Oh Lord, It’s Hard to be Humble

Nietzche’s infamous challenge to belief, “God is dead,” along with his impassioned arguments against Christianity, has always lurked around the edges of my faith. I have always felt that an encounter with Nietzsche, perhaps the Judeo-Christian tradition’s greatest critic, was inevitable. What value faith if it can’t withstand Nietzsche’ penetrating scrutiny? A layman rather than a Nietzsche scholar, I have turned for help in my encounter to Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken (killing two birds with one stone, as I had never before read Mencken, one of my adopted home town’s literary giants) . Mencken penned The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a remarkable summation of Nietzsche’s thought, recently republished and thankfully available at the local biblioteque. (It is important to note that, like Nietzsche, Mencken was a gifted thinker and writer, but also, like Nietzsche, fell into the trap of racial determinism. Put more bluntly, Mencken was an overt racist, as exhibited in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche when Mencken touts the inherent superiority of European Americans to their African American countrymen. We shall return to the shadow cast by Nietzsche’s philosophy, a darkness which haunted Mencken’s thought and continues to trouble humanity today, but this caveat should be noted from the start, as warranted by the worst chapters of our recent human history.)

Because Nietzsche’s thought has the breadth and depth befitting a great philosopher, it will serve our purposes here to simply jump in where Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity goes off the tracks (for a proper overview of Nietzsche see Mencken). Mencken captures the core of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity: “Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no… efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence. The beatitudes require, he says, that instead of trying to do so, the Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give no thought to himself.” This reading of Christianity leads to the necessary conclusion that if a man were to follow Christianity’s urging, then (again here Mencken interpreting Nietzsche) “his activity is restricted to one of two things: standing perfectly still or deliberately making himself inferior.” Mencken provides Nietzsche’s own words to clarify this stance, with Christianity understood as “the tendency hostile to life”, and that which “thwarts the law of development , of evolution, of the survival of the fittest.”

Nietzsche was philosophy’s first great Darwinian. His rejection of Christianity is the necessary counterpart to his embrace of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Per Mencken, Nietzsche “proposed, then, that before it was too late, humanity should reject Christianity, as the ‘greatest of all imaginable corruptions,’ and admit freely and fully, that the law of natural selection was universal and that the only way to make real progress was to conform to it.”

Nietzsche has misunderstood both Christianity and humanity’s relationship to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in one fell swoop. It is necessary first to treat of Darwin’s reductionist views on Darwinian theory. For Nietzsche, as seen above, Nietzsche’s theory of natural selection, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest, applies to humanity in the exact same fashion as it does to every other variety of flora and fauna. Per Mencken, “Nietzsche says that the thing which best differentiates man from the other animals is his capacity for making and keeping a promise.” I would argue that, instead, the most important difference between humanity and other animals is that, unlike animals, we humans are capable of destroying the world right along with ourselves. It is this crucial difference between humans and other animals, one that is overlooked by Nietzsche, which creates a separate framework for our relationship to evolution.

It is in this separate framework in which the teachings of the world’s great faith traditions, including Christianity, attain to heights of wisdom unavailable to Nietzsche in his reductionist stance of equating humans with all other creatures. But before we go any further, it is important to correct Nietzsche’s key misunderstanding of Christian teaching. While the gospels are replete with Christ’s insistence that his followers become less obsessed with their daily welfare, by, for example, pointing out how well cared for are the lilies in the field, these are primarily teachings to reframe his followers understanding of creation as a place of abundance. Of course, it is no mystery that even in the most abundant of settings one must still put in the requisite labor to reap the bounty, and I don’t believe that Jesus’ basic teaching that God will provide in any way denies the need for the labor required to access those provisions. Nietzsche would argue that a good Christian would be too busy looking after his neighbor to put in the necessary labor. In making this argument Nietzsche has misread the second in the pair of central commandments on which all of Christianity rests; this commandment states “Love your neighbor as yourself,” not “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.” The central point here, and one lost on Nietzsche, is that in order to do a good job of loving your neighbor you must be loving yourself an equal amount. And, if I am not mistaken, the love of neighbor will grow out of an abundance of love for one’s self, such that there will never be an inadequacy of love for self that might prevent one from reasonably seeing to one’s own welfare in the normal every day ways that no one else can provide. There is work that one can only do for one’s self. Part of loving your neighbor is letting her do this work while you take care of your own business. (The first in the pair of central commandments, to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” {Matthew 22: 37) is simply a translation of the greatest gift of Nietzsche’s philosophy, his “Yes to life!”)

