A religion for losers?

A conversation with Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson on Christianity
 

Thierry Baudet once let slip that Christianity would be ‘a religion for losers’. 
 

I witnessed at first hand how some Christians were rather anguished about this. By coming into this world, His miracles and resurrection from the dead, Jesus showed that he had definitively conquered death and all other evil powers in this world. And, thus ran the reasoning in good-faith circles, in Him Christians are more than conquerors!

Before Thierry, the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, came to the same conclusion. But what exactly did he mean? It is worth reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. 

The big question next is whether Christians are justified in being called ‘losers’. The Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson, recently published a study entitled, ‘We Who Wrestle with God.’

The difference between winners and losers

According to Nietzsche, whether you are a ‘loser’ is not a matter of being the loser in a duel with someone else. You can only lose if you are ready to fight for the goals you have set yourself. That willingness presupposes a certain morality, according to Nietzsche. 

In morality, we distinguish between good and evil. That distinction helps us determine what to do in occurring situations and provides the legitimisation for our natural behaviour.

Nietzsche thereby distinguishes between lordly morality and slave morality. The behaviour of people who act according to gentlemen's morality is characterised by courage, enterprise and a punishing hand in the pursuit of their goals. These values enable them to create something, rowing against the current and fighting against it. Thereby, lordly morality responds to the life force and will to power that, according to Nietzsche, every human being naturally possesses.

It is different from slave morality. In it, herd mentality, submission, and feelings of pity are dominant. The human will to power is repressed or suppressed under the doom of this morality. In modern times, this morality appears in the guise of values such as universal freedom, equality and solidarity. These values are to be enforced by the state - obviously at the expense of the freedom people have, according to Nietzsche, to discriminate and set limits to solidarity with others.

While gentlemen's morality creates and adds value, slave morality, driven by feelings of envy and resentment, aims to degrade. It is thus fundamentally destructive in nature, according to Nietzsche. The morality based on it is then an attempt to instil a sense of guilt in creative minds and then propagate one's own values as a possibility for reconciliation. 

According to Nietzsche, by submitting to a slave morality, one is not so at fault; it is just plain stupid, simply because by doing so you are selling yourself and those you love and hold dear.

Are Christians indeed losers?

Christianity has its roots in slave morality, Nietzsche states unequivocally in his Genealogy. This was not so much true of the Jew Jesus, who was not plagued by any resentment and was willing to risk his life for what he did. It certainly did apply to the interpretation given by Paul and the later church priestly caste to his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead.

Jesus died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead to reserve a place for us in the afterlife. That caste itself thereby appropriated the right to determine what was sin (sex and pleasure in general!) and by what means they could share in the salvation Jesus brought about through his death and resurrection (via celibacy or by paying a lot of money!).

Since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, people thought they had finally freed themselves from the church and the slave morality it preached. But, Nietzsche argues, it produced nothing more than a secularised version of the Christian pattern of norms and values in which humility, gregariousness and compassion were the guiding principles. Its modern translation into the political values of freedom, equality and solidarity still assumed a disregard for the human right to these. Instead of the church, according to a new caste of intellectuals, it was now up to the state to support the claim to those rights.

This created a practice in which supposedly liberal governments restricted free enterprise. On the other hand, envy and resentment of those who thought themselves victims or who were branded victims were given free rein. However, when the liberal revolution failed to make its values fruitful for ever new categories of victims, the socialist revolution of universal equality was propagated. 

This trend, where ever new victims were proclaimed, would continue even after Nietzsche's death. See the anti-colonial and, more recently, climate and woke revolutions that we have seen emerge since then, in which successively indigenous people, the planet and people with alternative sexual orientations were bombarded as victims.

Each of those revolutions identified new culprits. In them, oppression and exploitation is the constant. And again and again, abstinence and ever-increasing taxes and sanctions are propagated as indulgences, on pain of the end of time and eternal damnation, as if nothing at all has changed since the Christian Middle Ages, Nietzsche says.  Liberalism and socialism are nothing more than modern manifestations of the time-honoured morality of Christian losers.

Jordan Peterson in conversation with Nietzsche
Is Nietzsche right? Are Christians indeed losers - even if they claim to be victors in Christ?

That depends, argues Peterson in We Who Wrestle with God. He acknowledges that there is a Christianity that has completely surrendered to modern ideologies like liberalism, socialism and woke gender ideology. But not all Christians have fallen for that.

However, to be winners (again) they will have to learn to take their Jewish roots seriously to begin with. A Christianity that has broken away from them and degenerated into ‘Platonism for the rabble’ will inevitably end up in some form of Utopian idealism.

Today's woke ideology is the most recent manifestation of that Utopianism, according to Peterson. It despises material and historical reality and thinks it can replace it with a dreamed ideal without harming people and the world. And that, according to him, is a fatal miscalculation. Indeed, this ideology does untold damage by ignoring some of the laws of our reality.  

