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Nihilism's conscience: grounding human rights after Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche

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Nihilism's conscience: grounding human rights after Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche

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NIHILISM’S CONSCIENCE:

GROUNDING HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER DARWIN, MARX, AND NIETZSCHE

By

Ronald Elliott Osborn

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOHPY
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

December 2012

Copyright 2012 Ronald Elliott Osborn

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: THE THREE EXEMPLARS ...................................... 1
I. On the Crisis of Legitimacy in International Human Rights Law....................... 2
II. The Question: Can We Have Rights Without Foundations?............................ 11
III. The Three-Cornered Struggle: Situating the Debate ...................................... 15
IV. Why Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche?: The Plan of the Dissertation................ 23
CHAPTER 2: DARWIN AND HUMAN DIGNITY ....................................................... 35
I. Natural Selection as Prophecy: The Triumph of the Moral Instincts................ 38
II. “Care Wrongly Directed”: Utilitarianism, Empire, and Darwin’s Ethics........ 46
III. Into the Wasteland: The Naturalistic Fallacy Revisited ................................. 53
IV. Evolutionary Will to Power: The Nihilistic Turn........................................... 64
V. The Impossible Cordon: Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria...................... 71
VI. Apophatic Science: The Inner Life as Primary Datum................................... 77
VII. Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Natural Science as Natural History ..... 85
CHAPTER 3: MARX AND HUMAN RIGHTS.............................................................. 93
I. Human and Natural Technology: Marx and Darwin......................................... 97
II. The Marxian Dilemma: History as Slaughter-Bench..................................... 103
III. Excursus on Marx’s Metaphysics and the Hebrew Prophets........................ 114
IV. The Undefinable Menace: Prometheanism in Theory and in Practice ......... 121
V. On the Genealogy of Utopian Materialism: A Dostoevskian Reading.......... 133
VI. Forgiveness as Revolutionary Act................................................................ 148
CHAPTER 4: NIETZSCHE AND HUMAN EQUALITY ............................................ 154
I. Imperial Consciousness and the Great Subversion.......................................... 158
II. Domesticating Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Political Admirers .............................. 173
III. “The Abyss of Scientific Conscience”: Nietzsche’s Naturalism .................. 182
IV. Myths of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Metaphysics ..................................... 192
V. Libido Dominandi: Nietzsche’s Resentment ................................................. 202
VI. Dionysus versus the Crucified...................................................................... 208
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION: THREE APOCALYPSES ........................................... 213
I. Original Positions: On Political Liberalism..................................................... 219
II. The Creation Myth of the Secular Nation-State: On Religious Violence..... 225
III. Recontextualizing Rights: On Cultural Relativism....................................... 228
IV. Three Apocalypses (Or What is Finally at Stake) ........................................ 234
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................... 242

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My studies at the University of Southern California were made possible through the
financial support of the Bannerman Foundation and the Center for International Studies.
I am grateful to these organizations and to the people who comprise them for investing so
generously in my academic career. There are numerous others to whom I owe a great
debt of gratitude for making this dissertation possible. Ann Tickner agreed to be my
dissertation chair under difficult circumstances, providing invaluable guidance and
tempering wisdom at point where this manuscript was still in search of an organizing
thesis. Sharon Lloyd, John Barnes, and Anthony Kammas also provided vital support
and guidance. I am grateful to all of these individuals for the time and energy they were
willing to invest in my scholarly journey, for their always open doors, and most of all for
their collegiality and friendship. I am also grateful to several professors at USC who
were not on my final dissertation committee but who played an important role in my
doctoral studies: Patrick James, Richard Dekmejian, and Janelle Wong. Many friends
and fellow students have enriched my time at USC both in and out of the classroom. A
few who I would like to mention by name as valued conversation partners who have
helped me to think more carefully (not always by their agreement) about the grounding of
rights are: Matthew Burdette, Kory DeClerk, Eric Guttschuss, Simon Radford, and Zane
Yi. Finally, I want to acknowledge my parents, Ken and Ivanette, and my sisters, Kim
and Lorelie, whose encouragement, humor, and unflagging support throughout my life
has been a constant source of balance and inspiration.

iv
ABSTRACT

The idea of human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
other key documents of international law today faces grave theoretical as well as political
challenges from many fronts. In the light of ongoing debates about the sources and
meanings of “rights” I seek to answer the question: Can we have the right (or rights)
without the good, that is, without “thick” moral foundations? In a pluralistic world that
knows the perils of religiously motivated violence and intolerance all too well, is the only
alternative to fundamentalist zealotry (or philosophical dogmatism) some form of
ungrounded moral relativism, emotivism, or pragmatism? Or is it in fact impossible to
have a robust, persuasive, and sustainable account of human dignity, equality, and rights
without appealing to essentially religious or metaphysical understandings of personhood?
In this dissertation I focus in particular on the challenge of post-Enlightenment
skepticism for the idea of human rights through a critical examination of three
nineteenth-century thinkers who perhaps more than anyone else set the stage for our
contemporary discontent: Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. All three provided vital insights
into social realities that cannot be ignored, yet their theories also pose grave problems for
rights advocates. In response to the philosophical materialisms of Darwin, Marx, and
Nietzsche, I seek to trace a broadly ecumenical, self-reflexive, and non-dogmatic
approach to rights that at the same time builds on particularist religious understandings.
We cannot have a rationally coherent and normatively compelling political ethic or
discourse of human rights, I argue, without a metaethics that either implicitly or explicitly
finds its moorings in essentially religious or metaphysical ways of thinking.

1
CHAPTER 1:
INTRODUCTION: THE THREE EXEMPLARS
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with
reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
—Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
1

“During one of the meetings…someone was astonished that certain proponents of
violently opposed ideologies had agreed on the draft of a list of rights. Yes, they replied,
we agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why’ the dispute
begins.”
—Jacques Maritain recalling the French delegation’s deliberations about the UDHR
2

On December 10, 2007, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon launched a
year-long campaign, “Dignity and Justice for All of Us,” in anticipation of the sixtieth
anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). “The campaign,” he
said in a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Bangkok, “reminds us that in a world still reeling
from the horrors of the Second World War, the Declaration was the first global statement
of what we now take for granted—the inherent dignity and equality of all human
beings.”
3
Although the Declaration’s language of the inviolable moral standing of all
persons has achieved a remarkable force in international law, however, the vision of
universal rights set forth in the document remains both widely contested in theory and
widely violated in practice. At the start of the twenty-first century, there is in fact little
about the high ideals set forth in the UDHR that can be taken for granted. “[L]ooking
around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and

1
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” on the web at:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
2
As cited in Marina Svensson, Debating Rights In China: A Conceptual and Political
History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), p.35
3
“Statement of the General Assembly President,” December 10, 2007, on the web at:
http://www.un.org/events/humanrights/udhr60/

2
Abel,” Yale law professor Arthur Allen Leff declared in a much cited statement of
pessimism in the ability of Western legal traditions to overcome the problem of nihilism
in a world without God. “Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked
to make us ‘good,’ and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. As
things now stand, everything is up for grabs.”
4

I. On the Crisis of Legitimacy in International Human Rights Law
Much criticism of the Declaration has focused on its failure to adequately express the
aspirations, needs, and perspectives of historically marginalized persons, as well as the
way it might subtly reinforce social and political relationships that are themselves sources
of unjust privilege, domination, and structural violence. For example, the nine-person
drafting committee of the UDHR included a single woman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and its
language is heavily gendered, beginning from the first Article with its call for a spirit of
brotherhood. Throughout the Declaration, clear-cut distinctions are repeatedly drawn
between public and private spheres, with the “human” often being identified in what
some have deemed problematic “masculine” terms such as head of the household,
property owner, wage earner, or discrete non-pregnant individual.
5
Some feminists have
argued that these categories perpetuate exploitative treatment of women in the home
without any recourse to international law.
6
The Declaration also takes the role of states as
the guarantors of rights as a given, which may be a historical fact but not a normative

4
Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal,
Vol.1979:1229, No.6, p.1249.
5
See Kimberly Hutchings, “Towards a feminist international ethics,” Review of
International Studies, Vol.26, No.5 (2000), p.126.
6
See Fionnuala Ni Aolain, “Gendering the Declaration,” Maryland Journal of
International Law, Vol.24, 2009, pp.336-337.

3
ideal given the role states continue to play as systematic rights offenders. The United
States vigorously opposed the creation of the International Criminal Court and rejects the
authority of any multilateral body seeking to enforce human rights norms on the grounds
that international law must not in any way infringe upon America’s sovereignty. What
American exceptionalism has meant in practice is that U.S. soldiers involved in human
rights atrocities in other lands have often gone unpunished.
7

Critiques of the Universal Declaration such as these arise, though, from a clear
commitment to the idea of human rights as something that must be deepened and
expanded rather than confined to the noble but imperfect vision of an earlier generation
of rights defenders faced with the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau at the heart of
“civilized” Europe. They are “friendly” challenges insofar as they accept the
Declaration’s central tenets: 1) that all human beings—including, and in fact especially,
the most vulnerable—possess an inviolable dignity or sanctity that must not be exploited
or transgressed; and 2) that it is therefore the duty of all human beings and all political
orders to treat every person with a high moral regard in virtue of their humanity alone.
One might simultaneously critique and praise the Declaration, locating it within an
evolving canon of international human rights law that incorporates other documents. The
“International Bill of Human Rights,” as it has come to be known, includes not only the
UDHR but also two 1976 addendums: the International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights (which the United States, among others, has refused to ratify), and
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In 1979, the General Assembly

7
See Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith, eds., In the Name of Democracy:
American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005),
p.167.

4
adopted an important additional document on international human rights, the Convention
on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
Over the past 60 years, however, a far more unsettling set of challenges to the
idea of human rights has arisen. An increasing number of individuals now ask the
question the signatories to the Universal Declaration, according to Jacques Maritain,
agreed not to ask: the question of Why. Why do we imagine that the mere fact of
personhood generates “inviolable” or “sacred” rights? Why should we think that rights
attach first and foremost to individuals rather than to collectives? And why, if we find
that it does not serve our interests, should we feel at all bound by the secular doctrinal
formulations of human rights regimes or dedicated to fighting for their implementation?
Those who raise these questions implicitly or explicitly call into doubt not only certain
aspects of the Universal Declaration as a fallible work in progress but the intellectual
coherence and long-term viability of its vision of what it means to be human.
In 1993, more than 30 Asian nations—including states such as China, North
Korea, and Burma/Myanmar—met in Thailand to craft a document on human rights
putatively more sensitive than the UDHR to non-Western values and more in harmony
with “the aspirations and commitments of the Asian region.”
8
The Bangkok Declaration,
as it has become known, echoed much of language of the Universal Declaration of
inviolable personal rights, illustrating how politically difficult it has become even for
egregious rights offenders to openly deny its principles. Nevertheless, the document
included a significant proviso to the UDHR that amounted to an effective denial of the

8
“Bangkok Declaration,” in Fernand De Varennes, ed., Asia-Pacific Human Rights
Documents and Resources, Volume One (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1998),
p.88.

5
right of rights advocates to politically challenge or publicly shame authoritarian regimes.
Article 5 asserts the need for “non-interference in the internal affairs of States, and the
non-use of human rights as an instrument of political pressure.”
9
With nations such as
Malaysia and Singapore having successfully modernized while suppressing individual
freedoms assumed by most westerners to be central to the meaning of human rights,
many Asian leaders now speak of an “Asian Values” model of development in which the
collective “rights” of countries to economic prosperity and social order might not only
supplement but in fact supersede many of the individual rights of their citizens (including
rights of free speech, rights of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, and rights of
workers to organize independently of the state).
10
Why these officials should speak with
greater authority for the values of Asia or Asians than the human rights advocates they
suppress—people like Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dali Lama, and the students of Tiananmen
Square in 1989—is unclear. During the period of de-colonization the UDHR’s
vocabulary of individual rights provided a powerful weapon against the imposition of
Western values. The Asian Values critique of human rights does, however, highlight an
unavoidable reality: any effective defense of rights must be sensitive to cultural
differences and all rights talk is now a matter of vigorous cultural contestation.
An even more striking illustration of the failure of the Universal Declaration to
achieve global consensus in a pluralistic world is the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights
in Islam, adopted in 1990 by the 45 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic

9
Ibid., p.89.
10
In 1991, for example, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew claimed that Asians have “little
doubt that a society with communitarian values where the interests of society take
precedence over that of the individual suits them better than the individualism of
America.” As cited in Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, The East Asian Challenge for
Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.6.

6
Conference (now the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation with a membership that has
grown to 57 states). When the Universal Declaration was being drafted, the Saudi
Arabian delegation strenuously opposed two articles: Article 16 defending freedom of
choice in marriage for women, and Article 18 defending freedom of religion. Because of
these two statements, the Saudis refused to sign the final document.
11
Some fifty years
later, the signatories of the Cairo Declaration likewise rejected the Universal Declaration
as an illegitimate imposition of Western values on the Islamic world. Human rights, they
declared, can only be properly defined by the one true “Ummah” (community or nation)
spiritually able to “guide a humanity confused by competing trends and ideologies and to
provide solutions to the chronic problems of this materialistic civilization.”
12
Human
rights, according to the Cairo Declaration, must be delineated solely in terms of Islamic
law. All persons have a “right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic
Shari’ah,” the Cairo Declaration states.
13
“Everyone shall have the right to express his
opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the
Shari’ah.”
14
On the question of religious liberty, Article 10 prohibits freedom of speech
where this might result in a Muslim converting to another faith or to no faith at all—a
violation of Shari’ah according to most Muslim scholars from classical times up to the
present. The restriction is couched in the document in the language of a positive
protection from mental exploitation. “Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature,” the

11
See Michael Ignatieff, “The Attack on Human Rights,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 2001, p.103.
12
“The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam,” in Edward Lawson, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Human Rights, Second Edition (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996),
p.176.
13
Ibid., p.176.
14
Ibid., p.177.

7
Cairo Declaration asserts. “It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or
exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion or to
atheism.”
15
“The Islamic Shari’ah,” the document concludes, “is the only source of
reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.”
16

Still another source of opposition to the idea of human rights has arisen not
among non-Western thinkers suspicious of the UDHR’s roots in both secular
Enlightenment and Jewish-Christian sources but rather among philosophers in Europe
and America who have grown skeptical of any talk of an inviolable or essential human
nature. The intellectual sources of this Western post-Enlightenment skepticism include
Darwinian critiques of the idea of a stable or unique human nature, Marxian critiques of
“the rights of man” as a bourgeois social construct, historical and anthropological
critiques of nineteenth-century Western imperialism, and postmodern critiques of notions
of universal reason.
17
“Today, the threat to human rights is deeper than their sometimes
violation,” Max Stackhouse observes, “it is a profound intellectual and spiritual problem,
for many today doubt that we can have or defend any trans-empirical principles to judge
empirical life.”
18

15
Ibid., p.177. Although increasingly rarely enforced, apostasy is still punishable by
imprisonment and/or death in numerous countries that are signatories to the Cairo
Declaration, including: Afghanistan (both before and after the U.S. invasion of 2002),
Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, and Egypt.
16
Ibid., p.178.
17
Ignatieff, “The Attack on Human Rights,” p.104.
18
Max Stackhouse, “Sources of Basic Human Rights Ideas: A Christian Perspective,”
transcript of a talk given at the University of Chicago Divinity School, January 27, 2003,
on the web at: http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Sources-of-Basic-
Human-Rights-Ideas-A-Christian-Perspective.aspx

8
According to Richard Rorty, the question of whether or not humans actually have
any rights or any dignity in virtue of their humanity “is not worth raising.”
19
The reality,
he says, is “that nothing relevant to moral choice separates human beings from animals
except historically contingent facts of the world, cultural facts.”
20
Rights regimes, in
Rorty’s view, are nevertheless so deeply embedded in our political institutions (at least in
the West) they will continue of their own momentum regardless of their lack of
philosophical support. A great “intellectual advance made in our century,” he writes, “is
the steady decline in interest in the quarrel between Plato and Nietzsche,” that is, between
those who think that moral language must be connected to a metaphysical account of
human being and those who declare that moral language can only be a mask for will to
power.
21
What the past century has taught us is that we should no longer “take ontology
or history as a guide to life”; instead of asking, “What is our nature?”, we should
pragmatically ask, “What can we make of ourselves?”
22
What matters for Rorty
(building on the ideas of the eighteenth-century skeptic David Hume), is that we continue
to promote the right kinds of sentiments or empathetic feelings that will cause the human
rights culture we have somehow stumbled into to survive—even if these feelings at the
end of the day prove to be unjustifiable for any reason other than the feelings themselves,
and even if these feelings “do not distinguish us in any interesting way from many
nonhuman animals.”
23
Michael Ignatieff agrees. “Why do we need an idea of God in
order to believe that human beings are not free to do what they wish with other human

19
Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in Truth and
Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.170.
20
Ibid., p.170.
21
Ibid., p.169.
22
Ibid., p.169.
23
Ibid., p.181.

9
beings,” he asks. “These intuitions derive simply from our own experience of pain and
our capacity to imagine the pain of others.”
24
K. Anthony Appiah similarly suggests that
our ideas about human rights emerge from our ability to sense suffering and empathize
with others. “We do not need to agree that we are all created in the image of God, or that
we have natural rights that flow from our human essence, to agree that we do not want to
be tortured by government officials, that we do not want our lives, families, and property
forfeited,” he writes. We can take comfort in the fact that “ordinary people almost
everywhere have something like the notion of dignity.”
25

Much, though, may be revealed in those two seemingly innocuous yet strangely
equivocal words: something like. Can we be certain that people who have something like
dignity will be treated with dignity? Within two years of the publication of Appiah’s
reflections, the office of the Attorney General of the United States had begun drafting
legal memoranda to permit the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense
to use tactics of mental and physical torment on suspects in the “war on terror.” The road
to these policies, which received their strongest levels of political support among
evangelical Christians, was paved in part by the advocacy of prominent political
philosophers and legal scholars.
26
In a January 2002 article in the San Francisco

24
Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 88.
25
K. Anthony Appiah, “Grounding Human Rights,” in Human Rights as Politics and
Idolatry, p. 106.
26
In an April 2009 survey, the Pew Research Forum found that 62% of white evangelical
Protestants, 64% of Republicans, and 54% of those who attend religious services at least
once a week in the United States said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is
often or sometimes justified. By contrast, 46% of mainline Protestants, 40% of the
religiously unaffiliated, and 36% of Democrats did. See “The Torture Debate: A Closer
Look,” Pew Research Forum, May 7, 2009, on the web at:

10
Chronicle, barely four months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Harvard law
professor and liberal political theorist Alan Dershowitz urged the United States and other
Western democracies to legalize torture as a legitimate way of dealing with terrorists in
extreme situations. Torture by U.S. forces was going to happen anyway, Dershowitz
reasoned. Better for everyone concerned that it at least be well regulated. Warrants to
torture, he wrote, should be obtainable from a “distinguished judge” with the wisdom to
“approve, limit and monitor the torture.” The methods used would be restricted to
“nonlethal means, such as sterile needles, being inserted beneath the nails to cause
excruciating pain without endangering life.”
27
Judge Richard Posner lamented
Dershowitz’s failure to consider the effectiveness of sophisticated techniques of
psychological torment before leaping directly to such crude instruments as needles
beneath fingernails. “One might have expected that before recommending the infliction
of physical pain Dershowitz would have explored the adequacy of truth serums, bright
lights (the old ‘third degree’), and sleep deprivation,” Posner wrote. There were good
reasons not to tamper with international human rights law, he continued, although not
from any principled concern for inviolable human dignity or human rights. “[B]etter to
leave in place the formal and customary prohibitions, but with the understanding that they
will not be enforced in extreme circumstances.”
28

http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/The-Torture-Debate-A-Closer-
Look.aspx
27
Alan Dershowitz, “Want to torture? Get a warrant,” San Francisco Chronicle, January
22, 2002, A19.
28
Richard Posner, “The Best Offense,” in The New Republic, September 2, 2002, on the
web at: http://www.tnr.com/article/the-best-offense. Such moral theorizing played out
prominently in American popular culture in the hit television show “24,” which ran for
eight seasons beginning in November, 2001 and which depicted U.S. forces with the
Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) routinely torturing people for the greater good of the

11
Unfortunately, the very malleability of our conceptions of the human that
permitted the rise of the kinds of empathetic feelings Rorty, Ignatieff, Appiah, and other
liberal theorists approve of means that these values can also be greatly attenuated, or even
collapse altogether, under new social and political circumstances. Sentiments change.
Rorty’s assertion that the past century marks a great advance in moral feeling repeats the
Enlightenment myth of Progress in a postmodern key; but this tale of ever deepening
concern for the suffering of others passes too quickly over a grim historical fact: the past
100 years were the bloodiest in human history, and much of this bloodshed was the direct
result of social experiments based upon the very notions of moral relativism,
philosophical materialism, and the malleability of the human which he celebrates. The
debate between Plato and Nietzsche is not as easily brushed aside, it turns out, as some
philosophers have wished.

II. The Question: Can We Have Rights Without Foundations?
These three challenges to the idea of human rights enshrined (though by no means
exhausted or perfectly articulated) in the Universal Declaration—the challenge of
“strong” cultural relativism,
29
the challenge of non-ecumenical religious absolutism, and

country. In one episode, a suspected terrorist named Joe Prado is released through the
work of a naïve lawyer for a fictionalized human rights organization called Amnesty
Global. The show’s hero, Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland), resigns from his job
to dissociate the government from his actions and then breaks Prado’s handcuffed hands
in a parked car outside the CTU’s offices to extract vital information about a terror plot.
See Adam Green, “Normalizing Torture on ‘24’,” in The New York Times, May 22, 2005,
on the web at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/arts/television/22gree.html
29
We might define “strong” cultural relativists as those who declare that moral values are
radically incommensurable across different cultures and that it is not possible to pass any
value judgments concerning their differences since we lack a vantage point that
transcends our own cultural biases. “Soft” cultural relativists, by contrast, acknowledge

12
the challenge of postmodern radical skepticism—raise the central question of this
dissertation. Simply stated, the question is this: Can we have the right (or rights) without
the good, that is, without “thick” moral foundations? In a pluralistic world that knows
the perils of religiously motivated violence and intolerance all too well, is the only
alternative to fundamentalist zealotry (or philosophical dogmatism) some form of
ungrounded moral relativism? Or is it in fact impossible to have a robust, persuasive, and
sustainable account of human dignity, equality, and rights that at the same time
systematically excludes or evades deeper questions about epistemological and
metaphysical realities, including the ultimate nature of human personhood? Is some form
of skeptical pragmatism that joins the idea of rights to the importance of sympathetic
feelings or enlightened self-interests but that abandons the search for stronger reasons for
caring about the suffering of others the best defense of humanistic values on offer today?
Or are all such positions in fact expressions of a decadence if not nihilism that the victims
of extreme forms of violence, whether by states or by other actors, can ill afford?
I realize that these are perennially controversial questions that do not admit final
proofs or easy answers, but they can no longer be bracketed out of polite conversation the
way they were by the framers of the Universal Declaration for the sake of achieving
political consensus. Because the “why” questions never really went away, because many

that human rights ideals must always take diverse local forms if they are to be truly
emancipating but insist that it is still possible to critically evaluate the values of different
cultures, including one’s own, on the basis of universal principles. Those who fought
against the culture of apartheid in South Africa and the culture of segregation in the
American South, for example, did so on the basis of culturally sensitive rhetorical and
political strategies that were effective precisely because they also embodied a global
vision of human flourishing. More controversially, campaigns to abolish the practices of
female foot-binding in China and sati or widow-burning (as well as leper-burning) in
India were largely led by evangelical Christian missionaries. I will have more to say
about the challenge of cultural relativism in my conclusion.

13
of the answers now being given to these questions by powerful political actors as well as
by philosophers are deeply subversive of (if not explicitly hostile to) earlier
understandings of human rights, and because the practical human implications of these
theoretical moves are very great indeed, rights advocates have no choice but to engage
with the question of the grounding of rights claims. If the debate at times seems to unfold
in an atmosphere of highly rarified theorizing far removed from concrete human needs, it
is necessary to recall the adage that ideas have consequences. One’s metaphysical and
ontological commitments will unavoidably shape one’s epistemological and ethical
commitments, and this, in the long run even if not immediately, will have far-reaching
social and political implications. What we think about people must come to shape how
we treat them. Hanna Arendt’s famous statement on the plight of Jewish refugees during
World War II should serve as a reminder of the darkness of modern history, the fragility
of goodness, and what is ultimately at stake in philosophical discussions about the
grounding of rights:
The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human
being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to
believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all
other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The
world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.
30

In this dissertation, I hope to help move the conversation about rights forward by
excavating some of the sources of our malaise. My focus will be on the third of the three
challenges I have outlined above, namely, the challenge of post-Enlightenment
skepticism concerning any talk of inherent human rights or inviolable human dignity.
Several recent books have approached these questions by analyzing the work of

30
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
1973), p.299.

14
contemporary political theorists such as Ronald Dworkin, Alan Gewirth, Amartya Sen,
and Martha Nussbaum.
31
I have chosen instead to critically examine the ideas of three
nineteenth-century thinkers who perhaps more than anyone else set the stage for our
contemporary predicament: Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. In doing so I hope to
accomplish three things:
1) To demonstrate through close reading of three exemplary materialist or
naturalist thinkers why philosophical materialism—the path of purely “secular” scientific
reasoning—ultimately tends toward epistemological and ethical nihilism and the death of
the human;
2) To defend the proposition that we cannot have a rationally coherent and
normatively compelling political ethic or discourse of human rights (or even humanistic
values) without a meta-ethics that either implicitly or explicitly finds its moorings in
essentially religious ways of thinking;
3) To explore the contributions of Christian humanism in particular to the idea of
human rights. I do not think that the idea of human rights logically requires acceptance
of Christian belief structures or organized religion of any kind; yet Christianity might
provide especially rich soil for understanding and defending human rights and human
dignity. It is, in any case, the particular tradition from which I write.

31
See, for example, Ari Kohen, In Defense of Human Rights: A Non-Religious
Grounding in a Pluralistic World (London: Routledge, 2007); and Grace Kao, Grounding
Human Rights in a Pluralistic World (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press,
2011).

15
III. The Three-Cornered Struggle: Situating the Debate
The first great divide in the debate over the grounding of rights is that between
metaphysical worldviews on the one hand and strictly materialistic or naturalistic ones
on the other. It is the gulf separating Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Moses,
Mohammed, and Christ from Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Richard
Rorty (among others). Once one has embraced one of these two broad paths—either the
metaphysical or the materialistic path—important consequences follow. The divide is
not exclusively between the ancients and the moderns since religion persists as a
powerful social reality even in the “secular” West (confounding the predictions of
several generations of sociologists of religion), and many religious thinkers (from
Dostoevsky to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.) have played an important role in the
development of modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, we can discern in the outlooks of
many modern thinkers a radical break from older ways of thinking, a self-conscious
parting of ways with thousands of years of reflection in both Eastern and Western
traditions on what it means to be human.
If we agree with the ancients that empirical facts are embedded or contained
within a reality that is greater than the sum of its parts—a trans-empirical “ground of
being” that gives the world of empirical facts values and meanings—we must still
determine which guides have charted the most illuminating “maps” to lead us forward.
There may be considerable overlap between any two maps as well as terrain better
marked by one map than another so that we would be wise to keep both or even several
in our backpacks, that is, to be ecumenical rather than sectarian in our thinking. Such
ecumenism can certainly extend to the best insights of thinkers like Darwin, Marx, and

16
Nietzsche. If we decide, however, that all talk of human rights and values must in the
final analysis be treated in purely scientific or naturalistic terms—analytically reduced to
quantifiable explanations or material variables such as “selfish genes” (or altruistic
ones), class interests, or instinctive wills to power, without any recourse to the idea of an
overarching Natural Law, revealed truth, or the ineffable Way spoken of in Eastern
philosophy—we must work out the full implications of these beliefs according to the
internal logics of strict philosophical materialism or naturalism. We must ask whether
sheer social constructivism can construct its own normative validity without succumbing
to the charge that it is, at the end of the day, nothing other than an arbitrary assertion of
power by some over others.
The metaphysical path is the path of religion in the broadest sense of the word.
The idea that every human being is the bearer of an inviolable dignity and fundamental
rights that must under no circumstances be violated, Michael Perry argues, is
“ineliminably religious.”
32
There is no uncontested definition of “religion” but
sociologists widely agree that the concept should not be limited to theistic belief
structures since many Eastern traditions do not include belief in a God or gods and make
no distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural.” Metaphysical religious
beliefs should not be confused, however, with those we might classify as paradoxically
secular religious beliefs. In a 2009 lecture at the London School of Economics entitled
“Human Rights After Darwin,” Conor Gearty highlighted the difference:
Certainly human rights has its Holy Days (10 December), its saints (Eleanor
Roosevelt, Peter Benenson), its martyrs (Serge di Mello, Archbishop Romero, too
many, sadly, to mention), its missionary orders (Amnesty itself, Human Rights

32
Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquires (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), p.5.

17
Watch, many smaller movements), even—tragically—its crusades (Iraq) and its
Inquisitions (the human rights professors who support institutional ill-treatment to
save our civilised souls). But we are not a religion. Jesus is not our guide, nor is
Mohammed, nor any other of the great leaders of any of our world faiths. In
answering the question, “why do we care?”, we are on our own.
33

It is this belief that we are truly, even cosmically, “on our own” when faced with
the question of why we ought to care (along with the strong hint that unlike the people of
earlier ages or other cultures we in the enlightened West are now fully “grown up”) that
distinguishes the modern idea of human rights as a secular “faith” from the essentially
religious view that our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, good and evil, can in some
way—however contingently or imperfectly—correspond with the grain of the universe.
Every appeal to notions of justice and human rights, no less a rationalist thinker than
Noam Chomsky writes, will be based largely upon “structures of hope and conviction
rather than arguments with evidence. But nevertheless those are the structures that must
be there for there to be any moral content to our advocacy and action.”
34
Whether or not
this statement proves Chomsky to be a closeted religious thinker I will not venture to say,
but to speak of “structures of hope and conviction” that must be there for our ideas about
human rights, dignity, and justice to make any sense does seem to me to be a deeply
religious intuition—an intuition I share and want to examine more closely as a possible
clue to important facts about the human condition.
To embrace a metaphysical account of rights and personhood is not to deny that
rights talk is always at some level socially constructed, materially embodied, historically

33
Conor Gearty, “Human Rights After Darwin: Is a General Theory of Human Rights
Now Possible?,” The MSc Human Rights Alumni Lecture, May 7, 2009, on the web at:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/humanRights/articlesAndTranscripts/gearty7may09.pdf
34
Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, ed. Carlos-Peregrin Otero (Oakland: AK
Press, 2004), p.440.

18
conditioned, and caught up in a complex web of factors that can only ever be interpreted
from the perspective of highly particular and constantly evolving traditions. Still, I
would submit, normative no less than empirical ideas must have a greater or lesser “fit”
with realities that transcend our particular cultural systems or language games if they are
to have any meaning at all. When slaveholders in the American South agreed by
widespread consensus that Blacks lacked any essential dignity or personhood that could
be violated, they were staking the moral validity of the institution of slavery upon an
ontological wager—a wager that would have been ontologically false, I contend, even if
most people in the culture of antebellum America had continued to believe it to be true in
reasoned “discourse” supported by democratically representative legislation.
My argument is therefore simultaneously a postfoundationalist and a
metaphysical one. One can hold to certain metaphysical or ontological “foundational”
commitments without subscribing to epistemological foundationalism, i.e., the view that
we can locate a source of bedrock certainty that cannot be doubted and that might
command universal assent. It is by now clear that the grand project of Enlightenment
Reason, for example, is a failed project: we cannot build up our worldview from a single
source of indubitable, incontrovertible objective certitude because no such source exists
and even if it did it would still need to be interpreted. But the fact of the social
construction of human rights (and wrongs) and the failure of the Enlightenment project
to achieve its most ambitious epistemological goals should not be taken to mean that all
constructions of personhood constitute equally valid visions of human flourishing or
equally valid expressions of what it means to be a human being. Against the position of
pure moral and epistemological relativism or constructivism, I am suggesting that we

19
should embrace what is sometimes called critical realism—critical because it
acknowledges the social construction of reality, but realist because it maintains that there
is a world outside of ourselves to which we must be responsive and accountable in
reasoned dialogue with others—a world that includes not only empirically observable
facts but also meanings and values. In this perspective, the good is not only made but
can also—at least occasionally, even in the process of the making—be found.
Charles Taylor has described a “three-cornered” struggle for the heart and soul of
modern culture with “exclusive humanists”—namely, those who draw their inspiration
from thinkers like Darwin and Marx and who subscribe to an optimistic vision of human
rights that offers itself in strictly non-metaphysical or “secular” terms—in one corner;
neo-Nietzschean anti-humanists in another; and “acknowledgers of transcendence” in a
third.
35
Any pair in this three-cornered dispute, according to Taylor, will align together
against the third on some important issues. Exclusive humanists and neo-Nietzscheans
join together to condemn religious faith as irrational, divisive, and a mask for violence
and power seeking. Secular humanists and religious thinkers join in defending human
rights for different reasons against Nietzsche’s radical “perspectivism” and elitism. But
many religious thinkers or “acknowledgers of transcendence” have also found
Nietzsche’s arguments against human rights entirely convincing. Absent religious
beliefs—and particularly Jewish-Christian ones—the project of Western liberalism and
Enlightenment humanism begins to ring hollow at its core. Although contemporary
scholarship has problematized the idea of a singular “Enlightenment project,” the term
still has salience. Nicholas Capaldi describes this project as “the attempt to define and

35
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.636-
637.

20
explain the human predicament through science as well as to achieve mastery over it
through the use of a social technology [e.g. the systematic destruction of ‘idols’ of
custom, religion, tradition, and authority that are deemed obstacles to human
development].”
36
In this dissertation I write as an “acknowledger of transcendence,” as
one who believes that “structures of hope and conviction” (in Chomsky’s words) can
have substantive intellectual content and that these structures “must be there for there to
be any moral content to our advocacy and action.”
In emphasizing the importance of Christianity I do not mean to slight other belief
systems. I take Christian reflection on the human to be a continuation and expansion of
Jewish thought, and Islamic theology to be a derivation from both. The question of
whether the great Eastern traditions emerging in the Axial Age (around the middle of the
first millennium BCE), including Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, contain
within themselves the resources for a more robust defense of individual rights and
personal dignity than is found in actual practice in Asian societies today is beyond the
scope of this work (or the abilities of the author, who lived for several years in Thailand
but is not an authority on Eastern philosophy or religion). But as a matter of history it is
“a simple empirical statement,” Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld write, that “Only in
Western civilization has this perception of what it means to be human been
institutionalized in polity and law.”
37
There are therefore good reasons to attend to
Christianity in particular in human rights perspective, whether positively or critically. In
addition, even in a highly globalized and pluralistic world in which we are free to choose

36
Nicholas Capaldi, The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation (New York:
Springer, 1998), pp.17ff.
37
Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, In Praise of Doubt (New York: HarperOne, 2009),
p.151.

21
a great deal about what we will believe and incorporate into our worldviews we remain
embedded in highly particular historical matrixes and cultural trajectories. We simply do
not have equal access to all possible or imaginable belief systems or moral universes, no
matter how rich or compelling these might be on their own terms and in their native
soil.
38
I shall therefore leave the question of non-Western conceptions of rights aside for
most of this dissertation to focus on the two most important branches of human rights
thinking in the Western tradition—the Enlightenment rationalist one, and the Judeo-
Christian one. Insofar as I do speak of cross-cultural and cross-religious encounters it
will be primarily in terms of Christianity’s original encounter with the dominant pagan
culture of the Greco-Roman, non-Jewish Mediterranean world; for at its beginning,
Christianity was an Eastern, Semitic faith that effectively “colonized”—or better,
subverted—the values of the West. In doing so, I will argue, Christianity effectively
created the vision of what it means to be human that underlies our modern conceptions of
human rights.
I am well aware of how presumptuous this final claim will sound to many
individuals in light of the egregious violations of human rights that have historically been
committed in Christianity’s name (not only cynically, it must be said, but often with deep
piety and moral conviction). We must weigh very seriously Andre Glucksmann’s charge
that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Dostoevsky’s dictum—“If there is
no God, everything is permitted”—must now be reversed. According to Glucksmann it

38
No matter how much one might come to admire ancient Greek piety, for example, full-
blooded belief in Zeus, Hera, and Athena is simply not open to us in the way it was to the
citizens of Athens in the ninth century BCE since we lack not only cultural access to the
still enchanted universe of Homer’s Iliad but also the supporting community of belief that
would be required to make such beliefs intelligible and operative to ourselves.

22
is, rather, among those who do believe in God that there are no moral constraints and
everything is permitted.
39
People who have become convinced that they are the carriers
of transcendent Truths and that they alone possess an escape hatch to eternity can afford
to be terrestrial nihilists. Yet the biblical view of the human includes the awareness,
most powerfully expressed by the Hebrew prophets and in the stories in the Gospels of
Christ’s confrontations with the Pharisees, that even the highest expressions of religious
devotion are often implicated in the violence, injustice, competitive rivalry, and
exploitation of “fallen” human culture. The critiques of religion found in Darwin, Marx,
and Nietzsche are in this sense unoriginal; they are already contained or anticipated
within the biblical narratives and can be readily embraced by believers for what they
disclose of what it means to be, in Nietzsche’s lament, “human, all too human.”
Whatever compliments we might pay to the great masters of suspicion (and I take
Darwin to also be a master of suspicion in the picture of morality and religion he
develops in The Descent of Man) should therefore not prevent us from critically
analyzing other aspects of their thought. What makes Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche
original thinkers is not that they sought to dispel comforting illusions with ideas that are
in some ways vitally important (providing good readings, Merald Westphal suggests, for
believers to reflect on during the season of Lent
40
) but rather that they set out to supplant
the biblical grammar of the imago Dei with a very different understanding of human
origins, nature, and destiny—one that leads in the end to disastrous outcomes. They
therefore remain on one side across a great divide from thinkers like Kierkegaard,

39
As cited in Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador,
2008), p.136.
40
Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1998), pp.4-5.

23
Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, who were equally penetrating masters of suspicion as far as
questions of institutionalized religion, power, and human psychology are concerned,
41

but who went one crucial step further down the path of radical critique: they were
suspicious of suspicion itself and so escaped the trap of materialistic nihilism.
This dissertation is a study in moral and political philosophy, then, that focuses
not on the content of moral decision-making so much as on the “background languages”
or “inescapable frameworks,” as Taylor calls them, that lie behind our understandings
about what it means to be human and to live good lives.
42
I am concerned with helping
to map the sources or points of departure that have led us to the modern moral
imagination and its discontents. At stake in the debate over the grounding of human
rights is not whether or not God exists in an abstract sense as one additional fact of the
universe necessary to underwrite good behavior. It is whether the theories of Darwin,
Marx, Nietzsche, and their heirs give expression to ways of living and being that can
preserve the depth of human experience and dignity, and that can teach us, as Rowan
Williams writes, “what human beings owe each other.”
43

IV. Why Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche?: The Plan of the Dissertation
There are good reasons to examine Darwin’s, Marx’s, and Nietzsche’s ideas alongside
each other. Despite the great differences in their temperaments and final visions, there

41
See, for example, Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon “Christendom” (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); and Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
(Seaside, Oregon: Watchmaker Publishing, 2010).
42
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), pp.3ff.
43
Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco: Baylor University
Press, 2008), p.228.

24
are numerous points of agreement, contact, and influence in their lives and work that
invite comparative analysis. All three were close contemporaries whose lives overlapped
during the period 1818 to 1882 and all three offered powerful challenges in the name of
naturalistic science to religious or metaphysical approaches to epistemological as well as
moral questions. In the process, all three gravely undermined the idea that all human
beings are the bearers of an inviolable dignity or fundamental rights that should under no
circumstances be violated.
Marx was deeply impressed with Darwin’s Origin of Species and sent him an
autographed copy of Das Kapitol (although the often repeated story that Marx offered to
dedicate the English edition of the work to Darwin and that Darwin declined the honor
turns out to be unsubstantiated
44
). Both were centrally concerned with notions of
struggle, competition, and scarcity, with Darwin drawing inspiration for his theory of
natural selection from the field of political economy and the dire prophecies of Thomas
Malthus, and Marx in turn applauding Darwin’s materialistic assault in the biological
sphere upon religious conceptions of personhood as a vital corollary to his own social
and economic doctrines of “scientific materialism.” Engels vigorously championed
Darwinism as providing the scientific underpinning to Marx’s materialist conception of
history, while during Marx’s lifetime his disciple, the German philosopher Josef
Dietzgen, also sought to ground Marxian ethics in the Darwinian view that individual
lives have a purely instrumental value that can only be assessed in terms of the survival

44
See Stephen J. Gould, “The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral,” in The Richness
of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007),
pp.166ff.

25
or “progress” of the species or group as a whole. Karl Kautsky would later continue this
project of synthesizing Marxian and Darwinian ideas.
45

Nietzsche may have never read either Darwin or Marx and heaped scorn on
popularized versions of the ideas of both. Yet the influence of Darwinian ideas on
Nietzsche was in fact profound and helped to shape his naturalistic account of “the
struggle for existence”—a phrase that recurs in all three writers and that serves as an
important motif connecting their visions in the moral and political realms.
46
By the end
of the nineteenth century, Sven Lindqvist writes, Darwinian and Nietzschean theories
had become mutually reinforcing. British imperialist ideology was both naturalized and
“Germanized,” with individuals like Alexander Tille, Benjamin Kidd, and Darwin’s
cousin Francis Galton synthesizing Darwin’s biological and racial ideas with Nietzsche’s
ethical ones to explain why the “lower” races were reproducing at higher rates than
“civilized” peoples, and why ultimately non-Europeans would need to die out or else be
eliminated to make room for “higher” human types.
47
Darwin himself, despite his great
abhorrence of slavery and racial oppression, accepted the inevitability if not the
desirability of this outcome. “At some future period not very distant as measured in

45
See James A. Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the
Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp.30-39.
46
Nietzsche was at pains, however, to make clear that his own conception of “the
struggle for existence” differed sharply from Darwin’s insofar as mere existence or
survival was not the driving force in organic life. The more fundamental impulse among
all creatures, Nietzsche asserted, was an aggressive “struggle for power” or “struggle for
increase of life” in which organisms often expended their lives for the sake of discharging
power itself. See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.53.
47
Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” trans. Joan Tate (New York: The New
Press, 1996), pp.131-148.

26
centuries,” he wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871, “the civilized races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
48

Even earlier, Marx had expressed similar social evolutionary concepts (albeit in a
language of economic class rather than of biological fitness) in his writings on British
colonialism in India, which he saw as a brutal but tragically necessary stage on the path
to industrialism, capitalism, and finally communism. (Critics and admirers of Marx alike
often forget that Marx himself was in an important sense an ardent capitalist; he
proclaimed capitalism to be vitally necessary, by its very cruelties, to create advanced
industrial societies with the technology to sustain pure communism—and the displaced
and impoverished masses to sustain revolution.) The affinities between Marx’s thought
and Nietzsche’s are stronger still. As great as the antagonisms between the theorist of
class revolt and the theorist of will to power may be, Henri de Lubac observed, their
outlooks flow from the same underlying inspiration and lead to similar outcomes: “their
common foundation in the rejection of God is matched by a certain similarity in results,
chief of which is the annihilation of the human person.”
49

The materialistic ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche have had a profound
influence in virtually every field of scholarly inquiry. It is impossible to understand the
modern world without engaging with their thought. In the West today, “a naturalistic
materialism is not only on offer, but presents itself as the only view compatible with the
most prestigious institution of the modern world, viz., science,” writes Taylor.
50
New

48
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2
nd
Edition (Lawrence, Kansas: Digireads
Publishing, 2009), p.128.
49
Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1949), p.12.
50
Taylor, A Secular Age, p.28.

27
discoveries in physical, biological, and engineering sciences (including robotics,
artificial intelligence, genetics, neurobiology, and cloning) are cited in both popular and
academic publications as confirming evidence of a naturalistic and Darwinian conception
of humanity—and as grounds for hope in humankind’s eventual self-mastery through the
complete mapping of our genetic and biochemical natures. Political, economic, and
social sciences, in their striving to uncover general theories of historical and social
change, recall Marx’s search for the scientific laws of history, and in fact owe much to
Marx’s materialist ideas, even when this fact is not recognized or acknowledged.
51

Many critical theorists, economists, philosophers, and activists continue to draw heavily
on Marx’s insights in the hopes of achieving a more just and equal society. Literary,
philosophical, and cultural studies have meanwhile embraced a hermeneutics of
suspicion that may be traced back to the naturalistic assumptions of Marx, Freud, and
especially Nietzsche (Darwin’s theory providing biological support for all three). All
rhetorical claims to truth and reason, according to many postmodern thinkers following
in Nietzsche’s steps, are masks, constructed consciously as well as unconsciously, to
conceal more elemental and inescapable “drives” for power and domination over others,
both at the level of groups and of individuals.
The pervasive influence of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche on contemporary
thought extends even to the field of religious studies. The polemical and popularizing
materialisms of the so-called “new atheists” (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins,

51
See Daniel Little, “Marxism and Method,” in Twentieth Century Marxism: A Global
Introduction, eds., Daryl Glaser and David M. Walker (London: Routledge, 2007), p.240.

