The Nietzschean critique of Christian values goes like this: Christians find themselves poor, oppressed, and, basically, losers in this world. Christianity is an attractive worldview for losers because with Christian belief you get forgiveness for your sins and you get the promise of a good afterlife. So if you're miserable in this life, you have the next one to look forward to.
In other words, the values of Christians are suspiciously convenient. In the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, the rich man gets to have his fun in this life but then is tortured in punishment in the next life. It's a power fantasy for the oppressed. Actually, it's the rich and powerful who are losers! They are evil, greedy, selfish, blind to the spiritual truths we have access to, concerned about silly worldly things like material goods. Christians, following the teachings of Jesus, flip the script: power, money, and material happiness are bad while weakness, poverty, and spiritual happiness are good. The rich and powerful are at once happy, but too easily, demonstrating their shallowness and impoverished spirituality and virtue (C.S. Lewis' notes in The Weight of Glory come to mind when he mentions how too easily satisfied we are by boring things like worldly success), and yet at the same time the rich and powerful are secretly miserable because true happiness comes from closeness to God. Christians get to delight in their perceived moral superiority and superior happiness.
The critique is an accusation of dishonesty. If Christians were honest about how pathetic their lives are, about how awful it is to be poor and oppressed, then Christians would be miserable. To avoid that misery, Christians choose values that place them on top in some way, allowing them to feel good about themselves when otherwise they would feel bad about themselves.
The Rick and Morty moment comes to mind when Hologram Rick gets the opportunity to become real. When Morty says, "I thought you were proud to be a hologram?", Hologram Rick says "That's because I had to be one!"
Right. If Christians were to suddenly come into money, says the critique, they would stop lying to themselves, radically change their behavior and language, and would be honest about their true values, because now they have the option to be honest when they didn't before – not without incurring great pain.
Problem 1: Not universal
The first problem with this critique is that it won't apply to every Christian. There are wealthy, successful Christians who don't shed their "intellectually dishonest values" and adopt their true secular values. Rather, they use their wealth and influence to support churches, missionaries, Christian programs, and Christian politics. Their Christian values are not held out of convenience, but conviction.
Problem 2: Undergenerating reasons
The second problem with this critique is that it assumes there are no good reasons to hold Christian values, and thus the only explanation for why Christians do hold their values is because it protects their egos and avoids the pain of facing up to difficult truths.
But there are good reasons to hold to various Christian values, and these explain why these values are held. Greed is evil. Oppressing others is wrong. The "conqueror's mentality" of the rich and powerful is a stupid mentality. The way the rich and powerful do great evils and get away with it is not something to be admired, but abhorred. The beliefs and behaviors of the rich and powerful are failures of understanding of the goodness and badness of things, failures to maximize flourishing. This leads into Problem 3.
Problem 3: The critique goes both ways
The rich and powerful don't believe that greed is evil. Or if they do, they don't believe that their particular excess counts as greed. The rich and powerful conveniently rationalize their own greed and entitlement and refusal to help others. If the rich and powerful took a step back and viewed their exploitation of others, their Darwinian cynicism of "the poors", their insatiable greed, their cruel delighting in their domination of others others, their egotistical competitiveness, their psychopathic lack of empathy for those in need, their hateful "f* you I got mine" and "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" attitudes toward those less fortunate, and their lack of contentment with anything less than absurd gluttonous excess, then maybe they would feel something vaguely resembling guilt or a desire to put away the embarrassing ego-driven bullsh* and instead do the right thing and help others. But that doesn't happen. The rich and powerful are just as guilty, if not more so, of arriving at suspiciously convenient beliefs and values that allow them to feel good about themselves when otherwise they would feel bad about themselves were they to look at things more honestly and objectively.
The critique is completely right that if your values are suspiciously convenient, then you should introspect and ask yourself why you hold the values you do. If you discover that you hold onto them purely to protect your own ego, then you will have discovered that your values are bullsh*. If you discover that you hold onto them for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting your own ego, but are grounded in facts outside of yourself, then the Nietzschean critique does not apply to you, and someone who tries to apply such a critique against you is making the mistake of undergenerating reasons leading to a mistaken psychoanalysis.
This applies to the topic of virtuous despair as well. The idea is that despair can be virtuous if the despair is caused by virtues such as the virtues relating to the refusal to conveniently dismiss or ignore difficult truths. The Nietzschean critique says that for the person who views their despair as virtuous, this is a convenient belief; you want your despair to be virtuous so you can feel good about yourself. If you were given a position of success, your despair would disappear, showing that your despair wasn't caused by your virtue, but by you being a loser.
But the first and second responses to the critique apply here as well: This psychoanalysis will prove false for those whose despair sticks even with success, and someone can introspect and see their despair sticking because the despair is attached to permanent factors beyond the self, such as cynicism about human nature, pessimism about the fate of the world, and the fact that the foundation of the world is not good, and so the rampant injustice and tragedy we see in the world is baked into the very fabric of the universe.
The third response also applies: It's impossible to participate in this world or to be happy in this world without in some sense accepting this world and celebrating it. But how can someone accept or celebrate this world knowing the injustice and suffering that makes up its bricks and mortar? You are not happy because you are a winner, but because you are too small-minded to see the big picture, because you care more about protecting your own happiness than about believing what's true, and because you have thrown empathy out the window and have refused to acknowledge and empathize with the sheer suffering of our world. When a great deal of empathy leads to despair, it's easily predicted that there will not be a great deal of empathy.
Eh. Both psychoanalyses look ridiculous to me, and the truth is in the middle: Some of your despair comes from your virtue, and some of it comes from your failure in life; some of your happiness comes from your failure to contend with difficult truths, and some of your happiness comes from your success. You must introspect, throw away any self-deception, and with brutal self-honesty see for yourself to what extent the Nietzschean critique truly applies to you. How suspiciously convenient are your beliefs?
No comments:
Post a Comment