“Evil,
be thou my good” -Paradise Lost, IV.110
Friedrich
Nietzsche is one of those, what I like to call, “Phase
Philosophers.” What I mean by that is that I know a lot of people
who pass through his thought and walk with his ideas for awhile, but
then outgrow this phase and move on to something else. Some are
Cartesians (“Nothing exists but my mind”) or Randians
(“Selfishness is a virtue”), but Nietzschianism tends to be
popular (“God is dead”) with high school and college students. I
understand why. Nietzsche is passionate and he is brilliant, which
can be very attractive to the young. Socrates was passionate and
brilliant, which is why the young of Athens flocked to him.
Of
course, Nietzsche was also insane.
He
had a total psychotic break where he tried to strangle a horse in the
middle of a crowded street (to be fair, I'm sure the horse started
it). Surely there were biochemical factors to his problem, but I
also believe that his philosophy led to his madness. There are
several aspects of this thought that we could talk about but there is
one that I believe has slowly been infecting our world: The
transvaluation of values.
Don't
let the big words scare you. All this means is that Nietzsche wanted
to overturn the virtues of Christianity and turn them into vices. He
saw Christianity as a cancer that killed human nature. The
traditional virtues need to be flipped on its head. He famously
asked, “Granted that we want the truth: WHY
NOT RATHER untruth?”
And
while very few of us embrace Nietzche's ideas the way he embraced
horses, his influence in this area has subtly persisted. I've
noticed that we've been slowly shifting the pieces of our moral
chessboard to put virtue in moral checkmate to vice. We've turned
vices into virtues and virtues into vices. There are 2 ways this is
done:
The
first involves holding that which is good in contempt and that which
is vile as admirable. Here are some examples:
Honesty
– often we see this in the name of “sparing feelings.” Little
white lies cover small injuries. This is nothing new. But more and
more I've noticed that lying can be held up as not only acceptable,
but virtuous. Take a movie like The Dark Knight. The entire ending
is predicated on the “noble” idea of embracing a lie for the
greater good. As Batman says, “Sometimes the truth isn't good
enough.” We find it acceptable to deceive others as long “as it
makes them happy.” This is horribly dangerous because once we
undercut our demand for truth, we are cut off from a common objective
world and are left floating alone through life in the bubble of our
own lies.
Patience
– In the last few decades life has sped up to lightning speed. We
want our desires fulfilled NOW. If I graduate from college and do
not have my dream job, then something must be wrong with the world,
not with me. If I have to wait 35 seconds for my burrito to heat up,
I yell at the microwave. If the streaming HD video on my phone
buffers slightly, I want to slap someone. But patience is often
viewed with derision and inaction. We are told that we constantly
have to “DO SOMETHING.” I recall a bill was being debated in
Congress and many of the legislators said that they didn't read it
because it was important to pass it first. I found this odd. It
reminds me of the old joke where someone tries to get a man to sign a
contract. When the man notices that the paper is blank, the contract
maker says, “We'll fill it in later.” Socrates was always
disappointed when people wanted to move on in a conversation until he
truly understood what was happening. Now it seems that patience is
standing in the way of progress and should be shunted.
Faith
– Like pornography, faith appears to be one of those things that
society feels should be kept behind closed doors. There was recently
a Rhode Island woman who threatened to sue a group of Catholics who
prayed the rosary in the common room. Expressions of faith can make
people very uncomfortable, so we need restrain it to the privacy of
the house and the church. And how often are religious people
portrayed in popular culture as either manipulative charlatans or
naïve little lambs. Private personal piety is fine. But when
someone publicly speaks of their belief they are called phonies,
panderers, fanatics, and busybodies.
Chastity
– This is the most obvious one to see in the pop culture, but I
want to take a slightly different tact. As a society we have
basically conceded fornication as normal and our Church stands
against the tide there. But even the most abnormal sexual conditions
are being normalized. I mentioned in an earlier post about the movie
Savages.
Here, the lead female character is romantically involved with the
two male leads at the same time. In fact, they often refer to her as
“our girl.” The New York Times when telling the story of
ex-homosexual activist Michael Glatze casually mentions that at one
point he and his lover had “for the
last few years the relationship had a third member...”
Any kind of sexual self-control is held as a repression of healthy
desires. Also note how sexualized our society has become. Take this
example: two males are in an isolated area spooning each other.
Often they hold hands and show their affection with a kiss. Am I
describing Brokeback Mountain? No. This is Sam and Frodo from The
Lord of the Rings. But none of that activity of the hobbits is
sexual. But Tolkien wrote in a different time. Now, we sexualize
everything and anything we can. Don't believe me? Google search any
subject and I guarantee there will be some form of that thing
depicted in a sexual nature.
Now,
some virtues cannot be turned into vices because we hold them too
dear. But this leads to the second kind of corruption: redefine the
value. If we cannot get people to reject the virtue, distort its
true meaning. Two examples:
Courage
– Nobody believes cowardice is better than courage. It is good to
overcome fear. But then we distort the objective of that courage.
Two nuns riding a bus protesting the Church while getting fawning
media coverage is called brave. Taking on bullies by bullying them
is called brave. Throwing glitter at politicians is called brave.
Asking taxpayers to pay for maintaining your sex life is called
brave. To be sure we still have strong examples of true bravery, but
by widening the definition we lose its value.
Love
– I mentioned in one of my posts on logic that a student expressed
her support for “gay marriage” by saying “love is love.”
This points very clearly to bastardization of our language. Part of
the problem is the English itself. The Greeks recognized four
different loves: Storge is simple affection; Eros is romantic
desire; Phileo is friendship; Agape is complete self donation. To
confuse these is to cause great problems, both personally and in
society. How often in high school have we spent sleepless nights
trying to figure out if that hug we got from that cute classmate was
storge, phileo, or eros? And as a society don't we generally call
people to greater agape, but a more restrictive eros? In other
words, isn't good to have more compassion for everyone while being
exclusive with someone romantically? But when we confuse these four
loves we lose what makes them unique and then we cannot place them
appropriately in our lives.
So
vice becomes virtue, virtue becomes vice. How do we overcome this
problem?
Intellectually,
we must turn to reason and logic. The corruption of our virtues do
not come from our intellect, but from our emotions. Pointing out the
logical conclusions and implications of these corrupted virtues
applied universally will hopefully shock people away from its
absurdity.
But
more importantly than virtue being known is virtue being lived. The
living example of honesty, patience, faith, chastity, courage, and
love will speak more powerfully than any words.
How the hell do you produce this much well thought out content so fast. Is CatholicSkywalker a title for a group of people?
ReplyDeleteEvery person I have ever met that reads Nietzsche is one of those angry people that everybody walks on egg shells around. It is anecdotal but a consistent truth in my life.
I do the "spare feelings" thing all the time and I tell myself that I do it out of love, because I do not want to hurt the other person's feelings. However the truth is I do it out of a lack of courage.
Unknown,
ReplyDeleteI hope I did not come off as some kind of self-appointed moral hero, because the truth is that I am not. I pointed to the virtue of courage because it is one of the virtues that I often lack. I find this in the little things like when with a group someone is invited to share an opinion, and I wait to see who speaks first. CS Lewis said "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."
Maybe that's why I like Green Lantern so much. The whole point of the comic is overcoming fear.
As to whether or not there are a group of people writing: No, it's just me. I wouldn't be too impressed, though. I am a theology teacher on summer break, so I have a lot of free time and a lot of built of "lecturiness" in me.
Thank you for your kind words.