28
Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, A. C. Grayling, et al.
52
) would not be possible were it
not for the foundations laid by these three towering thinkers of the nineteenth century.
Yet many religious thinkers have also drawn inspiration from Darwin, Marx, and
Nietzsche. Darwinian theory has been embraced without reservation by many process
theologians, Marxian theory by liberation theologians, and Nietzschean existentialism by
death-of-God theologians. There is a sense, one might say, in which we are all now
Darwinians, Marxians, and Nietzscheans: their ideas have proven so potent it is difficult
to even begin to formulate a critique of them without employing the very categories and
perspectives they introduced.
53

Nevertheless, the critique must be made by those who desire to defend the idea of
human rights, for the challenges posed by Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche to concepts of
human dignity, autonomy, and equality are dire, and they cannot be resolved from within

52
The most influential “new atheist” diatribes are Dennett’s, Breaking the Spell;
Dawkins’s, The God Delusion; Hitchens’s, God is Not Great; and Harris’s, The End of
Faith. Grayling (acting from a strange compulsion to imitate the forms and even
language of the belief system he rejects) has meanwhile written a “secular Bible” under
the title The Good Book. The “new atheist” movement has also inspired a new genre of
modern fiction: “the new atheist novel” represented by the self-consciously anti-religious
recent works of acclaimed writers like Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Philip Pullman.
Their fiction depicts secularity as a force for freedom, individuality, and reason locked in
bitter struggle against religious faith, depicted as either synonymous with or leading
directly to a kind of blind fundamentalism. Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate have
offered an incisive analysis and critique of the ideological as well as literary aspects of
these novels. They argue that the (in fact not-so-new) “new atheism” has added little if
anything to serious philosophical inquiry but has served a politically disturbing
supporting role in the “war on terror” through its claims about the inherent evil of all
religions but of Islam in particular. See Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New
Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010).
53
Readers might find evidence of this throughout this dissertation. My very use of the
word “perspectives” in this sentence, one early reviewer suspected, was perhaps itself a
kind of unconscious Nietzschean inflection!

29
the strictly materialistic or naturalistic frameworks Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche have
bequeathed us.
In Chapter 2, I will explore the implications of Darwinian theory for the central
assumption underlying any normatively compelling account of human rights: the
postulate of an inviolable dignity that attaches to all persons in virtue of their humanity
alone. To understand how Darwinism undermines dignity we must understand Darwin’s
views on the origins of human morality. His ethics were based not only on his general
theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species but also on the moral philosophy of
utilitarianism. The early romance between Darwinians and utilitarians was foiled,
though, by what has come to be known as Hume’s Law or the “naturalistic fallacy,”
namely, the impossibility of deducing statements of normative value directly from
statements of empirical fact. An equally compelling vision of morality based upon
sociobiological and evolutionary concepts thus emerges in Nietzsche’s writings. Natural
selection undermined the basic tenet of Jewish and Christian anthropology that all
humans are born with equal dignity as sons and daughters of God by blurring the
distinction between humans and other animals and by rendering all moral claims entirely
relative to their biological utility. In Darwinian perspective, the very language of dignity
is itself yet another evolutionary survival strategy and ploy for power over one’s rivals in
a field of competitive rivalry. Some evolutionary theorists have sought to avoid these
corrosive implications of natural selection for questions of morality, ethics, and dignity
by resorting to a fact-meaning dichotomy in their epistemology. But it is an untenable
dichotomy that rapidly breaks down under scrutiny, raising the question: Is the theory of
natural selection and the materialism that underlies it adequate to explain all that Darwin

30
believed it could explain? And if not, how might we approach questions of human
nature in a way that is at once non-reductive, truly humanistic, and truly scientific?
In Chapter 3, I turn to Marx’s challenge to the idea that individuals possess
inherent rights that must under no circumstances be violated. I trace the connections
between his materialism, his consequentialism, and his millenarianism as they shape his
critique of “the rights of man.” For the sake of the larger story I want to tell in this
dissertation, Marx’s “scientific materialism” serves as an important historical bridge
between the optimistic secular humanisms of the Enlightenment project and the various
forms of postmodern anti-humanism that have called into question values of scientific
rationalism, political liberalism, and human rights. Marx’s hostility toward religion—
which advances a major Enlightenment theme in a radical key of the necessity of
overcoming “irrational” religious beliefs in order to achieve social and political
emancipation—masked the religious and utopian aspects of his own thinking. Yet
behind Marx’s political theories stands a distinctive eschatological reading of history.
Marxian faith in the scientific “laws” of history and the inevitability of progress toward
the ideal of complete political and economic equality enables an ethic of revolutionary
violence that is markedly less sensitive than other versions of consequentialism to human
dignity and to the integrity of the individual. In order to better understand the complex
relationship between Marx’s high moral language and the bloodletting that has
repeatedly followed attempts to construct communist societies, I turn to Dostoevsky’s
genealogical depiction of the sources and consequences of metaphysical rebellion in his
1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

31
In Chapter 4, I offer a more sustained reading of Nietzsche’s challenge to the idea
of human equality. Having grasped that in a purely naturalistic framework notions of
intrinsic human dignity and rights necessarily slip away, Nietzsche concluded that the
other key doctrine of human rights—the notion of human equality—must also be entirely
vacuous. I will work through the implications of Nietzsche’s “politics of aristocratic
radicalism” with the help of religious thinkers such as René Girard, David Hart, and John
Milbank. Nietzsche is widely depicted by his postmodern political admirers as a
counter-Enlightenment thinker who subverted all essentialist categories of moral and
scientific reasoning. Yet his radical subjectivism is, ironically, one more variety of
philosophical naturalism resting upon a thoroughly Enlightenment discourse of scientific
“objectivity.” Nietzsche’s politics and ethics are inseparable from his highly essentialist
claims—which overlap in important ways with those of Darwin—about the
“physiological” roots of human nature. I seek to show just how questionable and
arbitrary his naturalism is in existential and aesthetic perspective. Nietzsche’s
proclamation of the death of God—not merely as a verdict on the insipid religiosity of
his day but as an ontological fact—rested upon unsupportable metaphysical truth claims
and a politically deadly form of resentment. My suspicious reading of Nietzsche raises
questions about the relationship between his genealogy of morals, philosophical
naturalism, the Christian faith that he explicitly set out to overturn, and the future of
human rights. Earlier I wrote that the first great divide in any debate over human rights
is between metaphysical and materialist worldviews. With this final chapter, however, I
hope to illustrate how all worldviews are ultimately metaphysical in the sense of being
based upon “metanarratives” or myths that lie beyond the realm of any possible

32
empirical proof, even in a probabilistic sense. The difference between explicitly
religious accounts of human dignity on the one hand and materialist anthropologies on
the other is that only the former makes its metaphysics transparent in a way that invites
public debate while the latter is best seen as a masked metaphysics that frequently
conceals the arbitrariness and non-neutrality of its ontological commitments.
My critique of philosophical materialism/naturalism in human rights perspective
in this dissertation, it should go without saying, is not based upon the claim or the belief
that religious persons are by this fact more deeply committed to human rights than
others. The profound humanisms of Albert Camus, Primo Levi, George Orwell,
Bertrand Russell, and countless others whose names are not well known but who have
dedicated their lives to organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty
International, and Human Rights Watch—and conversely, the cravenness of every major
and minor Torquemada or fundamentalist true believer throughout history—makes clear
that religious commitment is no psychological requirement of political courage or
dedication to the work of human rights. Indeed, many forms of religious commitment—
including versions of Christianity—have been politically oppressive and undeniably
hostile to the dignity, rights, and equality of all persons. But in a post-Darwinian, post-
Marxian, post-Nietzschean age, the assumption that all persons should be treated with a
high dignity and value in virtue of their being “just” human can no longer be taken for
granted theoretically, and it is an open question what this might practically mean over
the long run. If humanistic values and human rights are in the final analysis built upon
nothing more than sheer acts of will, Williams suggests, this “must alter the terms of

33
human living itself.”
54
In Camus’ novel, The Plague, Dr. Rieux exhibits the greatest
humanistic concern for the suffering of others along with the least hope in humankind.
“But that is fiction,” Taylor points out. “What is possible in real life?”
55
As the Hasidic
philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel observed, “What determines one’s being human is
the image one adopts…A theory about the stars never becomes a part of the being of the
stars. A theory about man enters his consciousness, determines his self-understanding,
and modifies his very existence. The image of man affects the nature of man.”
56
The
critical question, then, is not whether Dr. Rieux—whose moral sensibilities have been
formed under the influence of a still deeply religious culture—can retain his secular
humanism without any substantive religious beliefs. It is whether Dr. Rieux’s children,
grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will share his concern for those who suffer and
his dedication to fighting to preserve human dignity even as the moral architecture of the
imago Dei continues to fall away.
It is a dilemma that is increasingly recognized by non-religious post-
Enlightenment thinkers no less than religious ones. As Jürgen Habermas has recently
confessed (in a surprising turnaround from his own writings over many decades, which
have been often cited by those seeking to find a non-metaphysical basis for human
rights), “enlightened reason unavoidably loses its grip on the images, preserved by
religion, of the moral whole—of the Kingdom of God on earth—as collectively binding
ideals.” It “fails to fulfill its own vocation…to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds
of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an

54
Williams, Dostoevsky, p.228.
55
Taylor, A Secular Age, p.699.
56
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965),
p.8.

34
awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven.”
57
This dissertation was
written from out of the conviction that violations to human dignity and human solidarity
are violations precisely because they continue to cry out to heaven.

57
Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-
Secular Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p.19.

35
CHAPTER 2:
DARWIN AND HUMAN DIGNITY
“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity.
More humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.”
—Charles Darwin
1

“The idea of human dignity turns out, therefore, to be the moral effluvium of a
discredited metaphysics…the bare fact that one is human entitles one to no special
consideration.”
—James Rachels
2

During the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the South African
representative C. T. Te Water raised a protest against the wording of Article 1: “All
human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Although every person was
entitled to certain basic protections, he argued, the idea of equality could not practically
be applied to every human being. In addition, he insisted, dignity was not a “right” and
therefore should not be mentioned in the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt responded by
pointing out that the language of dignity had been chosen not because dignity was itself a
right but because it was the necessary belief underlying the claim that humans have any
rights to begin with.
3
Talk of concrete social, political, and legal protections attaching to
persons in virtue of their humanity alone only makes sense on the assumption that all
individuals possess a high moral status, dignity, or sanctity that must not be transgressed.
But from where could such an idea of dignity arise and what kinds of beliefs would be
required to sustain it?

1
Darwin’s 1838 notebooks as cited in James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral
Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.1.
2
Ibid., p.5.
3
Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001) p.145-146.

36
There might be a variety of religious or metaphysical belief structures that would
support (with varying degrees of robustness) a conception of human dignity that could in
turn lead to a compelling account of human rights, but none, James Rachels argues, are of
any avail after Darwin’s Origin of Species. “[D]iscrediting ‘human dignity’ is one of the
most important implications of Darwinism,” he writes. Natural selection has
“consequences that people have barely begun to appreciate.”
4
“Darwinism leads
inevitably to the abandonment of the idea of human dignity and the substitution of a
different sort of ethic.”
5
The idea of human dignity, as Rachels defines it, involves two
vacuous claims: 1) that we are able to draw sharp distinctions between human and non-
human animal life; and 2) that we should prioritize human lives over those of other
creatures on the assumption that people occupy a place of special moral concern in the
universe. These beliefs held sway in the West for nearly two millennia under the
influence of the creation account in Hebrew Scripture in which the first humans are said
to be made in the “image of God” and given “dominion” or stewardship over the earth.
Such claims about the uniqueness and sanctity of human life are no longer scientifically
plausible in Rachels’ view, though, since Darwin showed us that there is no “big, morally
significant difference” between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
6
In place of
the “specieism” of human dignity as a guide to action, he calls for an ethic of “moral
individualism” that would attach different values to different lives—whether human or
animal—on the basis of their particular capabilities. A severely mentally disabled child
or elderly person whose life had deteriorated beyond hope of recovery, for example,

4
Rachels, Created from Animals, pp.79-80.
5
Ibid., p.171.
6
Ibid., p.171.

37
might be deemed less “valuable” (from a public policy as well as philosophical
standpoint) than a healthy dog or chimpanzee.
7
The moral advantage of this way of
thinking, Rachels suggests, is that it will cause us to treat animals with their varying
capacities for happiness and pain more humanely by placing them in the same category of
moral consideration as human beings. “Human life will no longer be regarded with the
kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-
humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a
sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased.”
8

Why, though, should we assume that devaluing human life will cause us to value
animal life more? Will those who have come to see humanity as no different in any
morally significant sense from other species as a result treat animals more like humans?
Or is it not more likely that people who have abandoned the idea of inherent dignity for
humans will grow even more callous to animal suffering on the assumption that if we
possess no dignity no other creatures can possess their own dignity or rights either? And
what might the implications of these ideas of the non-uniqueness of human life, based
upon the assumptions of “moral individualism,” have for persons who are unable to
somehow prove their individual capabilities or worth?
In this chapter I will trace (in partial agreement with Rachels) how Darwin’s
theory undermines concepts of inherent human dignity and raises the specter not of moral

7
“Our feelings are still largely shaped by pre-Darwinian notions…we feel instinctively
that the life of every human being has what Kant called ‘an intrinsic worth’ or ‘dignity’
and so we tend to value every human life more than any non-human life, regardless of its
particular characteristics. That is why the biological life of a Tay-Sachs infant, who will
never develop into the subject of a biographical life, may be treated with greater respect
than the life of an intelligent, sensitive animal such as a chimpanzee. Moral
individualism would also imply that this judgment is mistaken.” Ibid., p.209.
8
Ibid., p.5

38
individualism but of moral nihilism. To begin, I will revisit Darwin’s ethical theories in
the context of his day and explain the failure of the moral philosophy of utilitarianism to
overcome Hume’s Law or what has come to be known as “the naturalistic fallacy.” I will
next outline the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s evolutionary account of the origins of
morality as well as the failure of pragmatic attempts such as Stephen J. Gould’s “Non-
overlapping Magisteria” to restore lost meanings through a tidy division of labor between
the world of “facts” and the world of “values.” Finally, I will offer some reflections on
the reconciliation of religion and evolutionary science. There is no reason to reject
Darwin’s theory outright and the way forward lies not in a return to the ontological
dualisms of earlier ages but rather in the development of a more holistic view of our
human condition that fully embraces the materiality—the creaturely and embodied
aspects—of our existence. Yet faced with the fact of human minds possessing free wills
and moral agency, the language of philosophical materialism or strict naturalism fails us.
This fact, I will attempt to show, must be the starting point of our moral and political
reflection if we are to have any hope of developing a rationally coherent and normatively
persuasive account of human rights.

I. Natural Selection as Prophecy: The Triumph of the Moral Instincts
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was inspired not primarily by his observations of the
natural world but by Anglican clergyman Thomas Malthus’s theory of economic scarcity.
According to Malthus in his Essay on Population, published in 1798, human population
growth would increase geometrically until it outran food supplies unless checked by war,
famine, or disease. The practical lesson Malthus sought to instill in the minds of his

39
readers was that public policies to ameliorate the plight of the poor—among the highest
moral duties enjoined on European societies by the Christian church over nearly two
millennia—actually deepened social misery by hindering the laws of “nature.” The laws
of nature were established by God as a goad to “virtue”—not virtues of sharing for the
good of the commonweal as one might suppose, but virtues of private thrift and industry
among the poor themselves as they fought to survive the stern realities of the divine law.
The most compassionate thing Britain’s ruling classes could do in the face of mass
starvation and deeply entrenched poverty was to reduce humanitarian aid and allow
“nature” to take its course. Those resourceful and hearty peasants possessing the greatest
“virtue” would endure, while those who did not would necessarily perish, leading to
lower populations and, ipso facto, lower poverty rates.
Darwin was deeply impressed by Malthus’s doctrines, which he saw as having a
broader significance for all organisms. His ideas about natural selection began to take
form as the Irish potato famine of 1845-1852 unfolded (resulting in up to a million deaths
and hundreds of thousands of destitute Irish immigrants arriving on England’s shores).
Darwin’s theory was, in his own words, quite simply “the doctrine of Malthus applied
with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom.”
9
“[E]very single
organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers,”
he wrote in The Origin of Species (published in 1859 and originally titled On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the
Struggle for Life):

9
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin Books,
1968), p.68.

40
Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the
species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount. The face of Nature
may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed
close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge
being struck, and then another with greater force.
10

Destruction and death were thus the winnowing tools that allowed stronger and better-
adapted organisms to survive.
Under these circumstances, Darwin saw, any slight advantage that one organism
gained over another would be critical to its success while at the same time spelling its
rival’s doom. The mechanism, he believed, by which such competitive adaptations arose
in nature was random mutations.
11
Pure chance conferred unpredictable advantages on
the offspring of certain organisms. These products of indiscriminate luck were then
preserved over generations according to the unyielding law of competition in a world of
finite resources. Through the accumulation of new modifications over time, some
creatures evolved. Those organisms that failed to evolve in the face of relentless
competition and environmental change were meanwhile crushed to extinction by their
more fierce, wily, and better adapted rivals. The origin of the moral sense, it logically
followed for Darwin, was also a biological adaptation aimed at ensuring human survival.
There would be nothing particularly revelatory, of course, in saying that enduring moral
systems have human flourishing as their final goal. But for Darwin, morality does not
merely have biological value. Rather, the status of any moral value is entirely relative to

10
Ibid., p.119.
11
Darwin had no knowledge of genes but observed that within all species there were
heritable variations that could be selected by breeders to create new varieties of dogs,
pigeons, cows, etc. He assumed that with enough time the blending of different traits
from two parents of the same species could produce entirely new species. The so-called
Neo-Darwininan synthesis replaced this idea of heritable “blending” with the idea of
strictly random genetic mutations to account for all evolutionary change.

41
the biological function it performs. In The Descent of Man, first published in 1871,
Darwin laid bare this fact, outlining how emotions, sociability, morality, and even
religion all emerged as the outcomes of purely materialistic forces under conditions of
natural selection.
According to Darwin, social instincts induce animals to render valuable services
to one another, ranging from baboons grooming each other to wolves hunting in packs.
As a rule, the greater the cooperation between members of a community the greater will
be their offspring. The extent, however, to which creatures might engage in such acts of
reciprocal “altruism” is strictly determined by their ability to communicate effectively.
In the case of humans, more elaborate forms of cooperation emerged as a result of
language development. As the wishes of the community came to be better expressed,
Darwin believed, “the common opinion of how each member ought to act for the public
good would naturally become in a paramount degree the guide to action.”
12
Here, then,
was the essence of morality: biological utility mediated by social contracts, with human
consciousness and sociability having themselves been “selected” by nature for the
adaptive edge they gave the human species in the competitive struggle to survive.
Once the first links in the chain of cooperation were forged, social instincts were
reinforced through sensations of pleasure at in-group success, and, conversely, feelings of
pain at social ostracism. “[T]he individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society
would best escape various dangers,” Darwin wrote, “while those that cared least for their

12
Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, 2
nd
Edition (Lawrence, Kansas: Digireads
Publishing, 2009), p.85. Many of these ideas of Darwin’s about the biological sources of
human compassion or natural sympathy were already developed by Rousseau in the
eighteenth-century. See Bruce Ward, Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and
Liberal Virtues (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), pp.162-173.

42
comrades and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers.” Group sympathies in this
way became so strong that the mere sight of another person suffering could create
feelings of pain in those witnessing the fact. “We are thus impelled to relieve the
sufferings of another, in order that our own painful feelings may be at the same time
relieved”
13
(my emphasis). Courage, honesty, and compassion might therefore develop
along purely Darwinian lines of instinct and self-interest. Morality, as Frans de Waal
writes, is the historical outcome of “emotional contagion.” Our sense of right and wrong
is “evolutionarily anchored in mammalian sociality,” with empathy or sympathy for the
pain of others (intermixed, paradoxically, with instincts of aggression toward outsiders
for the good of the pack), having first taught us to behave “well.”
14
As Darwin wrote in
his posthumously published Autobiography of 1887:
A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal
God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of
life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the
strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he
does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forward and backwards, and
compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in
accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is
derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts
for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain
the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the
highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to
obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered
habitual may be almost called instincts.
15

Critics of natural selection charged that the theory inspired an elitist ethic of “might
makes right,” but this could not be farther from the truth so long as the biological success
of humans included such elements as cooperation and sympathy. There was thus no

13
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.91.
14
Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), p.56.
15
Charles Darwin, Autobiographies (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p.54.

43
contradiction between the ideals of liberalism and the laws of evolution. If anything,
many of Darwin’s admirers, including Marx and Engels, believed, his theory could be
seen as providing scientific grounds for a radical new egalitarianism.
Darwin’s political and ethical views were both pragmatic and optimistic,
influenced to a significant extent by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
Eight years before The Descent of Man was released, Mill published Utilitarianism, his
famous argument for a universal ethic based upon calculations of the common good.
“Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle,” wrote Mill, “holds that actions are right in
proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse
of happiness.” This did not mean that individuals were free to satisfy their personal
desires with complete disregard for other members of society, for maximal happiness, by
definition, included the pleasure and pain of all human beings, and even “the whole
sentient creation.”
16
The entire field of ethical inquiry was therefore reduced to a simple
question: What action most increases, in quantity and quality, the total happiness of
humankind? Calculations of this sort clearly left room for individual acts of heroism and
selflessness. Such actions, though, were only deemed virtuous insofar as they
contributed to the success of the group. “The utilitarian morality does recognize in
human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others,”
Mill declared. “It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice
which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness is considered
wasted.”
17

16
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism (New York: Bantan Books, 1993), pp.
144, 150.
17
Ibid., 155.

44
In purely Darwinian terms, “happiness” is a chemical or psychological state
selected by nature to reinforce biologically successful behavior. (“[E]motions are just
evolution’s executioners,” says Robert Wright.
18
) The transition from statements of fact
about the “sum total of offspring” in Darwin, to statements of value about the “sum total
of happiness” in Mill, was therefore practically seamless. After the social instincts were
formed, Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “the ‘Greatest happiness principle’ will
have become a most important secondary guide and object.”
19
Utilitarian morality, by
implication, is the only morality under the laws of evolution.
In mid-nineteenth-century England, utilitarian ethics were closely linked to the
doctrine of Progress. Mill believed that the application of his philosophy to society at-
large, accomplished through political and legal pressure, would eventually eliminate
unhappiness altogether. “[M]ost of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves
removable and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within
narrow limits,” he wrote. “As for the vicissitudes of fortune, and other disappointments
connected with worldly circumstances, these are principally the effect either of gross
imprudence, of ill-regulated desires, or of bad or imperfect social institutions.”
20
The
solution to the problem of human suffering thus lay in the perfection of political and legal
structures guided by reason: there was nothing inherent to the human condition to deny
the ultimate perfectibility of humankind.
For Darwin, by contrast, natural selection posited no final destination or purpose.
Still, he predicted, the trajectory of evolution would lead to a utopian world order based

18
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p.88.
19
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.102.
20
Mill, Utilitarianism, pp.153-154.

45
upon the same utilitarian principles espoused by Mill. “As man advances in civilization,
and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each
individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members
of the same nation, though personally unknown to him,” he wrote. “This point being
once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the
men of all nations and races...becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they
are extended to all sentient beings.”
21
Standards of morality, through inheritance, would
in this way rise higher and higher until humans rejected all “baneful customs and
superstitions” and instinctively treated each other according to Christ’s golden rule, albeit
for natural rather than spiritual reasons. Where Bentham attributed selfish, pleasure-
seeking motives to almost all human choices, Darwin held a far more complex view. The
theory of natural selection included the idea that utility maximizing behavior in an
ancient past could evolve over many generations into truly social or selfless behavior.
Conscious vices could be transformed by evolution into unconscious virtues. Darwin’s
own long opposition to slavery is perhaps the best illustration of the humanistic spirit that
would come to characterize society. By his own account, he was merely hastening the
inevitable. Darwin’s quest for a scientific theory of common ancestry, Adrian Desmond
and James Moore have suggested, was in fact fueled from the start by his passionate
commitment to abolitionism and his enlightened opposition to the view then held by
many devout Christians that God had created different races as distinct species (with only
the descendents of putatively “white” Adam and Eve being fully human).
22
Natural

21
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.103.
22
See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause (London: Penguin
Books, 2009).

46
selection was not simply a value neutral scientific theory but also a powerful moral
theory offered in support of the equalizing view that all humans are members of the same
family tree. Darwinism, at least potentially, might be interpreted in support of an account
of shared human dignity and rights in keeping with the fact of common ancestry.
Historians of science frequently discuss Darwin’s theory of origins as challenging
the creation story of Genesis. Far less consideration is given to Darwinism as prophecy,
as the new Revelation. In the economy of belief, however, Darwinism functioned not
only as a scientific inference about the past, but also as a secular reformulation of
traditional Christian eschatology. Nature, “red in tooth and claw,” in Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s famous words, would ultimately redeem humanity through its own inner
workings. “Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social
instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger,
becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance,” declared Darwin. “In this case the struggle
between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be
triumphant.”
23

II. “Care Wrongly Directed”: Utilitarianism, Empire, and Darwin’s Ethics
There was, however, a deeply unsettling dark side to Darwin’s moral theories and
political ethics that we overlook at our peril. Given the broad agreement between Darwin
and the classical Utilitarians, Bentham’s verdict on the language of human equality,
dignity, and freedom in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man should not be
forgotten. “That which has no existence can not be destroy’d,” Bentham declared, “that

23
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.105.

47
which can not be destroy’d can not require any thing to preserve it from being destroy’d.
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,
nonsense upon stilts.”
24

No matter how strong his abolitionist sympathies may have been, Darwin also
undeniably endorsed derogatory views of the “uncivilized” and “lower” races. If on the
one hand his theory provided support for the view that all humanity was related as
members of a single family tree, on the other it also provided clear support for notions of
an essential hierarchy of human beings, with some individuals or groups being more
naturally “fit” than others. Darwin offered no objections in The Descent of Man to the
project of British colonialism or the ongoing British, German, and French conquest of
non-European societies—far from it. From “the remotest times successful tribes have
supplanted other tribes,” he declared. “At present day civilized nations are everywhere
supplanting barbarous nations…and they succeed mainly, though not exclusively,
through their arts, which are the products of the intellect.”
25
However, he continued
(reverting to the lessons of Malthus, whose ideas on population growth had largely
inspired his own), “we civilized men” increasingly act out of misplaced compassion for
the weak in ways that thwart the law of natural selection and so dangerously vitiate
society. Darwin’s words are worth quoting at some length as a reminder that the roots of
eugenics were not inexplicably engrafted into his theory by Herbert Spencer or others at a

24
Jeremy Bentham, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Rights, Representation,
and Reform: Nonsense Upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.330.
25
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.108.

48
later stage but were, in a real sense, present from the creation.
26
It was, after all, social
Darwinism before Darwin—namely, a species of free market capitalism,
Malthusianism—that had provided the key insight for his theory and for which his theory
in turn provided a spurious scientific justification.
“We” Europeans, Darwin wrote, “do our utmost to check the process of
elimination”:
[W]e build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor
laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to
the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved
thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to
small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this
must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon want of
care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but
excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his
worst animals to breed.
27

Darwin then proceeded to quote from Scottish moralist William Greg to illustrate
the problem of inferior breeding, which in fact posed a vexing dilemma for his theory.
According to Darwin, only the fittest survive (the phrase “survival of the fittest” was
coined by Spencer after reading the original edition of On the Origin of Species and was
included by Darwin in the fifth edition of the book in 1869).
28
This raised the possibility

26
Those who insist that Spencer’s sociobiology was a misreading of Darwin must come
to terms with the uncomfortable fact of Darwin’s admiration for Spencer’s writings. “It
has also pleased me to see how thoroughly you appreciate (and I do not think that this is
in general true with the men of science) H. Spencer,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “I
suspect that hereafter he will be looked at as by far the greatest living philosopher in
England, perhaps equal to any that have lived.” As cited in Rachels, Created from
Animals, p.63.
27
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.111.
28
It would, however, be more accurate, Conor Cunningham points out, to say that only
the fitter survive under natural selection since fitness in Darwin’s theory is a relative
rather than absolute concept. See Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the

49
(as Karl Popper suggested in his controversial 1974 article, “Darwinism as a
Metaphysical Research Programme”) that natural selection was a form of tautological
reasoning: those who survive are by definition the “fittest,” hence, natural selection can
only predict survival of the survivors.
29
But even if natural selection was not a tautology,
it still seemed to suggest that reproductive rates are the best measure of biological success
or evolutionary “fitness.” There was one great problem with this idea: the Irish.
“The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes, living in a pig-sty,
doting on superstition, multiplies like rabbits,” Greg wrote and Darwin approvingly
quoted. Thus, “In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less
favored race that had prevailed—and prevailed not by virtue of its good qualities but by
virtue of its faults.”
30
If the Irish potato famine on the one hand illustrated the validity of
Malthus’s gloomy teachings and “nature’s” solution to human overpopulation, the Irish
peasants, with their higher birthrates, nevertheless seemed to be gaining evolutionary
ground in troubling ways on their cousins across the Irish Sea, namely, those self-
controlled English gentlemen who might be found in the tea room of the Royal Society
whose very moral virtues caused them to breed less prodigiously. Thankfully, Darwin
informed his readers, there are natural “checks to this downward tendency,” i.e., the
tendency of the lower classes to overpopulate and so drag society down with them. For
example, he wrote, the “extremely profligate leave few offspring,” and the “poorest

Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010),
p.22.
29
Karl Popper, “Darwinism as a Metaphysical Research Programme,” in Philosophy
After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Michael Ruse (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), p.167.
30
Greg as cited in Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.115.

50
classes crowd into towns” where “the death-rate is higher.”
31
Still, Darwin conceded,
evolutionary “progress is no invariable rule.” This meant that if “the various checks…do
not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from
increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will be retrograde.”
What was vital to grasp was that natural selection did allow for “inferior” human races to
flourish in certain areas, but the reason a “civilized nation rises, becomes more powerful,
and spreads more widely, than another” depends not only on population size but “on the
number of men endowed with high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as on their
standard of excellence.”
32

Within ten years of Darwin writing these words, Britain’s supplanting of the
“barbarous nations” through its “products of the intellect”—chiefly, the rapid-firing
Gatling gun—would include: wars against the Xhosa, the Zulu, and the Afrikaners in
South Africa; war against the Mahdi in Sudan; the second Afghan war; the occupation of
Egypt; the annexing of the Fiji Islands; war in Abyssinia; and Queen Victoria being
named Empress of India even as it underwent successive famines, greatly worsened by
British incompetence, cruelty, and greed. In the Great Famine of 1876-78, a
conservatively estimated six million people died following a severe drought, with
Viceroy Lytton (described by future Indians as the British “Nero”) withholding
humanitarian aid and maintaining high grain prices in the name of laissez-faire economic
principles—famine policies that were widely defended in England by way of appeal to
Darwin’s theory.
33
It wasn’t only craven British imperialists, nationalists, and capitalists,

31
Ibid., p.115.
32
Ibid., p.116.
33
Mark Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001), p.32.

51
however, who drew political and moral inspiration from Darwin’s plain words in The
Descent of Man within his lifetime but also some of the most progressive and brilliant
minds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England between the wars,
Fabians committed to principles of scientific rationalism and Darwinian theory (including
John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Emma Goldman, H. G.
Wells, Julian Huxley, Leonard Darwin, and H. J. Laski) all embraced theories of selective
breeding to improve the genetic stock, expressing the hope that socialism would at last
allow for eugenics to begin in earnest, unimpeded by bourgeois class interests and
outmoded religious superstitions about all individuals being made in the image of God.
34

One should not conclude from Darwin’s declarations in The Descent of Man
about biologically superior or “civilized” nations supplanting inferior or “barbarous” ones
that he was morally insensitive to the violence of European colonization. In The Voyage
of the Beagle published in 1839, Darwin reflected on what he had witnessed firsthand in
the islands of the Pacific. His words convey a strong sense of melancholy if not
revulsion at the destructive realities of imperialism, although they also suggest a grim
political fatalism or “realism” already closely connected in his mind with highly
deterministic sociobiological notions. The ongoing destruction of indigenous peoples, he
recorded, was not simply a glorious march of “civilization” made possible through
England’s superior “products of the intellect” or virtues of national character. It was
perhaps above all the outcome of the European spread of contagion, illness, and disease

34
See Diane Paul , “Eugenics and the Left,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.45,
No.4 (December 1984), pp.567-568; and L.J. Ray, “Eugenics, Mental Deficiency and
Fabian Socialism between the Wars,” Oxford Review of Education, Vol.9, No.3 (1983),
pp.213-22.

52
in the lands they entered. For Darwin, biology thus dictates that international or cross-
cultural encounters with the Other can only have the character of violent collisions:
The number of aborigines is rapidly decreasing. In my whole ride [in the
Australian countryside], with the exception of some boys brought up by
Englishmen, I saw only one other party. This decrease, no doubt, must be partly
owing to the introduction of spirits, to European diseases (even the milder ones of
which, such as the measles, prove very destructive), and to the gradual extinction
of the wild animals…Besides the several evident causes of destruction, there
appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the
European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide
extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we
find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the
Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus
driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on
each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always
extirpating the weaker.
35

But what does any of this have to do with human rights, human dignity, and
Darwin’s theory properly understood? Contemporary evolutionary theorists have
rejected the essentialism and racism of early social Darwinism on materialism’s own
terms as forms of pseudoscience.
36
There is no necessary connection between Darwin’s
genuine scientific discoveries and whatever prejudices he may have held as a man of his
age, nor would we discard wholesale the ideas of Aristotle or Saint Augustine on the
grounds that they defended slavery or held other moral positions we no longer accept.
These facts notwithstanding, we must ponder in another sense whether the history of
social Darwinism is indeed unrelated to Darwin’s theory properly understood.

35
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909),
pp.458-459.
36
See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1996).

53
III. Into the Wasteland: The Naturalistic Fallacy Revisited
The undoing of Darwinian ethics lay in a single word: ought. The problem was first
clearly identified by David Hume in his 1739 Treatise on Human Understanding and
later more rigorously argued by G. E. Moore in his 1903 work, Principia Ethica. At first
glance, the transition from statements of fact in Darwin to statements of moral value in
Mill appears to be seamless. Upon closer examination, though, the fatal flaw in the
argument becomes clear: in a purely Darwinian universe, no statements of value can be
made. Ever. Every appeal to beauty, honor, justice, compassion or purpose is excluded
by the materialist hypothesis, so there is no normative standard by which any behavior
can be judged, whether positively or negatively. Ethical precepts have no intrinsic
meaning or claim on human conduct, but are simply additional facts of natural selection
to be catalogued alongside strong talons and sharp teeth. “In the language of the
evolutionist,” Michael Ruse writes, “morality is no more—although certainly no less—
than an adaptation, and as such has the same status as such things as teeth and eyes and
noses.”
37
If something seems inherently right or good, it is only because what humans
take to be right generally aids them in their struggle to survive. Yet should any particular
moral trait cease to fulfill its biological function, morality would simply “evolve”—a
euphemism to say that outworn rules of behavior (maladaptive “memes,” in the parlance
of contemporary sociobiologists) shall undergo extinction. Alternatively, individuals
might retain a sterile or even detrimental code of behavior, but merely as a relic of their
biological ancestry, the appendix to a lost soul.

37
Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 1995),
p.238.

54
The problem, we must grasp, lies not in the evolutionism of Darwinian theory but
in its materialism. In the twentieth-century, Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin
sought to synthesize Darwinian ideas and Christian doctrines by reintroducing a
teleological reading of nature and by locating humanity at the center or apex of the
evolutionary process. But it was precisely the notion of an underlying telos in biological
existence—whether conceived in Christian, Aristotelian, Platonic, Buddhist, Confucian,
or other terms—that Darwin’s theory had at last seemingly found a way to dispense with
(even though Darwin himself at times continued to resort to teleological language). “The
problem with Teilhard’s vision is simple,” writes evolutionary philosopher Daniel
Dennett. “He emphatically denied the fundamental idea: that evolution is a mindless,
purposeless, algorithmic process. This was no constructive compromise; this was a
betrayal of the central insight.”
38
Evolution with a purpose—an idea that the Natural
Theologians had long accepted prior to The Origin of Species—is not Darwinian
evolution.
In his classic 1943 treatise on liberal education, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
deftly exposed the futility of any ethical system founded on these strictly naturalistic
premises. At issue is not whether natural selection can eloquently explain the physical
structures of life or whether these structures have some bearing on the moral dimensions
of human existence. It is whether the assumptions and vocabulary of philosophical
materialism are adequate in principle to account not only for physical structures—the
proper purview of physical science—but also for the phenomenon of the origins of life
itself as well as the depths of human consciousness and mind, including our language

38
Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p.320.

55
abilities; our rationality; our sensitivity to art, beauty, and the sacred; and the grounding
of human flourishing at least in Jewish-Christian ethics in grammars of shared human
dignity, freedom, and equality. Moral values, evolutionists tell us, are masks for self-
interest and biological utility. We must therefore learn to critically appraise all
pretensions of goodness through the lens of reason. But what about the values of our
educators, Lewis asked? “Their skepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on
other people’s values: about the values current in their own set they are not nearly
skeptical enough.”
39
Consider the cries of indignation that scientists who write about the
“selfishness” of all human behavior would evince if someone suggested that their own
profession was based upon purely egoistic and material “drives” for evolutionary
advantage, having nothing to do with reason as such. Or, consider the utilitarian ethics
evolutionary theorists often invoke.
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the tradition of Darwin’s Descent of
Man says that the “real” source of seemingly virtuous and altruistic behavior lies in the
utility of that behavior to the community. A fireman bravely sacrificing himself to save
others is thus praised for serving the common good. To say that the death of an
individual will serve the good of the community, though, is merely to say that the deaths
of some people are useful to other people. This should come as no surprise to anyone.
But after Darwin, on what grounds are particular individuals now to be asked to make
sacrifices and even, in extremis, lay down their lives for others? A refusal to sacrifice
oneself is surely no less rational than consent to do so. Strictly speaking, Lewis pointed
out, neither choice can be rational, or irrational, at all. “From propositions about fact

39
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1955), p.41.

56
alone no practical conclusions can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead
to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved.”
40
But without
reinstating the objective values unraveled by the theory of natural selection, whence do
we derive the idea that some particular configuration of society, or even society itself,
ought to be preserved? As we have seen, Darwin’s own view was that “inferior”
societies—that is, those comprised of inferior human beings—will inevitably and
continuously be exterminated, with “inferior” and “superior” now being defined purely in
terms of reproductive success. “As Darwin clearly recognized,” Rachels writes, “we are
not entitled—not on evolutionary grounds, at any rate—to regard our own adaptive
behavior as ‘better’ or ‘higher’ than that of cockroaches, who, after all, is adapted equally
well to life in its own environmental niche.”
41

I am aware that the is/ought problem, or “Hume’s Law” as it is sometimes called,
is not without controversy. A number of philosophers, most notably John Searle, have
tried to demonstrate that at least some normative statements can logically be deduced
from statements of empirical fact alone. If we allow that people are voluntarily
committed to various institutional arrangements that include certain obligations or
“constitutive rules” of membership, Searle argues by way of analogy to the game of
baseball, then empirical facts will certainly often dictate what norms ought to be
followed. If one is tagged out in baseball, one ought to leave the field, by definition of
how the game of baseball is played. But Searle fails to address precisely what is at issue,
namely, why some institutional arrangements or constitutive rules should be better or
worse than others, carrying not simply conventional, linguistic, effective, emotive, or

40
Ibid., p.41.
41
Rachels, Created from Animals, p.70.

57
pragmatic but moral weight. Searle declares that if we are “undertaking to play baseball”
then we should commit ourselves “to the observation of certain constitutive rules.”
42

What he cannot tell us is why we ought to devote ourselves to playing baseball rather
than cricket. Or why the rules of baseball ought to permit only two strikes rather than
seven. Or why one ought to play fairly even when the umpire is not looking and cheating
would help our team to win. None of these questions of “ought” can be answered simply
by reciting a description of what baseball is from an athletics handbook. More seriously,
the “constitutive rules” of, say, Imperial Rome, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the British East
India Company, the U.S. Marine Corps, and Human Rights Watch are radically different
and in certain ways radically opposed. But within a strictly naturalistic, Darwinian
framework there is no meta-Constitutive Rule to tell us to which particular constitutive
rules or institutions we ought to conform our lives.
In the end, we are left with a conception of morality based not upon reason or
morality but upon the mere fact of instincts. Humans sacrifice themselves for the good of
the species not for any ultimate purpose, but in obedience to natural urges acquired over
long ages of selective conditioning and upon a substratum of strictly material properties
and laws. If these urges can be exaggerated in selected groups through the fiction of
objective values, so much the better for the rest of us. Meanwhile, for those of us who
are in the know, all the old taboos appear to be swept away at last. Sacrifice, being
meaningless, may be avoided if others can be found to perform the task. Sexual desire,
being instinctive, may be gratified whenever it does not endanger the species. Individual
life, being expedient, may be ignored or disposed of whenever it does not serve the

42
Searle, John, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” Philosophical Review, Vol.73, 1964,
p.56.

58
interests of the group. “[T]here are no foundations to normative ethics,” Ruse concedes
in Evolutionary Naturalism. “We believe normative ethics for our own (biological) good,
and that is that.” Practically, this means that we just shouldn’t think too deeply about
metaphysical or metaethical questions. “The causal account of why we believe makes
inappropriate the inquiry into the justification of what we believe.”
43
Steadfast refusal to
enter into deeper philosophical waters is thus the Darwinian ethicist’s best answer to the
is/ought dilemma. “[O]ne simply cannot be guilty of committing the naturalistic fallacy
or violating the is/ought barrier,” Ruse declares, “because one is simply not in the
justification business at all.”
44

Dennett likewise urges us to stop asking questions of moral justification.
Knowing that the facts of natural selection—when applied without any qualifications to
human nature—erode any basis for ethical reasoning or for ideas about inviolable human
dignity and worth, he concludes not that Darwin’s theory might be a very limited way of
seeing the world, but rather that the political ideal of the “transparent society” might need
to be abandoned. Evolutionary theorists—similar, we shall see in Chapter 3, to the Grand
Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov—should employ “impurely
rational means of persuasion” to conceal from the masses, for their own good, what is
actually being said. The wise Darwinian ethicist, Dennett writes, can appreciate the
utility of “a little old-time religion, some unquestioning dogmatism that will render
agents impervious to the subtle invasions of hyperrationality.”
45
“Recoil as we may from
elitist mythmaking and such systematically disingenuous doctrines as the view [Bernard]

43
Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism, p.246-247.
44
Ibid., p.246.
45
Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.508.

59
Williams calls ‘Government House utilitarianism,’” he continues, “we may find…that we
will be extremely lucky to find any rational and transparent route from who we are now
to who we would like to be. The landscape is rugged, and it may not be possible to get to
the highest peaks from where we find ourselves today.”
46
From within the strictly
materialistic worldview Dennett is defending, however, the problem is not that we are no
longer able to find clear passage to those moral “peaks” that still somehow, strangely,
stand out and beckon in the distance. The problem is that Dennett’s very language of
unobtainable moral heights, as surveyed with putatively unflinching scientific realism
across an unnavigable philosophical terrain, can only be, according to his own terms, an
“impurely rational means of persuasion,” an either muddle-headed or devious figure of
speech designed to conceal the fact that we have well and truly entered the Wasteland.
The landscape of Darwinian ethics is no panorama of jagged crevices, rugged hills, and
forbidding summits, but an utterly scorched and featureless plain. There might still be a
few remaining flasks of life-giving water stored in our packs, but how long these will last
is hard to say. What we know with absolute surety is that every snow-capped moral or
spiritual Himalaya appearing on the horizon is nothing other than a tantalizing mirage.
The inevitable result of subjecting what is most distinctively and preciously
human to the tenets of philosophical materialism, Lewis sought to show in The Abolition
of Man, is political totalitarianism. Having set out to conquer nature with the tools of a
“reason” that systematically excludes every appeal to Natural Law or objective values,
Darwinian science’s final conquest of nature proves to be nothing other than nature’s
final conquest of the human. The “human” as such no longer exists. Lewis prophetically

46
Ibid., p.509.

60
described the coming age as “the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and
some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present laboring to produce.”
47

Our scientific Conditioners will henceforth decide what “the human” will be. Theoretical
materialism leads to applied materialism in which those who know how to fabricate
conscience will decide for the rest of us what kinds of consciences (as well as bodies)
ought to be constructed. But no longer constrained by either piety to the gods or
reverence for the good, the true, and the beautiful (which the Conditioners alone have
seen through as having no claim to the way things “really” are) the sorts of consciences
the Conditioners will create can only be either those that suit their own ends (whatever
those ends may be) or else ones produced in their own images (for reasons we know not
whereof).
If this sounds incredible then we have not been listening carefully to what
prominent evolutionary theorists have been telling us. The term “post-humanity” was not
common when Lewis used it in 1943 to describe the logical implications of scientism and
the trajectory of Western philosophical thought. Today, “posthumanism” or “post-
humanity” (and the still more vile neologism, “transhumanism”) are the precise terms
that some evolutionary theorists use with great enthusiasm to name their most fervent
wish: that in the near future we will see the rise of a new species that will have created
itself with the tools of biotechnology. Melding Darwinian theory with technologism,
apostles of the posthumanist dawn predict a day when we will seize control of our own
evolutionary trajectories and escape our present creaturely limitations through the
miracles of genetic modification, cloning, and cybernetic enhancement. At some point,

47
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.75.

