In “The Gay Science,” Friedrich Nietzsche mused about a madman who provoked ridicule as he ran around a marketplace looking for God and declaring we killed him. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” In Nietzsche’s world without God, Nietzsche claimed the impossibility of moral realism, which is an objective moral standard of truth. Without God, morality is relative, simply a matter of one person’s opinion relative to another’s. This idea ultimately results in a person becoming his own god, which Nietzsche labeled as one’s “personal providence.”
In the sea of moral relativism, people are constantly swimming with ever-changing currents to keep their morals aligned with the passing ideals of the times. We can witness the turbulence in this sea in the West when we see people elevating science from one side of their mouths (e.g., “Follow the science,” during COVID) while denying the science of our human biology from the other (i.e., Genesis 1:27; life begins at conception).
Nietzsche (1887) added, “There IS a certain high point in life: once we have reached that, we are, for all, our freedom, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and no matter how much we have faced up to the beautiful chaos of existence and denied it all providential reason and goodness, we still have to pass our hardest test. For it is only now that the idea of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force, and the best advocate, the evidence of our eyes, speaks for it – now that we can see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best.”
Like Karl Marx, Nietzsche was born in 19th century Germany where atheism, rationalism, secularism, and science ruled. Like Marx, Nietzsche rejected the Christian God and embraced moral relativism. Moral relativists believe that cultures can independently determine what’s good and what’s bad, or what’s right and what’s wrong. So what’s good and right in one society may be bad and wrong in another. During a time when Western societies elevated the dignity and intrinsic value of individuals, moral relativists embraced “the warmth of collectivism,” socialism, and communism, which restricts individual value and property rights in favor of the collective. Moral relativists would declare the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s acceptable since starving millions in one part of the USSR was for the betterment of Mother Russia as a whole. Fewer people = more food to eat for others in the USSR.
Moral relativism is a morally atrocious lens through which some want to view and judge the world. It leads people to justify morally reprehensible actions. It led to the untimely deaths of around 120 million people under the thumb of communism in the last century. Moral relativism denies any objective source of morality (aka, moral realism).
But we have an abundance of evidence that supports moral realism and our objective moral duties to do what’s right. Put it this way: if we have an objective moral standard, we should find universal evidence of people believing in a standard that withstands eras and cultures. In the GLOBE Study of 62 Societies (2004; updated to 150 societies in the GLOBE 2020), researchers analyzed cultural practices (what is) and cultural desires (what should be) all over the world. One value that is of particular note in the present context is humane orientation. Humane orientation speaks to a person’s kindness to both ingroups and outgroups. The authors found that the highest levels of humane orientation can be found in societies with high levels of poverty or suffering, while the lowest levels were in societies with high levels of wealth and social welfare programs (e.g., Germany). But in all societies, humane orientation as a practice was lower than humane orientation as a desire. In other words, people knew their societies should have higher levels of humane orientation than they perceived they had. This echoes the findings of Shalom Schwartz (2012) who also surveyed thousands around the world, finding that benevolence was the highest of 10 values that guide people’s lives, no matter the culture. Universalism and self-direction were either second or third, depending upon the country.
“An astonishing finding of the cross-cultural research is the high level of consensus regarding the relative importance of the ten values across societies. In the vast majority of nations studied, benevolence, universalism, and self-direction values appear at the top of the hierarchy and power, tradition, and stimulation values appear at the bottom. This implies that the aspects of human nature and of social functioning that shape individual value priorities are widely shared across cultures” (Schwartz, 2012, p. 17).
If all cultures share a universal appreciation of humanity and benevolence, it follows that we have an objective moral duty to accept this appreciation as a moral duty or moral prescription. If we have a moral duty to be benevolent, and that duty transcends cultures, it follows that we have a moral lawgiver. The Bible helps us to understand the way we’re called upon to treat other humans. And through the Bible, we can learn more about our objective moral lawgiver: Jesus Christ.
God is not dead. Nietzsche is dead. And moral relativism should be dead.
Thank you for your time.
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SJ Thomason is a wife, mom, and Christian university administrator who loves sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ.
References:
House, R.J., Hanges, P.J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P.W., and Gupta, V. (2004) Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Nietzsche, F. (1887). The Gay Science. www.stanford.edu/~jsabol/existentialism/materials/nietzsche-gay-science.pdf
Schwartz, S. (2012). n Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in
Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116. Retrieved here: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=orpc
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