Is there anything better than morality?

It is this lack of vision, this immature skepticism as to the service of morality to human welfare, that has fired a flame of revolt in certain minds, a revolt not merely against incidental defects and outworn conceptions of morality, but against morality uberhaupt.  The declamations of these Promethean rebels make it clear, however, that their protest is but the old fault of condemning a necessary institution altogether for its imperfections or its abuses.  Morality has been blended with superstition and tyranny, has been often blind, perverted, narrow, checking noble impulses and choking the rich and happy development of life.  But it is one thing to arraign these accidents and corruptions of morality; it is quite another to discard the whole system of guidance of which they are but the excrescences and mistakes.  This usurping is, of course, also in large part a thirst for novelty, a love of paradox, of practicing ingenuity in making the better appear the worse; it is in part a volcanic eruption of suppressed longings and a protest against the inadequacy of our present code to provide opportunity and happiness for the masses.  The motives vary with the individual rebels.

It must suffice, however, from among the many leaders of this revolt, to quote that clever but unbalanced German iconoclast, Nietzsche.  Typical of his doctrine is the following:  [Footnote:  Genealogy of Morals (ed.  Alex.  Tille), Foreword, p. 9.] “Never until now was there the least doubt or hesitation to set down the ‘good’ man as of higher value than the ‘evil’ man-of higher value in the sense of furtherance, utility, prosperity, as regards man in general (the future of man included).  What if the reverse were true?  What if in, the ‘good’ one also a symptom of decline were contained, and a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic by which the present might live at the expense of the future?  Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also in humbler style- more meanly?  So that just morality were to blame, if a highest mightiness and splendor of type of man-possible in itself were never attained?  And that, therefore, morality itself would be the danger of dangers?”

The point of this tirade is that morality puts a wet blanket over human powers; it is a bourgeois ideal, saving men, indeed, from pain, but also robbing life of its picturesqueness and glory.  Many people frankly prefer “interesting” to “good” people; Nietzsche generalizes this feeling.  Morality is to him uninteresting, dull, a code for slaves, for the clash of combat, the tang of cruelty and lust, the tingle of unrestrained power.  Every man for himself then, and the Devil take the hindmost.  Shocked as we are by this brutal platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing,