Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion§246 By pressing the doctrine of disinterestedness and love into the foreground, Christianity by no means elevated the interests of the species above those of the individual. Its real historical effect, its fatal effect, remains precisely the increase of egotism of individual egotism, to excess (to the extreme which consists in the belief in individual immortality). The individual was made so important and so absolute, by means of Christian values, that he could no longer be sacrificed despite the fact that the species can only be maintained by human sacrifices. All “souls” became equal before God: but this is the most pernicious of all valuations! If one regards individuals as equals, the demands of the species are ignored and a process is initiated which ultimately leads to its ruin. Christianity is the reverse of the principle of selection. If the degenerate and sick man (“the Christian”) is to be of the same value as the healthy man (“the pagan”), or if he is even to be valued higher than the latter, as Pascal’s view of health and sickness would have us value him, the natural course of evolution is thwarted and the unnatural becomes law —
In practice this general love of mankind is nothing more than deliberately favouring all the suffering, the misformed and the degenerate: it is this love that has reduced and weakened the power, responsibility and lofty duty of sacrificing men. According to the scheme of Christian values, all that remained was the alternative of self-sacrifice, but this vestige of human sacrifice, which Christianity conceded and even recommended, has no meaning when regarded in the light of rearing a whole species. The prosperity of the species is by no means affected by the sacrifice of one individual (whether in the monastic and ascetic manner or by means of crosses, stakes and scaffolds, as the “martyrs” of error). What the species requires is the suppression of the physiologically malformed, the weak and the degenerate: but it was precisely to these people that Christianity appealed as a preservative force, it simply strengthened that natural and very strong instinct of all the weak which bids them protect, maintain and mutually support each other. What is Christian “virtue” and “love of men”, if not precisely this mutual assistance with a view to survival, this solidarity of the weak, this thwarting of selection? What is Christian altruism, if it is not the mob-egotism of the weak which divines that, if everybody looks after everybody else, every individual will be preserved for a longer period of time?
He who does not consider this attitude of mind as immoral, as a crime against life, himself belongs to the sickly crowd and also shares their instincts —
Genuine love of mankind exacts sacrifice for the good of the species — it is hard, full of self-control, because it needs human sacrifices. This pseudo-humanity which is called Christianity would like to establish the rule that nobody should be sacrificed.
This is from some time in mid-1888, during the year before Nietzsche’s mental collapse. Whether or not this is his real thought, or evidence of the madness, isn’t entirely clear to me. He was aiming at a reconstruction of ethical thought which would replace the inevitable failure of Christianity, and the bulk of his writing leaves no doubt that he considered Christianity, at its formation, as a political movement of a decadent underclass by which wealth and ambition are condemned, and passive submission and weakness applauded.
It is important to locate Nietzsche properly in the development of Western thinking to understand the importance of this aspect of his thought. He became an academic during the 1860s, just a few years after publication of Darwin’s On The Evolution of Species in 1859. What is more, during the 1850s, Spinoza’s method of Biblical criticism had been revived in Germany, and Nietzsche was acutely aware of the ever-growing catalog of gross contradictions and historical errors discovered within the Bible. At least publicly, he was the first person to put those things together and grasp that progress in scientific thought, and historical study of the Bible as opposed to devotional study, doomed Christianity — that God is dead.
So: Is Nietzsche advocating what later became known as ‘social Darwinism’ in this passage? I don’t know, but I think probably so. He seems to think that the human species can progress only by letting the C-team perish — never realizing, apparently, that society needs not just philosophers but schleps to pick-up the trash and haul it to the dump.