The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (6 page)

one that has as much going for it as any god, which is not saying much—it still has the power to be depressing, for it reduces persons to masks. But Nietzsche needed persons, not masks, for his philosophy. Specifically, the Nietzschean love of fate (amor fati) works only insofar as a person, a self, is real enough to give this love a meaning—not something unreal, not a self-conscious nothing, not anything whose orders come from somewhere behind and beyond it. In confederacy with those whom he believed himself to have surpassed in the race toward an undefined destiny, Nietzsche did what he could to keep the human pageant strolling toward . . . wherever. (“We think, therefore we will die; so we had better learn to love dying, as well as any other ‘terrible and questionable’ thing we can think of.”) Even though he had the clarity of mind to recognize that values did not grow on trees nor were writ on stone tablets, he duped himself into thinking that it was possible to create them, although how and what would be created he could not say.

Tough-minded enough to demolish the life-rejecting faith of the Crucified, Nietzsche was also fated to perpetuate His tripe with the Anti-christ-like impostures of Zarathustra, who was groomed to take over Christianity’s administration of the Western world and keep it afloat with counterfeit funds.

Why did this no-saying yes-man believe it was so important to keep up our esprit de corps by fending off the crisis of nihilism that he predicted as forthcoming? Nietzsche could not have thought that at some point people were going to turn their heads to the wall due to a paucity of values, which may run low sometimes but will never run out, and, after all, regulate only how one lives, not if one keeps living. Those who were supposed to be among the suicidally affected have survived fine and dandy: whichever side of the nihilistic coin happened to come up for them, they still carried home an armful of affirmations. To publish or perish is not a question that professional thinkers have to think about for long. And whatever crisis there may still be ahead will have to take place in a post-nihilistic environment. As a bad name for some people to call others, as well as a general orientation of mind, “nihilist” will live on. But as a threat to the human head, the nihilist, if such a being ever really existed, is as dead as God and Dillinger. (See James E. Edwards’ The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in the Age of Normal Nihilism, 1997.) To make a clean sweep of one’s values is rather impossible—an ideal to be imagined till one is overtaken by a natural end. Schopenhauer, the maestro of life’s devaluation, knew as much. But Nietzsche fretted about those unborn values which he imagined his work needed to inspire, worrying over them as would an expectant parent concerned that his name, his blood, and his codes both moral and genetic be 31

bodied forth by generations fading over the hills of time. Leaving no values that posterity could not fabricate on its own, Nietzsche was all the same a magnificent opponent of enslaving values from the past. In their place, he left nothing. And for that we should thank him.

After Nietzsche, pessimism was revaluated by some, rejuvenated by others, and still rebuffed as depressing by ordinary persons, who went on yammering about their most activating illusion: “Today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better still.”

While being alive may be all right for the moment, the future is really the place for a person to be, at least as far as we care to see into it. Lovecraft is a figure of exceeding intrigue here because much of his fiction is based on a clutch of godlike beings whose very presence in the universe degrades the idea of betterment in human life into a cosmic miscalculation. Azathoth the Blind Idiot God, Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, and those monstrous researchers of the Great Race who pass the eons by traveling through time and the galaxies to record miscellaneous data and lore to fill their library: these entities symbolize the Lovecraftian universe as a place without unconditional sense, meaning, or value. This perspective is memorably expressed in Lovecraft’s poem

“Nemesis”:

I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim,

Where they roll in their horror unheeded,

Without knowledge or lustre or name.17

This is not what fans of a better future wish to hear. Even highbrow readers—perhaps because they tend to be immoderately stricken with consciousness, which is always a stickler if you want to keep your spirits from flagging into depression—will deny the validity of such a vision or treat it as only a literary diversion, which in effect is all that it is . . . along with every glyph and scribble ever made or tale told since Gilgamesh sojourned in the land of the dead. These same readers have been seen in public lapping up such drivel as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Transcendental Meditation, Paganism and Neopaganism, Pantheism, Gnosticism, and the preaching of New Age sects.18

As a rule, though, most prefer old and reputable belief systems and their sectarian outgrowths. So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent putz who soiled Himself and the universe with His corruption, a born screw-up whose seedy creation led the Gnostics to conceive of this genetic force as a factory-second, low-budget divinity pretending to be the genuine article. They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher cobbled together like Frankenstein’s monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried—a savior on a stick. They trust in Allah and his mouthpiece Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that verifies their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain, unclear, or an out-and-out nightmare, but which sates their appetite for values not of this earth—that depressing, meaningless place they know so well and 32

want nothing more than to obliterate from their consciousness.19 Sure enough, then, writers such as Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft only write their ticket to marginality when they fail to affirm the worth and wonder of humanity, the validity of its values (whether eternal or provisional), and, naturally, a world without end, or at least one that continues into the foreseeable future. Anything else is too depressing to be countenanced.

Phobic to any somber cast of thought, humankind has nonetheless imbibed ever-increasing disillusionments throughout its history. The biblical Genesis, and all other fables of origination, has been reduced to a mythic analogue of the big bang theory and the primordial soup. Pantheon after pantheon has been belittled into “things people used to believe.” Petitions for divine interventionism are murmured only inside the tents of religious fanatics and faith-healers. And things have not been the same since the earth began revolving around the sun rather than the other way around. In the past century or so, disillusionments of this kind have become the province of specialists in the various sciences, so they are not well understood by, if known to, those who go to church on Sunday and read the astrology column in the newspaper the rest of the week. Generalists of disillusionment broadcast on a wider frequency. Yet their message, a repetitive dirge that has been rehearsed for thousands of years, is received only by epicures of pessimism, cognitive mavericks who have impetuously circled the field in the race to the finish line.

