HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:

On this day in 1844, the brilliant and troubled atheist philosopher Friederich Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Germany. Nietzsche is best known for the claim “God is dead,” which he storified in two parables.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche announced God is dead, but promised that humans could be the thriving successor, if only we evolved beyond religion. “The Parable of the Madman” was more of a warning, written not to those who believed in God but to those who didn’t:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

In the late nineteenth century, many believed in a utopian future without a God weighing us down. Nietzsche, however, believed these children of the Enlightenment had underestimated how significant the death of God was. And so, his madman answered:

Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither it is moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?

Nietzsche was not claiming that God had once existed and no longer did. Rather, he recognized what the loss of God meant as the central reference point for Western life, politics, education, art, architecture, and most other aspects of culture. The death of God had, as he put it, “unchained the earth from its sun.”

In his 1997 essay on the brave new world of neuroscience, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” Tom Wolfe wrote:

[Nietzsche] called the death of God a “tremendous event”, the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. “The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.” He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the 20th century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth”, wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: “If the doctrines … of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly” — he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations — “are hurled into the people for another generation … then nobody should be surprised when … brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers … will appear in the arena of the future.”

Nietzsche’s view of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuroscientists a century later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse — thereby intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives and hold conferences on the subject.

And drone on about “defunding the police.” Last Year, Greg Byrnes noted at PJM: The Patron Saint of the Biden Administration Seems To Be Friedrich Nietzsche.

Or as the man himself predicted in 1883, “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.”