The Nietzschean critique goes both ways

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, their egotistical competitiveness, their psychopathic lack of empathy for those in need, their hateful "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 nonsense 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 nonsense. 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 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 imperfect, 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 predictable that there would not be a great deal of empathy.

 

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 and values?

Persevering through loss of faith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD2Hbq04oa8

 

In this talk, Alex Pruss discusses an argument for God's existence.

 

Whatever force the argument may have had though seems to instantly evaporate when at the very end he is asked about the problem of evil.

 

He responds by saying the greatest things in life are virtues, especially moral virtues like forgiveness, generosity, perseverance, and so on. But these virtues require suffering.

 

There are many ways one can respond to this, but here is a unique way. There's a very special virtue that Christians cannot possibly access, which is the virtue of persevering through loss of faith.

 

Let's imagine two people, Alice and Bob.

 

Alice is raised Christian and she never changes her worldview. She lives a normal, basic life of marriage, children, and so on.

 

Bob is raised Christian, and comes to a deep certainty in God and Jesus, and loves God and Jesus with all his heart, mind, and soul. But slowly, doubts creep in. At first, he pushes them away, because his love for God is so great that he cannot bear the thought that God might not exist. But over the years, he develops an obsession to prove that God exists to shut up those evil atheists who clearly just want to sin guilt-free. But in Bob's pursuit of truth, he discovers philosophy and philosophical methodology. He ends up pursuing a degree or two in philosophy. Very slowly, over many years, and in large part due to personal experiences of evil, tragedy, and unanswered prayers, the intellectual challenges to belief in God and Christianity eventually weigh heavily enough on Bob that he just can't believe anymore, despite how badly he wants God to be real and for Christianity to be true.

 

Bob wrestles with truth, with his own self-identity, his view of humanity and the world, the meaning of life, the nature of morality, everything. By losing his faith, life in many ways has suddenly become much harder. Before, he could trust in God, and let God guide him through life. Now, there is no God to protect Bob or validate Bob's existence through divine love. There is no God-given purpose to Bob's life.

 

Bob is in a terrifying place.

 

And yet, bravely, through seemingly miraculous strength, he picks himself up and builds a worldview that can account for morality, the meaning of life, the origins of religion, and so on. He humbly accepts his newfound worthlessness. (Bob smartly believes in a mitigated cynicism, so he doesn't view himself as entirely worthless. But he no longer sees himself as the immortal soul he once did.)

 

Bob bravely accepts that death is the end. There is a kind of ego death in accepting the fact that you are a limited, mortal being with no eternal God to love you or keep you alive. Instead of cowering behind comforting beliefs, Bob follows the truth where it leads, even when it leads to conclusions Bob so badly wants to be able to reject. Bob allows the truth, not desire, to guide his beliefs, and as excruciating as it was to give up his dreams of being with God forever and face the infinite disappointment of life, he perseveres through, through sheer strength, determination, and rationality.

 

Question: Is Bob a virtuous person? More virtuous than Alice? Not only is it true that he is, but he seems to capture some very special and powerful virtues, virtues inaccessible to a person of faith.

 

So Christianity has a problem. It probably relies on some kind of story like the one Pruss gives. The sheer good of perseverance through suffering gives the suffering a purpose and beauty to it. (Of course, as I've written on, I'm skeptical of virtues as being able to justify evils. I think I gave the example of a 9/11 first responder being asked whether he would rather have 9/11 and all the bravery of the first responders and the perseverance of the survivors, or to lose all of that virtue and prevent 9/11 from happening. The answer is so obvious that he's insulted.) 

 

But what better story of perseverance than one like Bob's? Persevering through loss of faith seems to me to be just about the greatest kind of persevering there is (I say with a hefty amount of bias), given how existentially deep it is and how it demands you to be radically open-minded and to be so radically open to not only changing yourself to match up with reality, but to change yourself completely and absolutely. To go from someone who wants God more than anything to a person who is at peace with the godlessness of the world, and at peace with his own mortality, and to go from viewing oneself as a divine, everlasting creature to a creature of limited value, is frankly an achievement so great that it's hard to comprehend.

 

In fact, there's a kind of dual virtue taking place. Bob has the sensitivity, love, blamelessness, empathy, and compassion needed to love God and to desire ultimate justice for all people, and needed to recognize just how much we lose when we lose God. At the same time, Bob has the love of truth, open-mindedness, humility, discipline, bravery, and patience to follow the truth where it leads.