61
we are told, we will no longer be human—and the result will be all gain without any loss.
Yet even if we do not subscribe to the most fantastic visions of cyborg (human-machine)
and hybrid (human-animal) creations, we are already living in a period of critical or
theoretical posthumanism in which it has become something of an academic
commonplace that no distinctively or essentially human nature can or should exist.
48

This is not to say that Darwinians do not themselves, paradoxically, have very
clear ideas about what kinds of humans should and should not be permitted to exist.
Evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, for example, declares that truly
recalcitrant religious believers such as the Amish, Mormons, fundamentalist Christians,
and Hasidic Jews should be prevented by the state from reproducing their inferior memes,
that is, their cultural and religious “DNA.” Religious parents, Humphrey asserts, should
be denied the legal—one might have thought human—right to pass on their beliefs to
their children.
49
This is, of course, nothing other than the old eugenics dream of
sterilizing the unfit now applied to a different level of human existence in the name of
philanthropic concern for the welfare of children and good of society. We might call this
the new social Darwinism of eumemics. But as in the earlier eugenics project, the
fantasies of the Conditioners remain manifestly authoritarian, utopian, and rationally
incoherent. In the same chapter in The God Delusion, for example, in which Richard

48
See Bart Simon, “Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Features,” in Cultural
Critique, No.53 (Winter, 2003), pp.1ff.
49
“Children,” Humphrey declares, “have a right not to have their minds crippled by
exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are…And we as
a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to
teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible…than we
should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.”
Nicholas Humphrey, The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology
and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.291.

62
Dawkins quotes from Humphrey with grave approval on the need to forcibly end the
“abuse” of the most inveterately religious parents, he tells the story of a six-year-old
Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, who was forcibly taken away from his parents by papal
police in nineteenth century Italy in order to be raised Catholic. The incident, Dawkins
writes without trace of irony, “sheds a pitiless light on present-day religious attitudes to
children.”
50

The Darwinian ethicist cannot appeal, then, to the self-evident goodness of
society, or even the intrinsic goodness of life, as guides to right action and the defense of
human rights; for then the same appeal to self-evident goodness could be made on behalf
of virtues like courage, justice, and compassion—or protecting the family bond,
providing humanitarian aid to the victims of famines in distant lands, instructing one’s
children in the religious beliefs of their forebears in the hope they will find meaning in
them, rejecting philosophical materialism, and resisting the posthumanist project—
without any reference to equations of genetic utility or evolutionary fitness. Human no
less than animal life, Darwin and Nietzsche both asserted, may be healthy or sickly,
beautiful or repellent, vital or insipid. But the empirical facts of biology, qua empirical
facts, cannot take us one step toward knowing what our moral response to Darwin’s
statements against excessive compassion (“care wrongly directed”), or Humphrey’s
suggestion that the children of religious believers be turned into wards of the state, ought
to be. Philosophical materialism—that surly bouncer at the party of scientific inquiry—
must expel all oughts that do not present an is calling card.

50
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
pp.349ff.

63
Darwin grasped these perils. Although he was not immune from the utopian spirit
of his day, and although his materialism was in many ways vacillating and contradictory,
he also saw that his theory, pursued to its logical conclusions, left no foundations for
morality of any kind. It could only endlessly describe behavior, whether generated by
instincts, egoism, will to power, or whims. “The imperious word ought seems merely to
imply the consciousness of the existence of a rule of conduct, however it may have
originated,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.
51
Earlier, in The Origin of Species, he had
praised queen-bees for their “savage instinctive hatred” of their young.
52
Now he implied
there was no essential difference between bee morality and human morality:
If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the
same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried
females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers,
and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of
interfering.
53

Interference, after all, would only hinder the total happiness of the hive.
54
In one of his
notebooks, Darwin thus warned (anticipating Ruse and Dennett in their foreclosing of
any deeper inquiry into questions of moral justification) against thinking very long and
hard about what his theory actually says about the human:
[Natural selection] will not do harm because no one can be really fully convinced
of its truth, except [the] man who has thought very much, & he will know his

51
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.98.
52
Darwin, The Origin of Species, p.230.
53
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.86.
54
Darwin may well have had Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 defense of capitalist
mercantilism, The Fable of the Bees, in mind when he wrote these words. The opening
chapter of Mandeville’s book was a satirical and allegorical poem entitled “The
Grumbling Hive” in which the collective goods of a thriving bee colony are described as
the cumulative result of each individual bee’s pursuit of its own selfish interests (“every
Part was full of Vice,/Yet the whole Mass a Paradice”). See Bernard Mandeville, The
Fable of the Bees (London: Penguin Classics, 1970), p.67.

64
happiness lays in doing good & being perfect, & therefore will not be tempted,
from knowing everything he does is independent of himself to do harm.
55

What is good for English gentlemen, Robert Wright interprets in The Moral
Animal, might not be good for the impressionable crowd. Wright goes on to make the
startling statement that the prevailing moral ethos of many university philosophy
departments is nihilism, and that this can be directly attributed to Darwin.
56
The full
philosophical implications of evolutionary theory, he declares, have long been the trade
secret of Darwinians.
57
But for the happiness of the many, shouldn’t we be grateful for
their concealment—at least from the minds of the young—of the scientific unraveling of
all our moral foundations? Did not Plato tell us in his Republic that the establishment of
social order requires “noble lies” by the Guardians for the sake of the greater good?

IV. Evolutionary Will to Power: The Nihilistic Turn
And yet, what about those who opt out of happiness? We might hope that the world
created in the image of the Conditioners will be a world of great compassion,
selflessness, and magnanimity of spirit in which people will instinctively continue to
dedicate their lives to alleviating the suffering of others and even risk their lives if
necessary to defend the rights and dignity of all human beings. But there are good
reasons to fear the world of the Conditioners will be nothing other than a world of
unfettered libido dominandi in which the language of human rights might well continue

55
As cited in Wright, The Moral Animal, p.350.
56
Ibid., p.328.
57
This unsettling assertion notwithstanding, Wright’s project, it should be noted, is not to
critique but to defend the application of Darwinian theory to questions of human nature,
morality, society, and culture. Wright hopes to popularize and rehabilitate sociobiology
from its exile in the hinterlands of academic discourse following the twin disasters of
American and Nazi race eugenics.

65
but be insidiously co-opted by the powerful to serve their own interests, just as Marx and
Nietzsche declared is already the case. It will certainly be a world in which those with
access to scientific technology and esoteric knowledge will exercise ever greater power
over the lives and minds of others, including generations not yet born. But on what
possible grounds—absent any appeal to religious or metaphysical conceptions of an
inviolable human dignity—can we possibly object to these facts? It would seem that all
we really can do is pit our own wills to power against the wills to power of others and
hope we prove the stronger.
There is an important difference, we must note, between the Platonic notion of the
noble lie and the scientific Conditioner’s lie. In Book Three of The Republic, Plato
suggested that a cosmological or religious myth of origins may need to be propagated by
intellectual elites to help sustain important political virtues among the masses.
58
It is only
concern for the good of the whole, however, that makes the lies or myths of the
Guardians “noble” in Plato’s telling (an idea that this reader by no means wishes to
defend). In the universe of the strict Darwinist, by contrast, the idea of the good itself
must now be seen as the real lie. The Conditioner’s lie cannot be a noble lie, at least not
in any moral sense, since there are no trans-empirical facts or standards by which to judge
human behavior. It can only be a lie, purely and simply. It is therefore not to Plato but to
another philosopher of power that Darwin’s theory directs us. Although Darwin himself
believed that a form of utilitarianism was the logical if not inevitable outworking of
natural selection, Mill is not the only important figure in the story of evolutionary ethics.
A more compelling vision of morality—based upon evolutionary concepts very close to

58
See Plato, The Republic (III.414-415), trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1968).

66
some of the passages in The Descent of Man I have quoted from above—may be found in
the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. I will have more to say about Nietzsche’s naturalism
in Chapter 4, but for the present his account of “the evolutionary will to power” may be
summarized as follows.
The problem with all previous explanations of the origins of morality, Nietzsche
declared, was that they took morality itself as a given. Yet what society had come to
perceive as evil was originally acknowledged as good. What traditional ethics—
corrupted by Judeo-Christian teachings—condemned as vice were merely untimely
atavisms of older ideals. In the pre-moral period (vaguely associated in Nietzsche’s mind
with pre-Socratic Greece), the value of a deed was determined not by the actor’s motives
but by the action’s consequences. Strength, cunning, and brutality held no moral stigma
but were simply expressions of human vitality. “Strong wills” thus dominated “weak
wills” as a means to their own glory or vitality, while all effective energy was “will to
power.”
The moral period marked a reversal of this situation as deeds came to be judged
by their underlying motives rather than their results. Nietzsche ascribed this readjustment
in human psychology to religion, and particularly Christianity. “‘God on the cross.’ At
no time or place has there ever been such a daring reversal, a formula so frightful,
questioning, and questionable as this one,” he wrote, “it ushered in a re-evaluation of all
ancient values.”
59
Primarily, Christianity asserted the equality of all individuals and sided
with those who suffer. Nietzsche found this notion—which he termed “slave-
morality”—utterly insipid. “Among humans as among every other species of animal,

59
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p.44.

67
there is a surplus of deformed, sick, degenerating, frail, necessarily suffering
individuals,” he wrote. By siding with these weaklings, Christianity had caused “the
degeneration of the European race.” It had “bred a diminished, almost ludicrous species,
a herd animal, something good-natured, sickly, and mediocre.”
60
In opposition to the
emasculated slave-morality of Christianity, Nietzsche proposed an ethic of the “free
spirit” in which the noble elite engaged in their own projects of value creation and self-
mastery. What was required of the Nietzschean paragon was the “hardness of the
hammer,” the rejection of unmanly and morbid pity for others:
We are of the opinion that harshness, violence, enslavement, danger on the street
and in the heart, seclusion, stoicism, the art of the tempter and every kind of
devilry, that everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, predatory, and snake-like about
humans serves to heighten the species ‘human being’ as much as does its
opposite.
61

Apologists for Nietzsche suggest that his philosophy has been misunderstood and
distorted. But however true this may be, Nietzsche’s defenders give away too much: the
impression that his ideas can be neatly separated from the political uses that were soon
made of them betrays historical realities.
62
The suggestion that Nietzschean ethics find

60
Ibid., 56-57.
61
Ibid., 41.
62
As Werner Dannhauser writes: “The problem of Nietzsche’s connection with fascism is
unfortunately not resolved by claiming, as many interpreters of Nietzsche are prone to do,
that Nietzsche was no fascist, that he was a violent critic of German nationalism, and that
he would have loathed Hitler. These things are undoubtedly true, and uttering them
shows the absurdity of a crude identification of Nietzsche’s doctrines with Hitler’s
ravings…But the fact remains that in various ways Nietzsche influenced fascism.
Fascism may have abused the words of Nietzsche, but his words are singularly easy to
abuse…A man who counsels men to live dangerously must expect to have dangerous
men like Mussolini heed his counsel; a man who teaches that a good war justifies any
cause must expect to have his teaching, which is presented half in jest but only half in
jest, to be abused.” See Dannhauser as cited in Ariel Kohen, In Defense of Human
Rights: A Non-Religious Grounding in a Pluralistic World (London: Routledge, 2007),

68
no support in Darwin is equally problematic. As it happens, Nietzsche may have never
read Darwin and expressed only contempt for the naïve social Darwinism that prevailed
during his day. His biological views included vitalistic and Lamarckian elements,
although Keith Ansell Pearson argues that he nevertheless remains closer to Darwin than
to Lamarck in his evolutionism.
63
He was repulsed by the fact that under natural
selection the weak herd may collectively overcome the strong few (which, we have seen
with reference to the Irish underclass, was a concern Darwin shared). And he resented the
deterministic undertones of the theory, which he deemed a threat to his own project of
creating a new “science” of the Free Spirit. These significant differences in vision as
well as temperament lay behind Nietzsche’s “Anti-Darwin” diatribe published
posthumously in The Will to Power. Still earlier, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
had heaped scorn on Darwin, Mill, and Spencer, who he described as “mediocre
Englishmen” marked by intellectual “narrowness, dryness, and diligent
meticulousness.”
64

Nevertheless, as Hans Jonas points out, Nietzsche’s amoralism is demonstrably
connected with the impact of Darwinism. “The will to power seemed the only alternative
left if the original essence of man had evaporated in the transitoriness and whimsicality of
the evolutionary process.”
65
According to Ansell-Pearson, “at the very heart of
Nietzsche’s outline of his fundamental concerns in his major text, On the Genealogy of

pp.36-37; and Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp.11-44, 355-356.
63
Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman
Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), p.87.
64
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp.144-145.
65
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1966), p.47.

69
Morality, we find a critical engagement with the Darwinian paradigm of evolution…even
when Nietzsche presents himself as ‘contra’ Darwin, he is, in fact, frequently writing
‘pro’ Darwin and refuting only an erroneous image of Darwin which he has derived from
popularizations of his thought.”
66
The reason Nietzsche held optimistic Victorian
naturalists in such contempt was for their failure to see that the old morality was truly
dead and gone. At a fundamental level, though, he agreed wholeheartedly with Darwin’s
notion of morality emerging from the welter of chance and competition for scarce
resources.

He railed against the “plebeianism of modern ideas,” and insisted that the will
to power could not be explained in material terms.
67
Yet his genealogy of morals in fact
rested upon two ideas, both seemingly scientifically validated by the theory of natural
selection: first, all of existence should be understood in terms of a constant competitive
struggle, leading to a natural hierarchy; and second, changes in the natural world
contained no inherent purposes, directions, moral values, or metaphysical meanings.
68

Nietzsche did not discover the amoralist position. He sided with the claims of
Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, which most Western philosophers had rejected for
more than two thousand years but which now suddenly appeared to many as irrefutable
scientific truth.
69
Darwin’s role in making Nietzsche’s attack on morality and on the idea
of human rights intellectually compelling cannot be underestimated. “If Nietzsche is the

66
Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, pp.85-86.
67
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.145.
68
On Nietzsche’s debt to Darwin and social Darwinian theories see also John
Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
pp.137-146.
69
“[I]njustice on a sufficiently large scale is a stronger , freer, and more masterful thing
than justice, and, as I said in the beginning, it is the advantage of the stronger that is the
just, while the unjust is what profits a man’s self and is for his advantage,” Thrasymachus
declares. See Plato, The Republic (I.344c).

70
father of existentialism,” writes Dennett, “then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of
grandfather.”
70
Absent Darwin’s worldview, Nietzsche’s would have had little intellectual
currency. Natural selection, Dennett goes on to declare, is “the universal acid”; it
radically corrodes and ultimately destroys every traditional concept and belief in its path,
whether in matters of cosmology, psychology, human culture, religion, politics, or ethics.
Under natural selection we are indeed beyond good and evil—or so some of Darwin’s
most eloquent and widely read interpreters and admirers have declared.
What even Nietzsche did not consider is the challenge posed by Dostoevsky (who
I will explore in greater depth in Chapter 3), who pressed the logic of philosophical
materialism/naturalism as “universal acid” in still more harrowing directions. “Man now
is not yet the right man,” declares the pale engineer Alexei Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s 1872
novel, Demons. “There will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it will make
no difference whether he lives or does not live, he will be the new man. He who
overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this God will not be.”
71
The idea of
the human is corollary to the idea of God, Dostoevsky sought to show, so that with the
death of God there is no longer any divine image left in humanity to be guarded or saved.
Self-annihilation, then, becomes a perfectly logical expression of one’s radical autonomy.
It is no less rational a choice, in any case, than any conceivable act of self-creation. For
Nietzsche, morality without God must be unmasked as yet one more guise for eros, the
subjective will to power. But for Dostoevsky, eros without God proves to be the final
mask for thanatos, the passionate will to death. “Whoever wants the main freedom must

70
Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.62.
71
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994), p.115.

71
dare to kill himself,” says Kirillov. “He who dares to kill himself knows the secret of the
deceit.”
72
Kirillov’s rapturous and even mystical embrace of thanatos, as an extreme
probing of what it means to replace the God-man of the New Testament with the man-
god of philosophical naturalism and to plunge not simply beyond good and evil but
beyond the human, raises the fundamental question: Why stop at post-humanism? Why
not try post-existence next? It was a question that Albert Camus famously placed at the
center of his philosophy. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that
is the problem of suicide.”
73
The more profound, disturbing, and relevant question for
this dissertation, however, is the one asked by Abraham Heschel in reply to Camus—not
is there anything worth living for, but “Is there anything worth dying for?”
74

V. The Impossible Cordon: Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria
In the end, we may discover that we are able to order our lives in spite of—not because
of—what we believe to be true: that the idea of inviolable human dignity is nature’s
greatest ruse. Staunch evolutionists remain loving parents and upright citizens. Darwin
himself was in many regards one of the most decent and humane figures of his time. But
whether the moral reserves of human instinct prove stronger than the nihilism introduced
by Darwinian sociobiology and materialist evolutionary psychology remains to be seen.
A more pessimistic view is that Western culture, by now steeped in philosophical and
scientific indifference to good and evil, is rapidly expending its inherited value reserves,
the spiritual capital of its Jewish and Christian heritage. This premonition is not merely

72
Ibid., p.115.
73
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p.3.
74
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965),
p.92.

72
the concern of theologians. It is the avowed goal of some sociobiologists to demonstrate
that all of our loftiest ideals are grounded in purely utilitarian impulses toward genetic
self-preservation or our putatively “selfish genes” (a highly misleading metaphor which
Robinson points out is logically equivalent to “wrathful thunder”
75
). But many scientists
are unwilling to concede the old morality. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould is one such
individual. Conscious of the impossibility of deriving normative values from facts, he
has attempted to articulate a new relationship between Darwinian theory and religious
belief. Is there no way, he asks, that natural selection and religion can be defined in
mutually respectful and beneficial terms?
Gould proposes what he calls the “Principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” or
“NOMA.” According to this principle, science and religion can be harmonized by a
simple division of labor. “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural
world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts,” he writes, while
religion attends to the wholly other realm of “meaning and moral value.” All attempts to
create a Darwinian ethic are thus flawed since they encroach on the domain of values.
However, religion for its part must refrain from making any claims about “factual
reality.” Once religion is weaned away from erroneous statements of fact, Gould
maintains, we will realize “a respectful, even loving, concordat between the magisteria of

75
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York:
Picador, 1998), p.47. Cunningham offers a still more devastating analysis of the notion of
the “selfish gene,” both on philosophical grounds as a rationally incoherent form of
metaphysical dualism and on scientific grounds in the light of the current state of
molecular biology, which has abandoned the atomistic, context-free informational picture
of the gene that Dawkins and others continue to put forward as though it were the cutting
edge of evolutionary thinking. See Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, 25-78.

73
science and religion.”
76
Wouldn’t this solve the problem of post-Darwinian human rights
once and for all?
I think not. By saying that it is the business of religion to ascribe meaning to what
are already described as the inherently purposeless facts of nature and human origins,
Gould recasts religion as a less angst-filled variety of existentialism. But if no natural
occurrence contains any intrinsic purpose, direction, or meaning, what makes the claims
of religion more than a desperate attempt to generate meaning and morality out of the
void? And what gives religious ethics any credence if divine justice and purpose are
merely wishful metaphors that we can safely say have never interposed themselves upon
factual reality or human history? Having chopped its legs from under it, will
evolutionists now command the truncated torso of religion to pick up its bed and walk?
Nor will it do to simply post a marker at the boundary between the biological and social
sciences, or between science and ontology: “Thus far but no further.” Darwin, we have
seen, was the first to extend the logic of his theory to questions about religion, ontology,
and morality. He may have done so with greater reticence than some contemporary
evolutionists, but not with less philosophical necessity or consequence. The question of
the human, which Darwin would directly address in The Descent of Man, was in fact very
much on his mind fully two decades before The Origin of Species was published. In one
of his notebooks in 1838, Darwin wrote, “Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics

76
Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New
York: Ballantine Publishing, 1999), pp.4, 6, 9-10.

74
must flourish—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than
Locke.”
77

It is here that I part ways with some theistic evolutionists who insist that Darwin
himself poses no challenge to theological and metaphysical ways of thinking. The
language of physical science may not be the right language to describe how God interacts
with the creation (the fallacy of “creation science”), but certain kinds of temporal and
physical claims clearly have profound moral implications. To radically separate theology
from science and history on the one hand is to deny both creation and incarnation, while
to radically separate Darwin’s theory from ontological and anthropological concerns on
the other is to deny what natural selection, by Darwin’s own account, was fundamentally
concerned with: the nature of being, including, ultimately, human being. “The theory of
evolution is not just an inert piece of theoretical science,” writes Mary Midgley. “It is,
and cannot help being, also a powerful folk-tale about human origins.” Hence, scientists
“calling for a sanitary cordon” to keep facts and values or scientific and human concerns
apart are calling for something that is “both psychologically and logically impossible.”
78
History—what has happened in space-time—matters. And it matters not just for our
thoughts but also for our feelings, our relationships, our values and our actions. Gould’s
NOMA ultimately fails to satisfy or convince because it continues to partake too deeply
of what Jürgen Habermas has called “the blinkered enlightenment which is unenlightened

77
Charles Darwin, On Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Selection,
eds. Thomas F. Glick and David Kohn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p.78.
78
Mary Midgley, Evolution as Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London:
Routledge, 1992), pp.1, 15-21.

75
about itself and which denies religion any rational content.”
79
It refuses to allow religion
any purchase on “factual reality.” But the world of factual reality is of course the world
we all must continue to live in and the world that we care most deeply about.
Yet Gould’s overture to religion is not mere dissembling. Evolutionary
psychology’s lobotomy of the soul is the death of goodness. Even more, the treacherous
kiss of materialism spells the death of reason: if “the good” is purely the outcome of
Darwinian selective pressures, then there is no inherent value but also no reliability in
Darwinian theory itself. If philosophical materialism/naturalism is true, Alvin Plantinga
argues, our cognitive perceptions of the world will be based upon biologically adaptive
belief structures that need not actually be true in terms of their correspondence with
external realities. But this means that belief in materialism itself, by its own terms, lacks
the necessary epistemological grounding to make strong claims about its own
correspondence with reality. Near the end of his life, Darwin expressed precisely this
fear. “With me the horrid doubt always arises,” he wrote, “whether the convictions of
man’s mind, which have developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value
or are at all trustworthy.”
80
Philosophical materialism or naturalism, according to
Plantinga, is thus internally contradictory or “self-defeating.”
81
It claims to offer a
reliable, objective, and comprehensive set of truths about the universe, but these claims
cannot legitimately be made if we accept the logical implications of evolutionary

79
Jürgen Habermas, et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a
Post-Secular Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p.18.
80
As cited in John Polkinghorn, “Anthropology in an Evolutionary Context,” in God and
Human Dignity, eds. R. Kendall Soulen and Linda Woodhead (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2006), p.89.
81
Alvin Plantinga, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” in Naturalism
Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, ed. James
K. Beilby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp.1-14.

76
biology’s own premises, which amount to a banishment of the lived and felt realities of
the mind from our minds. (Cunningham refers to this as the epistemologically nihilistic
move of materialism not from is to ought but “from is to naught.”
82
)
But even if we allow, contra Plantinga, that subjective beliefs in philosophical
materialism might in principle correspond with the external or objective facts of the
world, a great problem remains. After Darwin, Jonas observes, both the classical
understanding of man as homo animal rationale and the biblical view of humanity as
created in the image of God are blocked. Reason is reduced to a means among means
toward the organism’s or the species’ survival:
[A]s a merely formal skill—the extension of animal cunning—it does not set but
serves aims, is not itself standard but measured by standards outside of its
jurisdiction. If there is a ‘life of reason’ for man (as distinct from the mere use of
reason), it can be chosen only nonrationally, as all ends must be chosen
nonrationally (if they can be chosen at all). Thus reason has no jurisdiction even
over the choice of itself as more than a means. But use of reason, as a means, is
compatible with any end, no matter how irrational. This is the nihilistic
implication in man’s losing a ‘being’ transcending the flux of becoming.
83

No scientist can long tolerate such a repudiation of the mind, so somehow the
high dignity and value of human life must be readmitted through other entrances. Gould
selects the back door of personal sentiment, writing about the richness of Berloiz’s
Requiem and the joys of baseball. The emotive power of music and play, he suggests, is
meat enough to sustain us as we wander to and fro in the factual wilderness. Lest we
insist upon more rigorous logic, he diverts us with bewildering jargon. (“Science and
religion interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-

82
Conor Cunningham, “Trying My Very Best to Believe Darwin, or, The
Supernaturalistic Fallacy: From is to Nought,” in Belief and Metaphysics, eds. Peter
Chandler and Conor Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2007).
83
Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, p.47.

77
similarity.”
84
) Wright meanwhile tries to reclaim traditional morality by telling us that
Christ and Buddha were the ultimate Darwinian self-help gurus. But all this scrambling
after ancient wisdom without any intention of returning to ancient beliefs is futile.
Contemporary evolutionists have sawn off the limb on which they were perched. Lewis
predicted the final contortions of education in the materialist mold. “In a sort of ghastly
simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests
and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find
traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
85

VI. Apophatic Science: The Inner Life as Primary Datum
But what about the evidence? This, many will insist, remains the crux of the matter. We
may not like the philosophical implications of natural selection when applied to questions
of morality or to human nature, but we must still account for empirical evidence in ways
that are intellectually honest. What, then, are the alternatives? Not, I would agree with
Gould and the overwhelming majority of scientists, a redefinition of the scientific method
to include supernatural or “intelligent design” explanations of phenomena in the physical
world. Science is, by definition and necessity, a project that proceeds on the
methodological assumption of materialism, without any recourse to divine intervention as
a causal variable. Scientists are concerned with facts that can be observed, verified, and
tested in an inductive, naturalistic, and empirical sense. This is their profession and with
this we should have no quarrel. The converse of the naturalistic fallacy has sometimes
been called the “moralistic fallacy,” that is, making statements of fact on the basis of

84
Gould, Rocks of Ages, p.65.
85
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.35.

78
statements of value but without actually attending to the factual evidence, or doing so
with an a priori set of assumptions of where the evidence must somehow be shown to
lead, whether in order to buttress one’s ethical or one’s theological commitments at any
cost.
The problem, I have sought to show, occurs when scientific materialism, as a
methodological tool, evolves into a metaphysical prejudice, a species of epistemological
imperialism claiming all of “factual reality” as its own. Does Darwin provide anything
like testable empirical evidence for his account of human language, rationality, and
morality? Or, confronted by a mysterium tremendum that is irreducible in important
ways in terms of the scientific method, does he tell us a “just-so” story—a myth that may
be compelling or superficial depending on our starting assumptions but that, on closer
examination, is impossible to test in any falsifiable or even probabilistic sense? And if
the relentless application of Darwinian thinking to questions of consciousness, morality,
and even rationality provides confirming evidence for those already committed to a
thoroughgoing materialism yet leads to conclusions that are highly corrosive of some of
our deepest intuitions, experiences, and traditions—and even, as Jonas suggests, of the
pursuit of scientific truth itself—is it in fact rational to sell our birthright for a pottage of
hard-headed objectivity? Or might our intuitions, experiences, and traditions themselves
also be evidence of the kind of universe we live in, clues to the limitations of what a
materialistic and reductive science can tell us, precisely about factual realities where
questions of human nature and origins are concerned?
I am not suggesting a return to dualistic anthropologies in the Platonic or
Cartesian traditions, with the soul or mind now seen as a substance somehow detachable

79
from material and bodily realities (a “ghost in the machine” as it has been called). I am
arguing, rather, for a holistic, embodied, and integrative view that takes the interiority
and subjectivity of human experience—including our sense of freedom, our capacity for
wonder, and our intuitions that we are involved in a moral order in which good and evil
really do exist—as primary datum and departure points, inseparable from yet at the same
time never fully reducible to the laws of biophysics and the categories of Darwinian
theory. As Charles Taylor argues, we should “treat our deepest moral instincts, our
ineradicable sense that human life is to be respected, as our mode of access to the world
in which ontological claims are discernible and can be rationally argued about and
sifted.”
86

A worldview that is both truly scientific and truly humanistic requires neither
unqualified rejection nor acceptance of the theory of evolution by natural selection. What
it does require is that evolutionary theorists make much greater progress along the via
negativa, making clear what their method does not and cannot know, not simply for
present lack of data but in principle, as a matter of rational constraint. “[T]here ought to
be a limit beyond which we cease to hedge our ignorance with promises to ‘continue to
study the problem,’” Wendell Berry writes. “Scrupulous minds, in this age as in any
other, not only must be constrained occasionally to confess ignorance, but also must
continue to live with the old proposition that some things are not knowable.”
87

I am not speaking now of the various empirical challenges to Darwinian theory
that are the staples of creationist literature, such as the problem that evolution by natural

86
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p.8.
87
Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Washington,
DC: Counterpoint, 2000), p.38.

80
selection posits extreme gradualism whereas the fossil record presents a picture of
evolution by sudden leaps, beginning with the riddle of the so-called Cambrian Explosion
an estimated 540 million years ago. Evolution by leaps would be nothing other than a
miracle, Darwin confessed, while the Cambrian event presented, he said, a “formidable
challenge” and “valid argument” against his theory for which “I can give no satisfactory
answer.” Where the so-called new atheists, who style themselves Darwin’s most faithful
followers, insist that his theory fully unlocked the riddles of creation, Darwin himself was
far less confident or dogmatic in his assertions. The geological evidence of the Cambrian
period, he wrote, “at present must remain inexplicable.”
88
This statement remains true
150 years later.
89
But it is not for the incompleteness of the fossil record or other
physical evidence that Darwinian theory remains a scientific theory rather than the
incontestable and all-encompassing Fact writers such as Daniel Dennett, E. O. Wilson,
Michael Ghiselin, and Richard Dawkins proclaim it to be. In time, after all, these “gaps”
or empirical challenges might very well be overcome. And there is no reason why
present lack of material evidence should stand in the way of a strictly materialistic
program of scientific research, which has overcome many seemingly insurmountable
empirical problems in the past. The case of Lord Kelvin might serve here as a cautionary
tale of the fallacy of creationist or “Intelligent Design” theories that claim to empirically
prove God’s existence through the present appearance of “irreducible complexity” in
nature. Based on the best science and evidence available at the time, Kelvin claimed to
have proved that Darwin’s theory could not possibly be correct since in the time required

88
See Darwin, The Origin of Species, pp.312ff.
89
Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science,
Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003),
pp.180ff.

81
for evolution to occur the sun would have burned itself up. Radioactivity and nuclear
reactions were beyond Kelvin’s comprehension and unknown to scientists in his day.
90

In Eastern Orthodox thinking, however, there is a long tradition known as
negative or apophatic theology that refrains—out of an awareness of the limitations of
human language and reasoning to grasp ultimate truths—from making positive statements
about what God is and instead only declares what God is not. There is a need, I am
suggesting, for a kind of apophatic science that makes clear not the empirical challenges
to Darwin’s theory in the manner of dubious “creation science” but rather the rational
limitations of materialist methods and assumptions in the face of certain questions. These
questions, G. K. Chesterton suggested, are at least three in number: How could something
have arisen from nothing, as many theoretical physicists tell us their best models indicate
happened?
91
How could life have arisen from non-life?

And how could consciousness—
including moral consciousness—have arisen from non-consciousness? In each of these
cases, Chesterton asserted, reductive materialistic approaches not only fail to convince

90
John Polkinghorn, Faith, Science, and Understanding (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), p.118.
91
According to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book, The Grand
Design, the Big Bang moment in which even time itself began can be explained in terms
of physical laws alone, rendering God an unnecessary postulate to explain existence. But
as Paul Davies observes in a review of their work in The Gaurdian, Hawking and
Mlodinow do not in fact explain why there is something rather than nothing. Rather, they
offer a highly speculative argument for the origins of our particular universe from out of
an imagined “multiverse” that is itself heavily laden with physical properties and “meta-
laws.” The origins of the multiverse and its laws, Davies writes, remain unexplained by
Hawking and Miodinow but are simply posited as “eternal, immutable transcendent
entities that just happen to exist and must simply be accepted as given.” The picture of
our universe in their cosmology is in this regard not at all unlike one of a universe created
by “an unexplained transcendent god.” See Paul Davies, “Hawking’s big bang gaps,”
The Guardian, 4 September 2010, on the web at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/04/stephen-hawking-big-
bang-gap

82
for present lack of data. They involve category transgressions that amount to logical
fallacies. Philosophical materialism, in the face of each of the three “great transitions,”
amounts to an attempt to construct a mental bridge across an “abyss of the
unthinkable.”
92
The fact that there is something rather than nothing, that this something
includes not only material objects but also living beings, that some of these living
creatures possess sentience or consciousness, and that some of these conscious beings
possess a self-reflexive or self-conscious awareness of their own existence as free and
moral agents, means that there is more to our universe than philosophical materialism and
Darwinism, by very definition, can comprehend without doing violence to the
phenomena they set out to describe.
A description of life in terms of an aggregation of physical and chemical
interactions, for example, is not an explanation of life. For even if all of these
interactions could be known and observed, life itself is more than the sum of its parts.
Life is a miraculum, a thing of wonder, which eludes reduction precisely because it is
life. There is no need, of course, to deny the physical dimensions of an organism’s
existence, without which there could be no life. Life might in this regard certainly have
evolved; and in a world in which change rather than stasis is all around us, the truly
shocking and scandalous thing would be for evolution—that is, for organic change—to
not have occurred over time. But life is no longer life the moment it has been dissected
or reduced or translated “downward” into terms allegedly more fundamental than the
reality of life itself. For the apophatic scientist, this would be the epistemological
equivalent of slaying the goose that lays the golden eggs in Aesop’s fable (or perhaps

92
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton,
Vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p.158.

83
better, tantamount to turning a living egg into scrambled eggs in a manic attempt to
pinpoint the source of its life).
And what is true of life is also true of consciousness and the unique linguistic,
rational, and moral faculties of the human mind. “The difference between conscious
experience on the one hand and physiology and behavior on the other is not a difference
in matters of complexity or scope,” Clifford Goetz and Charles Taliaferro write, “but a
difference in kind” (emphasis mine).
93
It is of no avail for the philosophical materialist or
naturalist to appeal here to a vocabulary of “emergence” to leap over the logical hurdles
or to escape the nihilism implicit in materialist/naturalist ontology. The language of
emergence in fact only makes the “part-whole” problem I am describing more apparent.
Matter that has begun to ponder its own existence and to attach moral meaning to its
actions is not the sudden burst of some unfathomably complex configuration of matter,
like the unplanned explosion in a high school chemistry experiment that cannot be
repeated only because the students failed to note which ingredients they put into the mix
and in what proportions. There are in the universe not only changes in degree or quantity
but also what E. F. Schumacher referred to as “ontological discontinuities.” Refusal to
acknowledge these qualitative breaks in the “levels of being”—the fact, for example, that
something may be a living, self-reproducing organism or non-living matter but not
simultaneously alive and not alive—results in literature that is, Schumacher wrote, often
as inane as defining “a dog as a barking plant or a running cabbage.”
94

93
Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008),
p.75.
94
E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper and Row, 1977),
p.22.

84
For acknowledgers of transcendence, the inner life is itself primary datum, so that
a declaration such as “Inflicting pain on people for amusement is cruel,” or “The sunset
over Victoria Falls is beautiful,” is a declaration not simply about our genetic inheritance
or the chemistry that underlies our brain states, real enough though these may be. It is a
valid (even if contestable) claim about the kind of world we live in. Yet our subjective
intuitions and inter-subjective encounters, as vital modes of access to objective realities
of the universe, is precisely what philosophical materialists and sociobiologists following
in Darwin’s steps in principle deny. Modern science and various emotivist or pragmatic
ethical theories do allow for subjective perceptions of things like beauty and good and
evil. What they cannot allow is that these perceptions bear testimony to realities of the
universe to which reductive scientific methods and naturalistic thinking simply do not
have access. Moral and even aesthetic values, for the fully consistent philosophical
materialist, can only be invented, not discovered—and they can only be invented
instrumentally or arbitrarily, without any normative appeal to what is good or what is
beautiful since goodness and beauty as such do not exist. They must be “seen through.”
But some things can only be seen, Lewis pointed out, by not being “seen through”:
You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing
through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window
should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if
you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first
principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a
wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the
same as not to see.
95

We are thus faced with two radically opposing visions. Either all our talk of
values—including human dignity and human rights—is, at the end of the day, the result

95
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.81.

85
of complex survival mechanisms, involuntary chemical reactions, arbitrary choices, and
socially enforced but finally vacuous language games that only function as well as they
do because they are so effective at preventing us from seeing the world as it “really” is,
just as Darwin suggested in The Descent of Man and Nietzsche still more forcefully and
consistently proclaimed. Or there is a realm of values that is also part of the “fabric” of
the universe, so that strictly materialistic and reductive accounts of the human such as
Darwin’s may tell us a great deal yet still fail to grasp the whole and so end by ironically
blinding us to important facts of the world and of human nature in the name of revealing
them.

VII. Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Natural Science as Natural History
Non-materialism, Lewis makes clear in The Abolition of Man, does not necessarily
dictate theism. His critique of the moral nihilism of philosophical materialism and
logical positivism is based upon an ecumenical appeal to what has variously been called
Practical Reason, First Principles, or Natural Law and which he says was recognized by
Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius no less than Moses and Christ. Lewis refers to
this realm of values—without which conversations about the good would be meaningless
and no evolution in moral understanding possible—simply as the Tao. The Tao is not a
matter of proof or disproof. It is the point from which all statements of value begin. Yet
in the older ways of thinking, the grammars of value—aesthetic as well as moral—were
also, at least potentially, clues to the grammars of creation. The remarks that follow are
addressed primarily to fellow theists who are also wrestling with the challenges of

86
modern science and evolutionary theory for Jewish and Christian understandings of
divine creation.
Evolutionary explanations of much of what we observe in the natural world need
not threaten Jewish or Christian beliefs. In the twentieth century, defenders of the faith
such as Lewis, Étienne Gilson, and Jacques Ellul (an Anglican, a Catholic, and a
Protestant respectively) offered strong critiques of both the pretensions of modern
Darwinism and the fallacies of a certain kind of biblical literalism or fundamentalism (a
mode of reading Scripture that Ellul described as “a paper pope” and “an arrested system
that cannot avoid being scholastic in intellectual form”
96
). The non-materialist,
Chesterton pointed out, can cheerfully admit a great deal of natural development
according to physical laws into her worldview—it is the puritanical materialist who
cannot allow any hint of a telos, the transcendent, or the divine into his spotless
machine.
97
It is possible, in other words, to reconcile a properly humble methodological
materialism and evolutionary theory with a properly open theism—but not, as Gould
would have it, the other way around; only one of the two worldviews is large enough to
include the other without reducing and ultimately destroying it. Materialists deny every
appeal to the Tao as a limit upon the reach of scientific/materialistic methods and
vocabulary. Devout theists, far from denying physical realities or scientific thinking, by
contrast, led the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the
entirely logical conviction that a material universe created by a rational and non-

96
Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), pp.131, 163ff.
97
G. K. Chesterton, Heretics/Orthodoxy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000),
p.184.

87
capricious God can also be studied and comprehended by rational human minds created
in the image of God.
98

Still, scientific reasoning is a necessarily limited way of seeing the world.
Between the Scylla of philosophical materialism on the one hand and the Charybdis of
biblical fundamentalism on the other, I would therefore suggest, we should chart a path to
the facts of biological diversity and geology that stays closer in many ways to the
methods of historical scholarship than of atomic physics. Historians, as a general rule,
refrain from grand theorizing because they understand that life is more complex than any
single theory could possibly capture or explain. They recognize that any attempt to
interpret all of reality in terms of a single set of scientific laws (such as Marx’s dialectical
materialism) will not be based upon truly scientific reasoning but upon a commitment to
a particular worldview as a way of interpreting all of reality. The best that historians can
offer, then, are more or less plausible accounts of why particular sets of events unfolded
the way they did based upon the evidence actually available to us, making clear their own
presuppositions, biases, and theoretical commitments from the outset. But where no
evidence exists, no serious history—and so no comprehensive or unifying theory of
history—can be written.
These principles apply equally to historians who are theists and those who are not.
A scholar who, instead of mustering concrete and verifiable evidence, continually
invoked supernatural intervention or “intelligent design” to explain historical outcomes

98
As Alfred North Whitehead famously argued, the search for stable structures in nature
was animated in the West by the “inexpugnable belief” of medieval scholastic theology
in a personal God who had created the cosmos in such a way “that every detailed
occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner,
exemplifying general principles.” See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern
World: The Lowell Lectures, 1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p.15.

88
would clearly not be doing her job as a historian. There is no debate about teaching
intelligent design or supernaturalist history in American high schools because most
believers understand and accept that historical scholarship operates according to a
different epistemological grammar than the theological interpretation of history. There
might be perfectly valid reasons to think that human history has a direction or purpose
that falls under God’s providential guidance in ways we cannot predict, experimentally
manipulate, or fully comprehend, even in the face of a great deal of unfathomable waste,
suffering, and brutality.
99
Believers should be free to state such beliefs and their reasons
for them in the public square and in the academy without fear of censorship. But belief in
God’s providence in human history is ultimately a matter of religious faith that lies
beyond any possible “proof” using the tools of the historical method. Likewise, God’s
control over natural history is surely not something that can be pinned down beneath a
microscope. Theologically, a god who could be so captured or “proven” by scientific
methods would be a greatly reduced divinity—not the utterly transcendent, self-revealing
and self-concealing God of the Jewish and Christian traditions, who summons humans to
a life of faith that is not blind or irrational but is built upon what the Apostle Paul
describes as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
100
At

99
The related problem of animal suffering and natural evil in theistic evolutionary
accounts is not within the scope of this dissertation other than to note that the dilemma is
in no way resolved by young earth creationism since the natural world is filled in the
present with animals that are perfectly “designed” for predation—a fact that continues to
cry out for theological and scientific explanation and that Genesis and the rest of the
Hebrew Bible, on close reading, are completely silent about. Any intellectually honest
theodicy cannot take the form of a denial of the strong physical evidence for a very old
earth, very old life on earth, and animal carnivorousness before the existence of humans
any more than it could take the form of a denial of evidence for the Holocaust.
100
The move to exclude “natural theology” from science, Nancey Murphy points out,
was in fact initially led by two of the most devout scientists in history, Isaac Newton and

89
least a few creationists, Terry Eagleton points out, are in this sense not believers at all;
the attempt to transform matters of belief into matters of positive knowledge may be an
expression of faithlessness.
101
Ironically, there is no real difference between the
epistemologies of many fundamentalists and Richard Dawkins. The former merely claim
to have found the necessary empirical evidence to substantiate their inerrantist readings
of Genesis, while Dawkins and the overwhelming majority of scientists say they have
not. But for both, the critical thing is that there be empirical evidence, that one’s beliefs
be shown to rest upon a base of material evidence that might compel rational assent from
others in the high court of scientific argument.
Conversely, however, any historian who claimed to have discovered scientific
proof that there is no divine purpose or providence in history—that even if there is a God
this God is utterly detached from historical events, that all of historical reality can be
explained as a combination of material variables and random occurrences, and that in the
cosmic scheme of things we now know that there is no overarching direction, purpose,
value, or meaning to the human story—would no longer be speaking as a historian but,
ironically, as what can only be described as a true believer in philosophical naturalism as
a controlling myth. One can embrace the idea of God’s providential guidance and even
intervention in human history and be a serious historian. One might also detect a

Robert Boyle, who saw that the metaphysical mixing of science and religion resulted not
only in bad science but in a corruption of true faith. God’s transcendence theologically
requires a radical distinction between God as Creator and the operations of the universe
through secondary causes. Methodological atheism was necessary, Newton and Boyle
concluded, to protect theology from contamination by science. See Nancey Murphy,
“Phillip Johnson on Trial: A Critique of His Critique of Darwin,” in Intelligent Design
Creationism and its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives, ed.
Robert T. Pennock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), p.464.
101
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp.114-115.

90
powerful resonance between the Jewish-Christian narrative and the natural order of the
universe and be a serious biologist or physicist. But any scholar who denies, on
putatively scientific grounds, the very possibility that there is a God who acts in history—
including natural history—is no longer expressing a historical or scientific view but what
can only be described as a metaphysical conceit, a species of intellectual hubris. To the
extent that the theory of natural selection claims to show that all evolutionary change has
unfolded on purely materialistic grounds, as a “blind” algorithm without any direction or
purpose, and that human consciousness, rationality, and morality are also “nothing more”
than the final outcomes of these materialistic processes, Darwin too falls into this trap.
This larger materialist claim may be a compelling and at some levels even necessary
conjecture for scientists to work with. It is not—and never can be—a demonstrable fact
of science. It cannot even be submitted to any properly scientific test.
There is a wide range of ways of thinking about the evidence for common
ancestry in theistic perspective. When evolutionary theorists describe genetic mutations
as “random” and therefore “purposeless” or “blind” they are drawing invalid
metaphysical conclusions from their own inability to statistically predict the outcomes of
dynamic biological change. But “random” means scientifically “non-predictable,”
Alister McGrath points out, which for believers might easily be situated within a general
doctrine of divine providence and purposeful creation.
102
Divine action, Nancey Murphy
writes, may be “supervenient” on biological facts, not violating or suspending the natural
processes we are able to observe yet at the same time operating upon physical

102
Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and
Theology: The 2009 Gifford Lectures (Lousville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009),
p.186.

