The Prospect of Tragic Heroism in the Cosmic Scheme
Lovecraftian horror and the vindication of humanist pride
In 1882, in The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead. Just a few decades later, in 1926, after he’d published various other weird tales, HP Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu,” in which he resurrected the gods as symbols of nature’s catastrophic inhumanity.
Nietzsche’s point was that the philosophical implications of atheism threaten so-called “modernity,” as in the assumption that our era is progressive, that we’re advancing with science, capitalism, republicanism, liberalism, and human rights, and that we’re advancing over theocracy, feudalism, monarchy, patriarchy, and slavery.
We no longer have the crutch of theism to justify the values that would promote social progress. For instance, in developed societies governments and thought leaders can no longer assume that human rights are God-given. Religions used to dictate what we should do, but modernization includes secularization, the rejection of religion’s authority over public places. You can adhere to a religious code if you like, but that will be a private matter, like your taste in films or cheeses.
But without God, the king of the supernatural, it’s just us and nature. Nietzsche thought that that discovery…