Since God is declared dead, what Nietzsche feared has happened. Detached from any metaphysical ground, people become adrift. They no longer know what is true, what is good and for what purpose they are on this earth. Everything handed to them by tradition is rejected as criminal and oppressive and therefore hated. The result is self-hatred, radical dislike of one's own past, incessant religious stress and aversion to the everyday world of life as ‘the corpse of God’.

Peterson, however, doubts that Nietzsche's gentlemanly morality and ‘will to power’ are the best remedy against it. True, that will to power is a manifestation of the lust for life that is innate to every human being. But that lust for life does not unfold in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is part of a universe in which certain natural, social, psychological and spiritual laws apply, Peterson says.

His expertise as a psychologist also means that Peterson has less trouble talking about God than Nietzsche had. Indeed, God is not only a principle of life outside us, but also one that resides inside us.

For Peterson, conscience, in particular, is an important source of knowledge in this regard. He assumes that this conscience represents God's will element in us. This enables us to distinguish creative good from destructive and vindictive evil.

The actuality of the Jewish Bible
Peterson sees conscience as a knower of good and evil recurring in the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament. In it, God speaks to us humans.

A number of important stories contained in that Jewish Bible are reviewed in his book. The stories found in the Christian New Testament will be covered in a yet-to-be-published second volume. Against the suggestion that the New has replaced the Old, and thus made it redundant, Peterson stresses that the stories from the Jewish Bible are, on the contrary, as relevant as ever.

The Biblical stories may date from a time that seems foreign to us but they have a message based on collective experiences and insights which are either timeless or were far ahead of their time. It is their dramatic form which guarantees that they still appeal to our feelings, reason, moral consciousness - and something as elusive as the spiritual dimension of our existence, according to Peterson.

This explains why these stories have had an unprecedented impact in our history. In Peterson's words:

'The Bible is a bundle of stories that have served as a starting point for the most productive, the most free, the most stable and peaceful societies that have served world history. Together, those stories form the foundation of Western civilisation.

That is the central thesis of his book. He then elaborates that thesis in each of the successive chapters.

The good order of God's creation

The book of Genesis tells us of how God called the hitherto chaotic matter, so to speak, to order. How this was done becomes clear from the successive creation stories, which clearly show parallels with the modern evolution story. In it, man explicitly appears as the end point of various stages of development. In the Bible, God assigns man the task of cultivating creation in a way that does justice to its rich potential.

To perform this task successfully, man must reproduce and spread throughout the rest of the world. That procreation is provided for by the complementary relationship of man and woman, of which the biblical Adam and Eve are the archetype, according to Peterson. 

But getting the most out of it requires focus and concentration. Eve's sin is to believe that she is capable of taking care of the whole world. Adam's sin is to follow and support her in this. Translated to the here-and-now: Eve thinks that we in the West can offer the whole world a new home without any problems (see the current refugee policy), while Adam believes that establishing democracy globally is the right solution (see neoconservative foreign policy)

Peterson argues that pride is the great sin of which Adam and Eve are guilty. This leads to hubris that, like God, thinks it can solve global problems with a simple ‘Wir schaffen das’. Such hubris also makes us build ourselves towers of Babel again and again to realise the unity of the human species and a future world government. 

Such hubris ends again and again in dictatorial or totalitarian regimes that prove incapable of competing with human forms of organisation that are far better equipped to make productive and maximise their given potentials.

The willingness to sacrifice versus eternal victimhood

The building of the Tower of Babel ended in such a confusion of tongues that people naturally felt the urge to step out of their own comfort zone and bid farewell to the dictatorial-totalitarian system they had been part of until then. People once again allowed themselves to be driven by their own entrepreneurial spirit and set out to cultivate the rest of the earth as well.

In doing so, only the best we have to offer ultimately counts, Peterson concludes. Negative emotions like envy and resentment keep us from maximising our talents and the resources given to us. And God is not content with that, as the story of Cain and Abel, both sons of Adam and Eve, shows. Abel sacrifices the best and is blessed. Out of pure spite, Cain decides to beat his brother to death. Instead of realising the destructiveness of his action and giving himself another chance, he decides to flee - not realising that by doing so he condemns himself to eternal victimhood.

Many people, like Cain, are unwilling to give their best in the struggle to maximise this creation and prefer to choose the path of least resistance. Everything they do, they do half-heartedly and they drown their potential in flat hedonism. And God got so terribly angry about this at one point that he decided to drown all mankind in a global deluge. Only Noah, aware of God's calling, saw the judgement coming, and built an ark for himself, his family and every species in the animal kingdom so that they would be spared.

Stepping out of your comfort zone again and again 
But even after God started all over again with Noah, we see people building themselves cities again in which princes sit on thrones worshipped as gods. At that, God decides to call someone and tell him to get out of the metropolis of Ur in what was then Mesopotamia, to go to a land that at that time was kept from reaching its full potential by Cain-types. That man is Abraham, the one from whom, according to tradition, both Jews and Arabs are descended. And the land he must go to is Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine, the region of land that God himself says was meant to ‘overflow with milk and honey’.