It might help here to consider another wisdom tradition. I once went to a conference about working with troubled youth at which one of the speakers (see reclaiming .org for the speaker’s website) described his youth program’s approach as based on a central tenet of a particular American Indian tribe’s wisdom tradition. This tradition held that all individuals require four basic opportunities to prosper. The opportunity to experience, respectively, achievement , autonomy, altruism, and attachment; they are easy to remember when you name them the “Four A’s”. You would naturally pair the more individualistic pursuits of achievement and autonomy, and also pair the more communal elements of altruism and attachment. Jesus’ teaching of “Love your neighbor as yourself” is simply a pithy phrasing of how to achieve a life affirming balance of the Four A’s. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, is but the exclusive emphasis of achievement and autonomy, and a complete denial of the need to balance them with altruism and attachment. Perhaps, in the long history of Christian influence on western civilization, altruism and attachment were emphasized as spiritual virtues more-so than their counterparts of achievement and autonomy. To the extent that they were, than Nietzsche’s contribution can be seen as reawakening us to the need for achievement and autonomy in a healthy human individual. But mistaking Nietzsche for a prophet of truth rather than knowing him as a balancing corrective, is to invite disaster. One need look no further than the co-optation of Nietzche’s philosophy by the Nazi party to witness the dangers of misunderstanding Nietzsche’s contribution.

But a Christianity informed by Nietzsche would be a reinvigorated force for good. When Christianity loses its balance and overemphasizes attachment and altruism, when it does teach “Love your neighbor more than yourself,” it’s values are warped. An example of this is the Christian value of humility. A Christianity uncorrected by Nietzsche, skewing towards attachment and altruism, elevates humility to an end unto itself; one is to practice humility simply because it is good to be humble. But humility understood as an end unto itself is warped beyond repair. I’ve never liked Ralph Lauren Polo garments, largely because of the Polo logo affixed prominently to the left breast of every Polo shirt. My distaste for the Polo logo is based on my contempt for the act of wearing the Polo logo as an expression of socioeconomic status. But my refusal to don Ralph Lauren is an act of neurotic humility, because by refusing to wear Polo, based on my judgment that people who wear Polo are snobs, I necessarily conceive of myself as superior to the Polo consumer because of my humility. When humility becomes an end unto itself then all acts of humility based on this value are just another way of being better than other people, thereby rendering this warped form of humility neurotic. (Speaking of neurosis, after reading Nietzsche I realize that the father of all things neurotic, Sigmund Freud, was just a Nietzchean. Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillment and his theory of guilt as the aggressive drive pointed inward both appear first in Nietzsche. Nietzsche also wrote eloquently about the unconscious, a concept with which Freud built the entire edifice of psychoanalysis.)

The true, non-neurotic function of humility comes into focus when Christianity is balanced by Nietzsche’s reemphasis of achievement and autonomy. When achievement and autonomy are as important as attachment and altruism, there must needs be a mediator between the individualistic and the communal elements of human life. Humility is that mediator. This function of humility is seen clearly in the old cliché “keep your feet on the ground while you reach for the stars,” i.e. the only way to stay grounded while you strive for the heights of individual excellence is through displays of humility. We display humility not because it is important to be humble in order to be “good people”, but because humility allows us to maintain attachment, often by way of altruism, while we pursue achievement and autonomy. Humility strikes the necessary balance for us to keep the commandment of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

In closing it is important to return to the crucial difference between humanity and the rest of creation, which is nothing other than our ability to destroy all life on the planet. Unlike all that came before us, which evolved according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, humanity is that which must evolve to the state of loving our neighbors as ourselves, if we are to survive. We must temper our Nietzschean need for achievement and autonomy, our will to power, with equal consideration for attachment and altruism. Doing so is the only true way to say “Yes to life!”; not doing so will end all life as we know it. I would say that this is the true meaning of Jesus’ promise of eternal life for all those who follow him. Humanity can choose to follow the teachings of our great sages by loving our neighbors as ourselves, or not. Whether humanity lives on eternally depends precisely on this choice.