Contemporaneous with every generation, disillusionment must proceed surreptitiously.

Anyone caught trying to accelerate its progression will be reprimanded and told to sit in the corner. While the Church has lost its clout to kill or torture dissenters such as Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft, they are still closely watched by the guard dogs of consciousness both sacred and secular. A sign of progress, some would say. But sufferance of such minds should not lead us into premature self-congratulation. The speed at which our kind moves toward an ultimate disillusionment is geologically slow, and humanity can be cocksure of kicking the bucket by natural causes or an “act of God”

before it travels very far toward that glittering day when with one voice it might cry out,

“Enough of this error of conscious life. It shall be passed down no longer to those innocents unborn.”20

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NOTES

1. The nativity of human consciousness as depicted in this paragraph may be seen as (1) a fable of humanity’s “loss of innocence” and estrangement from a “natural” way of being in the world, an opening gambit borrowed from Peter Wessel Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah,” which, absurd as it may seem to some readers, is the backbone of the present work; (2) a speculative moment with a loose footing in evolutionary neuroscience.

Those acquainted with D. E. Harding’s On Having No Head (1961) should note that the metaphor of “headlessness” is borrowed from this work but does not signify an endorsement of it.

2. This train of thought synopsizes a brand of metaphysical and psychological determinism according to which human beings cannot either defy accepted workings of reality or manipulate the origination of a state of mind and emotion. Naturally, all forms of determinism court the incredulity of the most sizeable portion of thinkers and non-thinkers alike. Anyone who subscribes to one or more of the arguments for an absolute or qualified free will may choose to disregard this passage. (The futility of all argument has already been stipulated in the preface to this work.) Arguments against free will are the most vilified in human thought, far more than arguments against the existence of gods. Even leading atheists draw the line whenever someone argues that, logically speaking, we are not in control of our thoughts and behavior. As materialists, they deny that moral “laws” have been crafted in a world unperceived by our senses; as tax-paying citizens, they still need to live in this one. And to disallow moral agency and responsibility would overturn every authorized ruling that makes the world work, if deficiently. Without the assumption of morality and responsibility, no one could be held accountable for crimes against life and property. In principle, it is irrational to bring before a bar of justice some skin-suited automaton whose behavior is out of alignment with the herky-jerky machinery in which it is supposed to function. But not to do so would be destructive of the sociopolitical status quo, which must be preserved if people are to be protected from sinking into a funk of foundationlessness. Newsflash: anyone who must receive instruction in morality will not benefit from it. Those concerned with morality are not the ones who need concern themselves with morality. The ones who need to be concerned with morality are those who will never be concerned with morality. Ask any sociopath, whose deficit of fellow-feeling is evened out by others with a hyper-developed, unhealthy sense of moral responsibility. The latter group will take on the guilt from which the remorseless are spared, blaming themselves for tragedies they cannot lawfully or logically be connected with. One is as helpless as the other to be anything but what they are, morally speaking. Everyone in between these groups will go with the wind. The majority cannot be taught how to feel about their behavior, only bludgeoned or cajoled into doing one thing or another. Rewards and punishments may be effective, but there can never be a mathematics of morality. Either the chemistry and neurology are there or they are not. Every day it is proven that not even deities that hand down codes of conduct can enforce them among their believers.

For a god to publish the warning “Do this and do not do that . . . or else” is the moral equivalent of a highway speed trap. What a racket is right and wrong, and what a joke is justice or injustice: concepts thought up by parties with a vested interest in them. They hold nothing together that is not already held together by forces outside any law or moral system. But for a sensitive consciousness, this is something too terrible to know.

Among those who back determinism in theory, none lobby for major renovations of 34

their society’s justice system as its wheels grind slow but exceedingly fine. The determinist is not about to derail what he himself regards as illusions, which may be rough on bad-mannered or ill-designed automata but serve the social machine acceptably well. The determinist is also aware that if our illusions fall apart on paper, they are intractable in our lives. They have such a lock upon us that even the desire to escape from them is nearly impossible. To hate our illusions or hold them dear only attaches us to them all the more. We cannot stand up to them without our world falling apart, for those who care. While determinists stick to their logic, they are satisfied to let their philosophical opponents run the puppet show. What choice do they have? Yet how much slack do you give to what you believe is a lie, even a lie that holds steady the social order and braces up everything you have become accustomed to—your most cherished image of yourself, your country, your loved ones, and the value you place on your work, your hobbies, your possessions, your “way of life”? How much slack do you give to what you believe to be a lie before you say you have had it with lies, before you forsake everything to live with what you really think and feel about the way things are?

How much slack? Answer: all the slack in the world.

3. Although the translation of “The Last Messiah” in the March-April 2004 number of the British journal Philosophy Now is annotated as the first appearance of this essay in English, it was previously included in an anthology of English translations of the works of Norwegian writers entitled Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology (1993), eds. Peter Reed and David Rothenberg (translation of “The Last Messiah” by Sigmund Kvaløy with Peter Reed). Zapffe’s writings have not been translated into English except stingily and posthumously. This is not a queer happenstance for writers whose humor is unfriendly to the status quo. Until they have been long under the ground, if then, their works are kept on life support by an underground readership. Those among the resurrected include H. P. Lovecraft, whose horror fiction and varied nonfiction writings waited decades before they were made fairly accessible even to readers in his native country, where writers of a negative persuasion—whether homegrown or foreign—are relegated to the lower echelons of the cult figure until they are trusted to appear on the shelves of better bookstores or from the presses of major publishers.