Fire On The Horizon

The latest decoy set up by the indestructible god of illusions is Posterity. Man has been invited to live for various motives. Once it was for the glory of God; Comte proposed as a motive the glory of man; now we are invited to live for the glory of Posterity. Nietzsche called Posterity the Overman; Socialists call it “the rising generation.” No one has thought of the glory of living for the sake of living, of eating, fighting, reproducing merely because they give pleasure. Always there are devil-gods that call for sacrifices; always there is the bogey-word that demands obeisance and tribute of all our actions. Nothing must exist for itself. Each thing must exist for the sake of some other thing. The perfume in a rose is legitimate only if there is a human nostril somewhere to be intoxicated; and the perfume of our acts and thoughts is a “moral” or “right” perfume only if it gives pleasure to the nostrils of God, Church, Common Good, or Posterity.

Man has not yet become a good animal. He suffers from ideals, as he once suffered from superstitions. An ideal is a superstition in court clothes. It makes very little difference whether you believe that an east-wind blowing down the chimney on a moonlight night will ring you good luck or that an act that gives you pleasure in the doing is “right” if it benefits Posterity and wrong if it doesn’t.

The East worships its ancestors; the West worships Posterity. The East lies prone on its belly offering its tributes to ghosts; the West bows its head in adoration to the ghosts not yet born. When an Oriental worships the soul of a bit of wood, we call him superstitious; when the Westerner worships certain letters of his alphabet which spell “God” or “Church” or “Morality” or “Posterity,” we call it the Ideal. And a smile steals over the furrowed brow of wisdom, and Momus reels in glee. Ancestor-worship is the old superstition; posterity-worship the new superstition. The “gods of our fathers” are become the gods of our children. The old bottles are filled with the new wine, but the old labels have never been taken off. We still march under mottoes and tramp to Ultima Thule to the raging tom-toms beaten by priests and idealists. Still we signal a host of imaginary beings with the gaudily-colored pocket-handkerchiefs of our latest trumpery abstraction. Continue reading →