The Death of God and The Banality of Evil

by: Sou Gabato

“If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.” [1][2]

-Malcolm Muggeridge

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When Nietzsche declared to the world his most famous yet misread phrase: “God is dead”, he meant it as a cry of someone who is in great despair after knowing that at the peak of man’s endeavor to eradicate God had also meant the end of himself. For along the death of God comes the death of reality: values, truths, and absolutes crumbles down along with him. Such abandoning of the absolutes was seen by Nietzsche as absurd and difficult,

“What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.“[3]

The “God is dead” phrase was only one part of what Nietzsche wanted to say. He wanted us to understand that at the light of all these abandoning of the absolutes and of the moral foundations which the religious have once offered, and of whom the majority of the western societies uphold and lived by, would be a walk towards a “catastrophe” in his “Will To Power” (Der Wille zur Macht):

“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism...For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.“[4]

• 

Hence, the bloodbath of the 20th century, where hundreds and millions of bodies of mostly innocent men and women piling up as a sacrifice for the promotion of a new idea: the coming of the “new dawn”. He knew what was coming, and if he had lived longer to see it, “surprised” or “shocked” would be a foreign word to him. You may not like this, but this shouldn’t be something you would be surprised of either. We might as well defend this event in history as rather merely a result of established evil men succumbed with the desire for power and tyranny, but nay it was more: these are men who have been motivated by an ideology that mankind is nothing but a product of evolution and its environment. Even today’s world’s famous atheist and evolutionary biologist from Oxford University, Richard Dawkins acknowledged the consequence of living out fully this supposed reality, and thy quote:

“No self-respecting person would want to live in a society that operates according to Darwinian laws. I am a passionate Darwinist when it involves explaining the development of life. However, I am a passionate anti-Darwinist when it involves the kind of society in which we want to live. A Darwinian State would be a Fascist state.“[5][6]

The reality of this banality of evil brought us the bloodiest century in the entire human history, and we have yet to see it fully blown. The neurologist, psychiatrist, author, and holocaust survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl would agree with what Richard Dawkins have said in this hauntingly yet profound words:

“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.” [7]

As the great Russian literary genius and existentialist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible” [8]. Indeed, in the absence of God, to say bad is bad and good is good in a moral sense, and to dictate to another what is ought to be and ought not to be crumbles in utter abyss, and although we can reason out our intellect at the swift of our pens and placing them next to the other thousands of already written works of the same subject in our academia, we are still, according to the existentialists, ‘alone’ in this universe. Hence, the atheist philosopher, and existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre himself observed this concept as something “extremely disturbing” to know that God no longer exists, for “along his disappearance” Sartre added, “goes the possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There could no longer be any a priori good, since there would be no infinite and perfect consciousness to conceive of it.” [9]

Banality of Evil

Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers; the chief executioner of the holocaust who sent millions of Jews towards their gruesome death in the ghettos and extermination camps found no remorse as he was being sentenced to death by hanging in May of 1962. So much so that Hannah Arendt, a German-American philosopher and a political theorist wrote an entire book dedicated to Eichmann’s life and final hours with the title, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil“. Arendt described it so profoundly in the final pages of her book this fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil, and thy quote:

“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no “time to waste.” He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. “I don’t need that ” he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself nay he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while gentlemen we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows his memory played him the last trick he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” [10]

The Banality of Evil, ladies and gentlemen all over again. Have we really killed God? Has the gravediggers failed in burying God? Have we dug the hole deep enough, or was God too big to fit in his casket? Could it be then that what was thought to be the smell of the divine decomposition was actually the smell of the dead bodies of mortal men piling up like hills after a long dispute of deciding what progress’ name really is? Have we really set ourselves free from the poisons of the absolutes? Malcolm Muggeridge had it right on spot on telling us that “It is truth that has died, not God.”[11] And we have paid the great price of substituting truth for lie. Whatever happens to justice, and whatever happens to our courts of law, politics, and education. We have yet to see. Or have we? We might not acknowledge this, probably because we have gotten used to it, but its effect has long been felt and observed, so much so that Dr. Orval Hobart Mowrer, an atheist, psychologist, professor at Yale and Harvard University, and the president of the American Psychological Association in 1954 has finally said it in behalf of mankind, which later on, made him a subject for a great deal of criticism even from his own colleagues for boldly speaking out what really is happening:

