Deep in the recesses of Charles Taylor’s massive tome A Secular Age on the huge shifts that have transformed the Western world in the last five hundred years, he tells a story–a story of a friend visiting a political gathering:
A Buddhist acquaintance of mine from Thailand briefly visited the German Greens. He confessed to utter bewilderment. He thought he understood the goals of the party: peace between human beings, and a stance of respect and friendship by humans towards nature. But what astonished him was all the anger, the tone of denunciation, of hatred towards the established parties. These people didn’t seem to see that the first step towards their goal would have to involve stilling the anger and aggression in themselves. He couldn’t understand what they were up to.*
Taylor says that the person who would have been most delighted with the irony of this story was Friedrich Nietzsche. The late nineteenth-century German philosopher was famous for his idea of “will to power.” He thought, essentially, that there was no morality, no ethics. These were just thin, convenient covers for seeking to gain what we wanted—to impose our control on others!
Such a story would prove to Nietzsche that he was right, that people don’t operate by ideals, even the most high minded. It’s all a sham, a fake, a charade. Even a political party supposedly built on the foundation of peace with the natural world quickly degenerates into vitriol and violence.
We may think this view is cynical. Nietzsche just thought it was reality.
Like those pursuing progressive ways to make the world better, conservative Christians may also disagree with Nietzsche. But in a day in which some think that Jesus’ admonition to love our enemies is wrong or that it just doesn’t apply when it comes to asserting our political will, Nietzsche is still laughing.
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*Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 698.
Image credit: openart.ai photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche laughing.