91
phenomenon at a higher level of reality than reductive materialistic accounts can capture
or explain.
103
John Haught similarly proposes a “layered” approach that allows for
multiple levels of explanation of the same event or phenomenon. By way of analogy, one
might describe the origins of a book in purely physical, scientific, and materialistic terms
(describing how ink chemically binds to paper or tracing the evolution of the modern
printing press); but however useful such an account might be, the far more significant
facts about any text lie not in its physical properties or material history but in the vision
of the author and in the non-physical causes and consequences of the words themselves.
The words would not exist apart from material realities and this is one valid level of
analysis. But the genesis of the words is a matter not only of chemistry or physics but
also of authorship requiring a very different kind of explanation and interpretation—one
that is concerned not only with properties but also with meanings.
104
According to John
Polkinghorn, we should neither reject the insights of Darwin nor assume that the mind
and morality are fully comprehensible in terms of what he calls “unaided Darwinism.”
Ethical knowledge, he writes, is not “a curiously disguised genetic survival strategy” but
something that comes to us “from our encounter with the moral dimension of the reality
within which we live.”
105
The reality in which we live, in other words, is not value-
neutral but value-laden. This means that science and religion are distinct yet in certain
ways also overlapping magisteria, particularly where human beings possessing both
minds and bodies, neither separable from the other, are concerned. Conor Cunningham

103
Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and
Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Harrisburg: Trinity Press
International, 1996), pp.141-144, 156.
104
John Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), p.24.
105
Polkinghorn, “Anthropology in Evolutionary Context,” p.101.

92
argues for the move to what he calls “a second näiveté” in which we embrace our
biological natures and evolutionary history in a way that is more open-minded than either
fundamentalism or “ultra-Darwinism” can allow. Our first näiveté “sees man as distinct
[from the natural world],” Cunningham writes, “while the place of bare criticism sees
man as purely animal; but our second näiveté interprets man as animal and human.”
106

Darwin was by no means the first to declare that our lives are intimately related to
the lives of other creatures. “Surely we ought to show kindness and gentleness to animals
for many reasons,” said Saint Chyrsostom, “and chiefly because they are of the same
origin as ourselves” (emphasis mine).
107
As human beings, Darwin may thus helpfully
remind us, we are intimately related to the rest of the physical and organic world and so
may legitimately become the objects of a materialistic mode of scientific inquiry. But as
human beings we are uniquely made in the imago Dei and so share in the inexhaustible
mystery, freedom, and moral concern of God’s own being—dimensions of existence that
lie at the heart of what it means to be human and that will always elude the strict
Darwinian’s grasp. Failure to see or to acknowledge these dimensions of what it means
to be human, I will attempt to show in the chapters that follow, leads to disastrous
political consequences.

106
Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, p.180.
107
As cited in Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1994), p.11.

93
CHAPTER 3:
MARX AND HUMAN RIGHTS
“None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he
is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community,
withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in
accordance with his private caprice.”
—Karl Marx
1

“Lenin is said to have asked [before the October Revolution]: ‘What will happen to us if
we fail?’ To which Trotsky supposedly replied: ‘And what will happen if we succeed?’”
—Slavoj Žižek
2

When the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was at last adopted by the United
Nations in December 1948, it included major articles on economic and social rights as
“indispensable” to the “dignity and the free development” of all persons (Article 22).
Among these were: the right to work under “just and favorable conditions”; the “right to
equal pay for equal work”; the “right to form and to join trade unions”; and the “right to
just and favorable remuneration ensuring…an existence worthy of human dignity”
(Article 23).
3
Contrary to a popular view that arose during the Cold War, Mary Ann
Glendon points out, these statements were not included in the UDHR as concessions to
the Soviet Union. They were widely supported by liberal democracies at the time and
closely resembled Franklin Roosevelt’s “second Bill of Rights” proposed in his 1944
State of the Union speech.
4
During the drafting of the Declaration, however, the Soviet
Union expressed its opposition to any wording that might relegate economic rights to a

1
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed., Robert C.
Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p.43.
2
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011), p.33.
3
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” on the web at:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
4
Mary Ann Glendon, “Reflections on the UDHR,” in First Things, Vol.82 (April 1998),
pp.23-27.

94
perceived secondary status. René Cassin, a secularized French Jew and legal scholar who
had lost most of his relatives in Nazi death camps, crafted the language that finally
satisfied the Soviet delegation’s concerns by making clear that economic rights were
different in kind but not in importance from others and would need to be implemented in
ways that were sensitive to cultural and national differences (whereas, by contrast, no
cultural differences on a matter like torture could be countenanced). Charles Malik, a
devout Eastern Orthodox Christian and diplomat from Lebanon (who had studied
philosophy both at Harvard University under Alfred North Whitehead and at Freiburg
University under Martin Heidegger), skillfully guided the Declaration through more than
80 drafting meetings in an atmosphere of immense international tension (that included the
ongoing Berlin blockade). When the UDHR was at last adopted there were no dissenting
votes, although the Soviet bloc (joined by South Africa and Saudi Arabia) abstained. “In
the end,” Glendon writes, “the inclusion of social and economic rights meant less to the
Soviets than the perceived need to resist the slightest derogation from the old principle
that how a nation-state dealt with its own citizens was no concern of other nations.”
5
In
December 1948, as the UDHR was being signed, nearly three million persons were
confined in Stalin’s Gulags and prisons, including many so-called “punished” peoples—
Kalmucks, Chechens, Tartars, and others.
6

In the previous chapter I argued that within a strictly materialistic philosophical
framework there is no basis for making normative claims of any kind and especially not
claims of inviolable human dignity or rights. Nevertheless, Marx and his followers did

5
Ibid., p.25.
6
Alec Nove, “Victims of Stalinism: How Many?,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives,
eds. John Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p.272.

95
make strong normative claims. On what grounds did they do so? And what burden of
responsibility, if any, must Marx carry for the waves of collective political violence and
human rights violations that have repeatedly followed attempts to construct communist
societies?
Orthodox Marxism, both as a practical political as well as theoretical tradition, is
today all but dead. This is not to deny that Marx’s writings continue to inspire many
people around the world struggling to understand the workings of power and to expand
the spheres of human dignity and human rights. By focusing attention on structural and
economic realities that constrain freedom and lead to exploitation, misery, and
oppression, Marx provided vital tools for champions of social justice in his day and in our
own. In the academy this includes liberation theologians, critical theorists in the
Frankfurt School, and neo-Gramscian international relations scholars concerned with
resisting the perverse effects of hyper-globalization and capitalism. Nevertheless,
Andrew Levine writes, the labors of the great majority of today’s self-described Marxists,
who in good postmodern fashion freely mix and match Marx’s ideas with any number of
heterogeneous belief structures, “has little connection to the letter or spirit of Marx’s
work.”
7
Most of these thinkers are, we might say, Marxists in approximately the same
sense that Thomas Jefferson was a Christian when out of his admiration for Christ’s
ethical teachings he rewrote the New Testament excising those parts that offended his
rationalist sensibilities. In the case of Marx, however, the order of omission is exactly
reversed by his admirers: his rational critique of capitalism has been retained while the
disturbing ethical and utopian aspects of his historicism have been set aside. In order for

7
Andrew Levine, “A Future for Marxism?”, in The Handbook of Political Theory, eds.
Gerald F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (London: Sage Publications, 2004), p.75.

96
Marxism “to be able to offer any moral guidance of whatever sort as an independent
system,” Nicholas Rengger suggests, “we must believe that Marxism offers not just a, but
the, appropriate way to conceptualize the relations between the past, the present, and the
future.” Such beliefs no longer being morally or intellectually defensible, Rengger
continues, “the only way that the legacy of Marx will be able to live on in the context of
the ethics of international relations—and in terms of explaining it as well—lies in it
existing as a tributary that can feed other traditions not so generally problematic…The
point, perhaps, might be not just to understand Marxism; the point might be to change
it.”
8
In the process of mining Marx’s writings for insights that might be adapted in new
circumstances to help advance human rights objectives, though, we must not pass too
quickly over a troubling question—the question of the burden of history.
In this chapter I will trace some of the historical points of contact between Marx
and Darwin before critically examining Marx’s doctrines as a further development in the
nihilism of materialist thinking. Marx’s attempt to reground normative politics in terms
of a post-metaphysical logic of self-creation through revolutionary violence exposes the
morally ambiguous and finally tragic legacy of Marxism for human rights. My reading
of Marx will lead to an examination of the Christian humanism of Russia’s greatest
political and theological novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who provided a penetrating
analysis of what I will refer to as the genealogy of metaphysical rebellion.

8
Nicholas Rengger, “The Ethics of Marxism,” in The Oxford Handbook of International
Relations, eds. Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), p.198.

97
I. Human and Natural Technology: Marx and Darwin
For much of their lives Charles Darwin and Karl Marx lived less than 20 miles apart, the
biologist on his family’s Downe House estate in Kent south of London, the struggling
journalist and revolutionary economist first in squalid quarters on Dean Street in
London’s Soho district, later in a modest house near Primrose Hill. As far as we know
they never met although they were not unaware of each other’s work. The direction of
influence was, however, entirely one-sided. Darwin was an eminent figure in late
Victorian society whose 1882 funeral in Westminster Abbey was attended by the most
distinguished scientists, philosophers, and dignitaries of his day. His pall bearers
included two dukes, a baron, an earl, the Queen’s Printer, and the American ambassador,
along with his friends Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, and Alfred Russell Wallace (each
famous in their own right). It is not surprising that Marx closely read the Origin of
Species or that he greatly admired Darwin’s theory of natural selection and sought to link
it to his own doctrines of “scientific materialism.” By contrast, Marx’s magnum opus,
Das Kapital, was not widely recognized as a work of immense intellectual and political
importance until after his death. The book’s final two volumes were only published
posthumously. The first volume was received by economists in Germany with what
Marx bitterly described as “a conspiracy of silence.”
9
Darwin probably at most glanced
at a few pages written by Marx, who died eleven months after Darwin in exile from his
homeland and in relative obscurity and poverty. Marx’s funeral at Highgate Cemetery
was attended by only nine people. Yet while the contrast between Darwin’s fortunes and
Marx’s at the end of their lives could not in many ways have been greater, in his eulogy

9
Roberto Marchionatti, ed., Karl Marx: Critical Responses (London: Routledge, 1998),
p.2.

98
at Marx’s graveside Friedrich Engels declared that the two men should now be spoken of
together for what they had accomplished. “Just as Darwin discovered the law of
development of organic nature,” Engels said, “so Marx discovered the law of
development of human history.”
10

Despite his contempt for Malthus’s economic doctrines, which directly inspired
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Marx held Darwin’s Origin of Species
in high regard. “However grossly unfolded in the English manner,” he wrote to Engels in
December 1860, one year after its publication, “this is the book which contains the
natural-historical foundation of our outlook.”
11
In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle the
following month he wrote, “Despite all deficiencies, not only is the death-blow dealt here
for the first time to ‘teleology’ in the natural sciences, but its rational meaning is
empirically explained.”
12
In 1862, Marx along with his friend Wilhelm Liebknecht
attended a series of lectures by Thomas Huxley explaining Darwin’s ideas to a popular
audience. “We spoke of nothing else but Darwin and the enormous significance of his
scientific discoveries,” Liebknecht later recalled.
13

In the first volume of Das Kapital, published in 1867, Marx cited Darwin as an
exemplary materialist thinker whose ideas anticipated and supported his own. “Darwin
has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e. in the formation of
production for sustaining life,” he wrote. “Does not the history of the productive organs

10
Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in The Marx-Engles Reader,
p.681.
11
As cited in Valentino Gerratana, “Marx and Darwin,” New Left Review, No.82
(November-December, 1973), p.63.
12
Ibid., p.63.
13
As cited in Ralph Colp Jr., “The Contacts Between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin,”
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.35, No.2 (April-June, 1974), pp.329-330.

99
of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal
attention?”
14
Marx then proceeded to criticize religion from the materialist perspective,
calling for a history of “human technology” to compliment and expand Darwin’s ideas of
evolutionary or “natural technology”:
Every history of religion even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is
uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of
the misty creations of religion, than conversely, it is, to develop from the actual
relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations.
15

Engels similarly appealed to Darwin’s theory in his 1880 work, Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific. “Nature is the proof of dialectics,” Engels wrote. “In this connection Darwin
must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the
heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are
the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.”
16

If Marx and Engels saw in Darwin an important intellectual ally, however,
Darwin remained indifferent, at best, to Marx’s ideas. In 1873, Marx sent Darwin a copy
of the second German edition of Das Kapital. The accompanying letter has not survived
but the inscription inside the book reads: “Mr. Charles Darwin, On the part of his sincere
admirer” (followed by Marx’s address and signature). Several months later, Darwin sent
Marx a short, courteous note expressing his thanks but also pleading ignorance on the
subject of economics and showing no interest in further correspondence
17
:

14
As cited in Gerratana, “Marx and Darwin,” p.63.
15
Karl Marx, “Capital, Book One,” in Marx on Religion, ed. John C. Raines
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p.165.
16
Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, pp.696-697.
17
A second letter addressed simply “Dear Sir” and long assumed to have been from
Darwin to Marx was almost certainly a letter from Darwin to Edward Aveling, who
became the lover of Marx’s daughter Eleanor after Marx’s death and most likely placed
Darwin’s letter to him together with Darwin’s earlier letter to Marx in the same file. See

100
Dear Sir, I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your
great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by
understanding more of the deep & important subject of political Economy.
Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both Earnestly desire
the extension of Knowledge, & this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness
of Mankind. I remain Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, Charles Darwin.
18

Darwin did not read German well but if he grasped anything of Marx’s political
project, it is unlikely that he would have been eager to provide his endorsement of Marx’s
work. One reason was deeply personal. Darwin did not relish confrontation with
theologians or clerics and declined to enter into public debates about the theological
implications of his ideas, largely out of respect for his wife Emma, who was a devout
believer and was deeply distressed by her husband’s gradual loss of faith.
19
Marx, by
contrast, had no such reticence. In addition, Darwin was a respectable Victorian
gentleman with liberal but not revolutionary political views. In the 1870s, a fierce
polemical battle was waged in Germany between three camps: radical socialists, who

Ralph Colp Jr., “The Myth of the Darwin-Marx Letter,” History of Political Economy,
Vol.14, No.4 (1982).
18
As cited in Colp, “The Contacts Between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin,” p.334.
19
Darwin attended Cambridge with the goal of becoming an Anglican clergyman and
was still a devout theist at the time of his famous voyage to the Galapagos Islands.
“Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox,” he later recalled, “and I remember
being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for
quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some moral point.” The evidences of
geology and the problems of both animal and human suffering, including the death of his
daughter Annie at the age of eleven from scarlet fever, finally led Darwin, however, to a
tormented and essentially agnostic religious outlook. If there was any God she was a
remote and detached First Cause of logical necessity, not the personal and loving Creator
God of traditional Christian teaching. In an 1879 letter to James Fordyce, Darwin wrote:
“What my own views may be is a question of no consequence to anyone but myself. But,
as you asked, I may state that my judgment often fluctuates…In my most extreme
fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I
think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an
Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” As cited in Denis
O. Lamoureux, “Theological Insights from Charles Darwin,” in Religion and the
Challenges of Science, eds. William Sweet and Richard Feist (Hampshire: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2007), pp.41, 47.

101
claimed Darwin for their cause and even favored his writings above those of the
frequently impenetrable Marx
20
; anti-Darwinians led by the anthropologist Rudolph
Virchow, who sought to dismiss natural selection by warning that it led directly to
socialism; and pro-Darwinian anti-socialists with elitist political leanings represented by
the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who declared that Darwinism was in fact “the best antidote
to the absurd egalitarian theses of the socialists.”
21
Darwin himself commented in 1879
on this dispute with the following dismissal: “What a foolish idea seems to prevail in
Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural
Selection.”
22

Socialists found it increasingly necessary over time to emphasize the
discontinuities as much as the continuities between Darwinian and Marxian theory. In
1869, Marx described the theory of natural selection as an unflinching depiction of the
centrality of conflict to human no less than animal life. “Darwin,” he wrote, “was led to
discover the struggle for life as the dominating law of animal and plant life, moved by the
struggle for life in English society—the war of all against all, bellum omnium contra
omnes.”
23
But what would it mean for Marx’s radical egalitarianism if the ultimate “law”
of human no less than animal life proved in its very essence to be nothing more than a
Hobbesian “war of all against all”? Would this not essentialize and primordialize
competitive rivalry and inequality in ways that cast grave doubts on the entire socialist

20
Diane Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics,” The Cambridge Companion to
Darwin, eds. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p.232.
21
As cited in Gerratana, “Marx and Darwin,” p.81.
22
Ibid., p.81.
23
Enrique M. Urena, “Marx and Darwin,” History of Political Economy, Vol.9, No.4
(1977), pp.552-553.

102
project? Modern industrialism, Engels asserted, “is the Darwinian struggle of the
individual for existence transferred from Nature to society with intensified
violence.”
24
But was this transfer of the Darwinian struggle from “nature” to “society”
itself natural in Marxian theory? Or was it an unnatural departure from the stream of
biological evolution? Within a strictly materialistic frame, what could the distinction
between the “natural” and “unnatural” even mean?
In his 1909 work, Marxism and Darwinism, Dutch astronomer and Marxian
theorist Anton Pannekoek—responding to the anti-egalitarian social Darwinism of
Haeckel and Herbert Spenser—declared that in the human world, unlike the animal
world, competitive struggle “does not bring forth the best and most qualified, but
destroys many strong and healthy ones because of their poverty, while those that are rich,
even if weak and sick, survive.”
25
Social Darwinism, according to Pannekoek, was in
this sense actually anti-Darwinian insofar as capitalist competition thwarted biological
fitness and suppressed those animal traits of sociability and altruism that best promoted
the well-being of the species. Further, although Marxism and Darwinism “supplement
each other,” he argued, it was not possible to “carry the theory of one domain into that of
the other, where different laws are applicable.”
26
Social systems needed to be treated
according to social laws rather than in a crudely reductive biological way in the manner
of British and German imperialists, militarists, or capitalists.
There is much insight in Pannekoek’s critique of Haeckel, Spencer, and others
who sought to press Darwin’s theory into the service of anti-egalitarian, aristocratic

24
Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” p.706.
25
Anton Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism, trans. Nathan Weiser (Chicago: Charles
H. Kerr & Company, 1912), p.33.
26
Ibid., p.33

103
politics. However, I sought to show in the previous chapter, natural selection was
incapable of providing guidance of any kind in this essentially moral dispute. Darwinism
could be pressed into the service of communism, capitalism, imperialism, racism,
abolitionism, democracy, totalitarianism, egalitarianism, or anti-egalitarianism. What it
could not do was provide normative resources to judge between such conflicting political
ideologies. The theory of evolution by natural selection lacked the philosophical depths
required to resist its own misappropriations. At the same time, Marx was a thoroughly
consistent Darwinian in his attempts to face traditional problems of right and wrong in a
radically materialistic way—namely, by abandoning the very ideas of right and wrong,
good and evil, human rights and human dignity, as they had previously been understood
in Western philosophical and religious traditions.

II. The Marxian Dilemma: History as Slaughter-Bench
My own first serious exposure to Marxian theory came while pursuing graduate studies at
the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where virtually all of
my professors were deeply committed Marxian scholars. I later witnessed firsthand
Marx’s continued importance for social movements in developing regions of the world
while pursuing research on the Shining Path insurgency in Peru. During a national strike
I observed in 2007 led by labor unions, women’s groups, student organizations,
campesino associations, and others, Marxian slogans and imagery were everywhere on
display, not dampened by Shining Path atrocities committed in Marx’s name during the
1980s through the mid-1990s. Many of these individuals no doubt shared Terry
Eagleton’s view that no matter the violence that has historically been enacted in Marx’s

104
name, Marxism properly understood bears no direct responsibility for such tragic
outcomes. “Marx himself was a critic of rigid dogma, military terror, political
suppression, and arbitrary state power,” Eagleton writes:
He believed that political representatives should be accountable to their electors,
and castigated the German Social Democrats of his day for their statist politics.
He insisted on free speech and civil liberties, was horrified by the forced creation
of an urban proletariat (in his case England rather than Russia) and held that
common ownership of the countryside should be a voluntary rather than coercive
process.
27

Eagleton’s reading of Marx as a champion of human rights cannot be easily
reconciled, however, with many of Marx’s declarations. The trouble arises not in Marx’s
perceptive analysis and critique of the logic of capitalism but rather in the materialist
ontology and anthropology that underlies his normative political prescriptions to very real
problems of economic inequality, exploitation, poverty, and injustice. Marx’s ethics and
his relationship to the question of human rights must be understood in the light of that
which he sought to overcome. Politically this meant class divisions. Philosophically this
meant religious belief.
In his 1845 Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx lays the foundation of his materialist
anthropology and conception of history. Questions about human nature, he declares, can
only be answered in terms of “the ensemble of the social relations” by which humans are
formed. Implicit throughout the essay is a rejection of both the classical view of man as
homo animal rationale, and the biblical view of humanity as created in the image of God.
“All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human
practice and in the comprehension of this practice,” Marx declares.
28
Any notion of a

27
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p.21.
28
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach (1845),” in The Marx-Engels Reader, p.145.

105
soul or mind that is not fully reducible to “species life” is thus rejected a priori in Marx’s
theory. Truth, it follows for Marx, cannot be a logical or objective category based upon
reason. It is, rather, the historically contingent product of materially grounded social
relationships. “Man must prove truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his
thinking in practice,” he asserts, otherwise his thinking is “purely scholastic.”
Philosophers had long sought to interpret the world, but for Marx “the point is to change
it.” Once “truth” is seen for what it is, he declared—relative, plastic, philosophically
groundless—all social mores, values and structures could be unraveled, altered, and
finally destroyed. “[A]fter the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy
family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.”
29

At its best, religion was the pathetic though understandable “sigh of the oppressed
creature.”
30
The idea of the Heavenly Kingdom arose naturally among the workers as an
illusory consolation amid their ongoing, material exploitation by the owners of capital.
At its worst, though, religion was itself the means of that oppression, a powerful tool by
which the bourgeoisie dampened revolutionary impulses and kept the proletariat in their
thrall. Human progress, according to Marx, therefore required a radical critique of all
religious institutions and ideas—including notions of the inviolable sanctity or dignity of
individual persons—as “ghostly” projections of “inverted consciousness.”
31
Authentic
human consciousness, by contrast, began with the realization that moral principles and
human rights are dispensable scaffolding erected in support of “superstructure”—that

29
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach (1845),” in The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C. J.
Arthur (New York: International Publishers Company, 1970), p.122.
30
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right:
Introduction (1844),” in Karl Marx: Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph O’Malley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.115.
31
Ibid., p.115.

106
great façade of justifications which had accreted and evolved over time to mask unequal
power relations with an economic base. After the communist society was fully realized,
Marx assumed, whatever remained of the dubious superstructure of religion and
bourgeois morality would vanish before the clear light of the materialist conception of
history. Since “the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this
defect must be sought in the nature of the state itself,” he asserted. “We do not turn
secular questions into theological questions; we turn theological questions into secular
ones.”
32

Marx’s epistemological views are therefore closely linked with his politics and his
ethics; notions of morality and goodness, along with truth itself, are no longer seen as
“real” categories but as socially imposed constraints on human freedom that must be
overcome through processes of conflictive struggle. To enter on the path of revolutionary
struggle is the only sure sign that one is a free human being, that one has at least attained
mental even if not yet full political emancipation.
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing
and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed
upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential
to educate the educated himself. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at
dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be
conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
33

Already the internal contradiction is clear; for to what ends should the “superior”
part of society exercise their freedom as social revolutionaries if not precisely those
objective moral ends—including greater justice as measured by a clear conception of
human dignity and human rights—cast aside as so much intellectual deadweight in

32
Marx, “On the Jewish Question (1844),” in The Marx-Engles Reader, p.31.
33
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach (1845),” in The Marx-Engels Reader, p.144.

107
Marx’s materialist ontology? Yet Marx believed he had discovered the laws governing
human behavior, and that these laws would prove a better guide to action than outmoded
concepts of truth, beauty, or goodness. His purpose in writing the Critique of the Gotha
Programme, he declared, had been “to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one
hand to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some
meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the
other, the realistic outlook…by means of ideological nonsense about rights and other
trash so common among the democrats and among the French socialists.”
34

Marx himself, we must nevertheless observe, did not hesitate to use the old ideals
to rally his followers, no matter how devoid of meaning these formulations were in his
own mind. In his address to the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, he
urged the proletarians to “vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to
govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of
nations.” The Association, he declared, “will acknowledge truth, justice, and morality, as
the basis of their conduct towards each other, and towards all men, without regard to
colour, creed, or nationality.”
35
It would be difficult to explain these words had not Marx
explained them himself in a letter to Engels. He had not spoken sincerely, he confessed,
but opportunistically, as a way of channeling the energies of the masses. “I was obliged,”
he wrote, “to insert two phrases about ‘duty’ and ‘right’…‘truth, morality and justice’ but
these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm…[They are] only a means of

34
Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875),” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed.
David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.615.
35
Marx, “Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s
Association (1864),” in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (New York:
Penguin Books, 1983), pp.365-366.

108
making them take shape as ‘they’, as a revolutionary united mass.”
36
We therefore find
in Marx’s politics an essentially consequentialist ethic at work, a willingness to use
whatever means necessary—including even the very categories of bourgeois morality he
sought to undermine—to achieve desired ends. We also detect a curious dynamic of
power just beneath the surface: Marx vigorously unmasks the “superstructure” used by
the bourgeoisie to control the working class, but then himself puts forward, with
apologies to Engels, a new superstructure to likewise control the masses—an ideology
and rhetoric of liberation; propagandistic slogans drawn from the vocabulary of his
enemies for those too simple to understand the more advanced lessons of materialism;
noble lies for the greater good.
It may be, though, that Marx fell back on the old language of morality and virtue
not merely cynically or as a politically expedient tool as he claimed to Engels, but from a
more dire necessity: the fact that the ideal of the Communist Society and the critique of
capitalism could have no coherent meaning, could not even be conceived, apart from the
very realm of values historicism was said to have supplanted and which Marx at the same
time declared his revolutionary program could not in any way be held accountable to.
In his address to the Communist League in 1850, Marx’s consequentialist outlook
assumed a darker cast. Putatively vacuous yet still somehow potent language about “the
simple laws of morality” was not the only tool Marx was prepared to use to advance the
worker’s paradise. In the speech, Marx advised the proletariat, on the seeming eve of
revolution, to make common cause with the social democrats in Germany in order to
overthrow the government, but to then turn on these allies and seek their destruction as

36
As cited in Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), pp.6-7.

109
well. The party must make sure the proletarians are heavily armed, Marx declared, so
that they would be in a position to “resolutely and terroristically” confront the forces of
“reaction”—their former allies. At the point of victory, “Far from opposing so-called
excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings with
hateful recollections, such instances must not only be tolerated but the leadership of them
taken in hand.”
37
Then, with the reigns of control in their hands, the revolutionaries
should strive “for the most determined centralization of power in the hands of the state
authority,” not being led astray “by democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of
self-government, etc…[I]n Germany today it is the task of the really revolutionary party
to carry through the strictest centralization.”
38

The violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie was justified, Marx thought, on the
grounds that its very existence as a class led to the exploitation of the workers. But Marx
also saw that the bourgeoisie as people were generally free from blame in what they did;
under capitalism, the owners of capital have no choice but to exploit. Hence, Jeffrey
Vogel writes, the average member of the bourgeoisie who must suffer the lessons of
Marxist revolutionary praxis “can never know why they are to be harmed in the name of
human development…They must make the supreme sacrifice without ever knowing
why.”
39
Vogel calls this role of “involuntary supreme sacrifice” in Marxian theory
“Marx’s tragic understanding of history,” and argues that it does not “undermine Marx’s
basic optimism about human potential” or compromise his “grand vision of human

37
Marx, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850),” in The
Marx-Engels Reader, p.507.
38
Ibid., pp.509-510.
39
Jeffrey Vogel, “The Tragedy of History,” New Left Review, I/220 (November-
December, 1996), p.47.

110
progress and human dignity.”
40
Violent struggle is essential at each stage of human
development, and in the final stages in particular, so we must learn to see all historical
progress through the lens of evolutionary class struggle—and, if I read Vogel correctly,
to learn to accept violence, even at times against the innocent, for the sake of the grander
vision.
Marx’s tragic view of history leads, however, to a peculiar dilemma for Marx and
many of his followers: the political quandary and the sense of moral ambiguity that arise
from the fact that not only revolutionary struggle but imperialism, colonialism, and
capitalism, according to Marx’s writings, are all inexorably advancing the cause of
socialism by ironically producing the bourgeoisie’s own grave-diggers. The Marxian
Dilemma is most evident in Marx’s early writings about British colonialism in India,
which on the one hand he deplored but on the other embraced as a matter of historical
necessity. The misery inflicted by England on Hindustan, he wrote, was “of an infinitely
more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before”; for unlike previous
invasions, famines and conquests, British capitalism had “broken down the entire
framework of Indian society.” And yet:
…sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness…we must not forget that
these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had
always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the
human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool
of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur
and historical energies.
41

England “was actuated only by the vilest interests,” but this “is not the question.”
For “Has [the bourgeoisie] ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and

40
Ibid., pp.60-61.
41
Marx, “The British Rule in India (1853),” in The Marx-Engels Reader, p.655.

111
peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?”
42
What mattered, then,
was this alone: “can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the
social state of Asia?” If not, Marx declared, “whatever may have been the crimes of
England she was the unconscious tool of history,” unwittingly sowing the seeds of
revolution. “[W]hatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world
may have for our personal feelings,” we are wise to embrace the wisdom of Goethe:
“Should this torture cause us anguish since it increases our pleasure?”
43

Because Marx’s consequentialism is so heavily oriented toward the vaguely
defined good of a not-yet-existing society, Steven Lukes observes, it is markedly less
sensitive than other forms of utilitarianism to the welfare of humans in the present. John
Mill and Jeremy Bentham included in their calculations of the greatest good the goods of
actual people in the here and now. Marxian thought, however, “holds that such
constraints are likely to be class deceptions, lying in ambush to trap the unwary.”
44
On
the path of perpetual revolution, whether to exercise restraint or to fan violence to greater
levels of excess is no longer a moral question but a tactical one to be determined
“through calm and cold-blooded assessment of circumstance and unconcealed distrust” of
class rivals.
45
Marx’s entire political and ethical orientation, then, must finally be seen in
terms of his teleological interpretation of history. Like the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment philosophes, he embraces the doctrine of Progress—an unexamined faith

42
Ibid., p.656.
43
Ibid., p.336.
44
Lukes, Marxism and Morality, p.148.
45
Marx, “Address to the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850),” in The
Marx-Engels Reader, p.252.

112
in “the unfolding excellence of fact.”
46
Reason and science would progressively banish
all irrational superstitions, ushering in a harmonious city of freedom and plenty for all.
Marx’s view of history is more complicated and more profound than that of the
philosophes and their modernist heirs because he has a deeper awareness of what in
biblical language was referred to as “chaos,” the darkness of civilization in a “fallen”
world.
47
Things aren’t as they should be. There is injustice, exploitation, and oppression
in the social order. What is more, this injustice is not accidental but intrinsic and
structural. Nevertheless, Marx’s provisional pessimism when he surveys present realities
is overcome by his confidence that injustice will not last forever; that history is moving
ineluctably toward a new situation in which everyone will give according to their ability
and take according to their need; and that this certainty in the future somehow validates a
course of revolutionary action in the present.
In all of these declarations about the necessity of violence for historical progress
Marx closely follows ideas set forth by Hegel in his 1822 lectures posthumously
published under the title The Philosophy of History. Hegel described history as the
unfolding of “the consciousness of freedom” through three stages corresponding to three
geographical-cultural regions: the “Oriental” East in which only one individual—the
absolute despot—was aware of his freedom; classical Greece and Rome in which some—
the aristocracy—were free; and modern Europe, starting with Christian Germany, in
which all are finally able to grasp their essential freedom under conditions of democratic

46
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p.8.
47
Reinhold Neibuhr, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith,” in The Essential
Reinhold Neibuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986), pp.10-12.

113
rule. The process or “means” by which human consciousness of freedom has unfolded,
Hegel writes, has involved such staggering human misery and bloodshed we are
compelled to see “History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the
wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized.”
48

Nevertheless, Hegel urges us to resist the temptation to fatalism and despair and
to see the historical landscape in its entirety from the teleological perspective of
“Universal History.” The “History of the World is not the theatre of happiness,” he
writes. “Periods of happiness are blank pages in it” that must generate their
“antithesis”—periods of conflict, terror, and war.
49
Yet violence has a dynamic and
creative role to play in human affairs; for violence is what makes periods of peace,
stability, and progress possible in their turn. Conflict is the engine, then, that ultimately
allows humans to progress and to transcend oppression and slavery. Hegel’s term for the
revolutionaries who enact regimes of creative violence at pivotal (what the ancient
Greeks would have called kairos) moments in history was “World-Historical
Individuals.” What distinguishes these “Heroes” of the “World Spirit”—figures such as
Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon—is that they all defied conventional morality
and laws to impose their own passionate wills for domination upon others, forging new
social and political systems in the process. The World-Historical Individual might act,
then, in ways that are “obnoxious to moral reprehension,” Hegel declares. “But so
mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an

48
Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Prometheus
Books, 1991), p.21.
49
Ibid., pp.26-27.

114
object in its path.”
50
Yet it would be a mistake to think of history as being finally
determined by these few passionate and visionary individuals; for the “great men” of
history inevitably set in motion chains of events beyond their control. They also
invariably suffer terrible defeats and often death as a result of their actions. This, in
Hegel’s words, is the “cunning of reason.” In the end, the eros of the World-Historical
Individual is unwittingly still in the service of a rationality that is higher than any person,
namely, the Spirit or logos of history itself that is irresistibly drawing all of humanity
toward consciousness of freedom.

III. Excursus on Marx’s Metaphysics and the Hebrew Prophets
Although Hegel was the most immediate inspiration for Marx’s ideas about the
dialectical necessity of violence for historical progress, Marx’s optimism in the final
outcome of history and his passionate commitment to the communist ideal must be traced
much further back. Their wellspring lies in the moral and political thought of classical
Judaism and early Christianity, revived in the sixteenth century in certain strands of
radical Anabaptist thought. Marx’s hostility toward religion and toward Christianity in
particular sprang not merely from his analysis of religious devotion as a mask for
bourgeois hypocrisy. It emerged, rather, from a more complex, personal, and
problematic relationship with the categories of religious thought. The passion and often
venom of Marx’s critique of religion betrays a peculiar form of rivalry: the resentment of
indebtedness. Marx was not merely the descendent of great Eastern European rabbis and
Talmudic scholars. He was, in a real sense, the intellectual heir of a deeply biblical

50
Ibid., p.32.

115
vision. In the economy of belief, Marxism functioned from its earliest beginnings as a
distinct brand of messianism, as an immanentized socio-political eschatology intent upon
redeeming the world. The 1844 manuscripts, George Steiner writes, are steeped in the
very language of messianic promise. “Even where it proclaims itself to be atheist, the
socialism of Marx, of Trotsky, of Ernst Bloch, is directly rooted in messianic
eschatology. Nothing is more religious, nothing is closer to the ecstatic rage for justice in
the prophets, than the socialist vision of the destruction of the bourgeois Gomorrah and
the creation of a new, clean city for man.”
51
The base of Marxian history is the
superstructure of a Jewish dream.
If Marx attacked the organized religion of his day as an opiate of the masses, the
prophet Amos did so no less relentlessly thousands of years earlier. One of the most
striking facts of the Hebrew Bible in contrast to other sacred texts is its profoundly
antireligious character. In the time of Amos, Israel had reached its zenith in material
prosperity and military power. But according to the prophet, Israel’s burnt offerings, its
lavish displays of ritual piety officiated by sycophantic priests in the service of corrupt
monarchs, were utterly repulsive in the eyes of God. What was the reason for Amos’s
repudiation of the religious authorities and devout temple-goers? Economic injustice.
Callousness to human suffering. Oppression of the poor. Israel would ultimately reap
what it sowed, Amos declared, for in the moral economy of God’s sovereign rule over
history, divine wrath was being stored up for those who “sell the righteous for silver, And
the needy for a pair of shoes—They that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the
earth, And turn aside the way of the afflicted” (Amos 2: 6-7).

51
Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p.43.

116
Amos’s indictment of the nations surrounding Israel was no less severe. He
condemned them, Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in his classic study of the Hebrew
prophets, “for international crimes, although there was no law in existence governing
international relations”:
Amos…presupposes the conception of a law which was not embodied in a
contract, the conception of right and wrong which precedes every contract, since
all contracts derive their validity from it. Here a conception of law was expressed
which was binding for all men, though it was not formally proclaimed.
52

By the time of the prophet Isaiah, Israel found itself besieged by the armies of its
neighbors. King Ahaz—acting against the pleadings of Isaiah—formed a strategic
military alliance with the brutal empires of Assyria and Egypt. Jerusalem rejoiced at
Ahaz’s political skill, resuming business as usual. But Isaiah walked about the city
barely clothed like a slave to dramatize to the people their actual moral condition—their
slave morality—and soon literal fate (Isaiah 20). Heschel is once more an instructive
guide:
Isaiah’s utter distrust of worldly power, his disgust for the military boots, for
‘every garment rolled in blood’…made it impossible for him to approve of any
military alliance…Politics is based on the power of the sword. But Isaiah was
waiting for the day when nations ‘shall beat their swords into plowshares and
their spears into pruning hooks.’ Alliances involve preparation for war, but Isaiah
was horrified by the brutalities and carnage which war entails…The king is astute,
the priests are proud, and the market place is busy. Placid, happy, even gay, the
people pursue their work and worship in their own way, and life is fair. Then
again appears a prophet, hurling bitter words from the depth of a divine anguish.
People buy, sell, celebrate, rejoice, but Isaiah is consumed with distress. He
cannot bear the sight of a people’s normal crimes: exploitation of the poor,
worship of the gods…What is the issue that haunts the prophet’s soul? It is not a
question, but a bitter exclamation: How marvelous is the world that God has
created! And how horrible is the world that man has made!
53

52
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial Classis, 1962), p.38.
53
Ibid., pp.88,

117
Marx was not the first, then, to proclaim that the objectification of human
relations leads to the alienation of persons from each other and from nature. The biblical
word for what Marx called “commodity fetishizing”—the mystification and reification of
material objects—was idolatry. Along with Amos and Isaiah numerous other prophetic
voices could be added: Jeremiah, Hezekiah, Ezekial, Micah, Hosea—all spoke against
injustice, oppression, and exploitation in a searing poetic discourse that sought to convey
the divine anguish at the human capacity for greed and violence. Rather than attempting
to neutralize what Marx has to say about religion, Merald Westphal therefore charges him
with plagiarism. “His critique of capitalism is, in essence, the biblical concern for the
widows and orphans, stripped of its theological foundation and applied to the condition of
modernity.”
54
The Jewish faith is unprecedented among world religions for having given
the subversive texts of the prophets such a prominent place in its scriptures, to the point
that “false prophet” in biblical thinking is virtually synonymous with “one who supports
the rulers and the priests.” If religion is a poison, we might say, the Hebrew Bible
contains within itself the unique properties of a potent anti-venom.
In his confrontations with the Pharisees in the New Testament, Christ places
himself in this long tradition of the Hebrew prophets, deploying a hermeneutic of radical
suspicion to unmask the power motives of the priestly guardians of respectable religion.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, and
for a pretense you make long prayers…Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of
the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness…you, too, outwardly appear righteous to

54
Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1998), p.203.

118
men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness…you are sons of those who
murdered the prophets” (Matthew 23:14-33).
These texts have reverberated throughout history in the lives of a great cloud of
witnesses that includes such champions of human rights and social justice as Saint
Francis of Assisi (who began his religious vocation by publicly stripping naked in protest
against the wealth accumulation of his own father, a cloth merchant; who was jailed by
the pope for denouncing the Vatican’s greed and venality; and who embarked on a
perilous peace mission to the Middle East to end the Crusades, resulting in his
befriending the Sultan of Egypt and being accused by his co-religionists of being a
heretic and traitor); Bartolomé de las Casas (who led perhaps the world’s first human
rights campaign in history to stop an ongoing genocide during Spain’s conquest of the
Americas, documenting the atrocities he had witnessed and siding with the Indians in
their resistance to his own countrymen), William Lloyd Garrison (the radical abolitionist
and devout evangelical who did perhaps more than any other person to force the slavery
issue into public consciousness in the face of angry lynch mobs, going so far as to
publicly burn the U.S. Constitution to protest its pro-slavery compromises); Dorothy Day
(the journalist, anarchist, and social activist who founded the Catholic Workers
Movement to fight for the rights of the poor based upon the “third way” Catholic
economic philosophy of distributism); Martin Luther King Jr. (whose prophetic
indictment of American militarism and economic life from the pulpit is conveniently
forgotten by the politicians who today lay wreaths at his memorials); and Oscar Romero
(the archbishop of El Salvador whose community organizing and sermons against the

119
ruling oligarchs in the name of human rights and justice for the poor led to his being
assassinated by a death squad at the alter as he led in the celebration of the Mass).
Marx’s lack of originality in the sphere of moral imagination is evident in the
words of the radical reformer Hans Hergot, writing around the year 1527. What Hergot
took from his reading of Scripture was that history was advancing through clearly marked
stages that would soon culminate in a complete transformation of the material and
economic relationships of feudal society. God’s reign over history would be seen in the
emergence of “a new way of life in which no one will say, ‘That is mine’”:
All resources—such as woods, water, meadows, etc.—will be used in
common…Our obedience to spiritual and temporal lords will find an end. Also,
the servants of the princes and lords will abandon their service. And if anyone
thinks that he can maintain his social estate, it will be in vain…desires for selfish
gain will be done away with. And a longing for the common good will prevail.”
55

We might be tempted, then, to place Marx alongside Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah
as another prophetic Jewish thinker without much further consideration. To do so,
however, would be to deny Marx the integrity of his rebellion against the prophets. Any
claiming of Marx’s ideas by religious believers must not smooth over the fact that Marx
himself would vigorously resist our appropriations. Prophetic literature strives to awaken
from mental and moral complacency those afflicted by what Walter Brueggeman calls
“royal consciousness”—the soul-crushing condition that may be found wherever
managed realities are enthroned or “essentialized” by those in power through deadening
language rules that mask the actual workings of the empire. But in the inspired dialectics
of the Hebrew prophets in contrast to Marx, “there is no freedom of God without the

55
Hans Hergot, “On the New Transformation of the Christian Life,” in The Radical
Reformation, ed. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
pp.210-213.

120
politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion
without a religion of the freedom of God.”
56

In the Preface to his doctoral dissertation, Marx hailed Prometheus as the world’s
greatest saint and martyr for having defied the gods on behalf of man. “The proclamation
of Prometheus…‘in a word, I detest all the Gods’… is her own profession, her own
slogan against all gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man’s self-
consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.”
57
There is an
underlying continuity, Eric Voegelin pointed out, between Marxism and the ancient
“heresy” of Gnosticism. Both perceive the world as a place of unrelieved alienation
rather than the fallen but still good work of God’s creation; both aim at the destruction of
the old world and passage into the new; and both teach that humans must carry out this
work of salvation by and for themselves.
58
Marxism, as a form of secular utopianism, is
thus “twice removed from original Christian doctrine,” writes Tzvetan Todorov.
59
It not
only immanentizes salvation similar to certain medieval millenarian sects which sought
to establish the Heavenly Kingdom on earth by means of violence. It promises that the
proletariat will soon transcend nature, faith, and the moral law itself by undergoing the
convulsions of class warfare, by passing through the doorway of revolutionary social
upheaval. What happens to human rights both in theory and in practice once we embark
upon this radically materialist path?

56
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001),
p.9.
57
Marx, “Doctoral Thesis: Preface (1841),” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p.17.
58
Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery Gateway 1968),
pp.9-11, 53; on Marxism as a form of Gnostic thinking see also Luciano Pellicani,
Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism (London: Praeger, 2003),
pp.149-164.
59
Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p.19.

121

IV. The Undefinable Menace: Prometheanism in Theory and in Practice
Many Marxian scholars insist that Marx’s ideas can no more be linked with the great
human disasters that have gone under his name than the sayings of Jesus can be blamed
for the Spanish Inquisition. Yet an incongruous fact is lost in this juxtaposition: under
Lenin and Stalin, the works of Marx were widely disseminated, translated, taught, read,
analyzed, memorized, and declaimed at all levels of society. During the Middle Ages, by
contrast, ecclesiastical authorities deemed it essential that the Gospels not be translated
into any vernacular language which could actually be understood by a large number of
people. Reformers who secretly undertook the work of translation, such as William
Tyndale and Thomas Matthew, were burned at the stake. It is not difficult, in other
words, to see the great subversion and derivation of Christianity under popes and
emperors from the teachings of the faith’s Founder.
60
The derivation from Marx to Lenin
is less clear. Is there a derivation? Or did Bolshevism follow logically, though perhaps
not inevitably, from key doctrines in Marx’s writings, however appalled Marx might have
been by the results? “There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham,”
wrote Heschel. “There are only witnesses.”
61
If it is true that some truths cannot be
known in abstract analytical categories alone but must be grasped existentially who, we
might ask, are the witnesses of the Marxian materialist story?
To even raise such a question already assumes much that Marx appears to deny,
namely, that oppression can result not only from class relations but from beliefs, and that

60
See, for example, Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1986).
61
Heschel, The Prophets, p.27.

122
individual human agency and moral choices matter. “Beliefs were central to what
happened under Stalin,” writes Jonathan Glover. “Beliefs were invoked to deaden human
responses. Beliefs about morality being bourgeois eroded the sense of moral identity,
easing the process of ‘turning into wood’…There was an obliviousness to the importance
of self-respect and of autonomy, and to the variety of different conceptions of the good
life.”
62
Alexander Solzhenitsyn similarly held that the gulag archipelago—that vast chain
of arctic work camps in which an estimated 60 million people died in as many years—
had its roots primarily in thoughts. “The theoretical justification could not have been
formulated with such conviction in the haste of those years had it not had its beginnings
in the past century.” Marx “had never in his life taken a pick in hand…he didn’t even
know how firewood was split,” but he declared that productive labor, and labor alone,
would elevate offenders. “And for his followers everything now fell into place. To
compel a prisoner to labor every day…was humane and would lead to his correction. On
the contrary…to give him a chance to read books, write, think, and argue during these
years meant to treat him ‘like cattle.’”
63
While formally embracing the phraseology of
human rights, Leszek Kolakowski wrote, under the Soviet system the chief human right
was the right to work. “What they fail to add is that this has been achieved by a system
of compulsory labor...Thus the supreme freedom are materialized in the form of
slavery.”
64

62
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1999), pp.265, 313.
63
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-56 (London: Harvill Press,
1985), p.215.
64
Leszek Kolakowski, “Marxism and Human Rights,” in Daedalus, Vol.112, No.4 (Fall
1983), p.90.

