by Nathan Smith

Bishop Brian Tamaki is one of the only people in politics who clearly feels he has a right to rule. His main issue is that society has rejected the Christian god and fallen into nihilism. Tamaki wants to reverse this.

Thankfully, he’s getting a bit long in the tooth, so his chances of gaining any real power are slim. But his analysis of society, along with his panacea to fix it, seems to be common, all too common, amongst the young and power-hungry. I hear many people say a return to Christianity is the only way to solve our nihilism and ennui.

But if life is not absurd, if life has any meaning at all, why would you want to go back? If something is broken, then it broke because it wasn’t strong.

More importantly, why would you let your political enemies control the idea of progress? I want to go forward while looking forward, not forward while looking backwards. After all, the future is demonstrably more important than the past.

Tamaki is certainly correct that Christianity has declined. For example, Christians no longer burn people like me. If you go back 500 years, Thomas More was immolating people for reading the Bible in English because he said that was giving in to the Lutheran heresy of reading the Bible in a vernacular language. Burning people for reading the Bible in English is very far from atheism but is anything like that happening in Christian countries today? No. If this isn’t nihilism, I don’t know what is.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “god is dead” reflects this slow decline. It is a message that the Christian belief has become unworthy of us now. Ultimately, that’s good news for Nietzsche because he sees Christianity as a life-denying long process of exhaustion that prevents future revaluations of values. Nietzsche wasn’t interested in undermining the foundations of Christian morality because the actual content of Christianity is already self-undermining. In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the madman who proclaims “god is dead” is talking to a bunch of atheists in the marketplace. They already don’t believe: “As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.”

Tamaki’s mistake is to think nihilism is a consequence of the death of God. But nihilism comes from Christianity. This is a religion that puts all the worth of our life in a world beyond, and calls this world sin-cursed, a fallen world, which is all going to be burned away after the day of judgment. All our vainglory, all our pursuits, all our desires, selfish ambitions or pleasures, or even just fulfilling our base impulses, that’s all sinful. Everything human beings do in some sense is sinful. We’re originally sinful.

For Nietzsche, Christianity is otherworldism. It’s a form of valuation that undermines the very act of valuing itself. It’s the will aiming at something which undermines willing in the here and now. The Christian ideal orients itself to this world beyond. All the ends at which our will is directed in this life take place in another world which is inaccessible to us while we’re alive. As such, the good life becomes impossible in this world, and the true world is only accessible after death.

Nietzsche calls Christianity a kind of medicinal poison that is useful for humans at a certain time and place, such as for the Roman slaves. In the first century, there was an immense longing among the Roman proletariat for their miserable lives to end. Christianity was readily adopted because it made existence tolerable for the slaves by preserving their life while also weakening and exhausting it. Christianity harnesses despair with its celebration of martyrdom, or the self-torture and slow death of the ascetic monk.

The ascetic monk got the thumbs up from Nietzsche for showing great courage in self-overcoming. The monk’s ability to transcend his base animal impulses signals a way forward for nature making a leap in the form of mankind. The monk expresses a will to nothingness, but at least it’s still a will. At least it’s still a desire to negate something. Because the monk’s self-overcoming is wrapped up in the nihilism of Christianity’s otherworldness, his strength of character is ultimately a dead end for humankind. The Christian is Nietzsche’s vision of the last man. For the rest of the us, however, Nietzsche says Christianity can only turn us into a domesticated, pathetic and guilt-ridden mankind that is unable to will at all. We become a series of “great ant organisations,” instrumentalised individuals that are machines of production and consumption.

Tamaki sees the same thing, but I think his blame is heading in the wrong direction. Christianity can be a medicinal poison, but it’s still a poison. It’s not good to take poison. If nihilism is rampant, then that’s just proof Christianity has won.

To the extent that Nietzsche respected Christianity, he was pro-Catholic Church as it appeared in the Renaissance era. He wished that Cesare Borgia should become pope. He says when the popes were fathering illegitimate children, selling indulgences, raising armies, assassinating each other, at that time, the values of paganism sat on the throne of Christianity. He says life sat on the throne. Whatever you want to say about the Catholics back then, they were alive. They had ambitions. They had passions. They were not like Jesus. Then the Protestant Reformation pulled humanity back down into the crab bucket.

Tamaki often complains that the “woke” see the world as a battleground between oppressed and oppressor. Nietzsche thinks this, too. Except he says the slave morality of Christianity driven by a form of envy is the real origin of “woke.” Envy is like an explosive fuel that threatens to blow up society. So, to get out of this bind, Christianity performs a neat trick by convincing the “oppressed” to take imaginary revenge on their “oppressors” at the day of judgment. Accept your position, feel envious, but do nothing. Just wait.

Yet people are people, and people need something to do with their envy in this world. They can’t wait for the next world. When people adopt Christianity, they still need an outlet for their innate capacity for cruelty. So, the priests turn this cruelty back in on the convert with the weapon of guilt. They become cruel to themselves. Guilt is you punishing yourself, and as such it behaves like a tool of social control.

Nietzsche wants to escape the crab bucket of Christian nihilism by encouraging great experiments with creating values. He thinks it’s possible for humans to do this, because values aren’t discovered (which is what Carl Jung thought), they are created by humans, for humans.

Every set of values ranks things from best to worst, or from positive and negative. Then there’s a rank ordering within each of those, which aims for things we want more than other things. Obviously, there will be constraints on the possible range of values, given our biological limitations. But the ultimate creative act of will is to make a new rank of values, which is what Jesus did. Jesus put things like pity or faith as the highest values compared to the worldly values of the pagan world. So, it’s not like we’ve never reevaluated our values before.

The revaluation of values has happened many times in history. Every world religion is in some way a revaluation of values. That’s why it’s so strange to hear people like Tamaki say it is impossible for humans to create values. Jesus did it, and Nietzsche thinks Jesus is only a man. So, from Nietzsche’s perspective, a man can create values. We can create new values, too.

However, Christianity stands in our way of a revaluation of values because of its claims to be universal. The universalist stands truth on her head by ignoring perspective. The universalist view of the truth is topsy-turvy because there is no pure seeing. There’s always an eye that has to see. There is no immaculate perception. Nietzsche says people will have differing perspectives on values and he doesn’t expect these values to have any union. They will, in fact, go to war with each other because destruction itself is a form of creativity. He’s not being nihilistic or bloodthirsty by saying this, he’s being historical.

For Nietzsche, a revaluation of values would be the birth pangs of a more life-affirming world where we live in truths that are more admitting of perspective. It is a world that allows us to become kings of our own “little free cities” where we can make our own experiments with how to govern ourselves and follow different values. Again, many of these free cities will be failures. Many of them will come to war with each other. But that’s just part of how nature experiments with her creatures.

The only thing that can advance the human species is a competition between values, not the stultifying complacency of trying to get everyone to agree on the same values. Nietzsche thinks there will be new legislative figures, like Plato, Jesus, Muhammad or the Buddha, who will create these revaluated values.

The way I see it, we have to move forward while looking forward. The author of the future will be whoever can jettison the nihilism of Christianity and accept that this world is worthy. Tamaki is too old to change his mind, but if he’s so worried about nihilism, he should first check if the call is coming from inside the house.

Originally published on The Good Oil.