Subject: Re: Overcoming nihilism
Nietzsche worried that, if we fail to vanquish and decisively replace the shadow of values derived from God, we risk our culture slipping into a deep nihilism.

Thank you, Manlobbi, that's a good foundational post for an atheists' board. I would hazard that most adult atheists encountered the dogma and rituals of one or more organized religions as children. The dogma normally included the idea that if you didn't behave according to whichever book of rules and myths applied, you would be in big trouble. In fact, you would be subject to The Wrath of God.

If God didn't smite you, maybe your King would, or your elder, your parent, your local law enforcement officer. Someone would smite you if you didn't do as you were told.

Not just that, not just serious sticks, but also awesome carrots -- eternal life, seeing folks you'd lost, even, you know, certain enticements that might apply specifically to young men.

The people sipped their wine
And what with God there,
They asked him questions
Like: Do you have to eat
Or get your hair cut in heaven?
And if your eye got poked out in this life
Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?
-- Crash Test Dummies

If you're an atheist, and there is no Lord, no Lord's teachings, no divine right of kings, no Lord's Representatives Here on Earth, what is the basis of your moral code? Do you even have a moral code? Why would you?

Animal spirits is a term attributed to John Maynard Keynes, referring to the manic gyrations of financial markets, but it has to have been used privately long before to refer to the fact that humans are mammals. Mammals are not famous for moral codes.

So, for most of human history, Option 1 was The Wrath of God. After all these years, God is still more often the agent of war than peace, but hey, He's got a little Bernie Madoff in Him, He made it look good for a long time.

Along came The Enlightenment and Option 2: the human conscience. Thoreau thought there was an essential secular goodness in humanity and that our unique ability to reason would take it from there. One just had to commune with nature and be true to oneself. This was pre-Facebook, of course.

So now we arrive at Option 3: enlightened self-interest. This isn't so much a moral precept as a behavioral acknowledgement. The interests of the self -- in the modern world, survival, prosperity, fame, glory, riches -- are the strongest mammalian motivators, so unleash them and see what happens. This produces winners and losers. The winners think this is fine, the losers not so much. If something has replaced God in modern society with respect to universal aspiration, it would seem to be money, which, like the self-interest that pursues it, is inherently amoral.

What we once called art and literature, the highest expressions of humanity, we now, outside elite academic and cultural circles, call entertainment. The most accomplished art and literature still hold the keys to truth as best we can figure it, but it doesn't matter to the fate of the species if only a tiny percentage of self-selected humans are exposed to it. Even world leaders, the elite of the elite, are astonishingly vapid today in this regard. They have more pressing matters.

The modern entertainment industry's least subtle expressions of moral choices are reflected in the wildly popular vengeance genre, in which victimized characters exact a toll on immoral actors or systems, generally through violence. This expresses a feeling of helplessness in the face of immoral or amoral forces too powerful for mere mortals to resist. We must be superheroes to fight back. Hence the elevation of comic book characters, bringing us back to dependence on magical beings, but with costumes. Like church.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts. This seems quaint today. Joseph Goebbels may have founded the modern science of disinformation, but he had a lot of students. Today, social media make Goebbels' reliance on radio seem primitive.

Aside from God and money, what seem to work best, for the modification of human behavior, are appeals to our tribal nature. Our side is good, our enemies are evil, rah, rah, rah. We define sides by blood, nations, religion, language, political ideology, skin color, football jerseys. Science fiction hopefully proposes these divisions might vanish with the sudden appearance of a common enemy; say, an alien invasion. Of course, there are possible downsides there.

I, too, am hoping to be more cheerful the next time.