Überdad,
Weird how easy it is to confuse the end of an old era for the start of a new one. People see college kids screaming at their professors in the quad and think we’re witnessing some exotic new psychosis. But really it’s the final stage in a decades-long process of decay, as the once-chic relativism of the ’60s devolves into the childish power politics of the 2020s. Often we confuse the spasms of death for the contractions of birth.
I think that’s what happened with Nietzsche. His admirers imagine him ushering in a wild new age. He certainly thought of himself that way: the first book where his mature philosophy really starts to emerge is called Daybreak, and in Thus Spake Zarathustra he pictures the visionary Zoroaster awakening to a blaze of revelation: “he shouted for joy, for he had seen a new truth.”
But actually I don’t think Nietzsche came up with a workable new way of life. His real achievement was to discern the end of an old one, to admit that night was falling on European civilization. The confident ministers of progress imagined that reason and science would liberate the future from the weight of tradition. Nietzsche saw they had another thing coming.
That’s not nothing. Orwell said that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Nietzsche was willing to face up to something few others could: if that old time religion failed to carry conviction, what replaced it would be much more ruthless and brutal than the scions of the Enlightenment supposed.
He seems to have concluded—and some of his followers definitely believe—that ruthless brutality is the way of the future. But I think it’s just the death of the past, the final stage in the decay Nietzsche saw creeping into the heart of the West. The casual execution of unwanted children, the frenzy of sexual self-abasement, the subordination of humanity to machine logic—these are the kinds of corruption that set in when a corpse starts to stink.
But we’re in the business of new life. And yes, I think faith in the 21st century is going to have to express itself differently, with new forms and idioms. It’s going to have to sit comfortably alongside quantum physics and work with people as they live now, not as we wish they lived in some fanciful pre-industrial homestead.
But it might be more a case of revitalizing something eternal than inventing something altogether new. “You are the light of the world”: if our God-created humanity is the antidote to the heartless savagery of modernity, those words speak more freshly into the moment than any self-satisfied Nietzschean aphorism.
But we do have to learn to hear Jesus speaking as if he really were alive right here, right now. Maybe that means discarding our comfortable picture of domesticated religion to realize that God himself is in front of our noses, in none other than this world.
Love,
Spencer
Dear Klavan team, I really look forward to reading your witty and wise analysis every day because I learn so much and get closer to the truth. Both of you have an uncanny ability to see the real meaning of events and relate these events to the ultimate Truth - God. Learn so much more from you guys than from my college professors. Great quote by Orwell. Blessings to you both.
Deuteronomy 31:6 Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.