Marx and Nietzsche: Utopian Ethos of Suspicion Explained

Introduction: Culture, Control, and the Modernist Challenge

The pursuit of sex, the accumulation of money, and the worship of institutionalized religion — these three principles (to love, to prosper, and to find relief from the fear of the unknown) have come to define contemporary culture, particularly American culture. The containment of sexuality through cultural institutions of repression, the containment of the dispersion of money through capitalism and inheritance, and the containment of thought through religious doctrine still provide order and structure to contemporary life. Modernism rejected these impulses and demanded a radical questioning of all such culturally generated ideals — ideals so entrenched in our psychologies that they feel like innate impulses. Modernism demanded that ordinary individuals trust nothing, remaining suspicious and viscerally critical of everything taught by teachers, parents, and the media from birth.

Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche as Founders of Modernist Suspicion

Freud has been called one of the founding fathers of Modernism because of his characterization of the human sexual drive as natural. He believed there was an innate desire for the mother hard-wired into infant consciousness. Human beings were not of a higher order; only cultural repression contained their sexual desires. Marx rejected the notion that anyone could prosper, provided they worked hard enough, within a capitalist system. The system was designed to make workers the wage slaves of factory owners. Marx offered a radical critique of private ownership and the idea that creating and maintaining wealth by profiting from private property — and renting the bodies of employees for labor — was fair.

Nietzsche questioned the civilizing, progressive march of thought, rejecting Christianity and proclaiming the Christian God to be dead. He advocated a return to the classical era, when sexuality and individuality were unfettered by received notions of morality. This, he believed, would produce a true Superman — defiant of all norms.

A reading of these philosophers, Marx and Nietzsche in particular, might suggest that Marx was primarily suspicious of how human labor was valued in his society, while Nietzsche was primarily suspicious of faith as a medium of social control. However, it could be postulated that both philosophers aimed their sights at something even greater: the notion of positive historical progress altogether.

Capitalism, Christianity, and the Myth of Progress

Capitalism was initially seen as essentially democratic in its impulse — hence the concept of the factory owner as a representative of "new money," a self-made man who had earned his luxury through toil rather than birth. The capitalist, in Marx's view, merely accumulated wealth and used that wealth to unjustly generate more wealth, much like an aristocrat of old. The capitalist's exploitation of the worker was no progress at all. It was merely the latest manifestation of the age-old dialectic of the haves versus the have-nots. The have-nots inevitably overthrew the haves, came to power, and exploited the lower orders once again — as had occurred in the new economic system.

Likewise, Nietzsche questioned the idea that Christianity had made human beings more moral and civilized. He felt it had merely made them less creative and more complacent. Progress should not be measured through the creation of more social controls. Nietzsche advocated a return to a Dionysian worship of the body rather than a containment of it.