God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The full quote by Nietzsche is amazingly dark. Having removed god from our lives, we find there is nothing to replace it with, other than our own super-inflated egos. Religion is a good that is in the eye of the beholder. The same person, who grew up in the Midwest, sees beauty in Islam, might find the Catholic church a bankrupt system of hypocritical power structures meant to keep women subservient, facilitate abuse, entrench power, and accumulate wealth. (And they do this with no sense of irony or of having spent any real time amongst Muslims or in Muslim countries, with only a couple of units in World History and Tik-Tok as their intellectual foundation). The world in which they were raised is intolerable rubbish heap, but about which they are largely ignorant seems a lush garden. To understand why this is, we must acknowledge the quote from Nietzsche realize we tore it all down before we built anything else.

But what did we really tear down? Let’s go back to that person in the Midwest, who is dealing with one of infinite variety of moral choices with which we are all presented. It could be as grave, involving great pain and suffering, even life or death, or it could be as simple as agonizing over a small lie to avoid going to a social event. Imagine having to reconstruct, for a kind of first principles, the ethical and moral thing to do in that circumstance. To get through the day, the effort would be staggering. Which is why we create short-cuts for ourselves. We might call this an internal code, even a terrible one, such as “I only help people when it feels right.” We have our feelings, such as feeling guilty about something or gleefully confident about the choice. But we also look to the examples set by others. These could be people in our own lives, like a relative, or a person we don’t know, but whose example we use to gauge our response.

In the 15th century, the person facing a moral question might look to the lives of the saints. Should I kick dogs? St. Francis would definitely not kick dogs. Should I go off with my significant other into the bushes, even though the desire is great? There are plenty of saints who stayed chaste, even though they were tempted. Should I do anything for the beggar at the end of the street? There are plenty of examples of helping the poor. Should I be honest about why I’m late to church? There are plenty of examples honesty or acceptable fibbing from other saints. Should I desert the army, given the fighting is not going well? Maybe no saints, but other examples from our shared history or mythology. And if you were to go back to the Ancient World, you would find people who might not believe in a literal Apollo, but might mine the stories around gods for kernels of wisdom. I’m going to use a catch-all label, which is imperfect, but a reasonable container for all these – they are heroes. And their stories are their legends.

A hero is someone who may have done something great, but is basically someone we admire and would emulate. They may be individuals, like a saint or a sports hero, or a collective of heroes, like the last holdouts in a righteous but desperate struggle. Their life is an example provided through the accounts and stories, sometimes apocryphal, that surround them. If we admire them them, and identify with them, we have a moral short-cut to questions such as “should I lie about getting to work late?” And if giving the honest answer results in censure or loss of the job, it might help provide the resilience we need to get a new job or to show we will do better going forward.

There is an old saying that burdens are more easily suffered when shared. I may not know anyone around me who is suffering the same burden, or I might not be able to discuss it, but in the hero I have someone who shared it. Even though they may have died hundreds of years before, or may not have existed, I know that they suffered the same pain and fear and suffered it with grace and dignity. The delightful J. Draper points out many who were publicly executed went to the gallows happy. Many saints and martyrs died remarkably calmly, because they could think of the other martyrs and saints that had gone before them. In addition to the belief that the pain they would experience would be temporary, and that their reward was to come, but that it was also a shared suffering.

When we tore down god, we tore down the bevy of heroes and examples that circulated in the culture. That left historical, cultural, or racial heroes as our source of inspiration. In some cases, this was not unwelcome. The American mythologies are not religious in nature, based largely on secular ideals. The old stories about the shared Thanksgiving, or the tenacity of the Minutemen, or the mythos of the explorer are the enlightenment version of the lives of the saints. This mythology is fit for a world that no longer believes in a fantasy of heaven or hell, focusing their struggles on real events and their outcomes. And while these mythologies could survive god being removed from the public sphere, they would also fall.

At some point we would learn that George Washington was a flawed human being. In the minds of some people, an evil human being. I would argue that George Washington was, if not the Zeus, the Apollo of the American pantheon. As he fell, and Thomas Jefferson, and then the mass of other founders, we are left with a few modern examples. And these modern examples are not bad. There more than enough to admire in the stoic heroism the marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge met their moment. Or the many examples of sexual or racial ‘breakthrough’ athletes, entertainers, or politicians who overcame so much to just have their basic rights. And, for now, they still stand. But in the endless scrutinizing, rethinking, and re-examining of history and these stories against current notions of moral norms, will we lose these, too? Will it come out that, as sometimes flawed people, they were no more gods or great than any of the other people evicted from that role?

For most people, they are less inclined to think of John Lewis as they are are to think of sports heroes or fictional heroes. Or maybe heroes in their personal life, like some family member or friend. And we recognize the danger in ‘creating martyrs,’ whereby people are elevated to heroic status due to mistreatment or persecution, perceived or actual. But the landscape is becoming more fragmented, more isolated, and maybe only individually meaningful. And even those heroes can be quickly torn down, as we learn they are deeply flawed (if not horrible) in other parts of their lives. Since we often judge these same people who tried to make moral choices against modern notions of morality, it’s not surprising we find them coming up short. Could we one day see John Lewis in a horrible light as yet another false idol to be torn down. Maybe in a future morality the choices that good man made may seem unjustifiable.

In the end we are left with nothing. We lack the easy guide posts to moderate our behavior. There is a great benefit to approaching each problem from first principles, but it does not scale to to the myriad of challenges we face each day. We are also left with no one to share our suffering. Without a hero or martyr to look to, to see our own suffering in their suffering, we have to bear it alone. Isolated and alone each pain becomes intolerable. Having torn all of that down, with nothing to replace it, like rudderless boats we lurch from idea to idea on the shifting wind of social media. Of course we become a self-centered people. Of course we suffer from the disease of nostalgia. Of course we try to fruitlessly tape together now broken idols. But no degree of xenophobia, reactionary policies, or renaming military bases will fill that hole if there is nothing left to fill it.