(May 11, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Several, mostly Colombo based, NGOs vigorously advocate the adoption of a liberal, secular and pluralist polity by the State as a solution to our ethnic conflict. I agree. However, I feel that the proponents of these policies do not sufficiently probe the profound moral implications of secular liberalism.
The word secular derived from the Latin ‘saeculum’, means ‘world’, but in Christian usage it means ‘this world’ and refers to the earthly, and temporal, as opposed to the ‘other world – heavenly and eternal. In the Christian belief system, this world is a temporary testing place for humans. By the twelfth century CE, what is now called Europe had been effectively ‘christianized’. The Church asserted its supremacy over earthly life, which was in essence corrupt and sinful.
It Church was at the apex of a static and hierarchically organized cosmo-social order. Earthly life had no meaning except as a preparation for the next. Such was the Church’s supreme self confidence that Pope Boniface VIII in his edict Unam Sanctam of 1302, asserted hegemonic power over the over the temporal and spiritual orders and declared that “every human creature” was “subject to the Roman Pontiff”. The political history of Europe has in many ways, been marked by the struggle of European kings and princes to free themselves from this yoke. The republican constitutions of America and France not only freed the state from ecclesiastical control but also the citizens from monarchic despotism. Other Western nation states were to follow suit. The state freed itself from religion and gave religious freed to its citizens! The secular state relegated the Churches and by implication God, to the private realm. The Churches became one of the many discrete institutions of civil society. God’s will and ecclesiastical writ ceased to be the determinant of an universally binding ethic. Respect for religious diversity in civil society implies an acceptance of cultural and moral relativism. External restraint is imposed by the rule of law. But law becomes a dead letter unless it is quickened by an universally acknowledged and internalized ethic, which can be rationally or empirically validated, since one theistic religion will not accept the particular supernatural claims of another.
The philosopher who saw the moral vacuum created by secularism, as well and the cultural decadence which would engulf Western civilization in its wake, was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was born into and raised in a devout Lutheran family. His father was a Lutheran pastor. His mother was the daughter of pastor. His paternal grandmother who lived with his parents, was the daughter of an archdeacon and widow of a bishop.
The adult Nietzsche described himself as “an atheist by instinct”. But this did not mean that Nietzsche became a ‘materialist’ and a libertarian. Nietzsche paid dearly for his disbelief. Throughout his life he suffered because, he clearly saw the cultural consequences of the banishment of God from public life. He sensed, to the depths of his being, the utter bleakness of life and the devaluation of all values in a godless world. The Churches too he felt had become ‘unfaithful’ to the Gospels. He would have agreed with the Danish theologian Soren Kiekegaard, that Christianity had become a bourgeois religion, that ‘the salt had lost its savour’.
No aspect of Nietzsche’s teaching is better known than his pronouncement that “God is dead”. Note well, however. Nietzsche did not say God does not exist, but that God is dead. He puts this declaration in the mouth of a madman, in a dramatic parable: A madman lights a lantern in the brightness of noon, runs to the market place, and cries incessantly: “ I seek God!, I seek God!’ As many of the people who were dancing on the market place did not believe in God, the madman’s question provoked much hilarity and laughter. ‘Indeed this is a madman’, they derided, ‘because he is looking for someone who does not exist: “Looking for God? Perhaps he has migrated”, they mocked. The madman then jumped into their midst and pierced them with his burning eyes: “Whither is God?”, he cried, “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we do this? … God is dead. And we have killed him … What was the holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet known, has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe the blood off us …?”. “It has been related further that on that same day, the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied every time: “What after all are these churches now, if they if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?” Today, in much of Europe this prophecy has come true. Magnificent churches, emptied of devotees are rented out for art exhibitions, or theatrical and orchestral performances.
Nietzsche saw with fierce clarity that God’s banishment from public life (his ‘death’), threatened human life with a complete loss of all meaning and purpose. Nietszche feared that to fill the void created by the absence of God people would chase after secular substitutes which would deaden the human spirit and make existence absurd.
Nietszche died in the year 1900. He has justly been called the prophet of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century ended with the near religious belief that the twentieth century would usher in an era of unfettered progress, that it would produce ‘wealth for all nations’. It hasn’t. The myth of the Golden Age was shattered by two world wars precipitated by Western powers. The century ended with triumphant free marketers dancing on Marx’ grave. Instead of global prosperity, free market economies offer the possibility of unbridled hedonism to a few and unprecedented misery for nearly two thirds of the world’s population. In what sense can we say that we Sri Lankans live in a religious society when it seems unmoved by violent nationalisms, dehumanizing poverty, child malnutrition, lack of adequate housing and health care, daily road killings and cruel torture, routinely inflicted on the socially weak by the guardians of the law and when it is not outraged by the asphyxiating luxuries that the powerful and privileged permit themselves? Surely in such a decadent culture, God must be dead?
According to Nietzsche, what secular liberalism offers is merely a negative freedom – freedom from religious prescriptions backed by the arms of the State. Nietzsche feared that freed from external constraint people would not restrain themselves but give in to every impulse and become victims of a new servitude, the servitude of their blind cravings. As Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra asks, “Freedom from what? Zarathustra does not care about that ! But your eye should clearly tell me: free for what?
It is not without significance that Nietzsche’s madman could not find God in the Market Place. The people were dancing and rejoicing that God does not exist. On the Free Market God is dead. The people are urged to freely indulge themselves. Subjected to the tyranny of the Market all our most cherished values, our most noble professions and even the ministrations of religion are turned into commodities: everything and everyone can be bought. In a consumerist culture, as the very word ‘consumer’ suggests, the sole purpose of human existence is to consume whatever the free market tantalizingly dangles before us. Increasingly people are losing the ability to think critically for themselves. People are bombarded by TV ads urging them to indulge their senses, and telling them what they should eat what they should put on and how they should look, to win social acceptance. This invasive culture of consumerism, not religion, dictates the practical ethos of our times. It is hell bent on producing a new type of personality – that Nitezcshe despised most, a herd animal, with standard tastes and standard desires and standard life expectations. Globalisation of the free market is engineered by a globalisation of a culture of mass consumerism - a ‘MacDonaldisation’ of the world.
Nietszche envisaged the possibility for humans to utilize the new space of freedom from external restraint, to realize their true inner freedom and potential, to attempt something new and creative and not live as if their unique lives were the product of a biological accident, above all not live as herd animals mutely conforming to the dictates of the prevalent culture.
(The Article originally published in the Ceylon Daily News 15 August 2002 is reproduced with the author’s permission.) - Sri Lanka Guardian
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