Notes on Nietzsche and the Crisis in Morality

Apart from the exhilaration (along with the potential terrors) that comes with beginning a new story, I love how those initial stages of creation become something that dominates my thoughts instead of the usual petty concerns, worries, and gripes that tend to take front and centre. The same can be said, I’ve discovered, when it comes to reading Nietzsche (which, admittedly, I’ve become weirdly obsessed about over the last half year or so), as I find myself devoting a lot of those in-between moments to ruminating over his ideas, making connections to our present historical moment, and trying to find the answers to the numerous questions that come to mind. As Michael Tanner very aptly puts it in his excellent book Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction: “All good aphoristic writing is tiring to read, because one has to do so much of the writer’s work for him. [Nietzsche] supplies a sentence, the reader turns it into a paragraph.”

And so it is that I return yet again to the question of those who refuse to wear masks or otherwise abide by social distancing guidelines. Instead of allowing their cause to “simply” aggravate me, to say the least, reading Nietzsche has provided a kind of lens through which I can interpret not just their actions but also the times in which we live in such a way that, for me at any rate, is much more constructive and healthier: Nietzsche provides the sentence; now I’m turning it into paragraphs. (And again, I want to stress, that what I’m doing here is just a working out of ideas, as I’ve been doing all along in my posts on his work; I’m just a student as far as Nietzsche is concerned.)

So, to pick up from where I left off, while on one hand I feel confident that Nietzsche would look at the anti-maskers’ agenda and say what it really illustrates is an expression of herd (or slave) morality, on the other hand I’m less sure that Nietzsche would be entirely “pro-mask” either. The argument favouring mask-wearing (and all other related restrictions) is that it is for the “common good,” but Nietzsche’s response to the “common good” gives me pause. In section 43 of Beyond Good and Evil, he writes: “And how should there be a ‘common good’! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value.” While it may be advisable not to take Nietzsche too literally here, especially when he likes to indulge in word play, it does underscore his disdain for the “common man” and the threat he saw with rising egalitarianism integral to democratic societies, something he addresses repeatedly in both Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. (This is such a juicy topic I want to explore it further another time.) For Nietzsche, the “common man” (or “herd man,” “herd animal,” or “the rabble” as he also likes to say), is the product of Christian morality that, by design, breeds obedience and mediocrity. Christianity, as he saw it, negates this life, this world, and even the body, in favour of a promised afterlife. And while Nietzsche may have vehemently opposed Christianity for these reasons, he also conceded that it did offer an entire system upon which our morals and truths rested. So when the growth of sciences eroded religious faith (“the death of God,” as he famously said), the foundation upon which our morals are based similarly crumbled. Quoting from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (which is a couple books down on my to-read list), Tanner draws our attention to the following:

 When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God who alone knows it. Christianity is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.

As a result, our morals today rest on hollow ground, on habit, without anything solid to replace divine sanction and decree. In this absence, our laws over the past century have increasingly moved in a direction that places more and more value on individual rights and freedoms over that of the community, and what has suddenly become so glaringly obvious to me now (I’m not sure why I didn’t see it earlier) is that the issue of enforced mask wearing and tighter restrictions is a uniquely moral issue for our time, for nothing is more antithetical to contemporary liberal democratic values than to ask its citizenry to temporarily suspend its narcissistic obsession with the individual and all the “self-entitlement” it has has fostered in favour of the community. And unlike countries like China, for whom authoritarian measures are their own justification, unless there was evidence of malicious intent, there is no solid ground to justify stricter measures, enforcement, and punishment because we’ve painted ourselves into a moral corner that privileges “freedom” over human lives.

“Why should I?” is the response frequently offered by those who are requested to wear masks or not travel during the holidays or not attend large gatherings, followed by the argument that “we live in a free and democratic society.” As I said in an earlier post, Nietzsche illustrates that the notion of “freedom of the will” is an illusion, for whenever the will exerts itself, something else must obey, which can sometimes lead, as we are presently seeing, to deadly consequences. And it’s no wonder, therefore, that many liberal democratic nations can only be “weak-willed” in their response to a crisis of this nature—something Nietzsche understood was the Achilles heel of democracy and its concomitant emphasis on equality. (Again, this is subject for another time.)

And so, to return to the question I asked myself several posts ago concerning whether the anti-mask movement, by virtue of defying the “herd” mentality of blindly following government recommendations, was somehow Nietzschean in its approach, I can now see that I was both naïve and had missed the point entirely. For not only does their agenda demonstrate a slave morality, but the fact that we’ve gotten ourselves to this point at all—large anti-mask demonstrations; church leaders and their congregants disobeying government orders banning large gatherings; chiefs-of-police in California refusing to enforce stay-at-home orders; political leaders and others privileging “freedom” and the economy over human lives—in short, a complete inversion of our values and beliefs—seems symptomatic of what Nietzsche foresaw as the consequence of the death of God and what he feared would be its inevitable outcome: nihilism. For when the question “Why should I?” cannot be adequately countered—or rather, can only be countered with possibilities and cautious advice—it eerily recalls the opening pages of Nietzsche’s Will to Power in which he writes: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”