123
For Polish dissident poet Czeslaw Milosz, the distinguishing fact of life in the
“people’s democracies” was not their physical but rather their psychic depravation, the
“dreadful sadness,” “the undefinable menace of total rationalism”:
To forestall doubt, the Party fights any tendency to delve into the depths of human
being, especially in literature and art. Whoever reflects on ‘man’ in general, on
his inner needs and longings, is accused of bourgeois sentimentality. Nothing
must ever go beyond the description of man’s behavior as a member of a social
group. This is necessary because the Party, treating man as the by-product of
social forces, believes that he becomes the type of being he pictures himself to be.
He is a social monkey. What is not expressed does not exist.
65

In his essay On The Jewish Question in 1844, Marx declared that the individual
would only become free by being made into an “abstract citizen,” “a species-being in his
everyday life.”
66
The criticism of religion, he wrote elsewhere that year, “is the premise
of all criticism”—it begins with the realization that “human being has attained no true
actuality.”
67
What Marx meant by “species-being” must not be confused with the idea of
a universal human nature as in classical philosophy and biblical thinking. Rather, Marx
insisted, humans are nothing more than the sum of their contingent social and material
relations. In Marx’s “theoretical anti-humanism,” Louis Althussar wrote with approval,
“the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes.”
68
But if there are no
human beings, only species-beings, the Party deduced, to whom or what could a human
right possibly attach? “When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are
abstracting, in doing so, from man and nature,” Marx declared in his 1844 manuscripts.
“Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question”:

65
Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (London: Penguin Books 1953), p.215.
66
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right,” in Karl Marx:
Early Writings, p.114.
67
Marx, “On the Jewish Question (1844),” in Karl Marx: Early Political Writings, p.57.
68
Louis Althussar, “Marxism and Humanism,” in Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington
(New York: Palgrave, 2000), p.32.

124
Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from
the existence of nature and man has no meaning…[S]ince for the socialist man the
entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through
human labor, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man, he has the visible,
irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming-to-
be…[T]he question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man—a
question which implies the admission of the inessentiality of nature and of man—
has become impossible in practice.
69

For the fully consistent materialist, critical inquiry into basic questions about
reality is thus forbidden by Marx with a stern warning: “Don’t think, don’t ask me.” To
refute the existence of God might be necessary at a certain stage of history—but the final
goal, according to Marx, is to transcend even atheism itself, which in the process of
denying God always runs the risk of rekindling the ashes of faith by stirring memories of
the older search for the origins and calling of humankind. The materialist enterprise,
Voegelin concludes, rests upon an “intellectual swindle.”
70
The swindle is that questions
of momentous importance are summarily dismissed as idle and irrelevant for the analysis
of present realities, with the promise that in the future all such inquiries will be utterly
silenced…will in fact be rendered literally unthinkable (a theme that may also be detected
in Nietzsche; the Übermenschen “are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there
are”
71
). So what are the possible consequences of suppressing or evading these
questions? There is a striking similarity of language, Voegelin noted, between Marx’s
declaration that questions of human origins and nature are now “impossible in practice”
and the declaration of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the extermination camp in

69
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New
York: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp.112-113.
70
Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, pp.22ff; see also Ellis Sandoz, Political
Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2000),
pp.113-116.
71
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufman (New York: The Modern Library, 1967), p.522.

125
Auschwitz, that refusal to obey orders was simply unthinkable. “At that time I did not
indulge in deliberation,” Höss testified when asked why he had not disobeyed the
command to organize mass executions. “I had received the order, and I had to carry it
out…I do not believe that even one of the thousands of SS leaders could have permitted
such a thought to occur to him. Something like that was just completely impossible.”
72

For socialist/Marxian man and national-socialist man alike, the task of human self-
creation and mastery over nature (which Marx describes as a deliverance from the
oppressive burden of living “by the grace of another”
73
) requires the removal of any
questioning that might present obstacles to a truly dynamic and effective program of
social engineering. Action, not thought, is now the critical task.
The act of criticism, Marx asserted in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of the Right,” must be removed from the demands of reason and made into a
matter of pure political praxis. In order for theory to be truly “radical,” he declared, it
must now demonstrate its truths “ad hominem.”
74
German society was “beneath all
criticism” yet it remained “an object of criticism just as the criminal who is beneath
humanity remains an object of the executioner”:
In the struggle against this state of affairs criticism is not a passion of the head,
but the head of passion. It is not the lancet but a weapon. Its object is an enemy
which it aims not to refute but to destroy. For the spirit of this state of affairs has
already been refuted. It is not, in itself, an object worthy of our thought; it is an
existence as contemptible as it is despised. Criticism itself has no need of any
further elucidation of this object, for it has already understood it. Criticism is no
longer an end in itself, but simply a means; indignation is its essential mode of
feeling, and denunciation its principle task (Marx’s emphasis).
75

72
As cited in Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, pp.26-27.
73
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, p.112.
74
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right (1844),” in The
Marx-Engels Reader, p.60.
75
Ibid., pp.55-56.

126
The entire history of the gulags might be analyzed in terms of this statement
alone. Histrionic show trials, dramatic purges, and arbitrary arrests and executions in the
name of “peoples justice”—phenomena repeated in Marxian revolutions from the Soviet
Union to the highlands of Peru—were never intended to satisfy liberal conceptions of
human dignity, justice, or reason. What they sought to achieve, in keeping with Marx’s
words, was a mode of criticism beyond criticism, a politics of indignation and
denunciation in which there was nothing left to be understood or even thought as far as
those deemed enemies of the revolution were concerned. The only thing left to be done
was to demonstrate revolutionary or radical truth in action and “ad hominem”—against
the human.
In an 1841 declaration of allegiance to socialist principles, literary critic V. S.
Belinsky helped to prepare the way for Marx’s reception in Russia with the following
words:
I want the golden age, not the former unreasoning golden age of the beast, but the
one that has been prepared by society, laws, marriage, in a word by everything
that was in its time essential but is now stupid and vulgar…And that will be
affected through sociality. And hence there is no more is no object more noble
and lofty than to contribute towards its progress and development. But it is
absurd to imagine that this could happen by itself, with the aid of time, without
violent changes, without bloodshed. Men are so insensate that they must forcibly
be led to happiness. And of what significance is the blood of thousands compared
to the degradation and sufferings of the millions.
76

Lenin likewise proclaimed the political and moral necessity of mass bloodletting
for the sake of eliminating class distinctions once and for all and inaugurating the
communist utopia:
Why should we be squeamish about the sacrifices to our righteous cause?...It does
not matter if three-fourths of mankind is destroyed; all that counts is that

76
As cited in Sandoz, Political Apocalypse, p.17.

127
ultimately the last quarter should become Communist…Later centuries will
justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced us. Then everything will
be understood, everything.
77

The putatively more humane defender of Bolshevism, Leon Trotsky, similarly
rejected ideas of inviolable human dignity and the sanctity of life in the name of higher
principles:
As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-
Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life.’ We were revolutionaries in
opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual
sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem
can only be solved by blood and iron.
78

Once violence is seen as a purely tactical or instrumental question, though, it is no
great leap to the idea that violence might actually be a positive good in itself. Many
Marxian revolutionaries have gone a considerable distance down this path, both in theory
and in practice. Hence, for example, Frantz Fanon’s embrace in The Wretched of the
Earth of the redemptive power of violence:
Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and
from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-
respect…The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each
individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of
violence…Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized
and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social
truths and gives the key to them.
79

We must note the critical role reserved for intellectual elites in Fanon’s thought—
that self-designated class of leaders, the vanguards—who will philanthropically “organize
and educate” the masses in the Way of violence that leads to their enlightenment. Yet

77
Ibid., p.22.
78
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship Vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to
Karl Kautsky (New York: Workers Party of America, 1922), p.63.
79
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin Books, 1963), pp.68, 73-
74, 118.

128
revolutionary violence is essential not merely for binding the masses together in order to
overthrow the old order, but for transforming the revolutionary leaders themselves from
mere philosophes into authentic revolutionaries, both in their own eyes as well as in the
eyes of their followers. Absent any source of meaning or value outside of historicism and
apart from the revolutionary project itself, violence now serves as the sign and sacrament
of one’s commitment to the Marxian vision. Only those who are willing to shed blood
truly believe in the higher cause. Violence, then, lies at the very heart of the
revolutionary faith. “Belief in a purely secular salvation,” James Billington writes, “leads
the modern revolutionary to seek deliverance through human destruction rather than
divine redemption.”
80

In his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Wolin observes, Jean-Paul
Sartre praised anti-colonial revolutionary violence in terms that have the moralizing
quality of a new Kantian categorical imperative.
81
The sublime fraternity forged through
collective violence against the bourgeoisie (the natives “are brothers inasmuch as each of
them has killed and may at any moment have to kill again”) offers the only way to
achieve one’s full humanity and realize “revolutionary consciousness.” Violence
exercised against the European colonizers and capitalist oppressors, Sartre predicted,
would cause all “tribal dissensions” to disappear. He had no patience for those who
asked the question of whether a negotiated settlement or nonviolent tactics might lead to
a more just and peaceable future for Algerians. Those who dared to raise such ideas, he
declared, simply placed themselves “in the ranks of the oppressors”:

80
James Billington, Fire In the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999), p.25.
81
Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,
and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp.207-209.

129
Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen, by their
ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles
which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because of the settler, who
wants to make beasts of burden of them—because of him, and against him.
Hatred, blind hatred which is as yet an abstraction, is their only wealth…[T]his
irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage
instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think
we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it—that no gentleness
can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them…The
rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you
must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy
an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man,
and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his
foot.
82

The obsession of French Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s with violence-as-
creation often took the form of self-indulgent debates in which the radicals strove to
outdo one another in pushing the logic of revolutionary bloodletting to its farthest limits.
On February 5, 1972, Michel Foucault and the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne leader Benny
Levý (who at the time had assumed the name “Pierre Victor” and should not be confused
with the public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levý) debated for a special issue of Sartre’s
magazine, Les temps modern, the merits of “popular justice”, i.e., tribunals set up to try
police officers and state officials in absentia for crimes against the proletariat and even, in
extremis, to order executions through terrorist actions similar to those already being
conducted by the Baader-Meinhoff Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy.
Levý, a great admirer of China’s Cultural Revolution, was known in Marxian circles for
staking out the most radical positions possible. Suddenly, however, he found himself
completely out-flanked by Foucault, who heaped scorn on the notion of “popular justice”
as simply replicating the institutional forms of the state’s judiciary, thereby ensnaring the
masses in an insidious new version of bourgeois morality. Instead of “normal” justice—

82
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface” to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.lviii.

130
whether bourgeois or popular, Foucault argued—what was needed was the justice of “the
streets,” the unfettered exercise of power without any inhibitions, as had been exhibited
in the massacres of September 1792. These frenzied killings by the masses, Foucault
asserted, were somehow “strategically useful and politically necessary.”
83
Foucault
biographer James Miller provides a helpful summary of the events of 1792 that Foucault
was urging his fellow Marxians to draw their political inspiration from in 1972:
At the height of the French Revolution, crowds of Parisian militants, inflamed by
rumors of a royalist plot, had stormed the prisons and set upon suspected traitors.
Those believed guilty—among them, a number of prostitutes and ordinary
criminals—were forced to run a gauntlet of clubs, pikes, axes, knives, sabers,
even, in one instance, a carpenter’s saw. After the victims had been bludgeoned
to death and hacked to pieces, the lucky ones were thrown onto a bloody heap; the
others had their body parts—decapitated heads, mutilated genitalia—mounted on
pikes and triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris. Before the orgy of
killing was over, more than one thousand men and women had died.
84

Within a few years of their debate about “popular justice,” Levý converted to
Orthodox Judaism. Foucault never publicly recanted of his Maoist-phase praise of mass
killings, although after the publication in 1974 of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and
after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields (conceived and implemented by
Cambodian intellectual elites who had imbibed Marxian doctrines in tight study groups
while pursuing graduate degrees on government scholarships in Paris in the 1950s and
1960s), he lost interest in Jacobin-style terror and revolutionary vanguardism. In 1984,
Foucault issued a thoroughly conventional statement in support of Amnesty International
and other human rights organizations in their formation of the International Committee
Against Piracy to protect Thai and Vietnamese boat people from attacks in international

83
As cited in Wolpin, The Wind from the East, p.31.
84
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Firrar, Straus & Giroux,
1993), pp.204-205.

131
waters. “There exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and
that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever
its victims,” he now asserted. “After all, we are all members of the community of the
governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity.”
85
Henceforth Foucault’s battle
against bourgeois morality would consist in exploring in both thought and deed its
sadomasochistic sexual subcultures.
But what could phrases such as “international citizenship,” “rights,” “duties,”
“obligations,” and “abuse of power” possibly mean in strictly materialistic perspective or
within Foucault’s larger philosophical project? In an interview with Claire Parnet (filmed
in 1989 and broadcast on French television in 1996), another highly influential “left-
Nietzschean,” Gilles Deleuze—who would commit suicide by leaping from a window in
1995 following a prolonged battle with a painful pulmonary disease—heaped contempt
on the language of human rights that Foucault had inexplicably lapsed into in 1984:
The reverence that people display toward human rights—it almost makes one
want to defend horrible, terrible positions…It’s pure abstraction. Human rights,
after all, what does that mean?...To call out to justice—justice does not exist, and
human rights do not exist. What counts is jurisprudence: that is the invention of
rights, invention of the law. So those who are content to remind us of human
rights, and recite lists of human rights—they are idiots. It’s not a question of
applying human rights. It is one of inventing jurisprudences where, in each case,
this or that will no longer be possible…[A]ll these notions of human rights. It is
zero, philosophically it is zero. Law isn’t created through declarations of human
rights. Creation, in law, is jurisprudence, and that’s the only thing there is. So:
fighting for jurisprudence. That’s what being on the left is about. It’s creating the
right.
86

85
Michel Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” in The Chomsky-
Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: The New Press, 2006), pp.211-212.
86
Gilles Deleuze, “On Human Rights,” transcribed from the film, “L’Abécédaire de
Gilles Deleuze,” directed by Pierre-André Boutang (1996), on the web at:
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze10.htm

132
But if Deleuze was in certain ways more principled than Foucault in his steadfast
repudiation of human rights, his statement betrays its own contradictions, vacillations,
and lacerations. Why would Deleuze only “almost want to defend horrible, terrible
positions”? Why this restraint? Absent the idea of human rights, in any case, by what
standard could treatment of the Other, logically or morally, be deemed “terrible”? And
why should we be so dedicated to “fighting for jurisprudence,” which in orthodox
Marxian perspective can only ultimately be an expression of the old bourgeois morality?
To speak even of creating “the right” continues to trade on the language of right and
wrong in problematic ways. Would it not be more accurate to say that the only thing a
fully consistent Deleuzian can ever create is new configurations not of “the right” but of
power?
Another leading light in the Marxian-Nietzschean mélange of 1970s French
radicalism, Alain Badiou, has defiantly refused up to the present to repent of his early
admiration for Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, although he
acknowledges that “crimes” were committed. “Morality,” Badiou writes in his 2007
book, The Century (first published in French in 2005), “is the residue of the old world.”
The “passion for the real is devoid of morality.” The “meaning and importance of a
power struggle is judged according to the stakes involved”:
What about the violence, often so extreme [during China’s Cultural Revolution]?
The hundreds of thousands dead? The persecutions, especially against
intellectuals? One will say the same thing about them as about all those acts of
violence that, to this very day, have marked the History of every somewhat
expansive attempt to practice a free politics, to radically subvert the eternal order
that subjects society to wealth and the wealthy, to power and the powerful… The
theme of total emancipation, practiced in the present, in the enthusiasm of
absolute present, is always situated beyond Good and Evil...politics, when it

133
exists, grounds its own principle regarding the real, and is thus in need of nothing,
save itself.
87

As one Shining Path cadre—a trained psychologist—told me in Peru in response to my
question of how much violence was morally permitted to achieve the communist party’s
goals, “Si es necessario, ríos de sangre.” If necessary, rivers of blood.

V. On the Genealogy of Utopian Materialism: A Dostoevskian Reading
To this outline of Marx’s materialism and some of its implications for the idea of human
rights must nevertheless be added a complicating fact: Marx’s deep anger at suffering and
oppression, and his determination to do his part to weaken those structures on which they
were based. Marx’s anti-humanism remains in tension with his powerfully humanistic
aspirations. “The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme
being for man,” he declares. “It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to
overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned,
contemptible being.”
88
Confronted by British colonialism in India, Marx wrote of the
need to suppress sickening human feelings—but for Marx the sickening feelings
remained, denying him that respite of indifference his logic seemed to commend. How
are we to understand this gulf between reasoning and feeling in Marx’s thought, between
his humanism and his anti-humanism? What lies in the space between? Our best guide
to this question may be Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose 1880 novel, The Brothers
Karamazov, centers upon themes of political ideology, faith, and murder. Marx
powerfully unveils the internal contradictions of capitalism. But it is Dostoevsky who

87
Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp.62-
63.
88
Ibid., p.60.

134
sees most clearly the central problem of Marx’s own philosophy of history: the
impossibility of reconciling subject and object, freedom and order, theory and praxis,
within a purely materialistic or naturalistic philosophical framework. I am particularly
indebted in my reading of Dostoevsky to Charles Guignon’s analysis of “The Grand
Inquisitor,” and to Joseph Frank’s biography, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet,
1871-1881.
89

During the 1840s, the intelligentsia in Russia, including Dostoevsky, came under
the sway of French Utopian Socialism and German Idealism. They saw the Christian
vision of heaven as the highest ideal for humanity and rationalism as the key to making it
a reality on earth. Yet behind their show of humanitarian love, Guignon writes, a quite
different motivation was at work, “a craving for power, an impulse to stand above the
crowd and be like gods.”
90
The utopian reformers wanted to be seen as saints and
martyrs but their coldness and egotism simply repelled ordinary people. By twisting
Christian values to secular, rationalistic ends, they ended by robbing them of their power
and meaning. Alienated from the spiritual springs of Russian life, Dostoevsky saw, the
secular reformers lost their capacity for joy and love, and this drove them ever deeper
into narcissism, isolation, and violent conspiracy. Here, contra Vogel, was the true
Enlightenment paradox. The movement had begun with a noble vision of shared human
dignity, peace, and progress drawn directly from the beliefs of Judaism and Christianity.
But by seeking to ground these ideals in a materialist and reductive “reason” rather than

89
Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002); and Charles B. Guignon, “Introduction” to The Grand
Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993).
90
Guignon, “Introduction,” p.xv.

135
in faith, the Enlightenment idealists ended by undermining their own highest
commitments, paving the way for the nihilists of the coming generation.
For this new breed of intellectuals, emerging in the 1860s, the older reformers
were half-hearted and inconsistent. They had failed to grasp the full implications of their
own assumptions. The “authentic” radicals, by contrast, were determined to carry the
logic of philosophical materialism through to its final conclusions. These “New Men”
rejected all religious and metaphysical values and announced an audacious project of
moral and political engineering unbounded by notions of good and evil. Bourgeois moral
sentiments and feelings of compassion—the residue of outmoded Christian beliefs—had
to be ruthlessly overcome in order to elevate humanity to a new plain of evolutionary
consciousness. Difficult thoughts—and deeds—had to be faced with unflinching
“hardness” in order to transform the human animal into its own divinity.
All of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels are densely inhabited with individuals who
represent these naturalistic and nihilistic claims of the New Men. In Crime and
Punishment, Raskolnikov (echoing Hegel’s notion of “World-Historical Individuals” and
anticipating what Nietzsche would later call the “technique of mnemonics”
91
) argues
forcefully that all of the truly great “lawgivers and founders of mankind” were
“destroyers” who “did not stop at shedding blood” in order to bring new worlds into
existence.
92
Taking Napoleon as his model of heroic creativity and vitality (again,
recalling Hegel and anticipating Nietzsche
93
), Raskolnikov attempts to prove that he too

91
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.38.
92
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p.260.
93
See Paul F. Glenn, “Nietzsche’s Napoleon: The Higher Man as Political Actor,” in The
Review of Politics, Vol.63, No.1 (Winter, 2001), pp.129-158.

136
is an “extraordinary” man, capable of transcending the moral law and overcoming the
voice of conscience by murdering an “inferior” human being without remorse. In The
Idiot, the dying consumptive Ippolit, inspired by a great work of art, insists that violence
and destruction are the true heart of the universe and so rejects any hope beyond the
grave. His profound contemplation of Hans Holbein’s painting, “Dead Christ,” leads him
to conclude that nature is “a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which
everything is subjected,” a force by which even the most precious human being is
“senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly.”
94
(Nietzsche,
for his part, will soon praise the art of Greek tragedy for “having looked boldly right into
the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature.”
95
)
In Demons, Alexei Kirillov meanwhile unfolds a still more radical brand of nihilism
based not merely upon indifference towards one’s natural inferiors, as in Raskolnikov’s
thinking, but towards one’s very self. To truly stand beyond good and evil, Kirillov sees,
one must cease to attach any intrinsic value not only to the lives of others but even to
one’s own life. Kirillovian nihilism, beginning with a naturalistic rejection of religion,
ends by embracing a mystical counter-soteriology according to which the salvation of
humankind depends not upon agapaic love to the point of death on a cross but upon
absolute indifference to life to the point of philosophical suicide.
Dostoevsky’s most compelling and sympathetic rebel against faith, however, is
Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, who, like Marx, simultaneously embodies
both the millenarian idealism and utopianism of the secular liberal reformers and the

94
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 2001), p.408.
95
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.59.

137
nihilistic Nietzschean logic of the new generation of hard-headed materialists. Ivan’s
rebellion is captured in his “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” which he tells to his saintly
brother Alyosha in an attempt to unsettle his faith. The legend is set in Seville during the
Spanish Inquisition and involves a meeting in a prison cell at night between a captive,
silent Christ and the Jesuit Inquisitor charged with executing heretics. The Inquisitor
accuses Christ of placing an impossible burden on humans by giving them freedom, for
individual freedom and dignity cannot be reconciled with such collective animal needs as
shelter, security and food—which are all the weak herd wants or needs anyway. By
giving humans freedom, God has become complicit in the senseless, unending, and
incomprehensible suffering of the innocent. Ivan offers a searing litany of horrors
inflicted upon children—babies impaled on bayonets by Turkish soldiers before their
mother’s eyes, a boy torn apart by a general’s hounds for sport, a little girl beaten
mercilessly and locked in an outhouse for days and nights on end for no reason by her
mother—and concludes that even if God somehow finds a way to bend their cries of pain
into shouts of Hallelujah at the Second Coming the cost is too high. Ivan refuses to
accept the “entrance ticket.”
The Church, like Marx’s vanguard party, must therefore do what Christ refused to
do. It must—by assuming control of individual consciences—unite “all the insoluble
historical contradictions of human nature,” taking both the glories and the burdens of
freedom upon itself in order to overcome the problem of suffering and usher in a final
harmony on earth.
96
The end result, for the great masses of people, will be “a common,

96
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), p.252.

138
concordant, and incontestable anthill.”
97
Only the few noble guardians who hold the
secret truths of the ant-heap will be unhappy and suffer. But this cannot be avoided,
according to Ivan, since the Christian vision places impossible demands on humans to
freely love their neighbors as themselves. “Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God, that’s
his whole secret,” Alyosha declares at the conclusion of Ivan’s tale. “What of it?” Ivan
replies.
98
Whether one believes or not makes no difference: God’s order is flawed and
unjustifiable, even if accepted as true on its own terms.
But is Ivan’s Promethean assault against faith as powerful as it first appears? And
does the question of belief or unbelief really make no difference? Dostoevsky’s complex
understanding of the paradoxes of freedom and the challenge of philosophical
materialism to faith requires that we absorb the full force of Ivan’s accusations, which
may in one sense be logically irrefutable. The mark of Dostoevsky’s intellectual integrity
and the capaciousness of his worldview is that he presents the ideas of his opponents with
even greater rigor, subtlety, and emotional appeal than they were themselves capable of
(something Marx and Nietzsche do not so much as attempt in their attacks on
Christianity
99
). “The dolts have ridiculed … my faith,” Dostoevsky wrote in his diary of
his critics shortly before his death. “These fools could not even conceive so strong a

97
Ibid., p.257.
98
Ibid., p.261.
99
Both Marx and Nietzsche are in this regard intellectuals of bad faith. “Nietzsche’s
critique of Christian faith,” Kroeker and Ward point out, for example, “is highly selective
in comparison with Dostoevsky’s [critique of atheism]. Indeed, it appears that Nietzsche
contravenes what should be a cardinal rule of the intellectual conscience: that a
phenomenon, especially a complex one, be judged according to its higher manifestations
as well as its lower ones.” The same observation can be made of Marx. See P. Travis
Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity
(Boulder: Westview, 2001), p.172.

139
denial of God as the one to which I gave expression.”
100
But readers who assume that
Dostoevsky’s depiction of the pathos of metaphysical rebellion stems from a lack of
artistic control or secret rebellion of his own fail to grasp “the depth and daring of his
Christian irrationalism.”
101

To engage in a purely rationalistic or dialectical defense of faith for Dostoevsky
would be to accept the premises that constitute the heart of the problem. In order to be
pure, faith must be unsupported by evidence of the kind “secular” reason demands, while
the arguments of “Euclidean” logic (i.e., of materialistic rationalism) must be given their
full strength and allowed to play themselves out to their final conclusions in human lives
and relationships. Although Dostoevsky does not attempt to directly refute Ivan’s tale or
to rationally resolve his antinomies, then, his response to Ivan is not without its reasons.
Dostoevsky’s refutation of the New Men is an indirect and aesthetic one based upon the
literary “juxtaposition and interaction of alternative forms of life.”
102
His reply to Ivan’s
materialism is based upon a poetic revelation of the existential results of his ideas as
manifest in his life and the lives of those around him, so that in order to evaluate the truth
or untruth of Ivan’s materialism/atheism we must pay careful attention not only to his
words but also to his actions and experiences through the entire course of the novel.
Dostoevsky’s fiction is therefore like the world itself, Rowan Williams points out. It is

100
As cited in Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1949), p.296.
101
Frank, Dostoevsky, p.607.
102
Malcolm V. Jones, “Dostoevskii and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
p.170.

140
offered “for acceptance and understanding but unable to compel them, since compulsion
would make it impossible for the creator to appear as the creator of freedom.”
103

What we discover is that Ivan’s intellectualism—his belief along with Marx that
values are made rather than found—causes him to become increasingly detached from
society and divided within himself. He is lacerated by his still noble feelings of
compassion and pity on the one hand and by his colossal pride and resentment against
God and imperfect humanity on the other. In the end, Ivan is unable to suppress his
feelings of compassion and love for others, despite what his “Euclidean logic” tells him.
“I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic,” he tells Alyosha. “Though I do
not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring
are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, who one loves
sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why.”
104
Ivan therefore
continues to honor “out of old habit” deeds “which one has perhaps long ceased believing
in” but which are still somehow “dear” to his heart.
Nevertheless, Ivan’s theoretical leap beyond good and evil—his assertion that
“everything is permitted” emerging from his disappointed love for humanity and his
refusal to accept any transcendent source of meaning or redemption—serves as the subtle
inspiration for Smerdyakov, the sullen household lackey and Ivan’s half-brother, to
commit the actual murder Ivan’s father. Ivan is horrified and repulsed to the point of
mental collapse by Smerdyakov, but he must face his own complicity as ironic,
intellectualizing proselytizer for atheism in the crime. “Such a bond exists whether Ivan

103
Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco: Baylor University
Press, 2008), p.12.
104
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamzov, p.230.

141
desired it or not,” Joseph Frank writes, “because Smerdyakov has become indoctrinated
with the amoral nihilism of Ivan’s ideas, which had now begun to ferment within a mind
and heart quite lacking in his own sensitivity to human suffering.”
105
There is a direct line
in Dostoevsky’s genealogical understanding of the psychology and political morality of
unbelief running from the respectable liberalism of the secular reformers (represented in
the novel by Pyotr Miusov) to the more radical and corrosive materialism of Ivan to the
finally murderous nihilism of Smerdyakov.
And it is not difficult, in Dostoevskian genealogical perspective, to detect similar
lines of influence and implication running from Feuerbach’s liberal atheism to Marx’s
still more radical “scientific materialism” to Lenin’s purges of enemies of the state. “The
delicate hands of intellectuals,” as Milosz wrote, “are stained with blood from the
moment a death-bearing word emerges from them, even if they saw that word as a word
of life.”
106
Scholars who attempt to absolve Marx as well as Nietzsche of any complicity
in the rise of European totalitarianism (by showing the two thinkers would not
themselves have approved of the uses that were soon made of their ideas) fail to attend to
the deeper questions of moral and political influence raised by their work. What
Nietzsche offered his political admirers was a darkly suggestive appeal to dreams of
power and domination, a yearning for intensive action as a positive good in itself, and a
disdain for compassion and pity as the effluence of Christian decadence. What Marx
provided his “Smerdyakovian” followers, however appalled he may have been by the
result, was a vision of nothing less than utopia—and moral warrant for virtually any

105
Frank, Dostoevsky, p.619.
106
Czeslaw Milosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland,
1942-1943, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), p.60.

142
action whatsoever to achieve it.
107
Unlike in Dostoevsky’s fiction, though, it was often
the intellectual theorizing Ivans of twentieth-century totalitarianism who also played the
role of slavish lackeys to its crude Smerdyakovian implementers. Martin Heidegger
together with a host of other German intellectuals was deeply and cravenly complicit in
National Socialism. There was no equivalent among non-Jewish German philosophers of
the flawed yet still heroic Christian resistance to Nazism known as the Confessing
Church, led by theologians such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin
Niemöller.
108
The attraction of Western Marxists to Stalinism is equally notorious. “It is

107
Scholarly denial of the problem of genealogical contamination may be seen as a two-
way denial. Secular or “exclusive” humanists (as Charles Taylor refers to them in his
account of the three-cornered struggle, which I discussed in my introduction) disavow
their nihilistic offspring, failing to see or refusing to acknowledge the ways in which
nihilism infected their political project from the start. Postmodern radicals following in
the steps of Marx and Nietzsche meanwhile dismiss liberal humanism as a mask for
bourgeois conformity to power and outmoded Christian values, although their polemic
against religion remains wedded to the assumptions of a thoroughly modernist outlook of
Enlightenment rationalism. Postmodernity is in this light simply a kind of
hypermodernity, an updated version of a familiar, arbitrary, and totalizing discourse.
108
The complicity of the majority of German believers, both Catholic and Protestant,
with National Socialism is well documented, as is the virulent anti-Semitism that
disfigured Christian thought in Europe for centuries and helped to pave the way to the
Holocaust. Less well known today is the significant role that Christianity played in
inspiring resistance. A former professor of mine at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Beate Ruhm von Oppen (who was a self-described agnostic who escaped Germany as a
teenager shortly before the war began), spent much of her life researching the relationship
between religion and resistance to the Nazis. She found that time and again those
Germans who found the courage to oppose Hitler were individuals who in various ways
had rediscovered their faith. One of the most famous cases of resistance she often wrote
and spoke about was the White Rose student rebellion. Before their capture and
execution by the Gestapo the group secretly distributed thousands of anti-Nazi tracts that
developed an explicitly theological theory of rebellion in defense of human rights. The
murder of Jews, the students declared in one leaflet, was “the most frightful crime against
human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history.” Humankind, they
wrote in another, “is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenceless against
the principle of evil. He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant
without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.” Appealing to the witness of the true
saints and prophets throughout history as over and against the barbarism of the modern

143
an ill-kept secret,” Steiner writes, “that cloistered intellectuals and men who spend their
lives immured in words, in texts, can experience with especial intensity the seductions of
violent political proposals, most particularly where such violence does not touch their
own person.”
109

The discerning reader will therefore detect just beneath the surface of Ivan’s
indignant protest against God in the name of humanistic values the seeds of an actual
hatred of humanity. As Charles Taylor writes, an “ideology of universal love and
freedom can mask a burning hatred, directed outward onto an unregenerate world and
generating destruction and despotism.”
110
Ivan’s rejection of the order that permits the
suffering of children verges upon a desire that children never have existed. His “Legend
of the Grand Inquisitor” betrays his contempt for human beings as weak and debased
creatures, incapable of loving their neighbors and so in need of an alternative Savior who
is “beyond good and evil”—one who is willing even to burn innocent humans at the stake
if necessary to remove the burdens of freedom and resolve the contradictions of human
nature once and for all.
There is also more than a little masochistic delight in his relentless depiction of
the problem of theodicy through his litany of innocents being tortured in every

“Sparta” of National Socialism, they called upon their fellow Germans to embrace the
subversive politics of authentic faith, to sabotage every war effort through every possible
form of nonviolent resistance, and to ultimately overthrow their own government as a
demonic tyranny. “True anarchy,” they declared, “is the generative element of religion.”
See Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Religion and Resistance to Nazism (Princeton: Center of
International Studies, 1971); and “White Rose Leaflets” on the web at:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/wrleaflets.html
109
George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
p.xxvi.
110
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p.517.

144
imaginable way. If Ivan was at first inspired by a sincere search for truth and genuine
horror at the problem of evil, in the process of directing his moral outrage against God’s
creation he has begun to take an active pleasure in collecting and repeating stories of
cruelty and agony. He enjoys playing the role of the courageous intellectual who boldly
stares into the face of human suffering where others flinch and look away. He enjoys
discomforting Alyosha for what he deems to be a naïve and insipid devotion to Christ.
Ivan casts himself in the role of tragic Promethean rebel by employing the misery of
others as the rhetorical justification for his own unbelief. The torture of children,
Dostoevsky is suggesting, is a vital ingredient of Ivan’s titanic intellectual pride. And
this has deadly political implications, as Flannery O’Connor also grasped. “One of the
tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God,”
O’Connor wrote. “In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a
tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory.
When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.
It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
111
The rebellion of
the enlightened humanist who, like Marx, sets out to replace the God-man with the
autonomous man-God rests upon a lower rather than higher view of the scope of human
freedom and human dignity, even as it speaks in the language of elevating humanity to
new heights of creative power and consciousness. Chelovek-cherviak, Russia’s student
radicals of the 1860s chanted to shatter the aura of sanctity in their obligatory theology
lectures: “Man is a worm, man is a worm.”
112

111
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1969), p.227.
112
Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, p.395.

145
For Dostoevsky, however, every person is made, in the mysterious and endlessly
evocative language of Genesis, “in the image of God.” This does not mean we must
dogmatically reject all evolutionary concepts or properly scientific investigations into
questions of human origins. “Christ directly announces that in man, besides the animal
world, there is a spiritual one,” Dostoevsky wrote in a letter in 1876. “Well, and so
what—let man originate from anywhere you like (in the Bible it’s not at all explained
how God fashioned him from clay, took him from the earth), but it is said that God
breathed into him the breath of life (though sometimes man in his sins can turn into a
beast again)” (emphasis Dostoevsky’s).
113

The fact that humans are not only material but also spiritual beings implies radical
freedom, but only in openness to spiritual realities and recognition of the irreducible
divine image in others. Dostoevsky agrees with Ivan that loving one’s neighbor is
impossible from the standpoint of calculating rationalism and for those who willfully
sever themselves from the source of all love. He also identifies the loss of love as a
devastating and widespread reality of the human condition. Hell, Father Zosima declares
in the novel, is “the suffering of no longer being able to love.”
114
But the hell of no longer
being able to love—in the light of biblical anthropology and the luminous example of the
Christ of the New Testament—remains a human choice. This means that the “image
delineated by the Grand Inquisitor of a pathetic humanity, incapable of fulfilling Christ’s
law of love, is delusory and pernicious,” Frank writes.
115
Even Ivan is mysteriously filled
with an irrational and noble love of life that his logic tells him should not exist. It

113
As cited in Diane Oenning Thompson, “Dostoevskii and Science,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Dostoevskii, p.196.
114
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamzov, p.322.
115
Frank, Dostoevsky, p.623.

146
requires strenuous intellectual effort to suppress or explain away these spontaneous
feelings, which are in fact evidence of the divine origins of human nature and God’s
presence in the human heart.
Those who open themselves, like Alyosha and Zosima, to the witness of the living
Christ in history find evidence all around them that love is the primordial reality of the
universe and that life is a gift of grace from God. “Love all of God’s creation, both the
whole of it and every grain of sand,” Father Zosima declares. “Love every leaf, every ray
of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you
will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin
tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love
the whole world with an entire, universal love.”
116
There is a “living bond with the other
world, with the higher heavenly world,” Zosima continues. But “if this sense is
weakened or destroyed in you…you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate
it.”
117
For Dostoevsky, as Brueggamann writes of the Hebrew prophets, truth is “urgently
out beyond the ordinary and the reasonable.”
118
The goal of the Russian novelist’s art,
like the inspired poetics of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Amos, is to offer an alternative
imaginative vision that might help to subvert powerful but fatal views of reality. It is a
vision grounded in categories of memory, hope, love, and suffering, and flowing out of
the view of the prophets that “doxology is the last full act of human freedom and
justice.”
119

116
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.319.
117
Ibid., p.320.
118
Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p.xv.
119
Ibid., p.17.

147
Dostoevsky’s theological anthropology is also irreducibly aesthetic. He seeks to
make his moral and political truths known through a revelation of the beauty of the living
Christ as seen in the lives of those who follow Him. It is the peculiar luminosity of the
lives of Alyosha and Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, Sonya in Crime and
Punishment, and Prince Myshkin in The Idiot that enables us to see the poverty of
modern atheistic humanism, philosophical materialism, and social Darwinism, whether in
its Apollonian/liberal, Promethian/Marxian, or Dionysian/Nietschean forms. It was “the
radiant personality of Christ himself” that “was the most difficult problem” for
Belinsky’s atheistic socialism, Dostoevsky declared in the first issue of The Citizen in
1873. “As a socialist, he was duty bound to destroy the teaching of Christ, to call it
fallacious and ignorant philanthropy doomed by modern science and economic tenants.
Even so, there remained the beatific image of God-man, its moral inaccessibility, its
wonderful and miraculous beauty.”
120
But whether we find the lives of Dostoevsky’s
saints and sinners and the Christ they follow luminous and vital or merely servile
according to the criterion of Marx’s or Nietzsche’s alternative political aesthetics remains
a highly subjective valuation. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is quoted by Ippolit
Terentyev as saying that “beauty will save the world.”
121
Myshkin is ultimately ruined,
however, in part by the sensuous beauty of Natalia Phillipovna. In The Brothers
Karamazov, Dmitri declares that it is in the realm of beauty that God and the devil are
fighting and “the battleground is the human heart.”
122
There are, then, different kinds of
beauty exercising different kinds of appeals on our political imaginations. Dostoevsky

120
As cited in Sandoz, Political Apocalypse, p.12.
121
Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p.382.
122
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.108.

148
seeks to plant in his readers a love for that form of beauty that restores and preserves
human community, and an ability to see beyond the seductive blandishments of
alternative forms of desire.

VI. Forgiveness as Revolutionary Act
What, then, of Marx? In the Capital, Marx offered his own doctrine of original sin, the
myth of primitive accumulation. At a pre-historic stage in human development, he
suggested, one group of people—the ancestors of the bourgeoisie—violently seized as
their own the land that had previously been shared by all. The ongoing history of this
violent expropriation, “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire,”
123
is
the history of all human misery, poverty and degradation. This was the original Fall—not
the eating of fruit, but the separation of labor from the means of production. Yet while
Marx’s myth forces us to think about relations of class and power, it fails to answer a
critical question: Under conditions of relative equality and harmony, why would one
group of people decide to violently seize the land as their own? What was the source of
this greed before any economy of greed had yet been born?
In the theological anthropology of Solzhenitsyn, “the line separating good and
evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—
but right through every human heart.”
124
The oppressed in revolt, Simone Weil pointed
out, have never succeeded in establishing a non-oppressive society; for there is no

123
Marx, “Capital, Volume I: Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation (1867),”
in The Marx-Engels Reader, p.433.
124
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p.312.

149
injustice the oppressed are not themselves capable of committing once in power.
125
This
fact of “primal evil,” which cannot be reduced to purely economic, sociological or
psychological terms, is manifest in myriad ways. It is seen in savage structural
adjustment policies; in dirty wars and arms trafficking sponsored by the great powers; in
tribal warfare in Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda; in political and religious
demagoguery about good and evil; in games of simulated killing marketed to children; in
the manipulation and verbal abuse of much domestic life; in the petty fiefdoms and point
scoring of academic discourse.
126
The failure of all revolutions in history, Solzhenitsyn
writes, has been their failure to attend to this core fact. They “destroy only those carriers
of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of
good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself,
magnified still more.”
127
Recognition of the pervasiveness of problem of evil, of what the
Christian tradition refers to as the “fallen” nature of human existence, should not lead us
to inflict violence on the Other but rather to see in the Other a reflected image of
ourselves and refracted image of the divine. The danger arises not from perceiving evil
in the world but when we imagine that evil is only out there and not in here as well. It is
when we imagine that those not like us are guilty and we alone are innocent of injustice
and violence that the doors to crimes against humanity are opened. It is then that our
perception of the Other turns into scapegoating of those with “categorical identities”
different from our own. Such othering can certainly be amplified by religious beliefs but
is best seen as a pervasive reality of the human condition—one that Charles Taylor

125
Simone Weil, “Analysis of Oppression,” in The Simone Weil Reader (Rhode Island:
Moyer Bell, 1977), p.128.
126
Guignon, “Introduction,” p.xxi.
127
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, pp.312-313.

150
argues has received its most deadly forms in the modern era as a perverse effect of the
spread and interaction of democracy and nationalism.
128

Yet evil for Dostoevsky, as for Saint Augustine, “has no existence except as a
privation of the good, down to that level which is altogether without being.”
129
Evil in
this Augustinian sense does not exist. There is thus no need even for divine punishment
of evil. “The punishment of every disordered mind,” Augustine declared, “is its own
disorder.”
130
The irony of metaphysical rebellion in Dostoevsky’s novels is that those
who willfully repudiate the spiritual side of their natures in the name of affirming
material reality or pursuing justice in the end “become indifferent to life, and even come
to hate it.”
131
“I just don’t want to do good, I want to do evil, and illness has nothing to
do with it,” insists the precocious and unstable Liza under the influence of Ivan’s ideas.
“Why do evil?” Alyosha asks. “So that there will be nothing left anywhere,” Liza replies.
“Ah, how good it would be if there were nothing left.”
132
“One can argue endlessly about
everything,” Stavrogin confesses to Darya Pavlovna in Demons, “but what poured out of
me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Or not even negation.
Everything is always shallow and listless.”
133
In Dostoevsky’s fiction, Ellis Sandoz
notes, the man “turned radically inward upon himself falls into the abyss of his own

128
Charles Taylor, “The Sources of Violence: Perennial and Modern,” in Beyond
Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation in Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, ed. James Heft (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp.29-32.
129
Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin,
1961), p.43.
130
Ibid., p.15.
131
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.320.
132
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p.582.
133
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994).p.676.

151
nothingness.”
134
The final expression of materialistic rationalism, the lives of Ivan,
Raskolnikov, and Kirillov thus demonstrate, is not health and strength but psychological
weakness, “bad faith,” and laceration leading to mental collapse at the level of
individuals and social collapse at the level of communities and nations. Philosophical
deicide, in its more diluted forms, produces numbness, nausea, and the death of love. In
its most logically consistent and assertive manifestations it leads to violence, assaults
upon human dignity, and political tyranny.
Still, both Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky agree with Marx that there is an
imperative to act, that truth must be proved in deeds and practices and not merely in
words or thoughts. At his best, Westphal writes, Marx can help us to better understand—
and to resist—the injustice of modern capitalism, “to hear rather than to hide what the
Bible says about the widows and orphans.”
135
Contrary to what Ivan Karamazov thinks,
and precisely because we are all compromised accomplices in injustice, we must embrace
our connectedness with our neighbors. We must take responsibility and act in love to
change the world. The danger in such action, which will necessarily be flawed and
halting, is not the trap of bourgeois sentimentality, but the temptation to control and
manipulate or “convert” others for our own purposes or millennial dreams. The
temptation is real, perhaps insurmountable. But the step towards one’s neighbor,
Dostoevsky insists, must still be taken.
Concretely, what form might this “step towards the neighbor” take if not the form
of violent revolt against oppression or, in the language of the forces of reaction, “just
war” in defense of the existing social “order” and the real injustices that sustain it?

