Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

7 2 Interpretation
Even in their Christianity Americans exhibit pride. The
human quest for immortality—the noble form of what puling mediocrities
today call ‘self-assertion’—manifests human pride, “resemb[ling] what Plato
calls thumos, the willingness to risk one’s life in order to protect it, the combination
of self-disgust and self-elevation” (86). This very pride sets its own
limits, conduces to moderation, precisely because it so thoroughly binds itself
to religious teachings, “authoritative ideas” about God, the soul, and human
duties (87). The pride of the Christian and the humility of the Christian both
limit the sway of modern politics, especially as seen in its characteristic institutional
device, the modern state; Christian pride and humility also limit the
intellectual sway of materialism, which beckons souls to tyranny as surely as
any politically empowered religiosity ever did. The Christianity of the Gospels
is “the right kind of religion” (87). The wrong kind of religion is “the religion of
Mohammed,” whose doctrine “included political maxims, which involve the
church with the state, and scientific theories that interfere with freedom of the
mind” (87). Tocqueville was quite likely to have known that Islam was
Napoleon’s favorite religion.
Tocqueville worried less about a recrudescence of religious
fanaticism than the existing threat of attempted “rational control” of human
beings in various forms of benevolent despotism—democratic, administrative,
mild—all of them kindly destroyers of man’s self-government because they
lead men gently, unawares, without “any sense of being commanded” (89). The
immense tutelary power of the state takes away the trouble of thinking and the
pain of living, thus re-inventing God as a true anti-Christ—impersonal, unloving
but never punishing, lulling us into dreamless narcolepsy. “Tocqueville’s
religion endorses the separation of church and state,” the liberals’ institutional
response to religious excesses, but “more, it grounds the proud freedom that
makes self-government possible” (90). The Christian looks at the modern state
and says: I may be a sinner, but I am better than that. Nor does this religion
need to be Christian: “its function, which is not quite the Gospel message, is to
protect freedom by allowing the right amount of pride” (91); other religions
might learn to do that, too.
“While religion protects pride, it supports politics even more”
by deflecting politics from too much insistence on modern liberalism’s central
concern, physical self-preservation, and toward the spiritual and the spirited.
This again plays up the enterprising and confident Christianity that evangelizes
and affirms high hopes for the future as distinguished from the cloistered
Christianity of patience and piety.