WEEKEND COLUMNISTS There’s been talk in recent months about the return of values, whatever they might be, wherever they might be found. But values, tout court, sound somewhat nebulous. A short history of values is required to make sense of this talk.
Our history of values begins with Nietzsche. The pastor’s son from Röcken was the first to see, in the 1880s, the tremendous upheaval of values which would convulse the next century, and more. The “higher values” based on Christianity and Greek culture, in which the 19th century had taken such pride, were bound to collapse, because they were based on hypocrisy and denial of reality – not least biological reality. The “uncanniest of guests” had arrived, and its name was nihilism: nihilism, for Nietzsche, meant the situation in which “the higher values devalue themselves”.
Nietzsche felt profoundly ambivalent about nihilism; on the one hand it might be a necessary cleansing force, sweeping away all that was outmoded and allowing a new spiritual force to grow. On the other hand, it was dangerous, indeed “the danger of dangers”. The effect would certainly be deeply unsettling: “we are losing the centre of gravity that allows us to live; we are lost for a time ... It seems as though there were no meaning in existence, as though everything were in vain.”
He was right about the danger. The 20th century saw, as he had predicted, the migration of values from the higher – the spiritual – to the lower – the material, accompanied by an orgy of violence unmatched in recorded history, as well as a weakening of the taboos surrounding sex. The justification, if justification were needed, was that material values were more real, less hypocritical. I don’t know if Madonna reads Nietzsche, but her “Material Girl” (“You know that we are living in a material world/ And I am a material girl”) was a perfect embodiment of this shift, as, in a starker way, was the short life and death of Jade Goody.
Nietzsche never told us how long the uncanny guest might be staying. But he gave a hint that there was something beyond nihilism; in one of his last writings, he claimed to have “lived through the whole of nihilism to the end, leaving it behind, outside [him]self.”
What he didn’t predict, as far as I can see, is the situation where we find ourselves now: one in which the lower, material values have turned out themselves to have been over-valued, and have started to devalue themselves. Even Madonna herself, a convert to yoga, seems to have become a little bit less material. In our bleaker moments, we may feel we are facing, or indeed living in, a heap of collapsed values. The things we thought most solid and material, share values, house prices, even the money in the bank (especially if it was an Icelandic one), turned out to be as fickle as those other, long-forgotten higher values of yesteryear. Materialism itself is falling apart.
Our situation is especially difficult because it is easier to go from higher to lower – to debunk – than to perform the reverse operation: the word rebunk doesn’t make any sense. But one thing almost guaranteed not to work is to attempt to breathe life back into dead values; if I was a cartoonist I might have portrayed Gordon Brown and fellow leaders at the G20 summit with bursting cheeks, a fatally holed balloon at their lips.
I have a hunch that the inflation of the old higher values – the excessive power of the church and later the hopes placed in high art as a saving power – and the inflation of the lower values, though they appear opposite, are in some way connected. There seems to be a tendency for all human values to become inflated. So what causes this inflation?
I put my money on that fellow-traveller of humanity from earliest times, the fear of death. Timor mortis conturbat me, the fear of death dismays me, cries the medieval poet, conveying a visceral terror that we may think we have grown out of. In the plague-ridden medieval world death is everywhere to be seen. It makes sense to pin your hopes on life beyond the grave. Our tendency is surely the reverse – to try to have it all now. But wasn’t there something death-defying about the recent credit-fuelled bonanza – wasn’t the desire to have so much more than you could possibly need or use a bid for immortality? Won’t my multi-million pound pension pot keep the grim reaper at bay?
Any new values which may emerge from the rubble of materialism need to be less grandiose and death-denying. Nietzsche again has an inkling: as he suggests in Ecce Homo, “these small things – nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far.” Certainly these small things, good food, the importance of locality, the natural world (represented by climate, another prophetic touch), seem more hopeful and even joyful than the big, empty, abstract concepts our leaders are throwing at us.
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
