We began by asking what unifies our society. This is a vital question to which we must return. What binds our nation together? Are we fellow citizens or suspicious strangers? More fundamentally, can democracy survive in a world of Nietzschean Puritans? As we have seen, the answer is unambiguously no. The will to power, when unleashed, infects everything. Liberal democracy becomes a caricature of itself justifying the oppression of others in the name of abstractions such as equality, justice, and tolerance.
Centuries ago, Plato argued that democracy is fundamentally unstable and will slide toward tyranny. He believed that democratic citizens tend to deny the reality of any good beyond their appetites and any truth beyond their desires. So he proposed a “saving myth” that would reorient citizens to a moral reality above their individual desires and provide a standard of justice by which citizens could live and be governed. Nietzsche called Christianity “Platonism for the masses” because it too affirms a transcendent moral reality. Christianity provides a myth—believers would call it a true myth—that can save human beings from descending into moral nihilism and political tyranny.
Nietzsche, like Plato, recognized the indispensable power of myth:
Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement…. Images of the myth have to be the unnoticed omnipresent demonic guardians, under whose care the young soul grows to maturity and whose signs help the man to interpret his life and struggles. Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation that guarantees its connection with religion and its growth from mythical notions (BT, 23).
In a memorable parable, Nietzsche’s alter ego, Zarathustra, descends from his mountain cave to preach a new myth: God is dead. He seeks to replace the decadent old myth with a new one characterized by the will to power (Z, Prologue). The nihilism of Nietzsche does not aim at pure destruction but at destruction for the sake of creating something new. As he put it, “If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law” (GM, II, 24).
Yet the death of God is not accomplished without a certain dread that calls for a new myth to replace the old. In another parable, Nietzsche’s “madman” recognizes the problem. After bursting into the marketplace and declaring that God is dead, he grows reflective: “What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” (GS, 125). In short, what new myths will we need to create to replace the old myth we have shattered?
Nietzsche realized better than most that this new myth, like all myths, has a religious core that provides an orienting story for humanity. And even though the prospect of losing a long-established myth is disconcerting and perhaps even terrifying, Nietzsche saw what release from the moral constraints of theism made possible. Indeed, for “philosophers” and “free spirits”—those who can tolerate the loss—there is a “new dawn,” a blank canvas upon which the strong and creative may exercise their freedom (GS, 343). This liberation from the strictures of the past and its badly worn theism is symbolized in the “sacred ‘Yes’ ” uttered, as Nietzsche put it, by a child who emerges only after a lion vanquishes the fierce dragon of values, allowing the old myths to be replaced by new and more adequate ones (Z, pp. 25–27). Yet for all his celebration of this new beginning, as we have seen, there is a dark side to his vision, marked by cruelty and domination that leave most of us uncomfortable and perhaps even appalled.
Nietzsche was right. A people requires a common myth. Without a binding story shared by citizens, a nation is little more than a collection of individuals struggling to attain as much wealth, security, and power as possible. America’s loss of a common myth has left us fractured and alienated, forming tribes based on interest or grievance to alleviate the loneliness.
As our society becomes more fragmented, the practice of politics as an ongoing debate about the best means to secure ends that are generally agreed upon becomes more and more difficult, while warring factions seek power above all else. True politics requires a common culture with a common set of assumptions about human nature and the social order. An ever-expanding pluralism—taken as an obvious good in our age—calls forth only a politics of power, which is in reality anti-political, for it shuns debate and abhors compromise.
Americans today embrace a variety of often competing myths, and this lack of commonality is the source of our divisions. On the one hand, our Puritan heritage has bestowed upon us certain formative stories and concepts that remain with us even though the Puritans have long since passed off the stage. For example, the Puritans referred to themselves as the “new Israel” and saw their enterprise in the New World as a latter-day Exodus: flight from oppression across a seemingly boundless wilderness to a promised land flowing with “milk and honey.” The American Revolution was frequently framed as liberation from a tyrant—sometimes explicitly referred to as “Pharaoh.” The civil rights movement employed similar themes of liberation from injustice. The biblical narrative of liberation is deeply embedded in the American consciousness.
From this Puritan past we have inherited a devotion to equality and justice, which we can achieve, it is thought, through social and political action. When social justice warriors demand equality or justice, they are invoking the Puritan myth, which they explicitly deny but upon which they necessarily depend. When they demand liberation of the oppressed, they are echoing the Old Testament prophets, mediated through Christianity, without which liberation gains little purchase.
At the same time, as we have seen, Nietzsche’s atheistic myth has made substantial, if only partial, inroads into our consciousness. Social justice warriors embrace the tactics and rhetoric of the will to power but are unwilling fully to embrace the moral nihilism at the heart of Nietzsche’s thought.
Ultimately, moral nihilism may be simply unlivable. On January 3, 1889, as Nietzsche left his apartment in Turin, he witnessed a carriage driver beating his horse. Overcome with pity, a weeping Nietzsche flung his arms around the horse to shield it from the blows. He then collapsed in the street, never recovering physically or mentally before his death in 1900. He was bedridden much of the time, his once acute and creative mind confined to rare moments of lucidity and otherwise reduced to a confused stupor mixed with bouts of delusion—he once referred to himself as the successor of the dead god.1 He occasionally composed letters, but they were the ravings of a man far gone. The day after his collapse in the street, he dashed off a sentence to his friend Peter Gast:
To my maëstro Pietro.
Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy.
The Crucified2
The man who had spent a lifetime pitting himself against Christ came, in his insanity, to identify himself with the crucified God. Fittingly enough, Nietzsche put one of his most vivid declarations of the death of God on the lips of a character he called the “madman.” In an instance of life imitating art, Nietzsche’s final madness can be seen as a tragic realization of his fundamental insight.
Nietzsche was buried beside his father in a traditional Lutheran funeral that included church bells and a choir singing hymns. His coffin was decorated with a cross. Peter Gast concluded the ceremony with a benediction, “Hallowed be thy name to all future generations,”3 a grotesque parody of the Lord’s Prayer identifying Nietzsche with the God he had worked so hard to kill.
We are a fractured people desperately in need of a unifying myth. Without such a myth the center cannot hold. Nietzsche offered one option, but it is not clear if even he was able to embrace it fully. Orthodox Christianity provides another, but the price seems high, especially to those who have dabbled with Nietzsche’s ideas and at the same time fancy themselves men and women of a new age who pursue with self-righteous ardor the ideals of democracy, equality, social justice, and tolerance. At the very least, it is time to recognize that the merger of Nietzsche’s thought with moral absolutism is doomed to intellectual incoherence and must be a source of perpetual frustration and social unrest. Perhaps the only choice really is as stark as this: Nietzsche or Christ, Dionysus or the Crucified, the will to power or the will to truth. That’s how Nietzsche saw it. A bracing simplification, to be sure.