Nietzsche and the Holidays

A couple days ago, while listening to the news, I heard a journalist interviewing Americans at Reagan International Airport in Washington who were travelling for the holidays. While many of them were well aware of the risks associated with travel at this time, they felt compelled to do so because they couldn’t imagine spending Christmas apart from their families. As one interviewee said, “I don’t know… It would be somehow wrong not to go.”

This brought to mind, as many things these days do, Nietzsche and his ideas on what he calls the “morality of custom” or the “morality of mores.” For Nietzsche, the deeper something is entrenched in tradition or custom, the greater is its moral power. In section 9 of Daybreak, he writes that “Morality is nothing other … than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating.” And, further down, he adds this significant idea:

What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands. What distinguishes this feeling in the presence of tradition from the feeling of fear in general? It is fear in the presence of a higher intellect which here commands, of an incomprehensible, indefinite power, of something more than personal—there is superstition in this fear.

As the interviewee noted, while there was no practical need for him to fly out at this time, the commanding voice outweighed his concerns for safety and health, a voice so strong that to disobey it would weigh on his conscience; it would be “wrong,” as he said.

Nietzsche’s idea of the morality of custom is a fascinating idea, and we can see countless other examples in our lives, including the irony behind the widespread resistance to mask-wearing in Western countries (we have no tradition for wearing it, unlike many Asian countries), yet we think nothing of laws that enforce the wearing of seat-belts or the banning of smoking in restaurants or movie theatres, practices that only carry greater moral weight with the passage of time. (Who can imagine that it was once commonplace to smoke in restaurants and movie theatres, that there was a time when cars didn’t have seatbelts?) I am also reminded of the years I spent in Korea, a time that was also governed by its own unique “morality of customs.” There was, for instance, the traditional imperative of never wearing shoes indoors, for to do so one risked not only being personally condemned as boorish but also brought condemnation to all Westerners as well. I remember, too, the shock of once seeing a white man (obviously newly landed in the country) jogging shirtless down a crowded street—you just don’t do that in Korea! And then there was the time I was waiting for the light to change at a pedestrian crosswalk on one of the few occasions when no traffic was coming, yet having to repress the Westerner in me from jaywalking. Why? Because I felt compelled to obey the command of Korean custom.

But the morality of mores is something that also operates on the larger political level, as the recent US election has so clearly demonstrated. For not even a pandemic, with all its obvious health risks, could prevent the election from happening as it always does, every four years and right on schedule. There is also the tradition of America’s two-party system, a tradition so deeply rooted that it is practically impossible for a third party to emerge, let alone survive. And then of course there are all those traditional allegiances to either one party or the other, allegiances that are so deep that they are often passed down from generation to generation, which, in turn, leads to all those many American states that are regarded as either “traditionally” red or blue, a situation that relies on those “traditional swing states”—a relatively small proportion of the population—to determine the winner of any election. And yet, to break from any of these traditions is inconceivable for many Americans, who then go on speak of the “wisdom of our founding fathers”, illustrating yet another insight of Nietzsche’s: that when our ancestors, the originators of those customs, become deified, and any break with tradition is to incur the wrath of those gods. It’s no wonder then that many commentators have said that it would take nothing less than a civil war to effect real political reform in the US—or, viewed another way, a civil war would be a manifestation of the wrath of those same gods for having broached the customs they instituted.

But to return to the traditions associated with the holidays: I would, under ordinary circumstances, end this post by saying Merry Christmas—after all, the morality of mores demands we do so. Yet I can’t help feeling that a larger irony is being ignored here: that there is so much talk of “celebrating the holidays” with loved ones, but almost no discussion of mourning. With nearly 15,000 Canadians and 300,000 Americans dead due to covid-19 (not to mention the rising case count in Ontario), have we not yet reached the point where we all know someone who has tested positive or who has died from the virus? Or are there still people for whom the virus seems faraway and unreal, the way it did in the summer? The other day on CBC radio I heard a tearful nurse call in to the station begging people to just stay home. “It’s just one Christmas,” he begged, which got me choked up listening to him. But of course, tradition issues its command, and we in turn must obey, something I was reminded of this morning when I popped in at Shoppers and I overheard one cashier say to another that she was travelling somewhere to spend Christmas Eve with one group of people and travelling somewhere else tomorrow to spend Christmas Day with her parents.

“Not spend Christmas with my parents?” she said. “You kidding me? No one’s gonna stop me from going to see them.”

I couldn’t help but chime in.

“Oh, you’re lucky you can see your parents,” I said.

“Oh, you can’t…?”

“Thirty-two people have tested positive at my father’s nursing home,” I said, “including ten staff. So he’s going to be spending the next 14 days quarantined in his room.”

The moment naturally turned awkward, but nevertheless, as tradition would have it, we still somehow managed to wish each other a Merry Christmas.