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"There may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on—and die. But this is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul..."
—Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
These days there's a whole lot of nothing going on, and its exploits are the subject of keen reportage. The eschatological branches of Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all abuzz at the imminent fruition of their grim projects. Even the great secular stories are looking a bit long in the tooth. For example, no one expects to get bailed out by an advancing enlightenment or scientific progress anymore. Marxism went belly-up. Liberalism is wilting in the face of resurgent fascist tendencies. With everything ending at once, it's hard to know where to begin.
Nihilists are the most traumatized orphans of the world's many collapsing stories. Dispirited idealists, they yearn for something to lie down on; a creed, a hammock, a coffin, it hardly matters. The extreme branches of organized religion offer just what the mortally weary ordered: a morally-sanctioned end-game. What's less clear is the media's elected role as willing matchmaker to this nihilistic despair, inviting aggrieved parties everywhere to cobble their resentments.
With twenty-four hours to kill and a penchant for big bangs, television is the great enabler. Once, scruffy malcontents dotted every province. Now they draw strength from milling, televised crowds. Suddenly the world faces global affiliations of ideological warriors locked in titanic struggles. For anyone doubting the incendiary power of language, the resultant conflagrations are captured daily on videotape.
I'm reminded of a certain intrepid newscaster tethered to a pole in Florida during the very early stages of a pre-Katrina hurricane. As he tried mightily to talk the storm up, his body bent at a dramatic 25-degree angle, an old man shuffled across the foreground unimpaired. There isn't a reporter chasing an ambulance who doesn't dream of doing something really important. He wants to chronicle a movement. Those journalists blessed with proximity to the carnage seize their career-making moments with relish. The current bumper crop of dispirited souls provides a ready source of combustible material with the blood of innocents merely heightening the dramatic arc. Whether they realize it or not, journalists are in the business, not of fact gathering, but of manufacturing narrative, which in turn incites further violence.
Is the chattering class oblivious to the perils of mindless chatter? Perhaps they should teach more modern philosophy in journalism school. Far from being Plato's chaste-bearers-of-ideas, language is like the girl who lives on the hill: loose and endlessly accommodating. Wittgenstein blasted the metaphysician's tendency to flatter language as a 'pure intermediary.' Why else would 'family values' tumble from the mouths of Dr. James Dobson and Howard Dean with seeming profound singularity? People only think they've delineated their friends and beliefs with metaphysical certitude. In fact, their words court many darlings. It pays to do a background check on your own cherished rhetoric.
Perhaps the Surgeon General should affix warning labels to dictionaries, or at least to Bibles, Q'rans and Torahs. Toss about a few ill-chosen words and monotheisms can turn monomaniacal in a flash. That's why nihilism travels so well under religious cover. You say Yahweh, I say Tomah-to and a fight breaks out. Once a name gives birth to a god (and allowing for a reasonable period to establish a dogma and hire some clergy), the newly minted Universal sets out to undermine all competing Universals. Crusades, jihads, pogroms, inquisitions, holocausts, fatwahs, dust-ups; pick the language of your poison. Hey gang, there may be many paths up the mountain, but if you catch anyone using an alternate path, you have my permission to kick their ass. Now go be fruitful and multiply.
This essay is not an attempt to press a nihilistic agenda on the very existence of God. There are sharp distinctions between the gods of organized traditions and what Jung described as a personal experience with the numinous, his definition of an 'authentic' religious experience. Unfortunately, the latter has proven itself stubbornly resistant to transpersonal conveyance as the devil always lays waiting in the dogma. By all rights, contemplative silence should command a larger audience. But as it refuses to speak up for itself, few demagogues rise to its occasion.
Like Jung, Kierkegaard balked at the cumulus-robed-God-with-sandals, arguing for an essentially interior deity, a manifestation of 'sheer personality'. He devoted entire books to the gulf that separated the Christian god of organized religion from the Christian god of inner experience. To put it mildly, the bearded-guy-in-the-clouds folks bristle at the notion of God as a 'mere' psychologic reality (the psyche, as Jung would say, is everything, and thus no small thing.) People are quite fond of their anthropomorphic apparitions, thank you very much.
Take away God's arms and legs and you're left with a sublime blob of narrative inertia. Indeed religion, the organized kind, would not travel far without language, its propagator. History seems to plod along uneventfully enough until God discards a match, sending a bush into theophanic flames. In those precious careless moments, some human intermediary catches an earful, transcribing it onto the nearest available medium. That same instant, those outside the prophet's sphere of influence acquire a whole new cadre of sworn enemies. Nietzsche was unequivocal: "If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed" (his italics). Not surprisingly, the trouble starts in the literalist camps where a god's choice of language becomes the focus of idolatrous fixation. Holding God to every inflection has proved a lethal business. How many times has 'an eye for an eye' been trundled out for the sole purpose of zapping some mentally-incapacitated black guy in Texas?
Years ago, I heard a very wise rabbi politely debunk comparative religious studies as 'trans-empirical fallacies'. Though the implications are grim for inter-faith relations, he was on to an excellent point. Attempts to spark authentic, sustained dialogue across monotheistic traditions are akin to rubbing two novels against one another in the hope they launch into spirited debate. Novels wear dust jackets for a reason, preferring their own hermetic rarefaction. This is not a complete disparagement of interfaith dialogue. On the contrary, reasonable people of faith should probably keep engaging one another. For one thing, shared proximity complicates the launching of a Stinger missile. You might hit your pastor by mistake.
Comparative dialogue also diminishes our many jealous deities. All gods covet the role of Top God. Zeus veered between two base emotions —lust and jealousy— making him a shoe-in for CEO. A Maximum Leader by temperament, he chafed within the power-sharing pantheonic structure. Extreme-by-assertion ("there is only Me"), monotheisms are horrible goodwill ambassadors. But what can we do? Reintroduce animism? Audition Vestal Virgins? Vestal Virgin auditions accomplish nothing but spoiling the virgins.
For a time, it seemed like history might vex the old eschatologies right to sleep; secular humanism was on the rise, every suburban town had a Wiccan coven and Tom Cruise was at the top of the box office despite his Scientologist persuasions. But we've slipped back into a vicious struggle between the scorched-earth constituencies of Judaism (in its unyielding Zionist manifestation), Christianity and Islam —sort of an extremist-led game of chicken. Carelessly deployed language bears much of the blame here, as we've allowed ourselves to fall back on the old religious diatribes which, in turn, revive the old hatreds. If we could all just think of one another as what we really are —non-aligned assholes— and skip the religious invective altogether, the world would be a much safer place.
So whose nihilists are the baddest? That's the wrong question. Frankly all of them, together, draw from the same poisoned well. If religion really wanted to help, it might declare a moratorium on religious speech, silencing the many clerics who thrive on incendiary diatribe. Peace and quiet, at this moment in time, is perhaps the worthiest faith-based initiative.
Always with a keen eye for the sacred cow, journalist Christopher Hitchens mounts a spirited contrarian charge, bucking the media's tendency to de-pathologize the bad actors with religious palaver. Refusing to affix their abhorrent deeds to Islam's illustrious fifteen hundred year-old cultural tradition, Hitchens calls them what they really are: goddamned nihilists. Well, nihilists anyway. Here he is in a LastSuperPower.net interview:
"Thus, any society run by [bin Laden] or people like him would keep on going bankrupt and starving itself to death, with no ready explanation of why this kept happening...Below even the bin Laden level, however, there are those who insist that they prefer death to life, and who really mean it. Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction."
Precisely. Suicide bombings serve as their own rationale. Were they second-order activities, a tactic for example, palliatives might be devised. But mortally weary souls will not be assuaged when the mortal coil is everything that ails them. Hitchens should be applauded for sussing the existential abyss that looms behind the religious affectation. Indeed it benefits no one to Islamicize the villains nor Christianize the heroes: been there, done that —circa 1096. The real villains are the avowed enemies of culture and reason who champion death over life. Every tradition has them.
Jung suggested the age of the monotheistic gods would end only when they had accomplished their apocalyptic projects, something he viewed as an inexorable psychological process. Perhaps there have really only been two forces at play all along, reason and nihilistic destruction —Apollo and Dionysus. Champions of Reason and Culture from all religious and secular walks must vociferously disinvite their nihilist brethren. Let the latter petition the Earth without religious trappings, winning adherents on the merits of their own self-negating platforms. If such a campaign prevails, then we probably deserve them. But language, an adornment of culture, should not provide comfort to those who pursue oblivion and the cessation of humanity.
Until then, carnage at eleven...
Norman Ball is a Virginia-based writer, musician and poet. Some of his recent on-line efforts can be seen at Bright Lights Film Journal, Identity Theory, Potomac, Big Ugly Review and Folly.