Condemned to Individuality

The pendulum swings back toward the herd

In The Joyous Science, Nietzsche points out that for most of human history it was not a pleasure but a punishment to be alone, to signify being an individual. “Free thinking was regarded as inherently disquieting.” To act independently, to go against the herd was immoral; the more a person went along with the herd, the less they harmed the herd, the less of an individual they were, the more moral they were considered.

Morality is the standards we use for the preservation of our communities. These are often based in error and invention, rather than truth, but they survive because we survive, and our survival as a community, as a species, is ascribed to those errors and inventions, whether true or not. There are different moralities because the conditions of survival for communities vary.

One of the most common (and powerful) survival strategies for a community is censorship; anything critical of the community, or its standards, must be censored and condemned. The Catholic Church, for example, had its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books that threatened the morality (and survival) of the community. Books by astronomers, philosophers, and even translators of the Bible were on the list. In modern times, novels by D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Henry Miller were banned from publication in both…