A Madman's Prophecy Comes Home To Roost

In, "The Intellectual in the Infosphere",¹ an article written for the Chronicle Review, Peter J.M. Nicholson, president and chief executive officer of the Council of Canadian Academies, writes in part:

What qualifies as intellectual authority today is changing fundamentally. People are much less prepared to defer to the acknowledged experts in various fields. At the same time, however, we are being swamped with data and information — a glut that cries out for analysis and summary.

[...]

As president of the Council of Canadian Academies ... I am in the business of brokering intellectual authority. I believe that intellectual authority should have a close correlation with expertise as conventionally recognized. It should flow from the tried and true, although never infallible, processes of peer review and other forms of elite consensus building.

[...]

But I also recognize that the values that have created my worldview are being eclipsed by a new paradigm shaped by technology, globalization, and postindustrial affluence. Those factors have spawned a culture that, to an unprecedented extent, celebrates and empowers the individual. And a significant symptom of that pervasive shift is the decline of deference to virtually all forms of traditional authority — the church, the schoolteacher, the family doctor, the business executive, the union leader, the politician, and, not least, the intellectual.

[...]

In fact, the growing decline in deference to traditional sources of authority is a nearly universal feature of advanced societies. It transcends every specific, local instance. We are witnessing a sociocultural change whose roots run deep in the nature of economically advanced societies. But our understanding of that profound change remains rather shallow and limited largely to a description of the symptoms.

What are the deeper causes? The best analysis that I have read is a body of academic work led by the political scientists Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Neil Nevitte at the University of Toronto. Their research draws on more than two decades of statistics from the World Values Survey, which tracks multicountry public-opinion data. Those data establish convincingly that "the new citizens are less likely than their predecessors to be satisfied with any form of authoritarianism. ... Citizens cut from the newer cloth are more attracted to formations that are bottom-up."

Thus societies formerly based on deference to authority, community loyalty, and the struggle for the material basics of life have given way to affluent societies that have engendered a generational shift toward the "postmaterialist" values of self-esteem, quality of life, and the search for personal fulfillment.... When those postmaterialist values are combined with the empowering tools of universal education, a rights-oriented political culture, and the Google search engine, we should not be surprised that more and more people today regard ex cathedra expert authority with skepticism, if not outright hostility.

Mr. Nicholson then goes on to put forward a sober and reasoned explanation for this lack of deference to, and reckless eschewal of, acknowledged expert authority; an explanation grounded in terms of the "information explosion" — the "information glut" — and our easy and instant unmediated access to that information, both of which have been made possible by ever more sophisticated information technologies, and both of which we're woeful ill-equipped and inept to harness, manage, and deal with with sophistication and discernment.

Mr. Nicholson's explanation for this reckless eschewal and lack of deference is no doubt sound as far as it goes, but in not going far enough it misses the Big Picture; misses that which underlies and overarches everything having to do with and touching on this phenomenon. That Big Picture was limned in chillingly vivid and prophetic prose some century and a quarter ago by one who seven years after it was written went hopelessly mad.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

"Whither is God" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us — for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering — it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves.²

For those of you given to literalist readings, I would remind you (or point out to you, as the case may be) that the man who wrote that shattering prophetic parable was, by any conventional measure, a lifelong atheist, as am I.

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¹ Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.
² Friedrich Nietzsche, from, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), 1882, trans., Walter Kaufmann.