The Real Slave Morality

I get it: moral relativism is self-refuting, because it makes a moral case itself: thou shalt not be a moralist.

But this kind of argument is the stuff of spergy abstractionism, and therefore not very convincing, a tad unappetizing even.

A somewhat better way of looking at it is similar to the infinite regress of utilitarianism: if you make the case that there is no valid moral imperative, and it all simply comes down to the will to power, the law of the jungle, survival, fitness, or [insert latest fad], then you are still left wondering why the hell you should obey the law of the jungle, or survive, or maximize fitness, or generally faddify your life and that of others.

What is the goal here? You want to be strong, fit, powerful, survive, subvert, advance yourself, or your race, or humanity? To what end? Why bother? So that you can live in peace? Feel the vitality of life? Have a world worth living in? Get rid of suffering, stupidity, and madness? Or rather get rid of safetyism, intellectualism, and boredom? Just like utilitarianism always runs into some kind of a-priori-goodness eventually, so does moral relativism.

Then again, everybody does hate moralists: the holier-than-thou types who radiate this impertinent air of superiority, who have all the rules sorted out, know the road to salvation like a middle manager knows his project milestones: appalling busybodies running around telling everybody what they should or shouldn’t do, therefore always screwing up when it comes to actually judging unique situations, making the world a hellish place for everybody.

Moral relativism is akin to the nuclear option when faced with these types, and one might be tempted to use it. Plenty have done so, but alas: the moralizers are still with us.

In fact, throwing nuclear bombs is just a crass form of moralizing itself.

Moral relativists therefore are among the worst moralizers. They want to change your behavior, the way you think, and your healthy instincts. With the moralists, at least you know what you’re facing: they couldn’t be more brazen and transparent. The relativists can be more subtle: they whisper in your ear that you have been enslaved by morality, that there is a tiger in you that craves for its coming-out party, that you deserve better, that you have to free your spirit in an explosion of will, of vital energy, of your true nature, of your identity, your primal instincts, your true sexuality, or your [insert latest fad].

So what is the truth here? Ah, the truth.

The truth is concealed both by the moralist and the moral relativist. The moralist substitutes the intricate dance that is a life lived gracefully for a list of absolute rules that turn everything that’s good and proper into its opposite, while blocking an accurate view of reality by pathologically seeing everything through the lens of a childish good-or-bad haughty-judgement, powered by a low (or non-existent) spirit, expressing itself (or rather its absence) in a one-dimensional animating force towards authority.

The moral relativist recognizes this (which can make him convincing) but then also turns everything upside down: instead of an explosion of spirit, we get an implosion into unconscious baseline animal urges, or worse: the drive towards perversion not just of the spirit (which is a given) but even of our animal nature, smugly justified with elaborate (but tasteless) sophistry.

There’s yet more truth concealed by this mess. The realist school of politics has figured this out: in politics and the economy, behind talks about morality, religious indignation, human rights or however else the latest incarnation of self-righteous outrage happens to be habitually worded, lurks the cold reality of power and self-interest. The only difference between a somewhat decent politician with a conscience and a psychopathic butcher-wearing-a-mask-of-human-rights-sanity, is that the first, besides his self-interested plotting, also believes in morality (and actually cares about his people), while the latter is just in it for the spoils and the sadistic pleasure. But both don’t act morally in any simplistic sense recognizable in “public discourse” (i.e. propaganda); they both act coldly, rationally, based on hard interests.

But this observation isn’t an argument for moral relativism. It just demonstrates how important appeals to morality are for propaganda, how confused people are about it, and how far removed we are from reality. It also makes clear that if we know anything for certain, it’s that you can’t outsource morality to bureaucracies, whether religious or secular, just as you can’t outsource wisdom to credentials-peddling institutions.

A truly great leader can be a morally uplifting inspiration. But morality can never be found in an institution, a state, a church, or a “declaration.”

This is what gives moral relativists, and the Nietzsche shtick, their fuel: a list of stifling moral rules stunts, terrifies, outrages the true spirit, the one reaching high—high not to the mountains of power, or kindness, or strength, or any other mere attribute that may or may not be adequate or useful, but high to the beyond, to the source of our perception, to the not-quite-here-yet-all-there-is, where the symbols dwell that flood the unity of our inner and outer world with orderly glitter and disorderly beauty, bringing a subtle clarity that alone can help us take the right decisions, for our individual destinies, in our own circumstances, at our personal crossroads, which connect us to our soul and that of our kind.

It is this sort of spirit I can get behind. If moral relativism goes beyond a critique of moralizers and institutionalized pseudo-morality (which might also be necessary, but this is another discussion), and seeks to replace the true world we live in (which words can’t grasp) with some cynical and contradictory justification for using that ring of power to gobble up the world of appearances “to make it stronger and fitter” (yeah right), then hell no. Because that world I can only see looking down, where everything isn’t even dark, only small, insignificant, and pitiful.

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