4 . The Mission Of Mankind
As the Durants point out in The Lessons of History,
mankind places its own meaning on life. A common mission for past
civilizations has been to give glory to the state, its rulers, and its
gods. We can today visit great monuments to this effort that still
stand, to some degree or another, as monuments to long dead
civilizations which have long since passed from the affairs of mankind.
And what is the common thread
that connects all such monuments? Each was built to give pleasure to
the powerful individual(s) who ordered the building of each such
monument. No doubt all would agree that one of mankind's fundamental
longings is for some form of pleasure. But we have also long known that
mankind really needs to seek more than simply pleasure alone. Many of
the greatest accomplishments of mankind will each involve an exercise
of pure intellect alone, and passion will be totally absent.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his first (and really only) major book, Die Geburt der Tragödie,
1872 (The Birth of Tragedy, 1968), began by defining a dichotomy in
which he labeled the two parts as Apollonian and Dionysian. Nietzsche
identified the Dionysian (or pleasure seeking culture) as the first to
develop, while the Apollonian (or intellect based culture) came along
later. The Dionysian culture involved a near total absorption in the
passionate affairs of man, while the Apollonian involved an extirpation
of passion.
Nietzsche, apparently modeling
his argument on Hegel's logic concept of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, asserted that either Apollonian or Dionysian standing along
was incomplete. The greatest Greek tragedies were those where a
synthesis (or fusion) of the two forms occurred.
Later, in Also Sprach Zarathustra
1883-4 (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1954), this concept was extended by
Nietzsche to contrast the fusion of Apollonian and Dionysian forms with
most of the fundamental concepts of Christianity, which are most
certainly Apollonian alone.
Drawing from his own studies
of philosophy and from Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Nietzsche argued
that the mission of mankind was to produce a race of supermen; beings
who would be as equivalently advanced over mankind as mankind was
advanced over the apes. It is interesting to note that, more than a
century later, we can see that Nietzsche's goal of creating supermen
would be the inevitable consequence of just allowing nature to take its
course, as predicted by Darwin. The scary part is that we are now on
the verge of acquiring the scientific techniques which would be
necessary to make that great leap in a single generation, as opposed to
many thousands of years.
In The Story of Philosophy,
1926, Will Durant selects nine great philosophers to honor with
chapters about their lives and work. The first eight are Plato,
Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant,
Schopenhauer, and Herbert Spencer. The ninth (and last) was Friedrich
Nietzsche. Durant cited Also Sprach Zarathustra as Nietzsche's
greatest work. Presumably Durant would also endorse the concept of
creating a race of supermen as the mission of mankind, as expressed by
that work.
So, where does this leave us
in choosing a mission for mankind? Arnold Toynbee noted that there has
never been a high level Dionysian civilization. The reason why should
be obvious: we all know the town drunk, who has never accomplished
much, and who will never amount to much in his entire life. Clearly,
focusing on pleasure or passion alone is a dead-end path. However, as
Nietzsche points out, the Christian solution of only focusing on
Apollonian forms of expression is just as much of a trap. The allegory
for this is the father who buries himself in his job, while losing
virtually all contact with his wife and kids. Modern man is well placed
to know that each of these images is wrong. Accordingly, mankind cannot
be truly great until we lose our fear of passion, and learn to indulge
ourselves in controlled exercises of these passions, in fusion with our
Apollonian intellectual control mechanisms.
In the beginning, Christianity
was a religion of simple people, by simple people, and for simple
people. The moral choices were made simple by excluding passion from
the mix. This is obvious from reading the New Testament, particularly
the letters of Paul. Later, the Church decided to allow a passionate
love of Christ, but that is still the only passion which is officially
sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Even a passionate love for one's own
spouse is supposed to be kept hidden and out of sight, winked at by
those in the know, but never discussed in public.
Mankind has always tended to
yearn for that which is lacking from our own lives and which keeps us
each from feeling fulfilled. I am certain that many of us feel the lack
of passion in our lives and yearn to have that part of ourselves
fulfilled. Personally, I have always harbored a secret yearning to
start a Dionysian movement. I felt challenged by Toynbee's observation
that there had never been a high level Dionysian civilization. This
idea never went anywhere, in large part because no such movement can be
made practical in this day and age. There are enough drunks and drug
addicts cluttering up our streets already, and any such movement would
only tend to attract those who are least prepared to control their own
actions.
