Two Failed Reconstructions

Reconstruction after the Civil War failed and Nietzsche's Secular Reconstruction failed.[Classic]

“God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him,” Nietzsche wrote. “But considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which His shadow will be shown.”

“When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature?” Nietzsche asks. “When may we begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?”

The work to naturalize our self-conception continues. Nietzsche’s call to arms—so much more than just “God is dead!”—was not a cause but an effect, a culmination of a naturalistic tradition challenging religious epistemology, metaphysics and morals.

Like the American Civil War, it was a cataclysm and we understand what caused it and we know what we ought to do after it. Nietzsche called for an era of Reconstruction in which we do the work of accommodating ourselves to the new reality and a new moral paradigm—just as the North insisted the South undergo a Reconstruction in which the South’s slave-holding paradigm—in economic matters, in political representation, and in morality—must change, evolve, and demonstrate real progress.

But Nietzsche’s secular or nontheist Reconstruction, just like Reconstruction in the South, was a failure.

Faith-based epistemology, metaphysics, and morality continue to darken our minds even after their defeat on the scene of intellectual and ideational war, the battlefield of ideas.

In the South, statues to the Confederacy were not erected immediately after the loss of the Civil War, which was a time of Reconstruction and a time in which many Senators from Southern states were African-Americans. No, the movement to erect Confederate statues was a part of the failure of Reconstruction and the beginning of the next phase, Jim Crow.

With regard to the promise of a new philosophical paradigm on how to live after the death of God, we remain in a Jim Crow era. Secular Reconstruction seems to have failed.