The supreme folly of thinking we create ourselves

Denying the basic design of the universe thrusts us into the tossing waves of meaninglessness

In his 1988 book Kingdoms in Conflict, Charles Colson says that, while Friedrich Nietzsche was syphilitic and headed toward madness, he exhibited a great deal of foresight in his God-is-dead formulation. According to Colson, Nietzsche did not intend the phrase to be taken as a position he he wanted to argue for, but rather an objective assessment, a way of expressing how humanity had come to make its way in the world:

Nietszche’s point was not that God does not exist, but that God had become irrelevant. Men and women may assert that God exists or that He does not, but it makes little difference either way. God is dead not because he doesn’t exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern and die as though He doesn't . . .

Blaise Pascal had foreseen, three centuries earlier, the chilling consequences. He argued that in a spiritual vacuum, men can pursue only two options: first, to imagine that they are gods themselves, or second, to seek satisfaction in their senses. Ultimately, he predicted the routes that would be followed in the East and West in the aftermath of World War II.

Nietzsche went on to further flesh out his scenario, positing that humankind’s two option in the post-God landscape were to be a Last Man, who responds to this world with nihilism, or an Ubermensch, an archetype who makes things happen by force of his will. The Ubermensch, as far as I can tell, is as close to transcendence as a human being can expect to attain in this world.

It would have been interesting to see what Nietzsche would have thought of Ayn Rand’s heroes Howard Roarke and John Galt, who, it seems to me, fit the bill of what Nietzsche was talking about.

The argument can be made that Roarke and Galt are noble figures. Objectivists certainly make it, as do many in a wider circle of libertarian-leaning types predisposed to put freedom front and center among human values. Don’t the visions of such figures rise above mere pursuit of the sensually pleasurable?

Not really, according to Whittaker Chambers in his savage 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review:

Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent. And as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is a sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the state of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. 

At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him. And to him alone. His happiness, is strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his life." Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist Socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence on "man as a heroic being" "with productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if man's "heroism" (some will prefer to say: "human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness. And this, of course, suits the author's economics and the politics that must arise from them.

Randian self-actualization merely amounts to yet another form of self-gratification, perhaps not as unseemly as a cocaine or pornography habit, but as empty in the end as those preoccupations.

Trumpists like to point to the Very Stable Genius’s achievements (largely financed by bank loans he often didn’t repay) as evidence of his being qualified to “run the country.” This is sometimes emphasized so strongly that one can scarcely get a word in edgewise about his lack of depth, humanity and character. Trumpists also like to post out that a Republican minority presence in the executive and legislative branches of our government would mark a return to the collectivism and coercion of previous times of progressive dominance. What they fail to deliver as a convincing final argument for their case is what a Trumpist “vision” might offer beyond a slightly fatter paycheck.

Attempts post-Enlightenment, and certainly post-World War II, by humankind at self-invention inevitably run into a counter-argument posed by the daily experience of life itself: a design to this universe that will not brook resistance.

The sudden mainstreaming of notions about human sexuality that had for thousands of years of human history until about five minutes ago been fringe preoccupations is having its effect. We are, in real time, obliterating the primacy of the family, the building block of any healthy society at any time or place in our “long climb from the swamp to the stars.”

And the effects are tragic and profound:

So if a job or a home or education and training don’t make a difference, what does? Around 37 percent of federal and state inmates have received a mental health diagnosis, likely a small fraction of the prison population who could benefit from mental health treatment. Many of the Marshall Project interviewees said access to mental health and psychiatric services would have helped them cope with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental illnesses that are associated with criminal behavior. Drug treatment was another high priority, which is unsurprising when nearly half a million people are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Still others hoped for a life coach, mentor, or parental figure who could encourage them to stay out of trouble. Taken together, these needs suggest that our prisons are full of people who need specific medical and psychological treatment to help them develop stronger connections—to a positive vision of themselves and prosocial relationships with others—that can help them overcome a lifetime of trauma, including the trauma of incarceration.

The idea of focusing on transforming the inner lives of people to prevent crime and promote rehabilitation will strike many people as too “soft,” too focused on “feelings” at the expense of the cold, hard facts of crime and punishment. This perspective overlooks how our current criminal justice policy is also driven mainly by feelings: fear, a need for security and control that hasn’t caught up to current conditions, and a thirst for punishment and revenge. That these responses grow out of a human desire for justice and order does not mean they are any more correct than those who react to systemic injustice with equally unrealistic and potentially damaging calls to defund, and in some cases dismantle, the police. When it comes to refurbishing our policy approaches, it would be far better if we allowed the data to speak rather than listening only to our more primal instinct for punishment.

People always have choices about whether they commit crimes, and police, courts and prisons will always be necessary to isolate bad actors from society and punish wrongdoing. But it’s increasingly clear that policing and punishment alone cannot deliver the safer, more peaceful, and healthier society we all desire. As Congress and the incoming Biden administration take up the challenge of criminal justice reform, we all need to open our minds and our hearts to the possibility that we have reached the end of the road on coercion-and-punishment-focused anti-crime policy. Instead, we need to start asking some deeper questions about how all sectors of our society—government, business, and community and religious organizations—can help individuals, families, and neighborhoods fill the empty hearts that gives rise to crime in the first place.

Maybe most people in post-America as we embark on the third decade of the twenty-first century are willing to settle for the state of our artistic output, view of what education should be about, general health of organized Christianity and Judaism, journalistic integrity, and contribution of large corporations to our overall quality of life.

I daresay, though, that we’re not a contented bunch, looking forward to a vibrant future. If one wants to put blame on the pandemic, answer this: is there nothing that could have kept our spirits buoyant as this befell us, had we not thought we were the end-all and be-all of what we exist for?