False Gods

by Robert Bruce (March 2013)

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science,

Despite his notorious and much misinterpreted denunciations of ‘Jewish slave morality’ Nietzsche never doubted that the Old Testament faith had been indispensable to an embattled nation fighting for its survival and he was not beyond some backhanded complements to the creed’s founders. Why not make a virtue of the slave morality of the weak and saddle the strong with this millstone, and how poorly did the Last Man with his jaded diffidence compare with men like Moses chiseling out a table of values  by a supreme act of will? As Nietzsche noted there were other tables of values that could have been chosen, a thousand and one mutters Zarathustra but these ones created a people and gave them an inner purpose which a desiccated positivism was driving out. Nietzsche’s vision exercised great hold over the social sciences – Max Weber’s theory of the bureaucratization of social life is a gloomy sociological footnote to it, but its influence on avante garde artists and writers was even greater, and if for the most part they were dismissive of the metaphysics of God they were awed by the aesthetic. Religion may have been fraudulent but it was beautiful. The Bolshevik Commisar for Culture Anton Lunasharsky and the famous writer Maxim Gorky recognized this more acutely than most, and their forlorn attempt to recreate August Comte’s Religion of Humanity in the USSR was born of a recognition of Marxism-Leninism’s feeble spiritual grip.

The atheist attempt to create a Godless religion was a supreme example of the kind of circular false cleverness intellectuals are prone to. Trying to resolve the tension between a transcendental deity and dialectical materialism Lunasharsky opted to deify matter. It never quite touched the sides, and Lenin was no fan. The overt paraphernalia of God building was put on ice until the alcohol sodden cynicism of the 60s led to a fleeting renaissance. Yet God building was always more than the half baked secular rites of passage built into the Soviet calendar. Marxism was always a faith, and it broke precisely because it was so ambitiously totalitarian. 

You must love and deify matter above everything else, [love and deify] the corporal nature or the life of your body as the primary cause of things, as existence without a beginning or end, which has been and forever will be.

Desperate stuff. The aim was to make men Gods but the effect was simply to drag the sublime through the dust. Faith in these circumstances tends to break rather than bend. As Goldman has noted in How Civilisations Die this may be the central contradiction of Islamism. Iran for example is experiencing the collapsing birth rates, drug addiction and pervasive anomie which heralded the Soviet Union’s collapse. Too much sacredness can make a man choke.

[1] After the Franco-Prussian War he belatedly discovered the master race, and anticipated future dark obsessions.

The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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