George Nathan - The Collected Works of H. L. Mencken

So much for the utility of self-sacrifice—undeniable, perhaps, so long as a wise and ruthless foresight rules, but immediately questionable when sentimentality enters into the matter. There remains the answer in rebuttal that sentimentality, after all, is native to the soul of man, that we couldn't get rid of it if we tried. Herein, if we look closely, we will observe tracks of an idea that has colored the whole stream of human thought since the dawn of Western philosophy, and is accepted today, as irrefutably true, by all who pound pulpits and wave their arms and call upon their fellow men to repent. It has clogged all ethical inquiry for two thousand years, it has been a premise in a million moral syllogisms, it has survived the assaults of all the iconoclasts that ever lived. It is taught in all our schools today and lies at the bottom of all our laws, prophecies and revelations. It is the foundation and cornerstone, not only of Christianity, but also of every other compound of theology and morality known in the world. And what is this king of all axioms and emperor of all fallacies? Simply the idea that there are rules of "natural morality" engraven indelibly upon the hearts of man—that all men, at all times and everywhere, have ever agreed, do now agree and will agree forevermore, unanimously and without reservation, that certain things are right and certain other things are wrong, that certain things are nice and certain other things are not nice, that certain things are pleasing to God and certain other things are offensive to God.

In every treatise upon Christian ethics and "natural theology," so called, you will find these rules of "natural morality" in the first chapter. Thomas Aquinas called them "the eternal law." Even the Greeks and Romans, for all their skepticism in morals, had a sneaking belief in them. Aristotle tried to formulate them and the Latin lawyers constantly assumed their existence. Most of them are held in firm faith today by all save a small minority of the folk of Christendom. The most familiar of them, perhaps, is the rule against murder—the sixth commandment. Another is the rule against the violation of property in goods, wives and cattle—the eighth and tenth commandments. A third is the rule upon which the solidity of the family is based, and with it the solidity of the tribe—the fifth commandment. The theory behind these rules is, not only that they are wise, but that they are innate and sempiternal, that every truly enlightened man recognizes their validity intuitively, and is conscious of sin when he breaks them. To them Christianity added an eleventh commandment, a sort of infinite extension of the fifth, "that ye love one another" 5—and in two thousand years it has been converted from a novelty into a universality. That is to say, its point of definite origin has been lost sight of, and it has been moved over into the group of "natural virtues," of "eternal laws." When Christ first voiced it, in his discourse at the Last Supper, it was so far from general acceptance that he named a belief in it as one of the distinguishing marks of his disciples, but now our moralists tell us that it is in the blood of all of us, and that we couldn't repudiate it if we would. Brotherhood, indeed, is the very soul of Christianity, and the only effort of the pious today is to raise it from a universal theory to a universal fact.

But the truth is, of course, that it is not universal at all, and that nothing in the so-called soul of man prompts him to subscribe to it. We cling to it today, not because it is inherent in us, but simply because it is the moral fashion of our age. When the disciples first heard it put into terms, it probably struck them as a revolutionary novelty, and on some dim tomorrow our descendants may regard it as an archaic absurdity. In brief, rules of morality are wholly temporal and temporary, for the good and sufficient reason that there is no "natural morality" in man—and the sentimental rule that the strong shall give of their strength to the weak is no exception. There have been times in the history of the race when few, if any intelligent men subscribed to it, and there are thousands of intelligent men who refuse to subscribe to it today, and no doubt there will come a time when those who are against it will once more greatly outnumber those who are in favor of it. So with all other "eternal laws." Their eternality exists only in the imagination of those who seek to glorify them. Nietzsche himself spent his best years demonstrating this, and we have seen how he set about the task—how he showed that the "good" of one race and age was the "bad" of some other race and age—how the "natural morality" of the Periclean Greeks, for example, differed diametrically from the "natural morality" of the captive Jews. All history bears him out. Mankind is ever revising and abandoning its "inherent" ideas. We say today that the human mind instinctively revolts against cruel punishments, and yet a moment's reflection recalls the fact that the world is, and always has been peopled by millions to whom cruelty, not only to enemies but to the weak in general, seems and has seemed wholly natural and agreeable. We say that man has an "innate" impulse to be fair and just, and yet it is a commonplace observation that multitudes of men, in the midst of our most civilized societies, have little more sense of justice than so many jackals. Therefore, we may safely set aside the argument that a "natural" instinct for sentimental self-sacrifice stands as an impassable barrier to Nietzsche's dionysian philosophy. There is no such barrier. There is no such instinct. It is an idea merely—an idea powerful and persistent, but still mutable and mortal. Certainly, it is absurd to plead it in proof against the one man who did most to establish its mutability.

We come now to the final argument against Nietzsche—the argument, to wit, that, even admitting his criticism of Christian morality to be well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would serve the world as well. The principal spokesman of this objection, perhaps, is Paul Elmer More, who sets it forth at some length in his hostile but very ingenious little study of Nietzsche. 6Mr. More goes back to Locke to show the growth of the two ideas which stand opposed as Socialism and individualism, Christianity and Nietzscheism today. So long, he says, as man believed in revelation, there was no genuine effort to get at the springs of human action, for every impulse that was ratified by the Scriptures was believed to be natural and moral, and every impulse that went counter to the Scriptures was believed to be sinful, even by those who yielded to it habitually. But when that idea was cleared away, there arose a need for something to take its place, and Locke came forward with his theory that the notion of good was founded upon sensations of pleasure and that of bad upon sensations of pain. There followed Hume, with his elaborate effort to prove that sympathy was a source of pleasure, by reason of its grateful tickling of the sense of virtue, and so the new conception of good finally stood erect, with one foot on frank self-interest and the other on sympathy. Mr. More shows how, during the century following, the importance of the second of these factors began to be accentuated, under the influence of Rousseau and his followers, and how, in the end, the first was forgotten almost entirely and there arose a non-Christian sentimentality which was worse, if anything, than the sentimentality of the Beatitudes. In England, France and Germany it colored almost the whole of philosophy, literature and politics. Stray men, true enough, raised their voices against it, but its sweep was irresistible. Its fruits were diverse and memorable—the romantic movement in Germany, humanitarianism in England, the Kantian note in ethics, and, most important of all, Socialism.