But what exactly is that self?
We
can understand, to some degree, its horrors, if we wish to, but its goodness
remains more difficult to define. The self is the great actor of evil who
strode about the stage of Being as Nazi and Stalinist alike; who produced
Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the multiplicity of the Soviet gulags. And
all of that must be considered with dread seriousness. But what is its
opposite? What is the good that is the necessary counterpart of that evil; that
is made more corporeal and comprehensible by the very existence of that evil?
And here we can state with conviction and clarity that even the rational
intellect—that faculty so beloved of those who hold traditional wisdom in
contempt—is at minimum something closely and necessarily akin to the archetypal
dying and eternally resurrected god, the eternal savior of humanity, the Logos
itself. The philosopher of science Karl Popper, certainly no mystic, regarded
thinking itself as a logical extension of the Darwinian process. A creature
that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its
nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior
what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is
not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of
potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the
imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of others,
or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can, in Popper’s
formulation, let our ideas die in our stead.147 Then the essential
part, the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by
comparison, with error. Faith in the part
of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.
Now,
an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in
and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no
action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead
facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to
live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and
Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for
ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants
something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is
aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things
that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to
irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When it manifests itself
within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that person its avatar:
to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion (possession is
another word) can be so strong that the person will die, rather than allowing
the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision, given that it
is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person with the
idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue.
To
use the dramatic conceptualization of our ancestors: It is the most fundamental
convictions that must die—must be sacrificed—when the relationship with God has
been disrupted (when the presence of undue and often intolerable suffering, for
example, indicates that something has to change). This is to say nothing other
than that the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in
the present. No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold
hundreds of thousands of years to do it. It took further eons of observation
and hero-worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a
story. It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to
incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, “If you are disciplined and
privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality
in your favour.”
But
how best to do that?
In
1984, I started down the same road as Descartes. I did not know it was the same
road at the time, and I am not claiming kinship with Descartes, who is rightly
regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But I was truly
plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the
time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I
could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful
thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an
alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand,
through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its
motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the
poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the
capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if
different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish.
This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and
others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate
themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop
cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with
money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs
heavily on people who have nothing to do.
I
was simultaneously tormented by the fact of the Cold War. It obsessed me. It
gave me nightmares. It drove me into the desert, into the long night of the
human soul. I could not understand how it had come to pass that the world’s two
great factions aimed mutual assured destruction at each other. Was one system
just as arbitrary and corrupt as the other? Was it a mere matter of opinion?
Were all value structures merely the clothing of power?
Was
everyone crazy?
Just
exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it that so many
tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies? How
was it that we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and
corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to
supplant? No one had answered those questions, as far as I could tell. Like Descartes,
I was plagued with doubt. I searched for one thing—anything—I could regard as
indisputable. I wanted a rock upon which to build my house. It was doubt that
led me to it.
I
once read of a particularly insidious practice at Auschwitz. A guard would
force an inmate to carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the
large compound to the other—and then to carry it back. Arbeit macht frei, said the sign over the camp entrance—“Work will
set you free”—and the freedom was death. Carrying the salt was an act of
pointless torment. It was a piece of malevolent art. It allowed me to realize
with certainty that some actions are wrong.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn wrote, definitively and profoundly, about the horrors of the
twentieth century, the tens of millions who were stripped of employment,
family, identity and life. In his Gulag
Archipelago, in the second part of the second volume, he discussed the
Nuremburg trials, which he considered the most significant event of the
twentieth century. The conclusion of those trials? There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run
counter to the proper nature of human Being. This is true essentially,
cross-culturally—across time and place. These
are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To
dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to
torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or
guilt, to make an art form of pain—that is wrong.
What
can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists
cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics
cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of
suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone
of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action,
understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag
archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it
meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an
immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And
if there is something that is not good,
then there is something that is good.
If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering
produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good
is whatever stops such things from happening.
Meaning as the Higher Good
It
was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay
attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive
for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance,
oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your
cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of
your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair
the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s
you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen
short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution
to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t
lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small
lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of
people.
Consider
then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make
that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to
the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the
pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at
the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative
was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the
difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. To
place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your
hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s
a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.
Jung
observed that the construction of such a moral hierarchy was inevitable—although
it could remain poorly arranged and internally self-contradictory. For Jung,
whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents
and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what the
person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something
enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it’s a personality—or,
more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities. It’s Sherlock
Holmes or Moriarty. It’s Batman or the Joker. It’s Superman or Lex Luthor,
Charles Francis Xavier or Magneto, and Thor or Loki. It’s Abel or Cain—and it’s
Christ or Satan. If it’s working for the ennobling of Being, for the
establishment of Paradise, then it’s Christ. If it’s working for the
destruction of Being, for the generation and propagation of unnecessary
suffering and pain, then it’s Satan. That’s the inescapable, archetypal
reality.
Expedience
is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and
selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature
and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when
impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the
interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure
operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment
of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the
antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make
everything better.
If
you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now,
and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and
the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single
axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. This
stacking up is a place in space and time whose existence we can detect with our
ability to experience more than is simply revealed here and now by our senses,
which are obviously limited to their information-gathering and representational
capacity. Meaning trumps expedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses, now and
forever. That’s why we can detect it.
If
you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its
inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even
by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, “What
should I do today?” in a manner that means “How could I use my time to make
things better, instead of worse?” Such tasks may announce themselves as the
pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make
a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more
gratefully delivered to your family.
You
may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed “make
the world better” at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience
ever-deepening meaning. It’s not bliss. It’s not happiness. It is something
more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being.
It’s payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your
existence. It’s how you remember the Holocaust. It’s how you make amends for
the pathology of history. It’s adoption of the responsibility for being a
potential denizen of Hell. It is willingness to serve as an angel of Paradise.
Expedience—that’s
hiding all the skeletons in the closet. That’s covering the blood you just
spilled with a carpet. That’s avoiding responsibility. It’s cowardly, and
shallow, and wrong. It’s wrong because mere expedience, multiplied by many
repetitions, produces the character of a demon. It’s wrong because expedience
merely transfers the curse on your head to someone else, or to your future
self, in a manner that will make your future, and the future generally, worse
instead of better.
There
is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient. There is
no careful observation that actions and presuppositions matter, or that the
world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your life is better than to
have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you
truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. You
can set up the preconditions, you can follow meaning, when it manifests itself,
but you cannot simply produce it, as an act of will. Meaning signifies that you
are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and
chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.
What
is expedient works only for the moment. It’s immediate, impulsive and limited.
What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise
merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. Meaning is what is put forth more
powerfully than mere words can express by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a
triumphant bringing forth from the void of pattern after pattern upon beautiful
pattern, every instrument playing its part, disciplined voices layered on top
of that, spanning the entire breadth of human emotion from despair to
exhilaration.
Meaning
is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into
a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to cell to organ to
individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at each level
beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past, present
and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what emerges
beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of
nothingness into the light of sun and God. Meaning is the lotus striving upward
through the dark lake depths through the ever-clearing water, blooming forth on
the very surface, revealing within itself the Golden Buddha, himself perfectly
integrated, such that the revelation of the Divine Will can make itself
manifest in his every word and gesture.
Meaning
is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single
purpose—the glorification of a reality so that no matter how good it has
suddenly become, it can get better and better and better more and more deeply
forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense
that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all
of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile
part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and
Good.
Meaning
is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation
and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose
purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even
more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and
productive chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant,
the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when
nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely
that.
Do
what is Meaningful, not what is Expedient.
