Horse-Surgery

If only we could find a remarkably adept surgeon who could cut away all that horsiness from a horse we'd find a remarkably fine kangaroo underneath and all our problems would be solved. Or we might find that after all that inconvenient horse DNA had been removed we'd have a throbbing gobbet of horseflesh on the operating table that would necrose in short order and be consigned to the operating theatre bin. This horse of course is the three millennia of monotheistic religion which have informed the singularly successful civilisation on whose shoulders we all sit, to extend the metaphor a little. A scholar friend tells me that once one has dealt with Nietzsche's anti-idealism (which I applaud for its affirmation of life to the full here and now), and his attack on our enthralment to the Pale Galilean (and its spawning of a race of passive-aggressive, ressentiment-fueled and servile cowards), you have to move on to the 'Beyond Good and Evil' stuff. In this Nietzsche suggests that if only those three millenia hadn't been in thrall to the monotheistic religions, their moral framing within all that inexplicable arbitrarily and pointlessly vengeful stuff all would have been very fine indeed. If only we could delicately disentangle what happened because of those religions from what should have happened. This, of course, is a thought-experiment so grandiose, so monstruous, so insane, but ultimately so comical that one can't be surprised at the fate of the towering genius. If only a horse could have been a kangaroo. His adherents will of course say that it was the syphilis that got him or the loneliness of being rejected by an idiot society that failed to appreciate him that tipped him into insanity. There was, of course, an excellent real-time experiment that tested out his theories, not long after his death, known as the twentieth century. This century was dominated by three men who largely or explicitly eschewed monotheistic religion. Hitler sent his troops into battle with pocket-sized versions of Nietzsche's works and Chairman Mao and Uncle Joe banned religion entirely. They disentangled monotheistic religion fairly comprehensively from history and we all know it turned out well....... man stripped of such unfortunate encumbrance performed wonderfully