134
Sandoz, Political Apocalypse, p.182.
135
Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.216.

152
Dostoevsky’s Christian existentialism finds resonance in Hannah Arendt’s view that
violence is the antithesis of power, the end rather than the beginning of authentic
government. Violence can obviously generate its own universes of language, commerce,
politics, beauty, and meaning. Arendt understands that pyramids may be built upon the
backs of slaves. But she also sees that in the realm of human social relations violence
triggers forces of automatic reaction and revenge that can be broadly predicted and so no
longer constitute “free” or authentically creative acts. In contrast to the principles of
revolutionary violence and class struggle urged by Marx, Arendt proposes the necessity
of forgiveness, which she traces back as a political principle to the New Testament. “The
discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of
Nazareth,” Arendt writes. Forgiveness “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act
but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and
therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is
forgiven.”
136
Forgiveness is a word that does not exist in the Marxian lexicon (any more
than in the capitalist). But with the discrediting of Marx’s eschatological hopes, though
not his trenchant critique of capitalism, forgiveness may be the last untried metanarrative
of human history. As long as inequality, injustice, and poverty persist, the appeal of
violent millenarian ideologies—both secular and religious—will remain. But as long as
people continue to find ways to creatively forgive their enemies—the strange and
difficult path glimpsed “through a glass darkly” in South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, the Jubilee campaign for debt forgiveness to developing
nations, and countless nonviolent solidarity movements around the world that recall the

136
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958),
pp.238, 241.

153
Hebrew prophetic tradition—the possibility of new and more just social realties may
perhaps not yet be lost.

154
CHAPTER 4:

NIETZSCHE AND HUMAN EQUALITY

“Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great
chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without
reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith almost God (‘child of
God,’ ‘God-man’). Since Copernicus man seems to have got himself on an inclined
plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into—what? into
nothingness? into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness’? Very well! hasn’t this been
the straightest rout to—the old ideal?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
1

Gandalf: “He hates and loves the Ring just as he hates and loves himself. He will never
be rid of his need for it.”
Frodo: “It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill him when he had the chance!”
Gandalf: “Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death. Some
that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out
death and judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that
Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo
may rule the fate of many.”
—J. R. R. Tolkien
2

In notes dictated by Nietzsche in 1885, around the time he was completing work on his
“yes-saying” prose poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he derided egalitarians of all stripes
for their continued attachment to Christian ideals. Socialism, Nietzsche declared, was
“the logical conclusion of the tyranny of the least and the dumbest…In the doctrine of
socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a ‘will to negate life’; the human beings or races
that think up such a doctrine must be bungled.”
3
Nietzsche then made a sardonic wish
that in retrospect has the chilling ring of a precise historical prophecy:
Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist
society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots. The earth is large enough and

1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000), p.591.
2
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p.59.
3
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp.77.

155
man still sufficiently unexhausted; hence such a practical instruction and
demonstratio ad absurdum would not strike me as undesirable, even if it were
gained and paid for with a tremendous expenditure of human lives.
4

Still, Nietzsche wrote, there was at least one positive thing that could be said for
socialism:
In any case, even as a restless mole under the soil of a society that wallows in
stupidity, socialism will be able to be useful and therapeutic: it delays ‘peace on
earth’ and the total mollification of the democratic herd animal; it forces the
Europeans to retain spirit, namely cunning and cautious care, not to abjure manly
and warlike virtues altogether, and to retain some remnant of spirit, of clarity,
sobriety, and coldness of the spirit—it protects Europe for the time being from the
marasmus femininus that threatens it.
5

Despite their slavish if unwitting devotion to fundamentally Christian ideas about human
dignity and equality, when it came to embracing violence as the key to human progress
Nietzsche and the Marxian radicals could at least agree.
In the previous two chapters I have argued that within a strictly materialistic or
naturalistic framework few if any grounds remain for speaking in the language of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of an inviolable dignity that attaches to all
persons in virtue of their humanity alone. Darwin’s theory represented a great blow to
the idea of humanity’s uniqueness and any accompanying special sanctity of human life.
Marx extended the logic of materialist evolutionary biology still further, radically
challenging the plausibility of “the rights of man” in the social and political realms. Both
thinkers, however, retained the Enlightenment project’s optimistic faith in the ability of a
purely rationalistic, empirical science to ultimately guide humankind to a more
compassionate and egalitarian order, to elevate rather than to degrade our moral horizons.

4
Ibid., pp.77-78.
5
Ibid., p.78.

156
Even Marx did not fully grasp the ways in which the reductive logic of scientism would
hollow out the Enlightenment’s highest values, paving the way to the vertigo of
Nietzsche’s philosophy of will to power. He still believed that on the other side of
revolutionary violence we would somehow land upon a more humane and just shore.
Nietzsche harbored no such illusions.
I have already referred to Nietzsche several times in this dissertation. The time
has now come to examine his ideas and their implications for the idea of human rights in
greater depth. I plan to do so by pursuing a more Nietzschean reading and critique of
Nietzsche than some scholars allow, calling attention to essentialist, questionable, and
arbitrary aspects of his political project in existential and aesthetic perspective. My
purpose in applying some of Nietzsche’s techniques and categories to Nietzsche himself
is not, however, to elevate his hermeneutics of suspicion to a still higher level of critical
importance, but to demonstrate that there are reasons to suspect suspicion. My reading of
Nietzsche therefore requires, somewhat paradoxically, that we approach his anti-
egalitarian politics of aristocratic radicalism (as Bruce Detwiler, following George
Brandes, refers to them
6
) through more “naïve” eyes than some of Nietzsche’s
interpreters would allow. There is a long line of Nietzschean interpretation—beginning
with Nietzsche himself
7
—warning of the dangers of any surface reading of his work. We
must not naïvely assume, many scholars remind us, that Nietzsche ever means what he
plainly appears to say. Rather, we are often reminded, the key to understanding
Nietzsche lies in cultivating an appreciation for the subtlety, the plurality, and above all

6
See Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).
7
Friedrich Nietzsche, Appendix: Variants from Nietzsche’s Drafts in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, p.796.

157
the irony of his writings. By resisting the temptations of credulous literalism we may
thus locate the Nietzsche who sought to instill bracing lessons in nonconformity to
courageous spirits battling the tide of European nihilism, all the while tragically aware
that his vision would be misunderstood and misappropriated by the very mass ideologies
he sought to oppose. Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in The Gay Science, however,
suggests that one of the tragic implications of his philosophy is that none will dare to
comprehend him precisely when he means exactly what he proclaims.
8
In an already
ironic and disbelieving age, the perfect disguise will often be an inverted irony: the cloak
of appearing not to mean what one says by saying what one means. The greatest irony of
Nietzsche as a political thinker may lie less in the hidden depths of his works, such as
they may be, than in the attempts by his admirers to mine subterranean progressive
political truths from his writings, when Nietzsche has left many of his most profound
truths on the surface for all to see.
I will begin by outlining the “genealogy of morals” that lies behind my own
reading of Nietzsche and ultimately of key human rights texts such as the Universal
Declaration as well. Incomplete and impressionistic as this map must be for the sake of
space, I hope it will clearly convey the texture and political significance of the original
“revaluation of values” that led to the toppling of the “old ideals” that Nietzsche spoke of
in the epigraph above, which he hoped to see restored in the aftermath of the “death of
God” (Nietzsche’s indelible term not only for the loss of faith in the Christian God but in
every other source of transcendent value or meaning as well). I will next survey the

8
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an
Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.119-120.

158
attempts by some of Nietzsche’s admirers to deploy his ideas for a progressive politics
before challenging Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism on three fronts: his naturalism, his
metaphysics, and his resentment. Nietzsche’s critique of the idea of human rights is
compelling and, it seems to this reader, quite devastating to the project of Enlightenment
humanism. It is far less compelling, however, to those who did not accept the news of
the death of God to begin with as an irresistible truth of the modern age.

I. Imperial Consciousness and the Great Subversion
Throughout much of Western history the idea of human dignity has been defended by
philosophers by way of appeal to concepts of human reason. In the words of Kant in the
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, “every rational being, exists as an end in
himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” Every
person, as a rational agent, “has not merely a relative worth, i.e., a price, but has an
intrinsic worth, i.e., dignity.”
9
The Enlightenment/Kantian attempt to ground dignity in
autonomous reason (or any other capacity or set of capabilities) is, however, fraught with
obvious difficulties for modern rights advocates. Not all persons possess equal mental
abilities. Why, then, should they be treated as having equal values or dignity in virtue of
their humanity alone? With new advances in biotechnology, for example, why shouldn’t
we embrace policies of genetic discrimination based upon principles of “liberal
eugenics”?
10
We also now know in ways that Kant could not that scientific rationality

9
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp.35,40.
10
In the 1997 science fiction film “Gattaca” (written and directed by Andrew Niccoli),
discrimination based on genetic screening is officially illegal but is widely used to profile
people for employment based on their susceptibility to disease, their native intelligence,

159
can be deployed instrumentally in the service of any number of ends, including
terrifyingly inhumane ones: Auschwitz represented a triumph of technical civilization and
bureaucratic efficiency; in order for the death camps to operate the trains had to run on
time. In the long view of history, Kant’s humanism thus reveals far more about the
cultural assumptions and sensibilities of his age than they do about any universal moral
truth accessible through freestanding reason alone.
In classical antiquity, dignity was always understood to be an acquired rather than
an inherent trait so that some persons were more deemed more fully human than others.
11

Infants born with mental or physical defects, Plato and Aristotle both declared, have no
right to share in the life of the community and in fact have no right to life at all. In The
Politics, Aristotle writes, “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live”
(VII.1335b).
12
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that those “born deformed, [the
Guardians] will hide away in an unspeakable and unseen place, as is seemly.” He goes on
to encourage free sexual intercourse among adolescents on one condition: that they not
“let even a single foetus see the light of day” and “if one should be conceived, and, if one
should force its way” that they “deal with it on the understanding that there’s to be no

and other traits. All “normal” children are artificially conceived using pre-implantation
genetic screening techniques to maximize the chances they will be born “Valids” rather
than “In-valids.” While we may still be a long way from the level of technological
control depicted in the film, the moral universe of “Gattaca” with its politics of “liberal
eugenics” and “designer babies” is in fact in many ways the world we already live in. In
2009, a for-profit Los Angeles clinic, Fertility Institutes, advertised pre-implantation
genetic screening services to allow couples to select what cosmetic traits they wanted
their children to have, including hair and eye color.
11
Darrel W. Amundsen, “Medicine and the Birth Defects of Children: Approaches of the
Ancient World,” in On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, eds.
Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), pp.681-692.
12
Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988).

160
rearing for such a child” (V.460c-461c).
13
Slaves, women, and children in Greek and
Roman thought possessed less dignity than free males, while philosophers capable of
attaining heights of speculative philosophy possessed more dignitas—prestige, status, or
worthiness—than those who labored with their hands. Although Plato does allow for
equality between the genders in his Republic, it is only on the condition that female
Guardians abandon the role of motherhood and turn their children over to be raised by the
state. In order for reason to rule supreme, Socrates explains to Glaucon, the family bond
must be severed and maternal affections suppressed. When women are “full of milk,” for
example, they should be led to a “pen” to feed children in complete anonymity without
knowing which child is their own. Supervisors should make sure “that they suckle only a
moderate time.” Glaucon heartily approves. “It’s an easy-going kind of child-bearing for
the women guardians, as you tell it,” he says (V.460d). One cannot help but wonder
reading passages such as these if the equality of the genders promoted by Plato in The
Republic was not offered as a deeply ironical statement in support of the idea of actual
female inferiority. In order for women to attain equality in Plato’s ideal society, in any
case, it is clear that they can only do so by becoming like men.
Similar ideas about human inequality pervaded (and continue to pervade) non-
Western belief systems. The caste system of Hinduism and classical Buddhist doctrines
of reincarnation (according to which the less fortunate or “weak” members of society—
the poor, the physically handicapped, and women in general—are born into “lowliness”
as a punishment for sins in previous lives) run directly counter to concepts of inviolable
dignity and shared human rights. These assumptions of a rank ordering or natural

13
Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

161
hierarchy of human types, with only a few individuals possessing true dignity and so full
social standing, may represent the most nearly universal political morality throughout
time and across cultures that we can identify.
Classical beliefs in the natural inequality of persons did not give way in Greco-
Roman society to the idea of shared human dignity as a result of detached, ahistorical
philosophical reasoning. Rather, they were radically undermined by the scandalous
particularity of the Christian narrative. To grasp what Christianity opposed, and what it
historically overcame, we might consider a single seemingly trivial but illustrative detail
of life under Pax Romana: Roman coins on which defeated nations were depicted as
violated women being trampled underfoot by deified emperors or Roman gods. To
comprehend the deeper meaning of these symbols of imperial consciousness we must
recall the foundational myth of the city of Rome that they harkened back to.
Central to the legend of the founding of Rome by Romulus is the story of the
“Rape of the Sabine Women,” which became a celebrated theme in Roman art and
literature. The tale as told by Livy in his History of Rome, written about 30 years before
the birth of Christ, begins with Romulus offering asylum to male refugees from other
nations, who quickly swell the city’s population and transform the Roman state into a
“match for any of the neighboring states in war.”
14
The sudden increase in males of
fighting age also led, however, to a pressing dilemma: there were not enough women to
repopulate the city so “its greatness was not likely to outlast the existing generation.”
Romulus sends out ambassadors to neighboring states asking them to give their daughters
as brides to the Romans, but they refuse and as a result tensions rise. “The Roman youths

14
Titus Livy, Roman History, trans. John Henry Freese, Alfred John Church, and
William Jackson Brodribb (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898), p.11.

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were bitterly indignant at this, and the matter began unmistakaebly to point to open
violence.”
15
Romulus, “dissembling his resentment” according to Livy, tricks the
Sabines into coming to Rome to attend games allegedly in honor of the god Neptune. At
a prearranged signal the Roman men then pounce upon the Sabine maidens and carry
them off, those of “surpassing beauty” being reserved for “the leading senators.”
Romulus attempts to mollify the traumatized women by assuring them “they would be
lawfully wedded, and enjoy a share of all their [Roman] possessions and civil rights,
and—a thing dearer than all else to the human race—the society of their common
children: only let them calm their angry feelings, and bestow their affections on those on
whom fortune had bestowed their bodies.”
16
The kidnapped women do not embrace their
captors, however, and the Sabine men soon launch a counterattack. After some back and
forth fighting, the Romans gain the upper hand. Seeing their loved ones on the verge of
being slaughtered, the Sabine daughters rush onto the battlefield, pleading with the men
of both sides to make peace lest they become widows through the deaths of their Roman
husbands or orphans through the deaths of their Sabine fathers. The “leaders thereupon
came forward to conclude a treaty; and not only concluded a peace, but formed one state
out of two,” writes Livy. “They united the kingly power, but transferred the entire
sovereignty to Rome.”
17

This story of the rape of the Sabine women, Davina Lopez writes, was the
paradigmatic model of, and justification for, Roman expansionism. Its purpose as an
origins myth was to make imperial violence appear noble and “like the natural order of

15
Ibid., p.11.
16
Ibid., p.11-12.
17
Ibid., p.15.

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the world.”
18
Rape was the perhaps painful but ultimately glorious way by which Rome
incorporated the Other within the fold of its civilized laws and “civil rights.” The story
was “truly foundational to Roman imperial ideology as it expresses relationships between
self and other on an international scale,” Lopez writes:
The act of imperial expansion through expanding the borders is a sexual act where
the Roman men take the women of the nations they defeat and rape them, thus
curtailing the natural fertility of the conquered and rechanneling it for the future
of the Roman Empire. Personification of the nations (that contain women and
men) as female bodies draws the rape narrative into a larger ideological pattern.
It is not just individual women being raped, but entire nations—the land and
people are violated and feminized…The conquest and assimilation of the nations
into one body, with all rule transferred to Rome, is predicated and given a
template in the rape of the Sabine women. First, Romans over neighboring
women, then the Roman Empire over whole nations. Conquest rendered in these
terms reflects gendered difference in hierarchy: the impenetrable masculinity
inherent in Roman rule is chosen to penetrate the femininity of other lands and
peoples.
19

The New Testament, John Dominic Crossan, N. T. Wright, Richard Horsley, and
a host of other scholars have shown in great detail, is only intelligible when read against
the historical backdrop to Christ’s life, which was also the backdrop of Roman imperial
conquest and occupation. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a tiny village about four miles
away from the town of Sepphoris, which was struck by Varus’s legionary troops in 4
BCE. Josephus records another attack led by Lucius Annius at Gerasa on the other side
of the Jordan River:
[The Romans] put to the sword a thousand of the youth, who had not already
escaped, made prisoners of women and children, gave his soldiers license to
plunder the property, and then set fire to the houses and advanced against the

18
Davina Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2008), p.70.
19
Ibid., pp.70-71.

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surrounding villages. The able-bodied fled, the feeble perished, and everything
was consigned to the flames.
20

Crossan concludes:
In Nazareth around the time Jesus was born, men, women, and children who did
not hide successfully would have been, respectively, killed, raped, and enslaved.
Those who survived would have lost everything. I speculate, therefore that the
major stories Jesus would have heard while growing up in Nazareth would have
been about “the year the Romans came.”
21

We can perhaps now better appreciate the intellectual scandal and political
significance of Christ’s declaration—at time of obvious Jewish defeat, imperial
occupation punctuated by periodic massacres, mass crucifixions, and insurgency and
counterinsurgency war—that God’s kingdom was breaking into history through his own
words and actions and that the shape of God’s in-breaking kingdom entailed an ethic of
radical enemy love beyond good and evil:
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His
sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the
unrighteous (Matthew 5:43-48).

According to the earliest Christians, God had not only taken on human flesh but
had been incarnated in the person of a poor, provincial menial laborer in a defeated
backwater of the Empire. Christ’s public career as recorded in the Gospels was marked
by his ministry to the most marginalized and untouchable members of society, who he
sought to restore to physical wholeness and fullness of community. Among these was a
woman about to be stoned to death by religious zealots for alleged adultery (John 7:53-
8:11), and a woman suffering from a bleeding illness for 12 years, who according to

20
Josephus as cited in John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome,
Then and Now (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p.110.
21
Ibid., p.110.

165
Jewish law could not be touched without defilement due to her impurity (Mark 5:25-34).
Jesus’ life ended in his torture and execution on charges of heresy and sedition at the
hands of those religious and political authorities possessing the most “dignity.” What is
more, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark both recorded, in his final agony
Christ was abandoned by God himself. The cry of dereliction from the center cross is the
cry of one who has been not only humanly but even cosmically betrayed: “My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me!” Because Christ bids those who desire to follow him to
take up his cross and share in his sufferings, one can only be a disciple if one has also
experienced the death of God. Yet for Christ’s followers, the spectacle of Jesus’ agony
and humiliation—the extreme depths of his identification with the sufferings of
humanity, and even with its loss of faith or hope—had ironically unmasked the
“principalities and powers” once and for all, stripping them of their sacral authority and
revealing them for what they really were: unjust and oppressive forces. The remarkable
collusion of Jewish religious and Roman political power to destroy an innocent man was
now laid bare for all to see. “When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made
a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him” (Colossians 2:15).
Followers of the risen Christ were to courageously emulate his example of self-
emptying service and reconciling enemy love even to the point of their own deaths if
necessary for the sake of others. In the words of the author of the book of James, “Pure
and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and
widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). As
the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians:
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He
existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,

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but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the
likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by
becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (2:5-8).

There are, to be sure, passages in both the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament
that continue to reflect the dominant values of the ancient world and that, taken in
isolation, might be used to endorse oppression of women, slavery, and even genocide.
The apocalyptic book of Revelation, for example, includes frightening images of divinely
ordained (or at least permitted) violence against the unrighteous on the day of God’s final
judgment. Do these parts of Scripture thus negate or neutralize anything positive that
might be said about first century Christian beliefs and practices in human rights
perspective? Rather than attempting anything like a comprehensive apologia of New
Testament “problem passages” for modern rights advocates, I will simply highlight
Christ’s own words about God’s final judgment of the righteous and the wicked as
recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. The scene is described as a final judgment upon the
nations—what we might call a tribunal of international justice (the Greek word for
“righteousness,” dikaiosune, also means “justice”):
But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then
He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him;
and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep
from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.
Then the King will say to those on His right, “Come, you who are blessed of My
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave
Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you
clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to
Me.” Then the righteous will answer Him, “Lord, when did we see You hungry,
and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? And when did we see
You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? When did we see
You sick, or in prison, and come to You?” The King will answer and say to them,
“Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine,
even the least of them, you did it to Me” (Matthew 25:31-40).

167
The political implications of the Christian claim that the Godforsaken God had
elevated the weak and lowly to a status of high dignity as adopted sons and daughters
through his own sufferings, death, and resurrection, are evident in Paul’s words: “There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor
female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In a world in which the
exposure of newborn infants to wild animals and mass executions for public
entertainment were regular spectacles, in which slaves were defined by law as non
habens personam (“not having a persona” or even “not having a face”), and in which a
polymorphous polytheism led not to liberal toleration but to frequently unrestrained
violence against any who challenged the local gods of tribe and empire, the Christian
euangelion could only arrive, in David Hart’s words, as a “cosmic sedition.”
22

Christianity not only offended the patrician sensibilities of Roman aristocrats (as it would

22
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable
Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.124. There is an interesting
literature that owes its lineage to arguments first made by David Hume to the effect that
polytheism is more intrinsically peaceful or “tolerant” than monotheism since it allows
for a plurality of gods. There is scant historical evidence, though, to support this claim;
Rome’s genocidal extermination campaigns against druids as well as Christians were the
campaigns of a polytheistic culture. The biblical stories of Israel’s conquest of the land
of Canaan on which arguments about monotheistic intolerance are heavily based are not,
in any case, strictly monotheistic but in fact henotheistic, i.e., based on belief in the
supremacy of one God over a host of lesser rival gods. As Slavoj Zizek writes, “even so-
called exclusionary monotheist violence” is “secretly polytheistic. Does not the fanatical
hatred of believers in a different god bear witness to the fact that the monotheist secretly
thinks that he is not simply fighting false believers, but that his struggle is a struggle
between different gods, the struggle of his god against ‘false gods’ who exist as gods?
Such monotheism is effectively exclusive: it has to exclude other gods. For that reason,
true monotheists are tolerant: for them, others are not objects of hatred, but simply people
who, although they are not enlightened by the true belief, should nonetheless be
respected, since they are not inherently evil.” Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf:
The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), p.26.

168
Nietzsche
23
) by its undignified concern for the weak and lowly; it threatened the entire
social and political order of pagan antiquity by dramatically redefining what it meant to
be human. “What for us is the quiet, persistent, perennial rebuke of conscience within us
was, for ancient peoples, an outlandish decree issuing from a realm outside any world
they could conceive,” Hart writes:
Conscience, after all, at least in regard to its particular contents, is to a great
extent a cultural artifact, a historical contingency, and all of us in the West, to
some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral
ideals. For this reason, it is all but impossible for us to recover any real sense of
the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which
the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class
and condition, and of either sex.
24

In his Darwinian case for “moral individualism” (see Chapter 2), James Rachels makes
the same point in support of the opposite conclusion. “[M]any people do not believe the
religious story, and consider their own thoughts about ethics to be independent of it,” he
notes. “Yet a religious tradition can influence the whole shape of a culture, and even
determine the form that secular thought takes within it. Only a little reflection is needed
to see that secular moral thought within the Western tradition follows the pattern set by
these religious teachings.”
25

The rise of Christianity had immediate consequences for human rights, for even
where the language of “rights” was not explicitly used the New Testament narrative of

23
“They have an ambition which makes you laugh,” Nietzsche wrote, “people like that
regurgitating their most personal affairs, stupidities, sorrows and lingering worries, as if
the in-itself of things were duty-bound to concern itself with all that, people like that
never tire of involving God in the most trivial trouble they are in. And this continual use
of first-name-terms with God, in the worst taste!” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy
of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.108.
24
Hart, Atheist Delusions, p.169.
25
James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), p.87.

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God taking on human flesh invested every person with an incalculable and previously
unimaginable worth. Instead of individuals struggling to attain dignitas as a scarce
commodity in competitive rivalry with others, all persons were now summoned to live in
generous solidarity with their neighbors as persons having equal dignity and worth as
themselves. Dignity, in the Christian revaluation of values, could not be earned since it
was bestowed as a gift from God, although the gift could be lost or squandered precisely
by transgressing the dignity of the Other, whether through violence or by remaining
indifferent to their welfare—by denying that they too were the privileged bearers of the
divine image, the divine image now being of a man broken, tortured, and executed by the
state.
According to the book of Acts, in the original Christian community in Jerusalem
following Christ’s death and resurrection, “all those who had believed were together and
had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were
sharing them with all, as anyone might have need” (Acts 2: 44-45). One of the most
potent expressions of the Christian invention (if not discovery) of human equality was the
way the early believers gathered together for table fellowships without regard for class or
social standing. In the rigidly stratified world of ancient Greece and Rome in which
one’s status determined who one could and could not eat one’s meals with, Christians
transgressed all decorum and standards of decency in their common meals or
communions. Where the model for the incorporation of foreign bodies into the Roman
body/empire was paradigmatically set by the narrative of the rape of the women of
Sabine, incorporation of new believers into the body of Christ was patterned upon the
story of Christ’s last supper—the narrative of how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples,

170
the task of a slave, and generously gave of his own body, symbolized by broken bread
and wine, so that others might live with abundance.
The new faith proved especially attractive, sociologist Rodney Stark has shown
from a wide array of textual and archeological sources, to women. Christianity by all
accounts disproportionately drew in females, whose status and power was significantly
enhanced as a result of entering the Christian subculture.
26
They held positions of high
leadership in the fledgling church; they married older (at time when Roman families
often gave away their daughters in marriage before puberty); and they benefited from
Christian condemnation of traditional male prerogatives of divorce, incest, infidelity,
polygamy, and infanticide of female daughters.
27
The Apostle Paul’s somewhat notorious
statements about female “submission” to their husbands must be read in full context to
grasp their radically equalizing message of mutual submission and reciprocity patterned
upon Christ’s own selfless agape. In the book of Ephesians, Paul writes, “Wives submit
yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of
the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior” (5:22-
23). Yet these verses are part of an extended discourse on marital relations in which Paul
declares, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (v.21). He goes on to
instruct men, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave

26
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement
Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
27
Stark quotes from a letter dating from the year 1 BCE written by a seemingly devoted
husband Hilarian to his wife Alis to illustrate the casual disregard of the pagan world
toward female infants: “I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon
as I receive payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered of a child, if it is a boy
keep it, if a girl discard it. You have sent me word, ‘Don’t forget me.’ How can I forget
you. I beg you not to worry.” Ibid., pp.97-98.

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himself up for her…husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who
loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed
and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are all members of his
body…each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife respect
her husband” (v.25-33). However problematic these statements might sound to readers
today, it is important to judge their emancipatory force in the social context of Paul’s day
rather than our own. It was in fact a common slur against Christianity that it was a
religion for women. Insofar as women in the ancient world very often had their dignity
violated by powerful men, the slur was entirely accurate.
Paul’s letters do not include any explicit condemnations of slavery although in
one of his letters of ad hoc pastoral counsel (written from a Roman prison) he urges a
Christian slave owner, Philemon, to receive back into his household a runaway slave,
Onesimus, in order to be reconciled to him. Some readers have concluded that on the
question of slavery Paul was therefore a “conservative” who endorsed the status quo. But
Paul’s response was deeply subversive of the practice in other ways.
28
In his letter to
Philemon he in fact redefines the relationship between master and slave in a way that
rules out the Aristotelian view of “natural” subservience. Because Philemon is now a
Christian, Paul writes, he must view Onesimus “no longer as a slave but as more than a
slave, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 1:16). In the same way that the great Renaissance
painter Caravaggio used the technique of chiaroscuro—contrasting darkness and light in
order to make the light shine all the brighter—in his paintings, a consideration of
Aristotle’s statements on slavery might help to illuminate the radical core of what Paul

28
See Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp.40ff.

172
was saying. In the Politics, Aristotle wrote, “For that some should rule and others be
ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are
marked out for subjection, others for rule” (I.V. 1254a). “True” mastery is not merely
tyrannical force, Aristotle asserted. Rather, the true master is paternalistically responsible
for the slave, treating inferiors as “a living but separated part of his own bodily frame.
Hence, where the relation of master and slave between them is natural they are friends
and have a common interest, but where it rests merely on convention and force the
reverse is true” (I.VI. 1253b). Nevertheless, Aristotle declared, “as superior power is
only found where there is superior excellence of some kind, power seems to imply
excellence” (I.VI. 1253a). Further, he wrote in the Nichomachen Ethics, for “men of pre-
eminent excellence there is no law—they are themselves a law” (III.13. 1284a). The
distinction between tyrannical force and justifiable or “natural” force is in this way
rendered sufficiently ambiguous in Aristotle to give masters virtually complete
discretionary freedom in the treatment of their slaves. Aristotle concludes his discussion
of the relationship between masters and slaves with this highly suggestive statement:
“But the art of acquiring slaves, I mean of justly acquiring them, differs both from the art
of the master and the art of the slave, being a species of hunting and war” (I.VII. 1255b).
Deeply ingrained beliefs in human inequality did not go without a fight nor did
Christians cease being people of their age with all of the cultural riches as well native
prejudices this entailed. Evidence of this fact may be found within the biblical text itself,
which frequently lays the shortcomings of the early believers bare for all to see. The
Apostle Paul—a highly educated Jewish rabbi prior to his conversion who also held
Roman citizenship and so might well have lived out his life in relative ease as a man of

173
dignitas had he not undergone a dramatic conversion while leading a violent campaign of
persecution against Christians—chastises wealthy believers in Corinth, for example, for
excluding the poor and uneducated from their communion meals (1 Corinthians 11:22-
23). He could not force the churches he had planted to change their ways, but he could
appeal to their memories of the Jesus story and to the witness of his own life as a model
ironically worthy of emulation by those of high social status:
We are fools for Christ’s sake…we are weak, but you are strong; you are
distinguished, but we are without honor. To this present hour we are both hungry
and thirsty, and are poorly clothed, and are roughly treated, and are homeless; and
we toil, working with our own hands; when we are reviled, we bless; when we are
persecuted, we endure; when we are slandered, we try to conciliate; we have
become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now…
Therefore I exhort you, be imitators of me (1 Corinthians 4:10-13, 16).

The story of the Christian subversion of pagan values would over time become
the story of a tragic double subversion. The retrenchment of hierarchy and domination
within the Church—particularly after Constantine made Christianity the religion of the
empire in the fourth century, reversing several centuries of persecution of believers—
means that Christianity is today fully vulnerable to the charge of being a net violator of
human rights and human dignity. This second subversion was not, however, the primary
source of Nietzsche’s indictment of Christianity. It is to Nietzsche’s radical rejection of
the Christian euangelion and along with it the idea of human equality that we must now
turn.

II. Domesticating Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Political Admirers
In the introduction to his book, Morality Without God?, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
announces his intention to refute the Nietzschean-Dostoevskian claim that without God

174
“everything is permitted.”
29
Dostoevsky is unfortunately never mentioned again in the
book and Nietzsche’s name appears only once more in passing, without any exploration
of what Nietzsche actually thought or said. In her otherwise informative work,
Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World, Grace Kao presents two opposing camps:
religionists on the one hand and secular humanists/political liberals on the other. The
Nietzschean radical critique of both is never discussed. Similarly, in an article in the New
York Times entitled “The Sacred and the Humane,” Anat Biletzki writes, “There is no
philosophically robust reason to accept the claim that human dignity originates with
God.” The “fragility” and “resilience” of humanity are “awe inspiring” enough to sustain
our commitment to human rights, she declares, and in fact religion should not even be
admitted “as a legitimate player in the human rights game” since those concerned with
defending rights out of a sense of religious duty are not concerned with rights as such but
only with a kind of slavish obedience to the commands of the diety.
30
Nietzsche’s name
never appears in Biletzki’s article. Instead, she invokes Aristotle’s virtue ethics and
Kant’s categorical imperative before leaping to contemporary liberal thinkers like Martha
Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. We are left with the impression that there have been no
serious obstacles in the path of strictly secular moral theory from the Enlightenment up to
the present, and that humanisms grounded in the assumptions of philosophical naturalism
now face off against a single opponent: divine command ethics, which Biletzki equates

29
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality Without God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), p. xii.
30
Anat Biletzki, “The Sacred and the Humane,” New York Times, July 17, 2011, on the
web at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/the-sacred-and-the-humane.

175
with “religion” itself.
31
Yet the struggle of modernity, readers of Charles Taylor will
recall, is not a two-cornered but a three-corned struggle. Apart from the fact that neither
Aristotle nor Kant were philosophical materialists or naturalists
32
(as well as the fact that
Aristotle was a champion not of shared human dignity in the fullest sense of the word but

31
“Religion,” as Biletzki defines it, “is a system of myth and ritual; it is a communal
system of propositional attitudes—beliefs, hopes, fears, desires—that are related to
superhuman agents.” The most important of these “propositional attitudes,” she suggests,
is unquestioning obedience to whatever the “superhuman agent(s)” commands. “A deep
acceptance of divine authority—and that is what true religion demands—entails a
renunciation of human rights if God so wills.” This highly contentious definition of
“religion” ignores not only functionalist approaches that make better sense of a wider
array of religious phenomenon but also the substantive content of much of biblical
monotheism, which is Biletzki’s primary target. Far from insisting upon unquestioning
devotion to whatever God commands, Hebrew Scripture contains numerous stories of
individuals who protest against God’s silence and seeming injustice in the face of human
suffering. In the Jewish faith, one is permitted if not required to speak in defense of
humanity even if this means contending with the Creator of the Universe. To cite a
single example, when God announces his intention to destroy the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah for their wickedness, the father of the nation of Israel, Abraham, heroically
intervenes on behalf of humanity and in the name of justice. “Far be it from you to do
such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked
are treated alike,” he protests against God. “Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of
all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25).
32
For Aristotle, the study of politics was the highest or most authoritative science
(episteme) since in its orientation toward the well being of the polis or community as a
whole it was concerned with how all other sciences and methodologies—including the
natural sciences—might help or hinder our understandings of human existence in the
broadest sense. The episteme of politics in classical Greek thinking was understood, in
other words, to be in the service of something still more primary to human knowing,
phronesis or practical wisdom, whose goal was the good life (eu zen) which could only
be achieved by aligning one’s actions with the workings of the cosmos as a whole. “The
virtue that Aristotle calls phronesis, or political science,” Eric Voegelin writes, “is an
existential virtue; it is the movement of being, in which the divine order of the cosmos
attains its truth in the human realm.” Phronesis is what enables one to make judgments in
particular cases and so is the primary virtue on which all other virtues of character
(courage, generosity, etc.) depend. The good life for Aristotle is a complete human life
well lived, and this requires that one cultivate those qualities or virtues that will enable
one to move steadily toward the final telos of existence, eudaimonia, which is a state of
blessedness or happiness in which one stands in right relation to oneself, to the
community, and to the divine. See Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), p.70; and Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p.154.

176
rather of a ranked ordering of superior and inferior human types), Biletzki’s omission of
the anti-humanism of Nietzsche and his postmodern followers from even honorable
mention shows how far she has presumed precisely what needs to be explained.
When political theorists do seriously engage with Nietzsche’s ideas, though, it is
often in order to recruit him for political projects Nietzsche himself would have certainly
opposed. Many of these scholars openly acknowledge this fact. Nietzsche’s political
philosophy, William Connolly writes, was marked by an undeniable “disdain for
democracy,” yet Nietzsche remains, in Connolly’s reading, a “protean” thinker whose
ideas may yet be pressed into the service of a “theory of agonistic democracy.”
33

Although “Nietzsche was an adversary of democracy,” he writes, “a politicized left-
Nietzscheanism unearths building stones in the democratic edifice all too easily buried.”
These “stones” can be used to advance liberalism’s egalitarian agenda, “even if they
make the entire structure less smooth, regular, even, and ratic [sic].”
34
Connolly’s goal is
“not to offer the true account of the true Nietzsche hiding behind a series of masks, but to
construct a post-Nietzscheanism one is willing to endorse and enact.”
35
We must avoid
“single-minded” readings of Nietzsche as a philosopher of hierarchy and domination, he
writes, no matter Nietzsche’s own likely values or intentions.
36
Nietzsche’s conception
of the will to power, for example, should be relocated as a “will to self-responsibility,”
while his ideal of the overman should be reinterpreted in terms not of an actual social

33
William Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p.184.
34
Ibid., p.190.
35
Ibid., p.197.
36
Ibid., p.191.

177
caste but as an existential possibility contained within each individual.
37
While we must
learn to absorb Nietzsche’s radical critique of the resentment and oppression at the heart
of liberal societies, then, we must do so precisely for the sake of advancing liberal values
of pluralistic concern for the Other.
Romand Coles similarly enlists Nietzsche in the cause of liberalism and political
equality, Nietzsche’s openly stated hostility to democratic values and political structures
notwithstanding. For Coles, the political significance of Nietzsche lies in what he
describes as his “gift-giving” generosity of spirit in certain passages in Thus Spake
Zarathustra. It is not Nietzsche’s subsequent and far more explicitly moral and political
texts (particularly On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil) but his
enigmatic and esoteric mythology that we must concentrate on when considering his
politics. There “is much in Nietzsche’s pondering that runs directly against the grain of
the insights I seek to draw from him,” Coles writes.
38
But Nietzsche’s “striving into evil”
in Thus Spake Zarathustra is “animated and circumscribed by…generous respect for
otherness.”
39
Although Nietzsche takes Kantian thinking “to extremes and conclusions
that are terrifying,” he “also illuminates the untenability and horror of this project, and
points beyond it in promising directions with a power perhaps unrivaled in the nineteenth
century.”
40
Coles concedes that his reading of Nietzsche is “idiosyncratic” and fully
vulnerable to the charge of picking and choosing, but argues that what he refers to as

37
Ibid., pp.188-190, 196.
38
Romand Coles, “Liberty, Equality, Receptive Generosity: Neo-Nietzschean Reflections
on the Ethics and Politics of Coalition,” in American Political Science Review, Vol.90,
No.2 (June 1996), p.381.
39
Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p.22.
40
Ibid., p.15.

178
Nietzsche’s “agonistic giving and receiving in depth” can still somehow guide us “toward
a post-secular caritas.”
41

Lawrence Hatab is still more forthright in conceding that his reading of Nietzsche
is, in significant ways, a reading of Nietzsche “contra Nietzsche.” Egalitarianism in
Nietzsche’s political philosophy “gives the appearance of something positive but is in
fact a reactive negation…For Nietzsche, the unfortunate consequence [of democracy] is
the hegemony and promulgation of mediocrity and a vapid conformism, which obviates
creativity and excellence and portends the aimless contentment, the happy nihilism, of the
‘last man’, who makes everything comfortable, small, and trivial.”
42
It is therefore simply
not possible, Hatab concludes, to separate Nietzsche’s statements on power from
concepts of the desirability of actual political domination and hierarchy.
Hatab challenges Nietzsche’s assumption, however, that democratic political
structures must necessarily foster smallness of spirit in the cultural and social spheres, or
rest upon a belief in human equality in any substantive sense. Allowing that resentment,
conformism, and the suppression of creativity are indeed real threats in democratic
societies, and agreeing with Nietzsche that—absent belief in God—there is no reason to
accept claims of equal human dignity and worth as factual realities or binding moral
principles, Hatab seeks to re-position democracy in “postmodern, postmetaphysical”
terms as an agonistic arena (an “agonarchy”) in which political actors are able to assert
themselves in what he deems “dynamic, productive and creative” relationships of

41
Ibid., pp.11, 22.
42
Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern
Politics (Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 1995), p.28.

179
domination and submission.
43
Through democracy’s regular adversarial electoral contests
in which both truth-claims and power relations are continuously challenged and
overturned, “power is pluralized” and we are pushed in the direction of a Nietzschean
epistemology of “perspectivism”; that is, “an antifoundationalist depiction of human
knowledge, where no claim can pretend to apprehend ultimate truth.”
44
Where Connolly,
Coles, and others have sought to show how various parts of Nietzsche’s project might be
appropriated for democratic values, in other words, Hatab seeks to show how procedural
democracies in which rules of civil discourse are strictly adhered to by all can serve as
ideal settings for the realization of Nietzschean values of hierarchy, noble self-assertion,
and will to power.
Tracy Strong meanwhile suggests that Nietzsche’s ideas cannot be appropriated
for progressive or aristocratic politics. Yet this very fact, he strangely concludes, is itself
a vital resource for thinkers seeking to resist “domination.”
45
In Strong’s reading,
“Nietzsche’s texts are written in such a manner that if one seeks to find out what they
‘really mean’, to appropriate them, one will only project one’s own identity onto them.”
46

Modern attempts to formulate a theory of politics or ethics all fail because they seek
“solutions to the problems in thought and not in life,” while for the ancient Greeks as
well as for Nietzsche, the dynamic expression of life itself—not abstracted thinking about
life—is of the highest value.
47
Hence, those who seek to claim Nietzsche for either the

43
Ibid., pp.76-77.
44
Ibid., pp.75-76.
45
Tracy B. Strong, “Nietzsche’s Political Misappropriation,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Nietzsche, eds., Bernard Magnus and Kathleen Marie Higgins (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.122.
46
Ibid., p.140.
47
Ibid., p.141.

180
political left or right, according to Strong, are seeking a kind of “once-and-for-all-ness”
that “must always be wrong, because it claims to be always right; and assurance,
Nietzsche knew, is the basis of domination.”
48
Nietzsche teaches us to “let uncertainty
and ambiguity enter one’s world, to let go the need to have the last word, to let go the
need that there be a last word.”
49

To this list of Nietzsche’s political admirers could be added others (including
Daniel Conway, Mark Warren, and Richard Rorty) who collectively have exerted a
significant if not dominant influence on the reception of Nietzsche’s politics in the
Anglo-American world over the past 30 years. All of these readers in various ways have
sought to show how Nietzsche can provide valuable resources for contemporary
democratic theory while minimizing (with the exception here of Hatab) the illiberal,
elitist, and anti-egalitarian aspects of his vision, even though these are tacitly if not
explicitly almost always acknowledged. Whether by isolating acceptable texts to the
exclusion of others (as in Coles’ reading of Thus Spake Zarathustra), or by emphasizing
the infinite malleability of Nietzsche’s words as a way of simultaneously dismissing
unpalatable interpretations and re-positioning Nietzsche as an opponent rather than
champion of “domination” (as in Strong’s and Connolly’s readings), or by transposing
Nietzsche’s more unsettling political declarations into a vocabulary of strictly
individualistic and interior self overcoming (as in Connolly’s description of the will to
power as a “will to self-responsibility” and Leslie Paul Thiele’s account of Nietzsche’s

48
Ibid., p.142.
49
Ibid., p.142.

181
project as a “politics of the soul”
50
), we are left with the impression that Nietzsche,
properly understood, poses no fundamental challenge or inassimilable opposition to the
liberal political project and the idea of human rights. As Richard Wolin writes, “the
postmodern reading of Nietzsche has become canonical” while others “have become
anathema”:
In the postmodern reading, Nietzsche is reduced and reconfigured to suit the
needs of a blasé, post-philosophical (post-humanist, postindustrial, post-
Freudian—take your pick) culture, in which rarely is anything momentous or
important at stake. We are offered a domesticated and “presentable” Nietzsche,
who would perhaps make for a good companion on a long train ride. Here is a
Nietzsche whom even Richard Rorty, a self-described “postmodern bourgeois
liberal,” could wholeheartedly embrace.
51

Even if we allow, however, that Nietzsche’s texts might be deconstructed and
reconstructed in endless ways, including in the service of an egalitarian or liberal politics
and human rights, the question arises: What is the purpose of the exercise? “If all of this
bending and twisting turns the end-product—call it ‘Nietzsche’—into a mirror image of
one’s own convictions,” Fredrick Appel observes, “it is hard to imagine the point of such
an endeavor. A Nietzsche thus sanitized or domesticated can teach nothing that could not
be learned directly from dozens of contemporary writers.”
52
Appropriations of Nietzsche
as a champion of pluralistic concern for the Other may serve to insulate us from his
intended political meanings for the sake of an ersatz political usefulness and so deprive us
of an encounter with a critical thinker whose values are radically other than those of
liberal theorists. “Nietzsche’s usefulness to contemporary democratic theory may derive,

50
Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic
Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
51
Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism
From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p.33.
52
Fredrick Appel, Nietzsche contra Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999),
p.5.

182
paradoxically, from his uncompromising antiegalitarianism,” Appel argues. “An
engagement with his ‘untimely meditations’ about rank, domination, and nobility can
enliven the sensibilities of egalitarians of all stripes by forcing them to account for and
defend those convictions he holds in contempt: concern for the weak, belief in the equal
moral worth of all human beings and the desire to preserve and promote liberal
institutions.”
53

III. “The Abyss of Scientific Conscience”: Nietzsche’s Naturalism
If the truthfulness of a philosopher’s ethical teachings must be evaluated not simply in
detached analytical terms but also in existential terms as a mode of being in the world, it
is hard not to read Nietzsche’s evocations of a lost world of heroic valor as a desperate
and finally (dare one say) pitiable attempt to overcome the tragic realities of his life. One
must not evade a great thinker’s challenges simply by exposing their human weaknesses.
But when a person offers their philosophy as a new way of living we must ask whether
they are in fact able to live what they proclaim. Was Nietzsche himself able to be
Nietzschean?
When Nietzsche was five years old, his father—a devout Lutheran pastor to
whom Nietzsche was greatly attached—died from a prolonged brain illness. Nietzsche’s
younger brother, Ludwig Joseph, died the following year. Nietzsche never recovered
from these losses, which cast a great darkness over his childhood and deprived him of
anything like a normal youth. From the ages of 14 to 19 he attended a rigid boarding
school located in a former Cistercian monastery filled with medieval Gothic architecture.