“For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch-making. But at length we have discovered that to be “free” in this sense, i.e., to have the excuse of being “sick” rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost. This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in Existentialism which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral, and “free,” we have cut the very roots of our being; lost our deepest sense of self-hood and identity; and, with neurotics themselves, find ourselves asking: Who am I? What is my destiny? What does living (existence) mean?

In reaction to the state of near-limbo into which we have drifted, we have become suddenly aware, once again, of the problem of values and of their centrality in the human enterprise.

At the very time that psychologists are becoming distrustful of the sickness approach to personality disturbance and are beginning to look with more benign interest and respect toward certain moral and religious precepts, religionists themselves are being caught up in and bedazzled by the same preposterous system of thought as that from which we psychologists are just recovering.” [12]

I am not saying in any sense that because of this; therefore, “God”, nor am I offering you a proof for God’s existence in this article, it could as well be the case that life is absurd, without meaning and without absolute, but stepping back for a moment and asking ourselves these very questions all over again: are we really prepared for this murdering of God? Or are we only bold in our papers but never really considered the awful tragedy that will come about if one ought to live with the posted proposition consistently? It is a hard question, indeed, for even the great atheist and mathematician Sir. Bertrand Russell struggled with these same kind of questions and when push comes to show, he thought that he could not live as though moral values were simply a matter of personal taste, and goes on to say, “Incredible. I do not know the solution to this.”[13][14] he concluded.

Human existence is one of the most beautiful subject out there in philosophy, yet the most hauntingly and oblivious one. Will we be some day find our ultimate ethos and finally get rid of God? I don’t know. Or will it be that after all of our rebelling and our plot to kill the divine will find ourselves all over again back to the altar? As Nietzsche himself professed, “I am still too pious that even I worship at the altar where God’s name is truth.”[15]

Citations:

[1] Geoffry, Barlow (1985). Vintage Muggeridge. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
[2] Zacharias, Ravi (2004, p. 32). The Real Face of Atheism. Baker Books Publishing.
[3]Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.
[4] Nietzsche, F. W., In Kaufmann, W., & Hollingdale, R. J. (1968). The will to power. New York: Vintage Books.
[5] Evans, John H. “What Is A Human? What The Answers Mean For Human Rights” (2016, p. 30): University of Oxford Press. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
[6] West, John G. “Dawkins Flip-Flops on Link between Darwinism and Fascism.” Evolution News, 2 Aug. 2019, evolutionnews.org/2008/03/dawkins_expelled_and_the_nazis/.
[7] Frankl, Viktor. The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (1986, p. XXVII). Vintage; 3rd edition.
[8] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1983.
[9] Sartre, J., Kulka, J., & Elkaïm-Sartre, A. (2007, p.28-29). Existentialism is a humanism =: (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme) ; including, a commentary on The stranger (Explication de L’Étranger). New Haven: Yale University Press.
[10] Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975. (1994, p. 256). Eichmann in Jerusalem : a report on the banality of evil. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. :Penguin Books.
[11] Malcolm Muggeridge, The Green Stick: A Chronicle of Wasted Years, (Glasgow: William Collins & Sons, 1972), 16-17.
[12] “Sin, the Lesser of Two Evils,” American Psychologist, 15 (1960): 301-304).
[13] Bertrand Russell. A Letter to The Observer (October 6, 1957).
[14] Seachris, Joshua W. Exploring Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide (2013, p. 165). Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (September 4, 2012).
[15] Philip Novak ,(2003, p. 11), The Vision of Nietzsche. Vega.