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i have never really understood the function or interest in chicken-egg questions like this, particularly when they are framed in such a general way, or involve a history that trails off into the mists...ncb's basic claim is simple: without religion, christianity in particular, no morality. which i think is nonsense. without the judeo-christian tradition, no morality. again, total nonsense. patronising nonsense, no less--it assumes that the judeo-christian tradition represents some kind of peak in human development in general--which is a claim i suppose you can make if you also happen to be writing ths histories--the claim is in itself wholly arbitrary--but the arbitrariness has not stopped cycles of repetition.
on this question in general, like many others, nietzsche was basically correct. but then nietzsche actually defined what he meant by morality--which has not happened here. for nietzsche, the notion of morality involves a particular way of expressing and administering the rules that limit/delimit actions within a social group. it is of a piece for him with a kind of bureaucratization of social life--morality tends to be written, it tends to be imposed and.or enforced on the part of particular institutions that claim to be acting in the name of "society" or "humanity" or "the community of believers" but which in fact act primarily from self-interest (the main self-interest being the perpetuation of the institution itself--in this case the church). because it is formal and imposed from outside (in nietzsche's view--more or less) it functions as a mechanism of oppression. because morality is defined in such a way as it is not equivalent to politics or even to ethics in his work, it can be opposed or criticized without the result being that one is simply advocating anarchy or the breakdown of any possibility of social order.
more specifically, for nietzscche the notion of morality is linked to the question of metaphysics, that is of a philosophy that sees truth as unfolding at the level of stable, eternal forms--historical reality is a kind of epiphenomenon. it follows, then, that this notion of morality operates to erase the fact that human beings make their history as they live through it, that they themselves posit the rules that delimit what actions are and are not acceptable and that they are themselves responsible for the rules and their implications.
this intertwining of a philosophical project that understands truth to reside at the level of form opens the way for the conflation of christianity with Truth and the notion that christianity therefor has some kind of pre-ordained monopoly on matters that pertain to the dictating of social norms.
ncb would appear to me to have no interest in either defining morality as a subset of the larger question of social norms, nor in making any split between the role of christianity in particular and the question of social norms. the viewpoint i see operating is that all the above terms are functionally equivalent: morality with social norms in general, chrisitianity (which is really the only religion being referred to here) as necessary for the promulgation and enforcement of these rules. from which it also follows that ncb is a believer, and that from a viewpoint shaped by ssuch belief, the claims seem to not require examination. this too is an arbitrary position, if seen from viewpoints that do not share the assumptions that, for ncb at least, coincide with belief.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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