53
Ibid., pp.7-8.

183
At the age of 23 he then entered compulsory military training near his hometown of
Naumberg while living at home with his mother. His early years, Siegfried Mandel
notes, were marked first by “a suffocatingly pious upbringing and almost exclusively
feminine surroundings,” then by “disciplinarian and male environments.”
54
One day
while attempting to mount a horse in training he fell and suffered a chest injury that
refused to heal. He was discharged and resumed his studies. As his academic career as a
brilliant philologist of classical languages blossomed he cultivated friendships with
several notable individuals, including the composer Richard Wagner, but he was not
close to his colleagues at the University of Basel and many of his friendships (including
with Wagner) ended tumultuously. He was desperately lonely throughout his life,
longing to be married but failing spectacularly in his attempts win over the women he
pursued. Given Nietzsche’s strong preference for the values of pagan antiquity as over
and against those of prophetic Judaism and primitive Christianity, we should perhaps not
be surprised by his virulent misogyny.
55
But whether or not there was a relationship

54
Siegfried Mandel, “Introduction” to Lou Salomé, Nietzsche (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 1988, p.xl.
55
Some of Nietzsche’s more indelible pronouncements on women may be found in
Chapter Seven (“Our Virtues”) of Beyond Good and Evil: “Women have so much reason
for shame; there is so much hidden in women that is pedantic, superficial, carping, pettily
presumptuous, pettily unbridled and immodest…their great art is the lie, their highest
concern appearance and beauty…Stupidity in the kitchen; women as cooks; the frightful
thoughtlessness that goes into providing nourishment for families and heads of
households! Women don’t understand what food means…Black garments and a silent
tongue suit every woman old and young…let’s just say women are becoming shameless.
And let us add at once that they are also becoming tasteless. They are forgetting how to
fear men—but a woman who ‘forgets how to fear’ is abandoning her most womanly
instincts…To be sure, there are enough idiotic women-lovers and female-corrupters
among scholarly assess who are advising women to defeminize themselves…those who
would like to bring women down to the level of ‘general education’, or even to reading
the newspaper and politicking. Some of them would even like to make women into
freethinkers and literati…Women are being destroyed almost everywhere by the most

184
between his at once prudishly moralizing and vaguely sadomasochistic declarations about
women and his mature philosophy of power, his writings reflected the disappointment of
unrequited love and the pain of a solitude not of his willing.
56
From his late 20s onwards
he was plagued by chronic sickness and spent years as an effective invalid confined for
long periods to his bed. In 1889, at the age of 45, he suffered a complete mental
breakdown while in the city of Turin from which he never recovered. The cause of
Nietzsche’s insanity is unknown. Some scholars believe it was induced by medications
he was taking at the time, others theorize it was the result of a brain tumor, a syphilitic
infection, a genetic disease inherited from his father, or brought on by his own ideas.
Whatever the reason, there was a very great gulf between many of Nietzsche’s
declarations about the necessity of masculine strength and “good health” and the facts of
his existence. Whether this fissure reveals a courageous even if tragically flawed
individual striving in the face of great adversity, or the self-loathing of a wounded and
hyperactive ego, or some of both, I will not attempt to answer. Instead, I will try to
attend to Nietzsche’s writings on their own philosophical terms as a critique of the idea of
human equality as a basic tenet of the discourse of modern human rights.

pathological and dangerous kinds of music (our modern German music), making women
every day more hysterical and less competent for their first and last profession, the
bearing of healthy children.” Nietzsche’s general impression, Siegfried Mandel writes,
was that “women were ‘llamas’ or other types of ‘Tierchen’—little creatures with
possessive, predatory claws.” Ibid., p.xlii.
56
Perhaps Nietzsche’s most painful experience of rejection was his attempt to win over
the partner of his friend Paul Rée, Lou Salomé, who he fell furtively in love with when
the three travelled together across Italy in 1882. Along the way, the group took a comic
photo together in which Salomé sits in a small cart behind the two men as her horses
brandishing a whip. Nietzsche was at the time in the midst of writing Thus Spake
Zarathustra, which contains the notorious aphorism: “Are you visiting women? Don’t
forget your whip!” In light of the photo one can’t help but ask: Who did Nietzsche wish
would hold the whip?

185
Nietzsche’s attempted “transvaluation of values,” as set forth in his two most
systematic works of moral and political philosophy, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), is inseparable from his highly essentialist claims
about the “physiological” roots of human “nature.” All of life, he writes, “functions
essentially [das Leben essentiell, nämlich in seinen Grundfunktionen] in an injurious,
violent, exploitative and destructive manner” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
57
“Life itself in its
essence means [Leben selbst ist wesentlich] appropriating, injuring, overpowering those
who are foreign and weaker…‘Exploitation’ is not part of a decadent or imperfect,
primitive society: it is part of the fundamental nature of living things [Wesen des
Lebendigen], as its fundamental organic function [organische Grundfunktion]”
(Nietzsche’s emphasis).
58

The foundational necessity of violence in Nietzsche’s vision, he asserts, emerges
from his principled and superior commitment to the goal of scientific reasoning and his
ability to gaze fearlessly into “the abyss of scientific conscience” where others have
merely traded on scientific wisdom “as a means of self-anaesthetic.”
59
The trouble with
the “mediocre” psychological and evolutionary theorists of his day, he makes clear, is not
that they are excessively rational but that they have failed to press science’s deepest
insights through to their final conclusions, instead cowardly continuing to draw
“superfluous teleological principles” from poisonous metaphysical wells.
60
The
seemingly scientific claim of Darwin and Spencer that self-preservation is “an organic

57
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.50.
58
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), pp.152-153.
59
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp.109-110.
60
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp.15,144.

186
being’s primary instinct,” for example, surreptitiously enables a teleological myth of
Progress. Yet according to Nietzsche, humanity “as a species is not progressing…[and]
does not represent any progress compared with any other animal.”
61
A “living thing seeks
above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only
one of the indirect and most frequent results” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
62
Nietzsche’s
hostility to Darwin thus emerges from his fundamental agreement with the anti-
teleological thrust of Darwin’s theory. His claim is that he is a better Darwinian.
63

Nietzsche, not Darwin, has fully grasped—and embraced—the corrosive implications of
naturalism and evolutionary science when applied to questions of human nature and
origins. “Nietzsche intervenes to complete Darwin’s revolution,” writes Christopher
Cox. “Against vitalist evolutionary theorists, and despite his critique of mechanism,
Nietzsche retains the materialism promoted by classical physical theory, which asserts the
continuity of the organic with the inorganic world.”
64

The most insidious metaphysical vestige clinging to Western science in
Nietzsche’s view is the Christian belief that humans, by virtue of their reasoning or
conscience, possess a “mind” or “soul” or “will” that is not fully implicated in the
instinctive, erotic, and profligate “drives” of evolving, organic species life. The science
of “the new psychologist” (i.e. of Nietzsche himself), however, has banished once and for
all “the superstitions that proliferated…around the idea of the soul,” casting the human

61
As cited in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p.328.
62
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.211.
63
On Nietzsche’s debt to Darwin and social Darwinian theories see John Richardson,
Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.137-146.
64
Christopher Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), p.136.

187
animal into “a new desolation and a new distrust.”
65
The epistemological implication of
the death of the soul is that all knowing must now be seen as “perspectival knowing,”
inseparably linked to elemental emotions, evolutionary competitive rivalries, and
subconscious instincts.
66
When Nietzsche criticizes empiricists and materialists, then, he
does so for their failure to see that there is no detached Archimedean point from which to
judge reality, for reifying notions of causality, and for forgetting that their own
conceptual schemes for understanding the world also emerge from biological impulses
for power and domination.
67
At the same time, his belief that the alleged “lawfulness of
nature” in scientific discourse merely masks “the ruthlessly tyrannical and unrelenting
assertion of power claims” arises from his assumption that there is a “fundamental” law
of nature, namely, the law of the will to power.
68
Nietzsche’s apparent subjectivism (or
“perspectivism”) and anti-positivism are in this sense paradoxical corollaries and
conclusions to his claims of what science has shown the world objectively to be. We
must, accordingly, face the “hard” and “terrible” facts of an utterly disenchanted universe
in the light of Nietzsche’s own “evolutionary theory of the will to power.”
The subtlety and irony of Nietzsche’s writings therefore conceal a surprisingly
crude and tendentious sociobiology close to the surface of his philosophy. There is in
fact an unavoidably positivistic strain in Nietzsche’s thinking emerging from his
assumption (following Comte) that both theology and metaphysics are spent intellectual
forces and that philosophy should now ally itself with the new vocabulary of natural

65
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.14.
66
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p.87.
67
See, for example, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
pp.218-220.
68
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.22.

188
science.
69
The “animal vigor” of the genius, he declares, is a product of climate and
“metabolism,” while mediocrity results from “sluggishness of the intestines.”
70
When
Nietzsche casts his scientific gaze upon the phenomenon of religion—and the “sickness”
of Christianity in particular—he discovers the “inherently probable” results of “a
physiological feeling of obstruction.”
71
The “large masses of people…through lack of
physiological knowledge” fail to grasp the actual chains of causation governing reality,
he writes in a critical passage in On the Genealogy of Morals.
72
They ascribe their
sensations of “depression,” “fatigue,” “lethargy,” and “melancholy” to “guilt” or
“sinfulness.” But the “psychic suffering” of the masses, on closer examination, “has no
scientific standing,” because all psychological phenomena, according to Nietzsche, must
be traced back to “physiological” roots. The “obstruction” that generates “inverted”
religious consciousness, he concludes, emerges from diverse but purely material factors,
including: “crossing of races that are too heterogeneous”; “unsound emigration—a race
ending up in a climate for which its powers of adaptation are inadequate”; “the after-
effects of a race’s age and fatigue”; “a faulty diet (alcoholism of the Middle Ages; the
nonsense of the vegetarians…)”; and “corruption of the blood, malaria, syphilis, and such
like.”
73

If Nietzsche’s sociobiology, with its preoccupation with “sluggishness of the
intestines” and petulance for the follies of the vegetarians, is inadvertently comical and

69
On the relationship between Nietzsche’s thought and Comtean positivism see Nadeem
J. Z. Hussain, “Nietzsche’s Positivism,” in European Journal of Philosophy, Vol.12,
No.3 (2004), pp.344ff.
70
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.696.
71
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p.96.
72
Ibid., p.96.
73
Ibid., p.96.

189
unconvincing in one light, it is profoundly compelling in another. All humans might be
regarded in some ways as being biologically equal. All persons eat, sleep, breath, and
die. But these facts, Nietzsche enables us to see more clearly than any other, are tedious
and irrelevant to the problems at hand. The empirical reality is that the range of human
mental, physical, and spiritual capacities is vast. As George Steiner writes, “No social
psychology, no ‘biometrics’ can classify the manifold gaps or nuances which separate
genius from the moronic, which distance the creativity, the innovative energies of the few
from the passivity of the many.” There might be a sense, then, in which Shakespeare,
Mozart, and Einstein are “equal” to misanthropes, misogynists, child abusers, and cretins,
but by any purely naturalistic assessment of the evidence, the “theorem of equality
becomes elusive.”
74
So elusive, Nietzsche concluded, there is no reason to think that
equal human rights or shared human dignity can or should exist.
There is another sense, then, in which the crude reading of Nietzsche appears to
be the correct one, and that is in his clear enthusiasm for the project of eugenics.
Nietzsche’s statements about the need for policies of deliberate breeding to weed out
“degenerate” human specimens forms yet another bridge to Darwin’s theory as it was
widely understood by both British and German scientists in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote:
Let us glance ahead a century, and let us suppose that my attack on two millennia
of perversity and defilement of the human has been successful. That new party of
life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the breeding of a higher
humanity, including the ruthless destruction of everything degenerating and
parasitic, will make possible again that excess of life on earth from which the
Dionysian state, too, must arise once again (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
75

74
George Steiner, Errata (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p.124.
75
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.48.

190
In notes penned in 1888, about half a year before his mental breakdown,
Nietzsche wrote, “There are cases in which a child would be a crime: in the case of
chronic invalids and neurasthenics of the third degree.” He continued:
Society, as the great trustee of life, is responsible to life itself for every miscarried
life—it also has to pay for such lives: consequently it ought to prevent them. In
numerous cases, society ought to prevent procreation: to this end, it may hold in
readiness, without regard to descent, rank, or spirit, the most rigorous means of
constraint, deprivation of freedom, in certain circumstances castration.—The
Biblical prohibition ‘thou shalt not kill!’ is a piece of naiveté compared wit the
seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: ‘thou shalt not procreate!’—
Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no ‘equal rights,’ between the healthy and the
degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter—or the whole will
perish. —Sympathy for the decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted—that
would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as
morality!
76

In contrast to the physiologically degenerate masses of humanity, the energetic
elites—Nietzsche’s (in)famous Übermenschen or “blond beasts of prey,” the “master
race…organized on a war footing”—exhibit their “health” and “cleanliness” through their
“dominating instinct” or “instinct for freedom” (which Nietzsche says is synonymous
with “the will to power”).
77
In the pre-moral period, the human animal acted entirely
spontaneously according to its “drives” to “release strength.” Domination, cunning, and
brutality were not deemed “evil” but were simply accepted as expressions of vitality, with
noble “strong wills” exploiting bovine “weak wills” as a means to their own self-creation
and self-mastery. One might assume from Nietzsche’s use of words like “will” and
“freedom” that the idea of human agency is central to his project. But with his
“scientific” rejection of any being transcending the flux of nature’s becoming, the idea of
agency itself becomes deeply problematic and elusive in Nietzsche’s thought. Those

76
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p.389.
77
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p.58-59.

191
with the strongest “wills,” he suggests in numerous passages, are actually those who, in a
critical sense, possess the least will of all. They “appear as lightening appears…Their
work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary,
unconscious artists there are.”
78
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of “the problem of
consciousness” and the need to “dispense with it.” Consciousness arose, according to
Nietzsche, as a result of linguistic fictions designed to promote group safety and
cohesion. But the final result of the invention of language/self-awareness was that
humans began to gaze inwardly at their own thoughts, as though into a “mirror,” rather
than creatively and instinctively discharging their wills to power as they allegedly did at a
more “natural” stage of their evolution. Through the study of “physiology and the history
of animals,” however, we are able to glimpse how humans acted at this earlier, more
dynamic phase in their evolution—and how they might act once again. “We could think,
feel, will, and remember, and we could also ‘act’ in every sense of that word, and yet
none of all this would have to ‘enter our consciousness’ (as one says metaphorically).”
79

A skeptical reader might begin to ponder, Hart observes, whether the Nietzschean
paragon of life and health stands for “anything more diverting than the upward thrusting
of an empty will, blind and idiotic, to which he has arbitrarily ascribed…such qualities as
richness, vitality, and creativity.”
80
We might also detect an internal contradiction in
Nietzsche’s view that there is no telos and therefore no progress in nature, and his
assertion of the evolution of “superior” and “inferior” human types. Further, Alasdair

78
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.522.
79
As cited in Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in
Postmodern Politics (Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 1995), p.32.
80
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p.102.

192
MacIntyre shows, Nietzsche fails to see (or perhaps simply suppresses) the fact that the
heroic world of Homer and the pre-Socratics to which he appeals was built not upon
glorification of the individual will but upon duties (of hospitality to strangers, of loyalty
to family and tribe, of fair use of strength) within a rigidly defined epistemological and
moral realism. Nietzsche’s account of the values of ancient Greece is actually “an
inventive literary construction” based upon his own nineteenth-century Romantic
individualism.
81

Nevertheless, for Nietzsche the “longest and most ancient part of human history—
that is, the pre-moral period—was a period of “joy and innocence” of much “greater
biological value…to be scientifically evaluated and esteemed” than the period that
followed (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
82
The empirical facts of nature lead him to clear
normative statements. “No cruelty, no feast,” he declares. “I expressly want to place on
record that at the time when mankind felt no shame towards its cruelty, life on earth was
more cheerful than it is today.”
83
More cheerful for whom, we may ask. When Nietzsche
describes his vision as “tragic,” then, we must grasp precisely where the tragedy of
history in his thinking lies.

IV. Myths of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Metaphysics
In his still influential 1950 study of Nietzsche’s thought, Walter Kaufmann compares
Nietzsche to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Like Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea, he
writes, Nietzsche “felt the agony, the suffering, and the misery of a godless world” and

81
MacIntyre, After Virtue, p.129.
82
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, pp.503, 510.
83
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p.43.

193
warned in apocalyptic language of the dangers of mental complacency and the “universal
madness” closing in upon European societies.
84
Yet the pathos of the Hebrew prophets,
Kaufmann does not mention, lies in their exposure of the idolatry of might and
repudiation of violence and oppression from the point of view of divine justice. “The
prophets proclaimed that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker,” Abraham
Heschel writes. “God’s special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for
the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the
orphan.”
85
For Nietzsche, the law of the evolutionary will to power exposes these beliefs
of the Jewish as well as Christian traditions to be the insipid masks of an ascetic and
unhealthy human type. “Among humans as among every other species of animal, there is
a surplus of deformed, sick, degenerating, frail, necessarily suffering individuals,” spoke
the prophet from Prussia.
86
“Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of
natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction.”
87
What Nietzsche most
admires in the social and political realm—recalling in certain ways Hegel’s admiration of
“World-Historical Individuals”—is Napoleonic “hardness of the hammer,” the rejection
of unmanly and morbid pity in favor of “great deeds” and a rank ordering of humans
according to notions of instinctive and aristocratic vitality.
88
Passage after passage in
Nietzsche’s writings leave little doubt in the mind of this reader, at least, that he

84
Kaufmann, Nietzsche, pp.96-101, 110.
85
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial Classics, 1962), p.213.
86
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp.56-57.
87
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. H.L. Mencken (Tucson: See Sharp Presss,
1999), p.24.
88
On Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique of pity, see Appel, Nietzsche contra Democracy,
pp.154-157; on Nietzsche’s admiration for Napoleon, see Paul F. Glenn, “Nietzsche’s
Napoleon: The Higher Man as Political Actor,” in The Review of Politics, Vol.63, No.1
(Winter, 2001), pp.129-158.

194
conceived his life mission as an unflinching and scientific overturning of the prophetic
values of compassion and equality, which he sees as untenable and enervating chimeras
in the modern age, and which he believes achieved their final disastrous form in the life
and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Merald Westphal, following a very long tradition of friendly Christian (especially
Protestant) reception of Nietzsche, has emphasized the value of Nietzsche for Christian
thought.
89
Shouldn’t “Christian moral instruction include ‘Nietzschean’ warnings against
making a virtue out of various forms of impotence?,” he asks.
90
There are striking
similarities between Jesus and Zarathustra, both of whom “ask awkward questions about
the moral life, questions the good and just consider immoral.”
91
And doesn’t Nietzsche
like Christ and the Hebrew prophets show us in a profound way how ugly religion and
morality can be when they come to conceal the power interests of resentful victims or
priestly ascetics? “What Nietzsche gives us in his analysis of the priestly leaders of the
slave revolt in morality,” Westphal writes, “is the social psychology of the Grand
Inquisitor.”
92

89
Around the turn of the century, the general consensus among both mainline Protestant
liberals and radical champions of the “Social Gospel” was that Nietzsche helped
Christians by summoning them to a more authentic spirituality. Nietzsche’s ideas were
even preached from the pulpits of some churches as a kind of bracing “tonic” (in the
words of Reverend Robert Loring to his Milwaukee Unitarian flock in 1919). Catholics
likewise embraced Nietzsche as a vitally important thinker but from a generally more
critical perspective: he revealed that the final outcome of Protestantism was nihilism and
loss of faith. See Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon
and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp.80-99.
90
Westphal, Merold, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1998), p.251.
91
Ibid., p.262.
92
Ibid., p.245.

195
While all of these observations may be true and important to keep in mind,
though, Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christ is not ultimately of the same spirit as
Dostoevsky’s critique of the desiccating and Pharisaical pieties of institutionalized
religion. Nietzsche sees in the person of Jesus, and in “genuine, primitive Christianity,” a
“revolt against the established order” with socialistic and anarchic political
implications.
93
He therefore heaps scorn on self-professing believers for their failure to
live out the radical meaning of the Gospels. Yet Nietzsche’s claim to originality as a
moral genealogist (“Grit your teeth bravely! Open your eyes!…Never yet has a deeper
world of insight been opened to bold travelers and adventurers”
94
) lies in his criticism not
of false but of true discipleship. His suspicion is directed not merely at the hypocrisies of
sclerotic, resentful religion—a critique already contained within the Gospel narratives
themselves—but at those who “loathe the church” yet still “love the poison.”
95
According
to Kaufmann, Nietzsche never dreamed of repudiating the historical Jesus or the true
“spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.”
96
But while Nietzsche expresses admiration in
places for the audacity of Christ’s achievement, and although he allows that Christianity
may have served an ambiguously useful evolutionary role at a certain stage of history—
adding a new depth and complexity to animal consciousness—in “the whole New
Testament” there is, he maintains, “but a solitary figure worthy of honor”: Pilate, the
Roman prefect who ordered Jesus crucified.
97

93
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, pp.57-58.
94
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp.23-24.
95
Ibid., p.19.
96
Kaufmann, Nietzsche, pp.367-371.
97
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p.67.

196
Nietzsche’s depiction of Christianity can be faulted for its insensitivity to the
multivalency of biblical poetics and the varieties of religious experience, as well as its
uncritical recital of many of the prejudices of nineteenth-century German liberal
hermeneutics.
98
Still, Nietzsche knows his enemy. (“It is good that Christianity still has
enemies,” wrote Kierkegaard, “because for the longest time they have been the only ones
from whom it has been possible to get any trustworthy information about what
Christianity is.”
99
) Unlike many of his followers, Nietzsche refuses, in his most honest
and penetrating moments, to draw facile comparisons between the Christian narrative and
the religions of pagan antiquity. “‘God on the cross’. At no time or place has there ever
been such a daring reversal, a formula so frightful, questioning, and questionable as this
one,” he writes, “it ushered in a re-evaluation of all ancient values.”
100
Greek, Asian, and
Indo-European religious cults all told stories of dying and returning gods, but what
mattered, Nietzsche saw, was the subversive meaning the New Testament attached to
Christ’s life, suffering, death, and resurrection. Dionysus versus the Crucified—here was
the archetypal and irreconcilable divide.
101
Where the entire edifice of ancient
mythological culture rested upon morally indifferent acceptance of Dionysian ritual
slaughter, whether of humans or of gods, as a tragic revelation of the dialectical necessity
of “the harshest suffering” for life’s “eternal fruitfulness and recurrence,”
102
the Gospel

98
See Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, pp.94-95; Alistair Kee, Nietzsche Against the
Crucified (London: SCM Press, 1999), pp.148-154; and Vladimir Solovyov, The
Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, trans. Nathalie A. Duddington
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1919), pp.lix-lxi.
99
Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, ed. Charles
Moore (Farmington: Bruderhof Foundation, 2002), p.256.
100
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.44.
101
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.791.
102
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p.543.

197
writers proclaimed that the victim is innocent, that the killers are in fact guilty, and that
there is no creative necessity or vitality in the violence of imperium or powerful elites.
The Passion of the Christ in this sense, René Girard agrees with Nietzsche, was indeed
“an explicit allusion to the genesis of all pagan religions and a silent but definitive
condemnation of pagan, of all human order really.”
103
Nietzsche was right: Christianity is
slave morality. Hart is once more illuminating in his commentary on a single seemingly
minor detail recorded in the Gospels from the arrest of Jesus—the story of Peter hearing
the cock’s crow, remembering Christ’s words, and fleeing the scene to weep at the
knowledge that he had betrayed his friend and master:
Nowhere in the literature of pagan antiquity, I assure you, had the tears of a rustic
been regarded as worthy of anything but ridicule; to treat them with reverence, as
meaningful expressions of real human sorrow, would have seemed grotesque
from the perspective of all the classical canons of good taste. Those wretchedly
subversive tears, and the dangerous philistinism of a narrator so incorrigibly
vulgar as to treat them with anything but contempt, were most definitely signs of
a slave revolt in morality, if not quite the one against which Nietzsche
inveighed—a revolt, moreover, that all the ancient powers proved impotent to
resist.
104

Nietzsche perceptively sees that the Christian challenge to the “heroic” cultures of
pagan antiquity represented the culmination of the entire trajectory of Hebrew thought.
105

“This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this ‘Redeemer’ who brought
blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction
in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those
Jewish values and new ideals?” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
106
The Hebrew story of Cain in

103
René Girard, “Nietzsche versus the Crucified,” in The Girard Reader, ed. James G.
Williams (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002), p.251.
104
Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, pp.124-125.
105
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p.39.
106
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.471.

198
the opening passages of Genesis and the Roman story of Romulus are anthropologically
the same in that both tell of a brother killing his brother and then founding a city. But in
the biblical narrative the violent origins of human society are not passively accepted and
praised as in mythological thinking. Instead, the name of Cain is denounced and shamed.
The violence detected at the root of every culture and political order, in Jewish and
Christian thinking alike, is stripped and deprived of its heroic aura. Nietzsche, Girard
observes, is thus a “marvelous antidote to all fundamentally anti-biblical efforts to turn
mythology into a kind of Bible” on the one hand or “to dissolve the Bible into
mythology” on the other. What Nietzsche forces us to confront is “the irreconcilable
opposition between a mythological vision grounded in the perspective of the victimizers
and the biblical inspiration that from the beginning tends to side with the victims.”
107

(The fact that this is a powerful tendency or moral arc in the Hebrew Bible rather than an
always consistent or uniform witness should go without saying.
108
)
Yet Nietzsche chooses to side with the mythos of the victimizers, to call them
Romulus and Dionysus and Achilles instead of calling them Cain. Why? We have seen
how Nietzsche assumes a mantle of scientific necessity in his leap beyond good and evil,
positing “natural” and “instinctive” drives for power as the only grounds for
comprehending and judging human history. Modern man, he asserts, “is the most
botched of all the animals and the sickliest” because, by developing a moral conscience,
“he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts.”
109
Near the conclusion of The

107
Girard, “Nietzsche versus the Crucified,” in The Girard Reader, p.251.
108
On the violent legacy of other parts of Scripture see, for example, Regina Schwartz,
The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997).
109
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p.30.

199
Anti-Christ, he frames the entire meaning of his lifelong battle against the Christian faith
in terms of a struggle between the harsh reality revealed by modern science and the
mendacity of the Gospels for having rejected scientific truth and “devised to destroy
man’s sense of causality” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
110
On closer examination, though,
Nietzsche’s allegedly scientific repudiation of Christ appears to have been nothing more
than a rhetorical ploy. All that he describes as “instinctive,” “natural,” and “vital,” John
Milbank points out, is already a cultural invention; warriors do not resemble “noble”
lions or birds of prey but take these creatures as totems for emulation and then ascribe to
them properties of heroic vitality and nobility in order to justify and mask the
arbitrariness of their own aggression.
111

Nor is the claim that life at its most basic level is an agonistic and eternally
recurring struggle of “will to power” a self-evident or unquestionable truth. Nietzsche’s
preference for Caesar, Napoleon, Dionysus, and predatory animals is precisely that—an
aesthetic preference for cruel and violent metaphors. But what if Nietzsche is simply a
man of bad taste, a philistine at heart who chooses Rome’s “tasteless heap of gold and
marble” (as Nikolai Nikolaievich says in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago) over the One,
“celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world
over”?
112
And why shouldn’t the slave, who has seen through pagan civilization’s totemic
masks and metaphors, embrace an alternative topology built upon a counter vision of
reality, a grammar of creation that also fully accounts for the violence of history in a

110
Ibid., pp. 68-71.
111
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), pp.282-283.
112
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1991), p.43.

200
fallen world but that rests upon pastoral symbols, values of human equality, dignity,
mutuality, compassion, and solidarity, and faith in the primordial fact of love?
Nietzsche in the end rejects this Jewish-Christian counter vision of reality—and
along with it the idea of human rights—not for any superior access he has to nature or to
history, but because, as a self-consciously scientific genealogist committed to yet one
more version of the grand narrative of philosophical naturalism, he is also unavoidably a
metaphysician. Far from being the counter-Enlightenment thinker he sometimes presents
himself as being,
113
Nietzsche ultimately represents the Enlightenment thinker par
excellence, relentlessly pursuing the logic of secularism and the arid lessons of science
wherever they may lead—even to the deconstruction of scientific reasoning itself as one
more evidence of the omnipresent will to power. The “Nietzschean stance,” MacIntyre
observes, “is only one more facet of the very moral culture of which Nietzsche took
himself to be an implacable critic.”
114
Evolutionary novelty and change ceaselessly
disclose the ontological priority of violence and the unchanging “law” of the will to
power coursing through organic life in all of its variegated forms. For Nietzsche, in the
most profound sense, the death of God means that there is nothing new under the sun.
But the Enlightenment/Nietzschean attempt to unmask and destroy all myth is, at
every step, hopelessly enthralled and entangled in its own myth. “The principle of
immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds
against mythical imagination is that of myth itself,” Horkheimer and Adorno observed.
Its “barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic doctrine it rejects; the sanction of fate

113
See, for example, Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.766.
114
MacIntyre, After Virtue, 259; see also John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion
and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p.57.

201
which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was.”
115
Nietzsche rejects
Christianity because it values “weakness” in ways that offend his aesthetic sensibility, but
perhaps even more because it unmasks and subverts the essentialism and fatalism at the
base of pagan mythology and modern science alike, which his rejection of the Christian
narrative compels him to accept even as he dissembles this fact through a vocabulary of
radical autonomy and will to power. He cannot tolerate the “irrational” New Testament
claim that the universe is freely created and embraced by an utterly transcendent love
because, even to countenance this as a possibility, as Hart writes, “would require the
belief that nothing in the world so essentially determines the nature of humanity or the
scope of the human soul that there is no possibility of being reborn.”
116
Nietzsche, as
metaphysical fabulist of the Enlightenment, rejects Christianity for its anti-essentialism.
Is this why Nietzsche in the end proves unable to resist the seductive pull of the
mythos of violent necessity and the wheel of fate—the amor fati
117
—first as tragic
poetics, finally as true belief? “Nietzschean asceticism, which begins with the
recognition of fatality, ends in deification of fate,” writes Camus. “Nietzsche’s whole
effort is directed toward demonstrating the existence of the law that governs the eternal
flux and of the element of chance in the inevitable…The great rebel thus creates with his
own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity.”
118
In his
final lucid work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche boasts of his Buddha-like “fatalism” and of
“tenaciously clinging for years to all but intolerable situations, places, apartments, and

115
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p.8.
116
Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p.124.
117
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.714.
118
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage
International, 1956), pp.72-73, 80.

202
society, merely because they happened to be given by accident: it was better than
changing them, than feeling that they could be changed—than rebelling against them.”
119

In the notes published posthumously as The Will to Power, he presents his doctrine of
“eternal recurrence” not simply as a poetic thought experiment for evaluating one’s
actions in the present, but as a literal fact of history, scientifically proven by the “law of
the conservation of energy”
120
: a trillion years hence, Nietzsche too will bodily rise again,
not to new life—which would shatter the austere purity and geometry of his tragic
aesthetics—but to exactly the same life already lived. Reading statements such as these
one cannot help but recall the words of G. K. Chesterton. “The madman is not someone
who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his
reason.”
121

V. Libido Dominandi: Nietzsche’s Resentment
One may read a great deal of Nietzschean scholarship without encountering Nietzsche’s
resentment. What isn’t irony, provocation, or play, his Apollonian admirers insist, is
forgivable excess of rhetorical vigor. The moment we turn to Nietzsche himself, though,
the fact of Nietzsche’s great resentment also becomes impossible to avoid. Nietzsche
writes that “negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes” to life (Nietzsche’s
emphasis).
122
Unlike certain forms of Eastern metaphysics, however, Nietzschean
negation (notwithstanding his claims to the contrary) does not dialectically affirm the

119
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.687.
120
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp.547-549.
121
G. K. Chesterton, “The Maniac”, in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G. K.
Chesterton, ed., Alberto Manguel (Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000), p.73.
122
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.784.

203
harmony and goodness of the whole. Rather, he is filled with great “contempt of man”
and the “foul breath” of the human beings with whom he is “unhappily
contemporaneous” on “this wretched little planet called the Earth.”
123
He is repelled by
what he calls “the fungus of neighbor-love.”
124
He reviles “feminine incapacity to remain
a spectator” to suffering.
125
The lives of the saints teach “pity for the filth of things
human, all too human” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
126
But the vast majority of people are
mere chattels who, “in a good and healthy aristocracy,” should be treated as the
“scaffolding” on which “a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task”;
the mediocre masses must necessarily be “reduced and lowered to incomplete human
beings, to slaves, to instruments” in order to facilitate the rise of the new race of
supermen and to advance “high civilization.”
127
Nietzsche declares that the once and
future enslavement of inferior humans by their “natural” superiors should be performed
with “kindness of heart” since there is nothing “objectionable in mediocrity in itself.”
128

In the same work, however, he declares that the first principle of his love for humanity is
that “the weak and botched shall perish…And one should help them to it.”
129
He urges
us to reject “all sentimental weakness” and welcomes the dawn of a new breed of men
who will be filled with “cruelty that knows how to handle a knife,” who will be “harder

123
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, pp.54, 57.
124
Nietzsche, Appendix: Variants from Nietzsche’s Drafts in Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
p.799.
125
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.90.
126
Ibid., p.167.
127
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.392; and
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, pp.83-84; see also Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of
Aristocratic Radicalism, pp.113, 175-176.
128
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p.84.
129
Ibid., p.22.

204
than humane people might wish.”
130
In self-conscious parody of the Gospels, he
describes himself as “a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me,” the harbinger of
“great politics” that will produce “wars the like of which have never yet been seen on
earth.”
131
So what are we to make of these statements and countless others like them? Is
it excessively harsh to insist that we linger upon these passages? Or is it impossible not
to linger upon them because they are so many?
Nietzsche’s charge against Christianity is that it emerged from “hatred of the
intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom…of the senses, of joy of the senses, of joy in
general.”
132
Religious ethics, he suggests, can only stand as an anemic denial of
“cheerfulness” and “life.” The beginning of the slave revolt in morality occurs when
priestly ascetics—out of bitterness, envy, and fear of the vitality of noble elites—conspire
to create guilty consciences. The key to understanding the birth of values therefore lies in
excavating the hidden genealogy of resentment at the root of all religious morality.
133

Unfortunately, neither Nietzsche nor most of his postmodern admirers linger for long
upon the actual content of much of the Hebrew Bible or New Testament, which would
help us to see what precisely Jewish-Christian resentment looks like in practice. We
would then be forced to wrestle, for example, with the earthy and even sensual poetics of
much of Scripture, which bear little resemblance to the anemic, emasculated, and earth-
denying religion Nietzsche lays his charges against. An entire book of the Bible, the
Song of Songs, is a celebration of erotic love in which both man and woman are
presented as having equal voice, equal dignity, and uninhibited desires for one another.

130
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, pp.326, 393.
131
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p.783.
132
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p.37.
133
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p.20.

205
Christ’s first miracle is to change water into wine at a wedding. But if the Gospels in a
real sense marked a radical overturning of the values of pagan antiquity, as Nietzsche
believed, is it not worthwhile to at least consider the possibility that what they overturned
was itself nothing other than a culture of arbitrary violence, inequality, and resentment
that had successfully concealed itself for countless ages behind masks of heroic nobility?
We have seen that Nietzsche’s critique of religious values rests upon a set of
embarrassingly essentialist and finally metaphysical truth claims. His aristocratism
“justifies itself in terms of an untenable naturalism,” Keith Ansell-Pearson writes, and
“stands or falls with the validity” of his assertion that exploitation is “the primordial fact
of all history.”
134
Philosophical naturalism, elevated to the status of a foundational myth
and doctrine of violent necessity is itself a metaphysical conceit, or what Milbank
describes as a meta-narrative of “ontological violence.” The moment we deny Nietzsche
the logical and historical self-evidence and necessity of these claims, then, we may also
submit his aesthetic preferences to his own genealogical methods. Nietzsche tells us “we
have to force morals to bow down before hierarchy, we have to make them feel guilty for
their presumption” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).
135
But whence this guilt he wishes to inflict
if not a potent new strain of resentment? “Nietzsche attacked Christianity because he
believed that Christianity bears the responsibility for the state of things whereby the
anonymous crowd renounces joy and power and orders the vigorous, precious individual
to renounce them, too,” Czesław Miłosz wrote from the ashes of Warsaw in 1942. “Did
he not notice that the crowd was already made up of supermen just like him, just as

134
Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect
Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.394.
135
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p.113.

206
abused and filled with hatred?…Was he never visited by the suspicion that he himself
had become a victim of ressentiment?”
136
As Werner Dannhauser observes, “Nietzsche
praises cruelty and condemns pity without reflecting sufficiently on whether man must
really be advised to be more cruel than he is, or what the effect of such a view will be on
cruel men.”
137

If we recall the story of the Rape of the Sabines as told by Livy we might now
notice an important detail that raises grave doubts about Nietzsche’s imaginative
reconstruction of pagan virtues and his claim that the spirit of resentment is a mark
primarily of the weak: the fact that Romulus tricks the Sabines into coming to Rome,
according to Livy, by “dissembling his resentment.” If Nietzsche unmasks the
resentment that can often be found among the weak, he nevertheless fails to adequately
attend to the other side of the equation, the resentment of the strong. To see this, though,
would require ways of thinking and talking about the human beyond the categories of
sheer materialism. In his analysis of Roman society in The Two Cities, Saint Augustine
used the phrase, libido dominandi (“dominating lust”) to capture the way in which the
lust to domination becomes a lust that dominates. The peace forged through violence
produces “a bottomless paranoia,” writes Charles T. Mathewes of Augustine’s
theopolitics. “Once we go down the road of domination, it is endless”; the desire to
“have complete mastery, to be God”—whether enacted at the level of states or of
individuals—cannot possibly end in happiness or security:

136
Czeslaw Milosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland,
1942-1943, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), pp.47-
48.
137
Werner Dannhauser as cited in Ariel Kohen, In Defense of Human Rights: A Non-
Religious Grounding in a Pluralistic World (London: Routledge, 2007), p.36.

207
Ultimately the whole project ends up making all our pleasures hollow, for they
serve us only as momentary pauses in the endless drama of manipulation we
undertake with the world. We indulge in them finally not for themselves, but only
for the respite and diversion they provide from the increasingly wearying task of
struggling to overmaster the cosmos. Experience becomes wholly a matter of
evasion, of avoiding the facts of our life, of escape….To seek to make a God of
oneself is to end by making a wasteland of the world.
138

The libido dominandi of the Overman leads to a condition that we might call the
twice-inverted conscience. The revenge of the twice-inverted conscience is that now,
over every seemingly spontaneous gesture of affection, honesty, courage, and love, we
must raise the ensigns of Heraclitean chaos and will to power. We must vigilantly expose
the hypocrisy, violence, and cruelty that contaminate every apparently moral and selfless
deed, whether in others or within ourselves. But even more, with each new layer of
essential darkness we uncover in the human animal and social organism, we must learn to
feel guilty for having once felt guilty. Political liberalism’s clamorous calls for human
rights and political equality—a direct result, Nietzsche (correctly) sees, of the New
Testament’s grammar of equal human dignity in the eyes of God and its triumph over the
agonistic values of Homeric Greece and imperial Rome—are a form of decadence or bad
faith that Western civilization need no longer indulge—if in fact God is dead. In a world
that has fully absorbed the loss of every transcendent source of value or meaning and torn
away the masks of agape generated by the Jewish and Christian narratives, compassion
for the weak is slave morality. Erotic desire to dominate and exploit, when purified of
lingering doubts and moral compunctions, is good health. Darkness is light. Nietzsche,

138
Charles T. Mathewes, The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), pp.117-118.

208
as the feral, inverted gaze of philosophical naturalism, is nihilism’s bad conscience.
139

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

VI. Dionysus versus the Crucified
Nietzsche’s myth of eternal recurrence, Peter Candler Jr. suggests, is perfectly captured
in Tolkien’s symbol of the One Ring of power, an image of false eternity that is a “noble
lie” because it promises so much to those who would bear it yet in the end cannot deliver
on its promises, cannot create anything authentically new, and cannot be enjoyed.
140
To
possess the ring is to be possessed by it while to see the world through the gaze of
relentless suspicion is to see the world like Sauron, the disembodied all-seeing
panopticon eye who is pure will to power. But there are things that Sauron cannot see
and cannot comprehend because in order to know them as the Hobbits do, one must enter
into fellowship.
“The problem with this Nietzschean perspective is not only that it is
nonfalsifiable,” James Hunter writes, “but that it also fails to make distinctions in the
types of power and the layers of meaning that human beings impute to their own lives,
relationships, and circumstances.”
141
If both Albert Schweitzer (gifted musician,
theologian, philosopher of “reverence for life,” and medical missionary to Africa) and
Albert Speer (brilliant architect, devoted family man and father of six, Minister of
Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich) were equally motivated by “will to

139
The phrase “nihilism’s conscience” was used by Camus in The Rebel, p.77.
140
Peter M. Candler Jr., “Tolkien or Nietzsche, Philology and Nihilism,” a working paper
available through the Center for Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham on
the web at: www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk.
141
James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of
Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.107.

209
power,” how much purchase does the phrase actually have as a description of the shape
of their lives? And what kinds of actions would one have to perform to show that one
wasn’t simply motivated by resentment or will to power?
Nevertheless, Nietzsche exposes important truths about the modern condition that
cannot be easily set aside. The “brutal paradox” of Western civilization, George Steiner
writes, is that practically all of the greatest art, music, poetry, literature, and science that
we know of was at some level built upon the backs of the poor and lowly and required
massive exploitation and oppression.
142
If our definition of the social good places a high
value on individual creativity and the flourishing of “culture,” then, there are clearly
strong arguments that can be made against notions of political equality and irreducible
human dignity or worth. Anti-humanism also “works.” The question is: In whose
interests and to what ends? But this merely throws us back to the original problem: What
are the right ends we should value and pursue? The answer, from within a strictly
naturalistic framework, is nowhere forthcoming. Yet it is not a question we can afford to
remain agnostic or silent about.
Agnosticism on some questions is a moral and intellectual virtue. Those who
speak in tones of absolute certainty and authority on questions as mysterious and
inexhaustible as the origins of life and human nature—whether they speak in the name of
religion or of science—demonstrate not their superior wisdom but a fatal flaw known all
too well to the Greek tragedians: the temptation of hubris. Many positive things might be

142
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp.15-35.

210
said here about the virtues of doubt.
143
There are numerous intermediate positions, which
Taylor describes in A Secular Age as the actual outlooks of most of us in the United
States and Europe today, and which he refers to as an existential place of “cross
pressure.”
144
Persons whose worldviews are cross-pressured are inevitably shaped in
countless ways by the tenants of the “immanent frame,” according to Taylor, but they
nevertheless remain open in key ways to possibilities of transcendent meaning and value
breaking into their lives (perhaps now mediated through things like art and music, beauty
in the natural world, intuitions of cosmic wholeness, or hedonic experiences).
145
To live
in a place of cross pressure is to live in a largely but still not entirely disenchanted
universe, and we might hope that whatever scattered glimmerings of the transcendent we
can glean from eclectic sources will be enough to sustain the best in human culture and to
preserve the dignity of human being as central to the humanity of human being.
It should by now be clear, however, that the agnostic, cross-pressured position—
vital as it might be in certain ways as a reminder of how little we really know and as a
safeguard against fundamentalism—is a precarious one whenever questions of concrete
human rights and obligations to the Other arise. One of Kant’s most cherished beliefs—
as perhaps the last great spokesman and defender of the Enlightenment conception of the
Rights of Man—was that “all rational beings stand under the law that each of them

143
See Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, In Praise of Doubt (New York: HarperOne,
2009).
144
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.592.
145
The “immanent frame,” as Taylor defines it, is the constructed social space of secular
modernity in which time has been flattened into a purely linear succession of
undifferentiated moments (that may be filled in various ways by individuals but that do
not otherwise possess any intrinsic meaning), and in which the dominant values are
purely instrumentalist ones that rules out any appeal to transcendence, the sacred, or the
divine. Ibid., 542.

211
should treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as
an end in himself.”
146
Yet the Enlightenment project’s final rejection of any source of
meaning or moral knowledge in the cosmos apart from autonomous human reason
subverts the very humanistic and evaluative commitments from which rational inquiry in
the Western tradition sprang. In a wholly immanent universe it is hard to conceive how
free will and rationality are even theoretically possible. But accepting that freedom and a
capacity for reason are somehow “real” properties emerging from the evolutionary facts
of the human condition, we still find ourselves without any clear principles to guide how
this freedom and rationality should be used. Without external references, the Kantian
distinction between “ends” and “means” collapses. Reason itself comes to be viewed, on
scientific and rationalistic grounds, as nothing more than an extension of instinctive
“drives.” The spiritual crisis precipitated by the Enlightenment, in short, is that reason is
no longer seen as an end but as a means; but use of reason, as a means, is compatible with
any ends, no matter how irrational, violent, or oppressive. Hans Jonas’s warning, which I
quoted in Chapter 2, bears repeating. “[A]s a merely formal skill—the extension of
animal cunning—it [reason] does not set but serves aims, is not itself standard but
measured by standards outside of its jurisdiction…This is the nihilistic implication in
man’s losing a ‘being’ transcending the flux of becoming.”
147

Nietzsche exploits this crisis with devastating effect, forcing us to confront the
moral terminus of the Enlightenment’s epistemological trajectory and the arbitrariness of
Kantian humanism; if autonomous reason is our only source of authority, and if reason

146
Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, p.39.
147
See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1966), p.47.

212
can be used instrumentally for any ends, these might include—and one fears must
include—elitist and anti-humanist ends as well. “For Nietzsche, love of humanity has its
ultimate source in obedience to a divine command, obedience inspired by the fear and
desire of a weak will in the face of the God who threatens and consoles,” write Kroeker
and Ward. “The ideal of love of humanity cannot, and should not, survive the death of
God.”
148
The moral and political implications of philosophical naturalism, Nietzsche
reveals in an unprecedented way, are thus profound. The defining characteristic of
humanity can no longer be located in its exercise of logos, as in Platonic and Aristotelian
thinking, nor in its embrace of agape as in the Gospel writers. Instead, it must be
identified with some variety of eros, the passionate and subjective will to power and
domination over others that is the actual root of all human choices and which can only be
judged according to aesthetic or pragmatic criteria—if it can be judged at all. The great
value of Nietzsche as a political thinker for those who would defend the idea of human
rights lies in the fact that he forces us to face once more the radical historical and political
implications of the Hebrew prophets and of that Person and polis in which “strength and
beauty are inseparable from the good.”
149

148
Travis P. Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet
to Modernity (Boulder: Westview, 2001), p.153.
149
Vladimir Solovyov, The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy,
trans. Nathalie A. Duddington (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1919), p.lxi.

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CHAPTER 5:
CONCLUSION: THREE APOCALYPSES
“Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the
new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as
long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the
miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence.”
—Vaclav Havel
1

“We have read so many goods out of our official story, we have buried their power so
deep beneath layers of philosophical rationale, that they are in danger of stifling. Or,
rather, since they are our goods, human goods, we are stifling.”
—Charles Taylor
2

The drafting committee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included
individuals from several different cultural, philosophical, and religious backgrounds,
including Chinese, Middle Eastern, Hindu, Latin American, Islamic, and Marxian
traditions. This fact, together with the committee’s decision to exclude any references to
God or religion in its preamble, according to Michael Ignatieff, proves the secular and
non-Eurocentric character of international human rights law in the post-war era.
3
These
details alone, however, fail to do justice to the generative role of religious thinking in the
creation of the Universal Declaration and rise of international human rights ideals. In this
dissertation I have traced a small part of the story of how the Hebrew prophets and early
Christians subverted the values of pagan antiquity—values Nietzsche hoped to recover in
his efforts to escape the nihilistic implications of philosophical materialism/naturalism

1
Vaclav Havel, in What Does it Mean to Be Human: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by
Responses from Around the World, ed. Frederick Frank, Janis Roze, and Richard
Connolly (New York: Macmillan, 2001), p.55.
2
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p.520
3
Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.64-65.

214
and the death of God for Western culture. Others have documented how the Christian
subversion, as I am calling it, continued into the medieval and modern periods, providing
the basic vocabulary of human rights and human dignity that would be developed in
greater depth by Enlightenment thinkers, including those who declared themselves to be
avowedly anti-religious. The idea of natural human rights was explicitly formulated as
canon law by medieval Christian thinkers as early as the 1100s.
4
The concept of religious
toleration often credited to political philosophers like Locke and Voltaire, Perez Zagorin
documents, was in fact well established much earlier by believers such as Erasmus,
Sebastian Castellio, Roger Williams, and “sectarian” radical reformers (Anabaptists,
Dutch Arminians, Socinians, and others who were persecuted by Catholics, Lutherans,
and Calvinists alike). These individuals rigorously championed liberty of conscience on
the theological grounds that human dignity entails a God-given right to freedom of
conscience and freedom from persecution.
5
In place of the standard narrative of how
“secular” tolerance saved the West from the violence of religion, Bruce Ward argues, we
should therefore speak in terms of violent forms of religion being challenged by non-
violent ones, with the latter giving rise to liberal values.
6
It is to fundamentally religious
beliefs that the idea of human rights owes its moral persuasiveness. The Enlightenment
“was not so much a well-spring of Western rights as a watershed in a long stream of
rights thinking that began nearly two millennia before,” writes John Witte. This is not to

4
See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Modern Protestant Developments in Human Rights,” in
Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), p.155.
5
See Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
6
Bruce Ward, Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and Liberal Virtues (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p.122.

215
deny the vital contributions of Enlightenment philosophers to the idea of human rights, he
continues, but what these individuals “contributed more than anything were new
theoretical frameworks that eventually widened these traditional rights formulations into
a set of universal claims that were universally applicable to all.”
7

Religion also played a vital role in the birth of the Universal Declaration and
many human rights organizations in the twentieth century. Between 1939 and 1947,
Protestant theologians and church leaders working through the World Council of
Churches, the Commission for a Just and Durable Peace, the Federal Council of
Churches, and other bodies, in close ecumenical partnership with the American Jewish
Committee and the bishops of the Catholic Church, campaigned vigorously for the
creation of the United Nations and “a new world order” dedicated to human rights. In
fact, Max Stackhouse writes, “the more this history is dug out, the clearer it becomes that
they supplied much of the intellectual and ethical substance that formed these so-called
‘secular’ documents.”
8
The biographies of many human rights heroes who have left far-
reaching political and institutional legacies are also revealing.
Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International, was a Jewish convert to
Christianity whose first amnesty action in defense of the rights of Portuguese prisoners of
conscience was inspired in large part by his desire to end religious persecution and
defend the freedom of every person to “manifest his religion or belief in teaching,

7
John Witte, Jr., “Introduction,” to Christianity and Human Rights, p.40.
8
Max Stackhouse, “Why Human Rights Needs God: A Christian Perspective,” in Does
Human Rights Need God, eds., Elizabeth M. Bucar and Barbra Barnett (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2005), p.29.

216
practice, worship and observance.”
9
The first amnesty candle was lit on December 10,
1961 inside the church of St. Martins in the Field in London. Bernard Kouchner, who
founded Médecins Sans Frontières in 1971 to join the work of human rights advocacy
with the work of medical relief aid, is a “secular” man. Nevertheless, he explains his
lifelong commitment to defending human dignity in terms of his Jewish heritage (his
mother was a Protestant, his Jewish grandparents on his father’s side were killed during
the Holocaust). “What do the Jews do? They keep watch. They are the sentinels against
intolerance. We were a small group of men who did not want to remain idle facing other
people’s tragedies.”
10
Robert Bernstein founded Helsinki Watch in 1978 with a
particular concern for protecting the intellectual and religious freedom of Jews in the
Soviet Union. The organization rapidly expanded its campaigns and changed its name to
Human Rights Watch. The Polish Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa in the 1980s
was deeply inspired by Catholic social teaching as were the Czech dissidents led by the
Christian humanist Vaclav Havel. In 1983, Partners in Health was formed by physician
and Harvard medical anthropologist Paul Farmer (made famous by Tracy Kidder in his
biography Mountains Beyond Mountains) to bring health care to the poor in developing
nations as a basic human right. Farmer defends “a preferential option for the poor” based
upon the ideas of Latin American liberation theologians with their penetrating critiques of
structural violence and uncompromising defense of human dignity and equality.
11
The

9
Peter Benenson, “The Forgotten Prisoners” (1961), on the web at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2001/may/27/life1.lifemagazine5
10
Judea Pearl and Ruth Pearl, eds., I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the
Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publications, 2004), p.229.
11
See Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on
the Poor, forward by Amartya Sen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),
pp.139-160.

217
School of the Americas Watch was formed in 1990 by Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois
to expose U.S.-sponsored atrocities in Latin America. In the 1990s, Martin Dent, a
retired professor of politics at the University of Keele in the United Kingdom, founded
the Jubilee campaign for cancellation of third world debt, which has grown into a global
movement. He did so building upon the metaphors, principles, and commands of
economic justice outlined in the Hebrew Bible (particularly the “Jubilee” laws of
Leviticus 25) and the New Testament. The Save Darfur Coalition was formed in 2004 by
the American Jewish World Service.
The danger in calling attention to these facts is that by excavating the culturally
specific religious underpinnings or background metaphysical assumptions on which the
idea of human rights rests we will undermine hard won achievements on the ground by
heightening skepticism among those hostile to human rights as an imposition of Western
values. The danger in not raising these facts, though, is that we will sever ourselves from
the historical and spiritual reserves that might actually sustain an ecumenical
commitment to human rights and dignity in the face of the challenges I described in my
introduction and throughout this dissertation. We find ourselves trapped on the horns of
a paradox. In order to respect and protect difference we must appeal to concepts of
universal truth and justice that transcend any particular belief system; yet respect for
difference as a basic requirement of human rights must in the final analysis be respect
from somewhere. It must unavoidably rest upon highly particular belief structures rooted
in culturally inscribed worldviews. There is no escaping this fact. The Enlightenment
attempt to transcend the particular in the name of universal Reason was in this light an
attempt to conceal its own non-neutrality and inescapably metaphysical assumptions.

218
The difference between explicitly religious accounts of human dignity on the one
hand and materialist anthropologies like Darwin’s, Marx’s, and Nietzsche’s on the other,
in other words, is the exact opposite of what the liberal appeal to “public reason” asserts:
only theology makes its metaphysics transparent in a way that invites public scrutiny
while “secular” reason is best seen as a masked metaphysics that prevaricates the
arbitrariness—and in the political sphere, the violence—of its ontological commitments.
12

“The debate between different anthropologies is therefore a debate of different (mostly
implicit) theologies,” Christoph Schöwbel writes. “Christian theology does not enter the
debate on human destiny as the only theological perspective of interpretation; it is already
entangled in the battle of God and the gods that goes on behind the scenes of debates
about human dignity.”
13

One can anticipate several questions or objections arising from the preceding
chapters, which I will attempt to address below. I realize that each of these challenges
deserves its own book-length treatment and so my responses should be taken as gestures
in the direction of a possible future research agenda that builds on the arguments of this
dissertation:
1) Haven’t liberal political theorists shown that we can have a self-sustaining non-
metaphysical approach to human rights by simply refraining from making any arguments
either for or against the ultimate truth of religious beliefs, by remaining neutral on the
question of what John Rawls called “comprehensive doctrines”?

12
See especially John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2
nd

edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
13
Christoph Schöwbel, “Recovering Human Dignity,” in God and Human Dignity, eds.,
R. Kendall Soulen and Linda Woodhead (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans: 2006), p.46.

219
2) Even if we agree that there are problems with reductive philosophical
materialisms or naturalisms in the traditions of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, doesn’t
religion still need to be quarantined from public life lest we rekindle a modern day
equivalent of the European “wars of religion”?
3) In a pluralistic world, what about those “acknowledgers of transcendence” who
agree with my critique of the nihilism of Enlightenment rationalism but who do not
accept the particular Jewish-Christian underpinning of human rights I have offered in this
dissertation? In particular, what about non-Western cultures and belief systems?
4) Why does the debate over the philosophical or religious groundings of rights
practically matter? What is finally at stake?

I. Original Positions: On Political Liberalism
John Rawls’s theory of justice—to cite perhaps the most influential political philosopher
and liberal theorist of the past century, whose approach seems to me to be illustrative of
the grounding problem facing liberalism(s) in general—asks us to imaginatively situate
ourselves in an “original position” of ignorance as to our own social, religious, and
philosophical status in order to be as impartial as possible toward others.
14
However,
before placing ourselves behind this “veil of ignorance”—which I find to be a noble and
in many ways helpful thought experiment—Rawls’s theory requires that we first accept a
strong claim about persons as political agents: “we start with the organizing idea of
society as a fair and equal system of cooperation between free and equal persons”

14
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), p.9.

220
(emphasis mine).
15
For Rawls, free and equal citizens, in order to be treated as free and
equal, have a right to demand and to receive reasonable explanations in terms they can
understand for the policies being enacted by their governments, regardless of their
particular religious beliefs. But the idea of human rights and human equality must be
accepted a priori in order for Rawls’s appeal to the original position to get off the
ground. We place ourselves in the original position not because it generates human
dignity, rights, and equality but because it offers the fairest vantage point for agreements
between people who are already seen as free and equal—as having the kind of dignity or
sanctity that is precisely what is at issue in the debate over the grounding of human
rights. For Rawls, the way one respects the dignity of the other is by not imposing one’s
religious beliefs upon them and by not appealing to forms of reasoning they do not have
shared access to such as the sacred texts of one’s particular tradition.
In the final version of his theory, Rawls moderated his original views to allow for
“comprehensive doctrines” to be introduced into public reasoning in some contexts.
People should generally be free, he wrote, to let others know “where they come from.”
16

Still, “on constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice” we must satisfy the
requirement of the proviso: we must appeal to “principles of reason, and include
standards of correctness and criteria of justification.”
17
We can applaud the theologically
motivated struggles of the radical abolitionists and civil rights leaders but only, according
to Rawls, in charitable historical perspective and to the extent that their ideas support “the

15
Ibid., p.14.
16
Ibid., p.90.
17
John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, The University of Chicago Law
Review, Vol. 64, No.3 (Summer, 1997), p.778; and Political Liberalism: Expanded
Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.220.

221
clear conclusions of public reason.” Given “the doctrines current in [the abolitionists’]
day, it was necessary to invoke the comprehensive grounds on which those values [of
equality and dignity] were widely seen to rest.”
18
However, more enlightened societies,
in which the “clear conclusions” of public reason have been fully developed, should
dispense with superfluous theological grammars of justice and human rights. According
to Jeffrey Stout, the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, which
drew heavily on biblical language and religious assumptions, “represent high
accomplishments in our public political culture” and stand as “paradigms of discursive
excellence,” but in Rawls’s theory they appear merely “as placeholders for reasons to be
named later.”
19

I have argued throughout this dissertation that when it comes to questions of
human rights the reasons cannot be named later because strict philosophical materialism
or naturalism—the rules of which Rawls equates directly with “public reason”—cannot
logically get there from here. Or as Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “given that, after many
attempts, no one has succeeded in developing such an account, it seems unlikely that it
can be done” (emphasis mine).
20

In the end, Rawls also gives up on the search for a rational grounding for the
concepts of human dignity, rights, and equality on which his theory rests. The liberal
conception of “free and equal persons,” he writes, is part of a set of “fundamental
intuitive ideas” which should be “viewed as being familiar from the public political

18
Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp.250-51.
19
Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),
p.70.
20
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008), p.325.

222
culture of a democratic society.”
21
Justice as fairness “models our considered conviction
that…citizens are equal in all relevant respects: that is, that they possess to a sufficient
degree the requisite powers of moral personality and the other capacities that enable them
to be normal and fully cooperating members of society over a complete life.” Thus,
Rawls concludes, “those equal (similar) in all relevant respects are to be treated equally
(similarly).”
22
But Rawls’s view that all citizens possess equal “powers of moral
personality” and equal human and political rights remains a culturally dependent belief—
not a rationally proven (or provable) fact. According to Rawls, we must distinguish
between the reasonable and the rational. Neither can be “explicitly defined,” he tells us,
but “the reasonable is viewed as a basic intuitive moral idea” (emphasis mine).
23
It may
be rational to treat people unequally for one’s own advantage or some other social or
political end, but it is nevertheless unreasonable to do so because this violates “our
considered convictions,” our “common sense,” our “intuitive ideas,” our “moral

21
Rawls, Justice as Fairness, p.6.
22
Ibid., p.18.
23
Ibid., p.82. Stephen Toulmin similarly distinguishes between the reasonable and the
rational although he does so from a more critical perspective. The “reasonable,” as
Toulmin defines it, encompasses both practical and instrumental wisdom and was
exemplified by Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Montaigne who displayed an
“urbane open-mindedness and skeptical tolerance” that incorporated the best insights of
metaphysical and religious traditions. The “rational,” by contrast, is the attempt to reduce
all knowledge to abstract, universally valid propositions expressed in the most general or
law-like terms, which are ultimately the idiom of pure mathematics. The supplanting of
the reasonable by the rational in Western thought, according to Toulmin, began around
the middle of the seventeenth century largely under the influence of Descartes and it led
to a dramatic “narrowing in the focus of preoccupations, and a closing in of intellectual
horizons.” Toulmin’s preferred term for what is commonly known as the Enlightenment
is therefore “the Counter-Renaissance.” See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden
Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp.13ff; and Return
to Reason (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001).

223
sensibility,” our “moral feelings,” our “sense of justice.”
24
In sum, we hold these truths to
be self-evident: that all citizens familiar with democratic political culture are equal
(similar) in the requisite respects and so must be afforded dignity, human rights, and
political equality because this most closely corresponds with how we feel—to which the
postmodern skeptic and the human rights violator both reply: We feel otherwise.
To what extent, however, were Rawls’s intuitions of the dignity, rights, and
equality of all persons a reflection not merely of his “being familiar” with “the public
political culture of a democratic society” but rather of a more deeply personal even if
unspoken engagement with religion? Before the outbreak of World War II, Rawls had
considered entering the Episcopalian priesthood. His 1942 senior philosophy thesis at
Princeton, re-discovered and published posthumously in 2009, was entitled “A Brief
Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.” In it, Rawls argues that strict materialism or
naturalism fails to provide the philosophical resources required to sustain society. The
“world in its essence,” the young Rawls wrote, “is a community, a community of creator,
and created, and has as its source, God.” It is only the imago Dei that makes us “capable
of entering into community by virtue of likeness to God, who is in Himself community,
being the Triune God.”
25
Within a few short years, however, everything for Rawls had
changed.
In a short essay entitled “On My Religion” written in 1997 for the benefit of his
family (also published only after his death), Rawls pondered the reasons for his

24
Ibid., pp.7-8, 82; and “The Sense of Justice”, in John Rawls: Collected Papers, Samuel
Freeman, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.96-116.
25
John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith with “On My Religion,”
ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.113.

224
abandonment of Christianity “entirely by June of 1945.”
26
He attributed the sudden
reversal in his thinking to three war-time experiences as a soldier in the Pacific theater in
particular: listening to a Lutheran pastor claiming in a sermon that God would help U.S.
soldiers aim their bullets while protecting them from those of the Japanese; witnessing
the death of a comrade who took an assignment near the front lines that Rawls had
himself volunteered for; and learning of the Holocaust. All “attempts to [explain the
Holocaust in terms of God’s providence] that I have read of are hideous and evil,” Rawls
wrote. “To interpret history as expressing God’s will, God’s will must accord with the
most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be?
Thus, I soon came to reject the idea of the supremacy of the divine will as also hideous
and evil.”
27
Rawls proceeds in the essay to catalogue additional historical evils associated
with Christianity, including the “wars of religion” that devastated Europe during the first
half of the seventeenth century before the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia (establishing the
principle that states should not interfere in the religious affairs of other states). He ends
his reflections with the intriguing but opaque declaration that “atheism…is a disaster, but
nontheism need not be feared, politically speaking. Nontheism is compatible with
religious faith.”
28

Reading these statements of protest against God’s silence, impotence, or even
malevolence in the face of human suffering one cannot but be moved by their integrity as
a rejection of the self-confident but also complacent pre-war Protestant culture in which
Rawls was raised and that is reflected in many ways in his senior thesis. One wishes,

26
Ibid., p.261.
27
Ibid., p.263.
28
Ibid., p.269.

225
though, that one could hear Rawls in dialogue about the meaning of religious faith in a
post-Holocaust world with individuals such as Elie Wiesel and Abraham Heschel (who
narrowly escaped from Germany with his life, whose community was liquidated in the
death camps, who spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War, and who marched for
civil rights arm in arm in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr.). For Heschel, “A person
cannot be religious and indifferent to other human beings’ plight and suffering…The
essence of a Jew is his involvement in the plight of other people, as God is involved.
This is the secret of our legacy, that God is implied in the human situation and man must
be involved in it.”
29

II. The Creation Myth of the Secular Nation-State: On Religious Violence
One also wishes one could hear Rawls in conversation with scholars like Richard King
and William Cavanaugh on the question of religious violence and the significance of the
“wars of religion.”
30
Contemporary academic discourse on “religious violence,” King
argues (following the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu), is a striking example of a doxa,
that is, an “unquestionable truth or authority that frames the very possibilities of thought
itself—the stage upon which orthodoxies and heterodoxies can be played out according to
a set of rules and assumptions that none of the participants question.”
31
According to

29
Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Plight of Russian Jews,” in Moral Grandeur and
Spiritual Audacity: Essays, ed., Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1996), p.213.
30
Richard King, “The Association of ‘Religion’ with Violence: Reflections on a Modern
Trope,” in Religion and Violence in South Asia: Theory and Practice, ed. John R.
Hinnells and Richard King (London: Routledge, 2007); and William Cavanaugh, The
Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
31
King, “The Association of ‘Religion’ with Violence,” p.229.

226
Cavanaugh, most contemporary literature on religion and violence is in fact a way of
sustaining the “creation myth” of the European nation-state, which in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries wrested exclusive control of the means of violence from the church
and forged the modern conception of “religion” as a realm of strictly privatized and
interiorized faith through a conflictive process that was retrospectively labeled the “wars
of religion.” But the very naming of this period of carnage as the “wars of religion,”
Cavanaugh argues, is one of the ways individuals committed to an ideologically suspect
narrative about the nature of modernity and “progress” later scripted history.
32
The
narrative is highly problematic for at least three reasons: 1) A significant part of the
violence of the period in question was between members of the same church or
confession, with Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, and so on acting in collaboration or
alliance with members of other churches against their co-religionists (hence making it
very hard to maintain the idea that it was primarily religious difference that drove the
fighting); 2) in every major conflict of the period it is impossible to disentangle religious
motivations from clear political, economic, and social ones, raising the question of what
was primarily causing the carnage; but most importantly 3) the process of state-building
did not innocently emerge in response to the problem of “religious violence,” rather,
state-building both preceded and “was perhaps the most significant cause of the

32
The designation of the period beginning around 1600 as the “Enlightenment” and the
millennium before as the “Dark Ages” is also ideologically suspect, tainted with
polemical ideological purpose. Both terms were invented by intellectuals with
anticlerical agendas who suppressed or ignored the fact that the medieval period,
whatever its faults, was not one of intellectual stasis or unreason but in fact one of
remarkable scientific discovery and technological progress nurtured largely by the
philosophical and empirical work of devout scholastic monks and priests. See Rodney
Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-
Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp.128-146,
166-167.

227
violence.”
33
In the process, the state “did not rein in and tame religion but became itself
sacralized,” claiming for itself a hegemonic right to use violence for its own ends, and
practically achieving this “right” by means of conflictive force.
34
As Talal Asad writes,
“The reading of uncontrolled religion as dangerous passion, dissident identity, or foreign
power, became part of the nation-state’s performance of sovereignty. Defining religion’s
‘proper place’ while respecting ‘freedom of conscience’ became both possible and
necessary.”
35

It would be just as historically accurate, then, to call “the wars of religion” the
“wars of secularization” or “the wars of state-making.” And as a matter of actual history
as opposed to liberal political theory, Charles Tilly famously argued, state-making from
the beginning was an extremely violent process based not upon social contracts or the
consent of the governed but upon coercion, rent extraction, and extortion emerging from
and analogous to the dynamics of organized crime.
36
The fragmentation of Europe into
competing nation-states arguably produced far greater violence than Europe had ever
seen before. Far from ushering in a new era of peaceful coexistence in which individuals
and societies were shielded from the violent and divisive tendencies of religion through
the forging of liberal values and the interiorizing of faith as a matter of strictly personal
piety, political violence in the modern age of rival nationalisms and imperial projects
took on new and increasingly arbitrary and unrestrained forms.

33
Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, p.177.
34
Ibid., p.176.
35
Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies, ed.
Lawrence Eugene Sullivan and Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press,
2006), p.498.
36
Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the
State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

228
At the same time, the state ironically (if not idolatrously) took upon itself the task
of providing its citizens with a new soteriology and eschatology to replace the older
institutions and belief structures.
37
The state rather than the church would now save its
citizens from a host of internal and external perils through its monopoly on violence. The
state would give people meaningful roles to play in a new grand narrative about the
purposeful arc of history—a narrative in which the state might summon its members to
killing violence against the members of any other state at any time. The standard account
of the “wars of religion” in international relations theory and liberal political philosophy
in this regard conceals more than it reveals. Without holding any nostalgia for the project
of medieval Christendom or advocating a new collapsing of church and state, King
writes, “the way that the debate about [religious] violence has been framed effectively
insulates the institutional forms, organizations and ideologies that govern modern
(‘secular’) life from critical interrogation.”
38
Put another way, the modern doxalogical
framing and social construction of “religious violence” is not itself innocent of violence
but is a way of rendering modern institutions of power and violence immune from
prophetic criticism.

III. Recontextualizing Rights: On Cultural Relativism
But if human rights discourse cannot be abstracted or decontextualized from its history
the way some liberal theorists have attempted, if it must always be from somewhere, can
it ever be experienced as anything other than a form of violence for those who happen to

37
William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T & T Clark, 2002), pp.5-
7.
38
King, “The Association of ‘Religion’ with Violence,” p.227.

229
be from somewhere else? If, as I have argued, the story of human rights cannot be
sheered off from the scandalous particularity of the Jewish-Christian grammar of human
dignity and equality, does this mean it can only ever arrive for the Other as a form of
Western cultural imperialism? And in the Western context itself, must acknowledgment
of the religious grounding of human rights always signify a neo-Constantinian or
fundamentalist attempt by believers to grasp political power by collapsing hard won walls
of separation of church and state?
The fact that Christianity was deeply complicit from the beginning in the projects
of European colonialism, slavery, and imperialism means that we cannot take these fears
at all lightly. According to Christ, practice (or praxis as Marxians would say) is the true
test of authenticity: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” And the practices of believers
have often been atrocious, bearing poisonous fruit just as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche
charged. Still, it must be pointed out, in the age of slavery it was not only white
slaveholders or white abolitionists who appealed to the Christian narrative when
formulating their political ethics. Slaves themselves also embraced Christianity, which
they fused with traditional African beliefs and reinterpreted in subversive liberationist
terms.
39
Unless we are prepared to deny these individuals all agency and dismiss African
American and Latin American liberation theologies as nothing more than cases of “false
consciousness” or coping strategies somehow less authentically Christian than the
theologies of European racists, we must therefore come to terms with the fact that
institutional Christianity was a powerful legitimating ideology in imperialist and

39
See, for example, Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the
Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Henry H. Mitchell,
Black Church: Beginnings (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).

230
colonialist projects while the Christ story remained a powerful force of resistance to these
same ideologies and political configurations. Non-Western appropriations of the
Christian narrative against slavery, against violence, and against colonialism and
imperialism resulted in Christian evangelism often “boomeranging” back upon the
evangelists as an emancipating critique of the West itself through the voices of the
oppressed.
This highlights an additional fact that cultural relativists have not sufficiently
wrestled with: there simply are no Cultures in the capital “C” sense of pristine,
monolithic, homogenous value systems that can (or should) somehow be saved from the
contaminating influences of other cultures. Culture is always culture in contestation,
culture in transition, culture in interaction, culture in change, culture in encounter, culture
in “contamination.” The story of the genealogy of nonviolent social movements, for
example, would show how the Roman execution of a Jewish rabbi and prophet named
Jesus in first century Palestine led to nearly three centuries of Christian nonviolence in
response to brutal persecution prior to the conversion of Constantine; how translation of
the New Testament texts into vernacular languages inspired radical reformers in
Germany, France, and England to embrace an ethic of strict pacifism in imitation of
Christ’s example of nonviolent enemy love; how these ideas migrated to America where
they were embraced by the pacifist abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, whose prophetic
campaign for human rights helped to inspire the New England transcendentalist Henry
David Thoreau when he composed his essay “On Civil Disobedience”; how Thoreau’s
words spread to Europe where they would help to stir Count Leo Tolstoy’s nonviolent
Christian anarchism in Russia; how Tolstoy’s 1908 “Letter to a Hindu”—in which he

231
explained how Indians might topple the British Empire using techniques of nonviolent
civil disobedience—fired the imagination of a young Hindu lawyer in South Africa; and
how Gandhi’s highly effective campaign of satyagraha (or “truth force”) “boomeranged”
once more, demonstrating to a Southern Baptist minister in the United States the
effectiveness of mass nonviolent resistance to racial injustice.
The constant “interaction effect” of different cultures upon one another means
that it may no longer even make sense to refer to Christianity as a “Western” religion.
While Europe and the United States remain in many ways the cultural center of gravity of
Christianity, and while the New Testament reflects a distinctively Greco-Roman
worldview (although written entirely by Jewish authors), the assumption that the West is
the only center of gravity and that Christianity is a “Eurocentric” faith can only be
sustained by, ironically, discounting the lives of people in non-Western parts of the
world, who today represent the vast majority of Christian believers. The official number
of Christians in China according to a government survey in 2010 is over 23 million, 70
per cent of whom are women. The Pew Forum conservatively estimates that the actual
figure for the same year was 67 million.
40
Reliable data on Christianity in China is
extremely hard to acquire since many believers worship in unofficial “house” churches,
often in secret for fear of persecution by authorities, but by all accounts church growth in
the country has been staggering and has been led not by Western missionaries (who are
barred from the country) but by Chinese female pastors. The number of Christians in
India, according to Pew, is nearly 32 million, in South Korea approximately 14 million,

40
See “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s
Christian Population,” Pew Research Forum, December 19, 2011, on the web at:
http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-worlds-christian-
population.aspx

232
and in the Philippines more than 86 million. Although a small minority of their overall
populations, there are some 269 million Christians in the Asia-Pacific region alone—
excluding Australia—by Pew’s estimates. In comparative perspective, this represents
more than 20 million more Christians than live in the United States and nearly 40 million
more than live in England, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy combined. This is to say
nothing of the number of Christians from Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa. Of the
global population more than 2 billion or one third are Christians, representing by far the
world’s largest religion.
Finally, I do not think one should shy from saying that some deeply rooted
cultural values and practices should not be defended or protected but should be actively
resisted through a wide range of locally appropriate strategies reflecting global human
rights concerns. As Arvind Sharma writes of the Protestant missionaries who (together
with rights champions in Britain such as William Wilberforce) vigorously fought against
the practice of sati or widow burning in India:
The abolition of the sati rite in 1829 owes much to the efforts of the Christian
missionaries. Under the watchful eye of a Government which was hesitant to take
any action to terminate the rite, and reluctant to allow missionary interference in
the religious beliefs of the Hindus, and in the face of rather cold indifference of
the native people, the missionaries started working for the abolition of a practice
which they thought inhuman. They sent investigators, collected data and
compiled statistics of the victims, and they preached and published books and
pamphlets against the rite, and thus helped to create in Britain an anti-sati public
opinion which eventually forced the issue before the British Parliament.
41

The labors of the Protestant missionaries, according to Sharma, were marred by
“Overenthusiasm for conversion” and “imperfect knowledge of native religion”:

41
Arvind Sharma, “Widows are not for Burning: Christian Missionary Participation in
the Abolition of the Sati Rite,” in Sati: Historical and Phenomenological Essays (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), p.62.

233
Yet to an independent observer of Indian history, the contribution of the
missionaries to India’s social and religious reforms cannot be overlooked. From
the fortified social and religious system of the Hindus, they brought the sati issue
out in the open and pointed out the inhumanity and insensibility of the whole
community and appealed to stop a practice which was founded on stagnant and
misguided ideas and false hopes. It was the missionaries who kept the issue alive
in the conscience of the people in both India and Britain and it was they who
helped indirectly to organize a Hindu response for abolition which as an internal
force played an important part for the termination of the rite.
42

The early Christian faith, Nietzsche reminds us, represented a conscious
subversion of deeply rooted Greek and Roman cultural assumptions of human inequality
and natural hierarchy. If true to the moral arc of the New Testament witness, Christians
therefore cannot but continue to be a subversive presence in cultures of inequality today.
One quantifiable indicator of how deeply rooted conceptions of human inequality remain
throughout much of the world are rates of sex-selective abortions and female infanticides.
Despite laws formally banning abortions based on gender, the practice is widespread and
growing in patrilineal and highly patriarchal countries such as China, India, and Korea.
In the world’s largest democracy, according to a 2011 study in the British medical
journal, The Lancet, between 4 and 12 million girls were aborted between 1990 and 2005
on the basis of their gender.
43
The study found that female selective abortions in India
were, surprisingly, most common among the most highly educated and wealthy classes
who had the greatest access to prenatal screening and abortion services. The practice was
“common,” though, among all classes in all parts of the country. As a result, in a fifteen-
year period India experienced one of the sharpest declines in girl-to-boy sex ratios at birth

42
Ibid., p.64.
43
See Prabhat Jha, et al, “Trends in selective abortions of girls in India: analysis of
nationally representative birth histories from 1990 to 2005 and census data from 1991 to
2011,” The Lancet, Vol.377, No.9781 (4 June 2011), pp.1921-1928; and Barbara D.
Miller, “Female-Selective Abortion in Asia: Patterns, Policies, and Debates,” in
American Anthropologist, Vol.103, No.4 (2001), pp.1083-1095.

234
of any country in the world. In 1990, there were 906 female births per 1000 boys
(already far less than most parts of the world). In 2005, the number had declined to 836.
A dilemma such as this cannot be addressed simply at the level of formal laws. Deeper
change—cultural change—is necessary. How such change should be effected can no
longer take the form of foreign missionaries arriving from afar to tell indigenous people
what is wrong with their beliefs and practices. It might, though, take the form of Indian
Christians working alongside others for stronger public policies to defend the lives of
women while modeling a radically different praxis that helps others to rediscover
submerged aspects of their own sacred texts and traditions that also point toward a vision
of human dignity, rights, and equality.

IV. Three Apocalypses (Or What is Finally at Stake)
What is finally at stake in the philosophical debate over the grounding of rights? What
practical difference should it make to those who are actually doing the work of human
rights at great personal sacrifice or risk, many of whom do not identify with any
particular religion at all? It is (relatively) “secular” Europe, after all, not (relatively)
more religious America (or exceedingly religious Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa),
which today stands at the forefront of human rights advocacy and enforcement. The
radical skepticism and relativism of a Marx or Nietzsche is rare in theory and even rarer
in practice. As James Davison Hunter notes, “Apart from a few celebrity nihilists and a
few disaffected graduate students, there are actually few consistent relativists or

235
committed postmodernists for the simple reason that it is not livable.”
44
Why, then,
should we fear any collapsing or diminishment of the program of rights we have already
attained? There are two possible replies to this “so what” question, which I will refer to
as the Apocalypse According to Raskolnikov and the Apocalypse According to
Zarathustra.
Near the conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the not-yet fully
repentant murderer Raskolnikov, while performing hard labor in Siberia, is visited by a
recurring nightmare of where his earlier materialist ideas are leading the world. In his
dream, “microscopic creatures” appear that infect entire nations, causing the bearers of
the “new trichinae” to go mad. “But never, never had people considered themselves so
intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they
thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs
more unshakeable.”
45
The affect of the disease is to isolate each individual in his or her
own solipsistic outlook (“Each thought the truth was contained in himself alone”) and to
foster radical moral relativism (“They did not know whom or how to judge, could not
agree on what to regard as evil, what as good”). As the infection spreads in
Raskolnikov’s dream, there is a horrifying and surreal unraveling of all social bonds,
proving the impossibility of enlightened egoism or materialistic rationalism ever serving
as a foundation for the common good:
People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into
whole armies against each other, but, already on the march, the armies would
suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers

44
James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of
Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.207.
45
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p.547.

236
would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another.
In the cities the bells rang all day long. Everyone was being summoned, but no
one knew who was summoning them or why…Only a few people in the whole
world could be saved. They were pure and chosen, destined to begin a new
generation of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth. But no one
had seen these people anywhere. No one had heard their words or voices.
46

A sense of extreme historical possibilities—including the return of extreme
inhumanity even to the liberal West—may also be found in Heschel’s writings on the
meaning of the Holocaust. “One of the lessons we have derived from the events of our
time is that we cannot dwell at ease under the sun of our civilization, that man is the least
harmless of all beings,” he wrote:
We feel how every minute in our civilization is packed with tension like the
interlude between lightening and thunder. Man has not advanced very far from
the coast of chaos. It took only one storm to throw him back into the sinister. If
culture is to survive, it is in need of defenses all along the shore. A frantic call to
chaos shrieks in our blood. Many of us are too susceptible to it to ignore it
forever. Where is the power that could offset the effect of that alluring
call?...This is the decision which we have to make: whether our life is to be a
pursuit of pleasure or an engagement for service. The world cannot remain a
vacuum. Unless we make it an altar to God, it is invaded by demons. This is no
time for neutrality.
47

Is it possible that Dostoevsky’s darkest premonitions for Western civilization—
steeped in materialist doctrines, enthralled by modern science, oblivious to the
consequences of ideas, and committed to ever more opulent modes of production and
consumption—are as prophetic for us today as they were at the fin de siècle, on the eve of
trench warfare, of the gulags, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki? Today fears of the apocalypse are harbored by many secular no less than
religious thinkers. The dangers we now face, Noam Chomsky declares, have “reached

46
Ibid., 547.
47
Heschel, “No Time for Neutrality,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.75.

237
the level of a threat to human survival.”
48
The human race is “likely” to “self-destruct.”
49

The apocalypse, René Girard has suggested, may have already begun. “The only
Christians who still talk about the apocalypse are fundamentalists,” he declares. “They
think that the violence of the end of time will come from God himself. They cannot do
without a cruel God. Strangely, they do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the
process of amassing and that is looming over our own heads is entirely sufficient to
trigger the worst.”
50

There is an alternative vision of the apocalypse, however, to which Nietzsche
points us that does not require the idea of a final catastrophe on a literal historical
timeline. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he predicted the rise of a race of Last Men who
would lack all passionate commitment and whose highest goals would be to wrap
themselves in enervating material comforts and trivial pleasures:
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—thus asks
the last human being, blinking. Then the earth has become small, and on it hops
the last human being, who makes everything small. His kind is ineradicable, like
the flea beetle; the last human being lives longest. “We invented happiness”—say
the last human beings, blinking. They abandoned the regions where it was hard to
live: for one needs warmth…One still works, for work is a form of entertainment.
But one sees to it that the entertainment is not a strain…No shepherd and one
herd! Each wants the same, each is the same, and whoever feels differently goes
voluntarily to the insane asylum. “Formerly the whole world was insane”—the
finest ones say, blinking. One is clever and knows everything that has happened,
and so there is no end to their mockery. People still quarrel but they reconcile
quickly—otherwise it is bad for the stomach. One has one’s little pleasure for the

48
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), p.231
49
Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. C.P. Otero (London:
Routledge, 2003), p.391.
50
René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary
Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p.xvii.

238
day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one honors health. “We invented
happiness” say the last human beings, and they blink.
51

It is not difficult to see that the world of Nietzsche’s Last Men is already our own—a
world of casino capitalism and consumption to the point of satiation; of insipid
entertainment, ephemeral amusements, and mass spectacles that continually dull our
moral, aesthetic, and intellectual imaginations; of corporate branding of everything from
education to worship; and of a ubiquitous language of “rights” detached from any sense
of accompanying obligations or necessary virtues in a world of staggering poverty,
inequalities, and structural violence. The nihilism of Nietzsche’s will to power, we must
not forget, was not offered as nihilism by Nietzsche himself but as an attempt to
overcome the nihilism of more banal forms of disenchantment.
The world of the Last Men has been made possible by economic and
technological developments but also by the dissolution of trust in any meaning
transcending strictly instrumentalist and materialist forms of rationality. According to
Hart:
Nihilism is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what
the human intellect can impose on things, according to an excruciatingly limited
calculus of utility, or of the barest laws of cause and effect. It is “rationality” of
the narrowest kind, so obsessed with what things are and how they might be used
that it is no longer seized by wonder when it stands in the light of the dazzling
truth that things are. It is a rationality that no longer knows how to hesitate before
this greater mystery, or even to see that it is there, and thus is a rationality that
cannot truly think.
52

51
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.9-10.
52
David Bentley Hart, “A Philosopher in the Twilight,” in First Things, No.210,
February 2011, p.46. By this description the religious believer Immanuel Kant might
also, arguably, be deemed a nihilistic thinker. The word “nihilism” was in fact first used
by the mystic J. H. Obereit in the 1780s and picked up by the Christian philosopher
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi soon after as a criticism of Kantian philosophy with its
deployment of an extreme rationalism that ultimately leads to the subjectivist claim that

239
In the world of the Last Men, formal defense of “human rights” can come to serve
as yet another tool for the bureaucratic routinizing of all areas of life. Rights talk quickly
devolves into the grim and interminable battles of “identity politics” in which the
assertion of one person’s vision of the good can only come at the expense of another’s in
a zero-sum competition for power, recognition, status, or material rewards. Beneath the
glittering façade of novelty that late capitalism provides, the language of “rights” can
mask an actual loss of human dignity through the sterile flattening of all social relations
and human experiences. “Rights” can serve to sustain oppressive and unequal class
relations, just as Marx asserted, and they can lead to a mutilation of the human spirit as
Nietzsche feared. The “highest ideals and aspirations also threaten to lay the most
crushing burdens on humankind,” Charles Taylor warns.
53

What we are in need of, then, is another apocalyptic vision to answer both
Raskolnikov and Zarathustra. Apocalypsis in Greek does not mean destruction (as it has
come to connote in popular usage), but rather a “lifting of the veil,” a revelation or
disclosing of buried truths. What is required to disclose and preserve human dignity, I
would suggest, are people whose praxis is not beyond good and evil but beyond human
rights. Or, stated differently, what we need are people whose lives in relationship to the
Other rehumanize human rights for us in ways that a political and legal theory abstracted

we have no access to phenomenal reality as such. Whether or not Kant sowed the seeds
of nineteenth and twentieth century nihilism he was in any case, Hart writes elsewhere,
“perhaps the single most boring man ever to darken a wigmakers doorway”—and it may
be that boringness and nihilism have something to do with each other. A person’s
philosophy, I have suggested throughout this dissertation, should not be viewed in
complete isolation from the existential shape of their life. See Frederick Beiser, Hegel
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp.27-28; and David Bentley Hart, In the Aftermath:
Provocations and Laments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p.93.
53
Taylor, Sources of the Self, p.519.

240
from authentic human relationships cannot. When we encounter people whose lives are
characterized by self-giving love for the Other beyond reason, safety, or propriety, the
veil is temporarily lifted and we see that the “wager on the meaning of meaning,” as
George Steiner calls it, is not yet lost.
54
The burden of responsibility for rehumanizing
human rights therefore falls, it seems to me, upon believers themselves. I have written
this dissertation from the particular perspective of the Christian faith as I understand it,
challenging those who situate themselves in various strands of the Enlightenment
tradition to face the failure of philosophical materialism to answer basic human needs or
to sustain a strong sense of human dignity and rights. I shall leave the final words,
though, to Albert Camus, who in 1948 addressed the monks at the Dominican Monastery
of Latour-Maubourg with the following highly revelatory remarks that shine a
penetrating light on both the promise and the peril of religious faith in our age:
What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and
clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a
doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That
they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history
has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak
out clearly and to pay up personally. When a Spanish bishop blesses political
executions, he ceases to be a bishop or a Christian or even a man; he is a dog just
like one who, backed by an ideology, orders that execution without doing the
dirty work himself. We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all
those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so
that man can be something more than a dog…Perhaps we cannot prevent this
world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the
number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can
help us do this?...But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity
will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the
obscure form of the encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all
the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case
Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the others will in fact
pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is not within my province to
decide, despite all the hope and anguish it awakens in me. And what I know—

54
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.4.

241
which sometimes creates a deep longing in me—is that if Christians made up their
minds to it, millions of voices—millions, I say—throughout the world would be
added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of
affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for
men.
55

55
Albert Camus, “The Unbeliever and Christians” (1948), in Resistance, Rebellion, and
Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p.70-74.

242
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The idea of human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other key documents of international law today faces grave theoretical as well as political challenges from many fronts. In the light of ongoing debates about the sources and meanings of “rights” I seek to answer the question: Can we have the right (or rights) without the good, that is, without “thick” moral foundations? In a pluralistic world that knows the perils of religiously motivated violence and intolerance all too well, is the only alternative to fundamentalist zealotry (or philosophical dogmatism) some form of ungrounded moral relativism, emotivism, or pragmatism? Or is it in fact impossible to have a robust, persuasive, and sustainable account of human dignity, equality, and rights without appealing to essentially religious or metaphysical understandings of personhood? In this dissertation I focus in particular on the challenge of post-Enlightenment skepticism for the idea of human rights through a critical examination of three nineteenth-century thinkers who perhaps more than anyone else set the stage for our contemporary discontent: Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. All three provided vital insights into social realities that cannot be ignored, yet their theories also pose grave problems for rights advocates. In response to the philosophical materialisms of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, I seek to trace a broadly ecumenical, self-reflexive, and non-dogmatic approach to rights that at the same time builds on particularist religious understandings. We cannot have a rationally coherent and normatively compelling political ethic or discourse of human rights, I argue, without a metaethics that either implicitly or explicitly finds its moorings in essentially religious ways of thinking.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Osborn, Ronald Elliott (author)

Core Title Nihilism's conscience: grounding human rights after Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Politics and International Relations

Publication Date 10/09/2014

Defense Date 07/09/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag christianity,Darwin,human rights,Marx,Materialism,naturalism,Nietzsche,OAI-PMH Harvest,Religion

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tickner, Ann J. (committee chair), Barnes, John E. (committee member), Kammas, Anthony (committee member), Lloyd, Sharon (committee member)

Creator Email ronaldosborn@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-103789

Unique identifier UC11289361

Identifier usctheses-c3-103789 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-OsbornRona-1240.pdf

Dmrecord 103789

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Osborn, Ronald Elliott

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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