Back in the late 1800's Fred as I like to call him spoke of the Death of God. He was not talking about the diety as mortal. He was rather talking about the shift in values taking place in Europe. Some of this stuff is directly from Fred, some from Robert Pirsig. Pirsig wrote "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals."
Fred was talking about the fact that the God of Abraham was no longer the central figure in Europe. People had been using him to justify all manner of bad behaviour since Constantine. The grip of the clergy was beginning to loosen. He did not mean the literal meaning of the words. He was talking about the fear of an after life as a mitigating factor in human behaviour.
It might be stated "Oh Shit! God is Dead! Now what?!!" He acknowledged that most of the ethical and moral code of The West was bound up in the Judeo Christian view of the world. Europeans were "People of the Book" at least in giving lip service to morality and ethics. This also included the world of Islam. If the state and society were to believe that human beings made up morality as they went along and life had only the meaning that the individual brought to it there could easily be a total breakdown of ethics.
On of the primary values in the Victorian world was society. Not the church although that was important. It was Society. This was, much more than any clergy, the regulating force in day to day life.
Think of it this way. If all meaning comes only from human agreement on what that should be, the highwayman and the pirate, the confidence man and the swindler had only to disagree or choose to opt out of the societal agreement and the ethical code did not apply to them. The murderer could kill and if he was not caught, there would be no consequences: he never opted in to the agreement. If he were no more than an electro-chemical carbon based reaction, there would be no morality involved.
Fred thought that the restraints on human behaviour were off. There was no anchor. Where was the beginning assumption for what was acceptable? This leads us to Robert Pirsig.
Pirsig says that civilisations function around values. It is a set of organising principles. The Victorians saw polite society as the most important value. One can determine this by reading novels from that era. There was manure everywhere in Victorian England. In the summer if there were a dry spell it turned into a powder in the air. No where is the muck and smell of the street mentioned in a book like "The Golden Bowl" by Henry James. The theme may be adultery but the problem is solved without divorce. No mention is made of manure in the streets, the soot that blackened everything, the caste system that existed in British society in 1904, none of the problems that beset most of society.
Turkey legs were called "Drum Sticks" because the word "Thigh" had a sexual connotation to it. Think about it for a minute. Society was everything to these people. But there was another force on the horizon. It was the Beagle carrying Darwin.
Darwin shook the foundations of belief for a lot of folks. His trip around the globe was stunning. He was part of the changing values that were sweeping the European world. He was post Enlightenment and a scientist. Slowly the world changed. Science became the supreme value. Darwin is important because he represents the modern world. Science is important because there are no intrinsic moral values to science.
Fred saw this coming. He predicted there would be blood in the 20th century. Lots of it. Morality is what men say it is. Honesty, truth, reality are what men say they are. There is no God to judge. Morality and acceptable behaviour are what one can accomplish over the objections of others. It is as if he saw the rise of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, Mao T'se Tung, Saddam Hussein, and a host of others. He died in 1900. He resigned in 1879. He predicted most of the blood bath that was the twentieth century.
Pirsig says Science has no morality. Think of it Mathematics has no moral implications. Trigonometry is without an ethical code. Factoring an equation does not have any behavioural guide lines. None. Science became the central focus of the West during the Twentieth Century. Everything from 3D movies to Voyager, trips to the Moon and back, satellites, cell phones, the web. Think of the technology the century developed. The West is left with no moral code. Science cannot give life meaning but it can distract modern man. It can fill time and provide amusement. Amusement is not character.
Nietzsche was mourning the loss of God. He was mourning the loss of even a pretence of morality by governments or what Machiavelli would have called "The Princes" meaning the ruling elite.
I will be back with more. Don't you just hate it when I read Tom Wolfe and then research some of his ideas? More later.