By promoting the value of virtue to save Christianity from the problem of evil, the Christian ironically promotes the value of the virtues involved in persevering through loss of faith. And if existential perseverance is one of the greatest virtues there are, then it's not clear that the Christian has any advantage over the non-Christian when it comes to capturing the goodness of virtue. If anything, the ex-Christian who demonstrates dual virtue has the advantage.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Richard Swinburne once evinced a kind of regret over not changing his worldview, because doing so is such a strong demonstration of intellectual virtue (assuming you're changing your worldview for the right reasons).

 

Edit: Found it: YouTube: Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press), "Has your worldview changed since you started doing philosophy? | Richard Swinburne" --  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxlYAssgD58

 

"I often feel guilty about this because I greatly admire people who had a certain worldview and then come to have certain important life experiences or been exposed to certain arguments and suddenly abandoned it and given up that view and adopted a different one, and I think these are highly rational people . . ."

What is virtue? What does it mean to be wise?

To answer this question, here is a similar question: What is intelligence? What does it mean to have intelligence versus not having it?

We associate intelligence with many things: the ability to recognize patterns, grasp concepts, process information, memorize and recall, to solve puzzles, solve problems, invent things, to be creative, to think outside the box, to avoid making mistakes, and so on. We also associate intelligence with knowledge—an awareness of a collection of important or complex truths, which leads to an understanding of how things work in life. Intelligence is associated with success, and stupidity with failure.

Intelligence then is something like: your mental capacity, or mental powers. The more mental powers you have, the smarter you are, and the fewer mental powers you have, the less smart you are.

Wisdom could be just a synonym for intelligence: To be wise is to be smart. Or we could say wisdom is something more specific than intelligence—wisdom is a subcategory of mental powers. On this view, to be wise is to be smart (that is, to have a specific mental capacity is to have mental capacity in general), but to be smart is not necessarily to be wise. (Compare: Having a strong imagination is smart, but being smart does not entail having a strong imagination.)

One way to think of wisdom on this view is that wisdom is the specific mental power of figuring out the golden mean for any given virtue. This ‘figuring out’ means 1) the ability to identify and understand the golden mean between two vices, and 2) being able to choose the golden mean, to have an understanding strong enough that it instills within you a confidence such that you cannot help but will yourself to live out the golden mean. So (1) and (2) are two parts of one category: the category of understanding.

Virtue then is the disposition to choose the golden mean. Bravery is the disposition to be brave, to choose the golden mean between cowardice and recklessness. Patience is the disposition to be patient, to choose the golden mean between impatience and indecision.

Wisdom and virtue are nearly the same thing. Wisdom is a mental power—the power to figure out and/or comprehend the golden mean. Virtue is the disposition to choose the golden mean, which comes from having wisdom.

If someone is wise (if they have the understanding), then they will be virtuous (possessing a disposition to choose the golden mean), and if someone is virtuous, then they will be wise, as one cannot have a disposition to choose the golden mean without having an ability to recognize and understand the golden mean. For some people, this is not an overly conscious effort; some people understand what the golden mean is for a given virtue on instinct or intuition. Mental activity occurs subconsciously, like when a mathematician figures out the solution to a problem suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, because the brain does work that the mind doesn’t see. So the understanding of wisdom needn't be explicitly conscious or reflective.

Just as wisdom is a specific kind of mental capacity, and is thus an instance of intelligence, a virtue, such as bravery, is a specific kind of virtue, and is thus an instance of wisdom (and is thus an instance of intelligence).

This view is compatible with Socrates’ view that virtue is a kind of knowledge (Protagoras 345 - 360). Many people might think that virtue is doing what’s right even when it’s difficult to do so. But I think Socrates would say that everyone is always choosing what’s least difficult. For the brave person, it would actually be more difficult for them to choose to be cowardly. It is exactly the difficulty of one choice outweighing another that explains why that person made that choice. The virtue does not lie in the ability to do what’s hard, but rather the virtue lies in what comes easy for the person. The fact that being cowardly is so difficult for a person that they’d rather face pain or death, that tells us something about the bravery of this person.

Socrates argues that virtue cannot be taught, and yet paradoxically argues that it’s a kind of knowledge, and knowledge can be taught. Here’s one suggestion to resolve the paradox: Virtue can be taught to a degree, but because virtue is grounded in wisdom, and wisdom in intelligence, at some point virtue is simply a matter of capacity, and capacities cannot be taught. Compare a student in a math class. We certainly need math teachers to teach us math. But at some point you either can do it or you can’t, and teachers cannot teach talent or a passion for math. They can inspire some students, and encourage them to pursue math, but ultimately those things fall on the student.