Robert Bly, Nietzsche, and the Breaking of Moral Paradigms
There is an epidemic afflicting our young men who have it all together. It is an affliction not of the down-and-out, but of the up-and-coming. The ones entranced by the light of reason and overcome by the bright vision of tomorrow. It is an affliction of purity, or rather an arrogant attachment to purity. We would admire them were it not for their lack of self-awareness. I have seen it, perhaps survived it, and have taken to calling it White Knight Syndrome.
The name comes from a chapter in book by Robert Bly in which he discusses the ancient story of Iron John. I will not recount the whole story, but toward its end, after joining the battle in the nick of time and saving the King’s army, the hero of mysterious identity attends the king’s festival. The first day he is dressed in red armor, the second he comes dressed in white armor, and the last day he arrives in black. Each day he catches the golden apple thrown by the princess, but he always runs away with it without revealing himself. It is not until the last day that he is chased, caught, wounded, and finally unmasked as the hero of the battle.
The significance of the progression of color – red to white to black – is of course not elaborated upon in the story itself (the wisdom of fairy tales always remains implicit). Bly expounds at length upon the associations of each color in this and other stories to tease a thread of meaning from the tale. (It goes without saying that we are speaking in terms of associations and not blanket universalities).
These three colors are often seen together in tales. The story of Snow White begins with the mother falling into an inexplicable prophetic state after pricking her finger while sewing at the ebony windowsill covered in snow. “Oh if only I had a child as white as this snow, as red as this blood, and black as this sill.” Her daughter grows up to be a young girl with white skin, black hair, and, at least as drawn by Disney, wearing slitted sleeves that look as if they are ringed with drops of blood, to match her red lips.
Bly describes both a feminine and masculine progression in these colors. The feminine is something like what is seen in Snow White. It begins in white: purity, virginity, beauty, yet also naivete. But with time comes the red of maturity and motherhood, the blood drawn by the prick of the spindle. It is a story that leads to the black of death, or at least enchanted sleep. The princess must pass through this night before she is ready for the happy resolution.
But it’s the masculine trajectory that is seen in the story of Iron John: Red to white to black. Bly describes the “red” beginning of young men:
“Red is the color of Mars. The old men initiators among the Gisu and Masai in Africa lead the young ‘moran’ men immediately into the red: the young men are encouraged to flare up, fight, see red, get into trouble; and in emotions they are encouraged to express pride, to be arrogant, antisocial, quarrelsome, and be friends with anger.”
Whereas the feminine begins in clean delicacy, the masculine begins in a rowdy mess. Blood for boys does not mark a turning of the page because his scraped knees are there from the beginning.
Whiteness in this trajectory takes on slightly different connotations. It is not an untouched purity or untapped potential. It is the whiteness of, we could say, mission, vision, and values. The red hoodlum perceives the lodestar that then defines his strivings. The wild energy is finally given direction and purpose. He becomes a white knight who honors the honorable and pursues every threatening menace.
This is of course not bad in itself. There are always threats to left and right that need to be guarded against by loyal defenders of the good. And it is better to be a White Knight than a Red one. But the wisdom in our stories tells us that the road always leads into the Black.
Then what is the threat of White Knight Syndrome? The danger is getting stuck, believing the road ends there. It is one thing to finally have a direction, it is another to believe one’s purpose encompasses all Good. White Knight Syndrome flattens the moral complexity of adulthood into formulaic slogans. He becomes unable to balance contradictory demands on his loyalty or conflicting calls to sacrifice. He is given to black-and-white thinking, nuance be damned.
On the benign end, the syndrome can be seen in anyone with the blithe self-assurance to believe that all truly intelligent and sensitive people naturally agree with them. But taken to an extreme, white-knightism without the balance of humility winds up in the place of extremists and cults: We are the ones on the side of truth and justice; they are the threats to all that is good.
This is the language of firebrands and pundits, both religious and political. White Knights make great orators. They offer clarity to a confused world and can marshal vast energies toward their moral vision. They’re the ones always telling us it’s time to “stand up” against… whatever fashionable scourge.
It is comforting to rely on the structure of boundaries that separate light from dark. White Knights become so enmeshed with their own cause that they take any questioning of their moral vision both as a personal affront to their honor and a mortal threat to Civilization. To disagree with them is to be wrong. They’re not much interested in listening. For to admit that their vision is insufficient is to threaten the entire structure of their identity. It is to threaten the moral order itself with dissolution into darkness.
It is the black that terrifies the White Knight and arrests his progression. Fear drives the syndrome. The moral order of the White Knight is rigid but clear, and in that world the voice of dissent is the unbearable voice of a monster who laughs at their pretense.
But the monster is there to tell us that our vision is insufficient, our understanding of good and evil inadequate to properly color the world. This is the Jungian shadow, the darkness in ourselves and in the world, our wild twin that finds us at the crossroads. If we ignore it, the white knight syndrome exacerbates. In the end it is our undoing, whether we cooperate or not. The path of the white knight leads inevitably into the black, to some kind of death.
Such a voice that dissolves the structured world of the White Knight can only be the voice of God or the Devil. The path from white to black takes one of two forms.
Nietzsche: The Black of Defiance
Nietzsche is no white knight. You could summarize his moral project as the frantic dismantling of simplistic moral stances. And all “theories” of morality are, in the end, simplistic. He wants to do away with, not only the theories of ethicists, but their conceit altogether.
Of course it would be lovely to live in the ordered world that we are taught to believe in 2nd grade, where we get what we deserve, and bad things happen for reasons. Where injustice is rectified, or can be, if only we throw our weight into opposing it. But this is not our world. For Nietzsche, the suffering we face cannot even be said to be unfair, it does not rise to the level of injustice. Our wretchedness is the result not of some inadequacy of the cosmos but of its vacuous indifference. Or worse, the divine order is fundamentally opposed to the human. So the duty of the white knight is to reject his own foolish moralizing.
