[THS] !!!!!!! Chris Hedges: After Religion Fizzles, We`re Stuck with Nietzsche

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25415.htm

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After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche

By Chris Hedges

May 10, 2010 "Truthdig" -- It is hard to muster much sympathy over the implosion of
the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations or Jewish synagogues.
These institutions were passive as the Christian right, which peddles magical thinking
and a Jesus-as-warrior philosophy, hijacked the language and iconography of
traditional Christianity. They have busied themselves with the boutique activism of the
culture wars. They have failed to unequivocally denounce unfettered capitalism,
globalization and pre-emptive war. The obsession with personal piety and “How-is-it-
with-me?” spirituality that permeates most congregations is undiluted narcissism. And
while the Protestant church and reformed Judaism have not replicated the
perfidiousness of the Catholic bishops, who protect child-molesting priests, they have
little to say in an age when we desperately need moral guidance.

I grew up in the church and graduated from a seminary. It is an institution whose
cruelty, inflicted on my father, who was a Presbyterian minister, I know intimately. I
do not attend church. The cloying, feel-your-pain language of the average clergy
member makes me run for the door. The debates in most churches—whether
revolving around homosexuality or biblical interpretation—are a waste of energy. I
have no desire to belong to any organization, religious or otherwise, which
discriminates, nor will I spend my time trying to convince someone that the raw anti-
Semitism in the Gospel of John might not be the word of God. It makes no difference
to me if Jesus existed or not. There is no historical evidence that he did. Fairy tales
about heaven and hell, angels, miracles, saints, divine intervention and God’s
beneficent plan for us are repeatedly mocked in the brutality and indiscriminate
killing in war zones, where I witnessed children murdered for sport and psychopathic
gangsters elevated to demigods. The Bible works only as metaphor.

The institutional church, when it does speak, mutters pious non-statements that
mean nothing. “Given the complexity of factors involved, many of which
understandably remain confidential, it is altogether appropriate for members of our
armed forces to presume the integrity of our leadership and its judgments, and
therefore to carry out their military duties in good conscience,” Archbishop Edwin F.
O’Brien, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, wrote about the Iraq war.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the eve of the invasion, told believers
that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a menace, and that reasonable people
could disagree about the necessity of using force to overthrow him. It assured those
who supported the war that God would not object.

B’nai B’rith supported a congressional resolution to authorize the 2003 attack on Iraq.
The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents Reform Judaism,
agreed it would back unilateral action, as long as Congress approved and the
president sought support from other nations. The National Council of Churches,
which represents 36 different faith groups, in a typical bromide, urged President
George W. Bush to “do all possible” to avoid war with Iraq and to stop “demonizing
adversaries or enemies” with good-versus-evil rhetoric, but, like the other liberal
religious institutions, did not condemn the war.

A Gallup poll in 2006 found that “the more frequently an American attends church,
the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake.” Given that Jesus was a
pacifist, and given that all of us who graduated from seminary rigorously studied Just
War doctrine, which was flagrantly violated by the invasion of Iraq, this is a rather
startling statistic.

But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved
by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the
Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems
illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is
as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.

There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people
toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to
the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions. The essential
teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma,
hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion. These teachings
helped create the concept of the individual. The belief that we can exist as distinct
beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make
moral decisions that can defy the clamor of the nation is one of the gifts of religious
thought. This call for individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions
in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for compassion, especially for the weak, the
impoverished, the sick and the outcast.

We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of
individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. We are
enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of
individual conscience was the starting point of the great ethical systems of all
civilizations. Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to
Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-
criticism. They initiated the separation of individual responsibility from the demands
of the state. They taught that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the
powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious and moral life required us to often
oppose and challenge those in authority, even at great personal cost. Immanuel Kant
built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always
recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means”
runs in a direct line from the Socratic ideal and the Christian Gospels.

The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the
older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and Destiny ruled human fate-a belief
that, when challenged by Socrates, saw him condemned to death. They challenged
the power of the tribe, the closed society. They offered up the possibility that human
beings, although limited by circumstance and human weakness, could shape and
give direction to society and their own lives. These religious thinkers were our first
ethicists. And it is perhaps not accidental that the current pope, as well as the last
one, drove out of the Catholic Church thousands of clergy and religious leaders who
embodied these qualities, elevating the dregs to positions of leadership and leaving
the pedophiles to run the Sunday schools. [!!!!!!!!!!!]

These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They are ruled by moral and
intellectual trolls. They have become arrogant and self-absorbed. Their sins are
many. They protected criminals. They pandered to the lowest common denominator
and illusions of personal fulfillment and surrendered their moral authority. They did
not fight the corporate tyrants who have impoverished us. They refused to denounce
a caste of Christian heretics embodied by the Christian right and have, for their
cowardice, been usurped by bizarre proto-fascists clutching the Christian cross. They
have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in
droves, know it. But don't think the world will be a better place for their demise.

As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign,
the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. We are becoming
objects, consumer products and marketable commodities. We have no intrinsic value.
We are obsessed with self-presentation. We must remain youthful. We must achieve
notoriety and money or the illusion of it. And it does not matter what we do to get
there. Success, as Goldman Sachs illustrates, is its own morality. Other people's
humiliation, pain and weakness become the fodder for popular entertainment.
Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing see contestants
disappeared from any reality television show or laughed out of any Wall Street firm.

We live in the age of the "Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of
traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human
instincts, drive and will. We worship the "will to power" and think we have gone
"beyond good and evil." We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and
wisdom to create our own moral code. The high priests of our new religion run Wall
Street, the Pentagon and the corporate state. They flood our airwaves with the
tawdry and the salacious. They, too, promise a utopia. They redefine truth, beauty,
morality, desire and goodness. And we imbibe their poison as blind followers once
imbibed the poison of the medieval church.

Nietzsche had his doubts. He suspected that this new secular faith might prefigure
an endless middle-class charade. Nietzsche feared the deadening effects of the
constant search for material possessions and personal hedonism. Science and
technology might rather bring about a new, distorted character Nietzsche called "the
Last Man." The Last Man, Nietzsche feared, would engage in the worst kinds of
provincialism, believing he had nothing to learn from history. The Last Man would
wallow and revel in his ignorance and quest for personal fulfillment. He would be
satisfied with everything that he had done and become, and would seek to become
nothing more. He would be intellectually and morally stagnant, incapable of growth,
and become part of an easily manipulated herd. The Last Man would mistake
cynicism for knowledge.

"The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars," Nietzsche wrote
about the Last Man in the prologue of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." "Alas! The time of
the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself."

"They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to
their mockery." The Last Men indulge in "their little pleasure for the day, and their
little pleasure for the night."

The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has turned us into what Chalmers
Johnson calls a "consumerist Sparta." The immigrants and the poor, all but invisible
to us, work as serfs in this new temple of greed and imperialism. Curtis White in "The
Middle Mind" argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice
used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects
they do not care. They don't want to see what is done in their name. They do not
want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and
faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former
manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is
welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain Last Men. And the death of
religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last
Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and
greed, the one that justifies our ruthless callousness toward the weak and the poor.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com .

© 2010 TruthDig.com