So, as I said above, we must
add back the missing Dionysian forms into our overall mission, but we
must do so in fusion with our Apollonian control mechanisms.
And what Apollonian goals
should we seek? Christianity is virtually silent on this subject, as
the only real commandment in the New Testament is to live a virtuous
life in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ. Of course, this
omission eventually made Christianity acceptable to virtually every
state in which it took up residence. If a state has ever suffered at
the hands of a Christian church, it was entirely due to the
non-religious beliefs of the church leaders, not to the faith itself.
Jesus was entirely ambivalent about states, with his famous
commandment: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." (Matthew, 22:21.) In
point of fact, as the Durants eloquently point out, the basic function
of all religions is to aid the state in maintaining order among the
people, and thus a religion is most acceptable to the state when it
performs that task without imposing any limits on what the state may or
may not declare as a goal for its people to meet. If the state goes to
war, then so does the church. If the state sends out a trade
expedition, the church sends along missionaries. This sort of symbiotic
relationship has existed right on down through all of mankind's history.
So, is there an Apollonian mission for mankind? I do believe that there is.
If you take the long view of
the centuries, and you ask what it is that we have received from our
forefathers, the answer is singular: it is knowledge. Furthermore, it
is knowledge that allows the civilizations of mankind to climb the
spiral of progress, as opposed to requiring each group of raw humans to
begin the entire process anew. So, the Durants' quote becomes the
Apollonian mission for mankind:
. . . let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much that he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath, he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.
If you choose
to follow the path outlined by Nietzsche, the creation of supermen, be
it over a thousand generations or in a single generation, it still
involves the accumulation and transmission of knowledge for which we
have painfully accumulated the basic underlying premises. In other
words, if we get to the point where the geneticists can engineer the
birth of a superman or a superwoman, it will be the end product of
thousands of years of human development, not an isolated intrusion into
a sphere of God-like knowledge. In this sense, knowledge begets
knowledge, as we need to achieve a certain fundamental level of
understanding before we can take the next step in our ever growing list
of human achievements.
Given the Apollonian mission
of transmitting knowledge, and the Dionysian mission of passion and
enjoyment, all that remains is to define a balanced fusion of the two
in order to have the greatness first envisioned by Nietzsche.
Obviously, there is no clear prescription in this regard. However,
modern man has been faced with the task of making this sort of decision
for a long time now. The fact that many wrong decisions are made is no
argument for not requiring each individual to make his or her own
decision in this regard. In fact, mankind has been making this sort of
decision for all of history, and back at least into the times of the
Old Testament. (see Genesis 9, 20-27, where Noah got drunk, and the
moral of the story is to take care of the drunkard who defiles
himself.) In fact, the ability to genetically engineer humans may
provide us with a way of instilling the control mechanisms into our
super-children. There is increasing evidence of a genetic basis for a
susceptibility to addiction, and obviously, a genetically engineered
person would have that particular trait eliminated. Eliminating any
genetic contributions, plus an appropriate training of those kids in
how to enjoy life without falling into the traps laid for pure pleasure
seekers, ought to give our super-children the innate ability to achieve
the proper balance without spending much time thinking about it.
At present, there is simply no
way to define a true answer for the balance required between these two
missions, so I will leave it at that: a balance, to be defined by each
individual. This should not constitute a license for the drunk to
continue drinking to excess, because that is still the definition of
drunkenness, which is still wrongful because it is obviously not
balanced. But this should also not argue for the Christian Temperance
Union, or Alcoholics Anonymous, which would abolish all drinking, at
least by their own members.82
That is also just as wrongful as drinking to excess, because, again,
that is not balance, but an extirpation of passion. Beyond those two
extremes, each of which is wrong in some way, we will just have to let
mankind find its own answers, pending results from any research which
might prove useful on this subject.
82 It must be noted that the efficacy of total abstention as a treatment for alcoholism is currently being questioned in the scientific literature, at least for drunks who lack the genetic predisposition to drunkenness.