After Abraham's death, a period of famine followed in Canaan, and the Jews moved to Egypt, where food was abundant at that time. Those who did not return to their land after the famine were enslaved after a few generations. But God refuses to surrender them to their slave existence and, through Moses, calls them to withdraw from the dictatorial power of an Egyptian pharaoh.

But removing yourself from a dictatorial regime, in which the ruler imagines himself god, is one thing; being able to find new ways and create an alternative society is another. That is why God gives his people the Law, in which he states that worshipping idols is once and for all forbidden because God himself is always greater than that which allows itself to be captured in human images and masquerades as ‘God’. To that Law, everyone is equally subject - leaders from Moses to Netanyahu as much as the ordinary man and woman on the streets of Jerusalem and Amsterdam. That Law serves as a guide to always observe the right limits in our efforts to bring this earth to its maximum development. If we fail to observe them, we do ourselves and our descendants wrong.

Is that easy? No - especially when you consider that the same piece of land promised to the Jews was inhabited by Cain types who, in their envy, did not allow them a single piece of the largely fallow land from the river to the sea for cultivation and development. And in that respect too, nothing has changed since the times of Abraham and Moses.

And be prepared to sacrifice your life for it

But since people are given a choice to always observe proper boundaries or to surrender to idol worship and the hedonism of bread and games that goes with it. The Jewish people were as guilty of this as the surrounding pagans. But as much as Jews can repent and be given new opportunities, the same is true of gentile peoples.

For this reason, God sends his prophet Jonah to the capital of the then Assyria, Nineveh. Jonah, however, refuses to heed his call and flees by boat in the opposite direction. On the one hand, because deep down he believes that the city weighed down by flat hedonism, injustice and abuse of power should simply be destroyed. On the other hand, because he was, after all, also afraid of paying with death for his confrontation with the rulers and the majority who legitimise their power.

But in his attempt to escape, he gets caught in a storm, ends up in the belly of the famous whale (an archetype of hell according to Peterson), regrets his rebellion and is spat out on the banks of the Tigris after three days. He then decides to heed his call after all. And instead of giving him the poison cup or nailing him to the cross, he finds a response and Nineveh repents of its bad habits. Thereupon, God decides to spare the city and give the people and their rulers another chance.

The story of winners or losers?

With his book, Peterson has tried to make the relevance of the Jewish Bible understandable for modern people. In doing so, he makes frequent use of insights borrowed from psychology. Although he often tends to elaborate quite a bit, this does make his argument more understandable to the uninitiated than the time-honoured dogmatic works. 

In my view, he clearly shows that the Judeo-Christian civilisation that draws from the Old Testament is not simply indebted to the slave morality that Nietzsche deduced in the New Testament and Christianity that he believes was inspired by it.

To say that it is typical of man to maximise the possibilities that lie in creation is, in my impression, not very far removed from Nietzsche's will to power. On the understanding that this will to power is hardly hindered, if at all, by the aforementioned laws that, according to Peterson, are an integral part of God's work of creation.

On the other hand, Nietzsche did not experience the horrors of the two world wars and the utterly destructive regimes of Hitler and Stalin. He was sceptical of the phenomenon of democracy because of the ever-threatening dictatorship of the majority. His will to power was meant as a remedy against that.

That his will to power could also degenerate in ways hitherto unseen is wisdom in hindsight. Possibly, against this background, Nietzsche would also have been more amenable to ordering principles that could have prevented a derailment of the will to power. Think of principles such as subsidiarity, separation of powers and a powerful civil society that Alexis de Tocqueville had touted in this context and whose importance, according to Peterson, even Moses recognised in his time. (Indeed: the Greeks may have invented democracy, but political philosophy, on reflection, turns out to be equally, if not more, indebted to ancient Israel).

Peterson is also right to point out the importance of ‘stepping out of your comfort zone’. Surely this has more to do with zest for life, enterprise and daring to swim against the current than with the herd mentality inherent in slave morality. In contrast, he even sees in the liberal and socialist drive for universal solidarity and compassion a manifestation of the pride that led to the fall of the archetypal first human couple.

In conclusion 

That Jews in their sprightly pursuit for maximum fulfilment of their talents and the possibilities which lie in creation have to struggle again and again against envy and resentment of surrounding peoples - even to this day - need no further explanation here. That they have risen again and again in that struggle - even after sometimes devastating defeats - is enough to see them as winners even by Nietzsche's standards.

Whether that winners' story will continue in the second part of the series Peterson has in mind, we will have to see. In it, the figure of Jesus and Paul's interpretation of his life, death and resurrection from the dead will take centre stage. Then we will see whether the New Testament too is woke-proof and not the inspiration for the slave morality Nietzsche saw in it.

Be that as it may, We Who Wrestle with God I can heartily recommend for reading. Thanks to Nietzsche, who did play a decisive role in Peterson's reading of the Jewish Bible in the background.