This view takes on its most “positive” form Nietzsche’s early work, The Birth of Tragedy. The Greek poets, Nietzsche says, looked into the abyss underlying our existence and perceived the “primordial contradiction that is concealed in things” (Section 9). However grand our moral ideas are, we live in a world of childhood cancer and mass murder, a world in which infants are already on the road to death, however short or long it may be. It is this contradiction, this fundamental opposition between gods and men, that dooms all white-knight moral schemes to failure. And it is all for the better that we discard superficial moralities, for it is Oedipus’ patricide and incest that establishes the kingdom. It is the supreme violator who solves the riddle of the sphinx.
The Tragic ideal transcends idealism and glories with Prometheus in the defiance of divine order. The suffering that this entails can be faced with the terrible cheerfulness of the indomitable hero. This is the rapturous suffering of Dionysius, whose frenzied Maenads dance and kill. Life is a murderous orgy.
This is one version of the black knight: the one who despises the moral vision for its naïve simplicity; who rises above the flimsy boundaries of convention and bellows exuberant defiance in the face of the gods; who accepts suffering as the inevitable birth pangs of free individuality. One can imagine the appeal of holding to this purportedly triumphant vision amid such medical difficulties as Nietzsche suffered. The white armor of his Protestant adolescence was dipped in the Dionysian abyss.
The worst that could be said about this approach is the worst that could be said about anything. It leads nowhere – or more specifically, to Nothing. Nihil. And the nihilism of Nietzsche’s later work, decked with elaborations on the will to power that dissolves slave morality, is window dressing for a dark vision of principled meaninglessness. Or if not meaninglessness, at best a hope for man’s meaning that dies with the man, individuated beyond all reckoning, a man who reigns in Hell. In this case, the voice from the Dark that the white knight fears is the voice of the Devil, and he is right to fear it.
Job: The Black of Humility
The other approach to donning the Black Armor is hardly better on its face. It too must reckon with the inadequacy of naïve moral pretense in a world seemingly ruled by Death. Meticulous obedience to Law will never preclude suffering, and disaster comes upon us despite our pleas that “I did everything right!” When catastrophe comes even to the white knight of good faith, he must decide what to make of the voice that laughs at him from the dark.
In the Biblical story of Job, it is the voice of God’s Devil, the opposer, on a spiteful mission to determine whether the obedience of Job reflects humble submission to God or mere self-serving transaction in a deterministic moral economy. For reasons pointedly unexplained, God permits the unaccountable disaster that we are all so familiar with in our own lives.
But unlike Nietzsche, Job never discards his moral vision. He clings to it despite the railings of misfortune and the doubting lectures of his friends. His faith in the truth of Justice is proved in his dogged insistence that both he and it be vindicated in the very Court of God. It is there that he asks the burning question of all humanity: Why, God?
Job wants a peek at the cosmic moral calculus that explains the calamity that has befallen him. This is the picture of a white knight confronting the black of unaccountable evil, the place where all preconceived notions of justice break down. This is the place where Nietzsche scornfully cast away the idea of “morality” itself. But in the story of Job, when confronted with irrational moral outcomes, he casts away not morality but his demand for reason. Job releases his supposed claim to quality-check the Divine Will after being shown how absurd a claim that would be.
Job is rebuked, not for believing in a Divine Law, nor for believing himself to be guiltless. He is rebuked for attempting to argue that the Will of God should follow a short and straight path of blessing from Righteous God to Righteous Job. There is no such simplicity in a fallen creation.
The story of Job upholds two ideas that only an arrogant man would assume are mutually exclusive, which is precisely the point. First, goodness and justice are anchored in God Himself. Without this anchor, we would live in Nietzsche’s dark and meaningless world, slaves to whatever is strongest. But the vast beauty we encounter in our lives continually presses us to deny meaninglessness as plausible. One can only embrace nihilism despite daily evidence to the contrary. The morality of the white knight may be naïve or incomplete, but not untrue.
Second, we are not up to the task of tracing our pallid visions of goodness through the Gordian complexity of the cosmos. We don’t have the complete map; we cannot answer all questions (a fact intolerable to the arrogant). Crucially, this does not negate the beauty or truth of the moral vision; it only renders the knight into the proper posture of humility. It brings him down from his soapbox.
When the white knight stands to declare his cause just and denounce all who oppose him, the shadowed figure raising his eyebrow is no Nietzschean devil. He is the wise crone, come to lead him through the inevitable baptism of doubt and suffering. And when the groaning knight asks “why?” he is answered only by the ancient echoes of Christ: Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?
Two Endpoints
Where exactly the black road leads depends on the grip we have on the first bright hope that directed us. All that is not genuine unravels; our pride and presumption of “knowing” dissolves. But that is not the same as despair. There is room for a holy silence that holds on to hope. This is the dogged insistence of Job. This is the prayer of Jonah from the belly of the whale. The black knight who keeps faith resurrects. The one that doesn’t gives himself utterly to the Dionysian dark – and in the gruesome orgy of the maenads, the euphoria of transgression is short-lived.
In the story of Iron John, it is the Black Knight who is both wounded and revealed as hero. It is telling that he must be forcibly unmasked, for the black knight is marked most often by silence, and not the jabbering of the moralist. He hesitates to speak because he knows the difficulty of elucidating the knotted paths of God. These paths wound all – that is the point – and the best anyone can do is keep faith.
We meet these wounded healers in our lives. The ones whose deep suffering only rendered them more gentle, more gracious, and ready to listen. Death cannot coerce them, no matter what face it wears. They have passed one night, not by their strength but by their breaking, and their candle is kept to pass any other.