The Boss Baby, Nietzsche, and Christian Ethics
Over the past academic year, I had the privilege of co-teaching a class in Christian ethics to senior high school students. As often occurs, I may have learned more than my students did. And in this reflection, I want to relay the critical aspects of Christian ethics of which I came to a fuller understanding.
The ethical life manifests itself in every choice we make, and because of this, I elected to move away from the ethical dilemmas that for my students primarily reside in the political sphere (abortion, transgenderism, contraception, etc.) yet often don’t characterize their day-to-day choices. Instead, it quickly became clear that the ethical issues facing my students, and myself for that matter, are much more subtle. Namely, when choosing to pursue virtue, we implicitly ask ourselves: “Why should I sacrifice my desires for comfort, pleasure, and power?” Or “Why not indulge my whims, when it is far easier than prayer or almsgiving?” At another angle, the ultimate question is, “Doesn’t Judeo-Christian morality prohibit my freedom and harshly reject my natural desires?”
These questions plague modernity. It suggests that Christianity limits the happiness you can experience, fundamentally restricting you from “living your best life.” This view, however, can’t be further from Christianity aright: Judeo-Christian ethics doesn’t eliminate your freedom and contradict your human inclinations. They order your freedom and draw up your desires into a higher-oriented desire for God as your final end.
Nietzsche and Freud
Pondering the nature of the aforementioned questions which captivated the students and myself, I realized something interesting: in no way are these critiques novel or unique to our cultural moment. Rather, they derive from the classical objections leveled by Friedrich Nietzsche and later “psychologized” by Sigmund Freud. To briefly summarize their positions, Nietzsche, with a vicious and conniving prose, asserts Christianity as thoroughly “anti-life.” He believes Christian ethics centers around the denial of the goods of this world. Formulating the person as an amalgam of “drives” or “wills,” Christian morality’s ethos prescribes suppression; it demands the faithful to reject any want for social praise, material wealth, or sexual gratification; it firmly and resolutely proclaims “NO!” to fundamental human desires, relinquishing our ability to express our individualized will to power. Subsequently, we turn in on ourselves, creating severe neuroses and ultimately nihilism.
Freud makes a similar move. The fundamental motivational drive, Freud argues, is pleasure, and whether conscious or unconscious, it animates our action on a day-to-day basis. Of course, this remains concealed at certain points, because the will to pleasure is sly and barbarous, willing to temporarily sacrifice in anticipation for future pleasure. But it can’t sacrifice too long, since this drive toward pleasure– predominantly sexual in nature– contorts and corrupts to the extent that it is suppressed into the unconscious; and Christian morality, among other things, preaches a gospel of sexual suppression.
The ideas put forward by Nietzsche and Freud remain central questions in our age. We need a sound and solidified answer as to why we really should avoid the goods of pleasure, wealth, prestige and power—the idols which tempt all Christians according to St. Thomas. Further, we need to figure out if Christian ethics really do suppress intrinsic human drives, leading to psychological instability. Because if so, any Catholic notion of the unity of faith and reason shatters, destabilizing the entirety of Catholic doctrine. The answer to this question, in certain ways, makes or breaks the truth of the faith. So which is it? Does christianity carve a path to human beatitude? Or do the teachings of Christ really say “no” to life?
SUPPRESSION OR INTEGRATION
All Christ’s teachings rest upon one singular and all-encompassing command: Love. Specifically, our love ought to possess three dimensions: God, neighbor, and self. As a result, contrary to Nietzsche and Freud, the human drives are not to be repressed altogether, but rather, the Christian must integrate his desires into what Augustine calls the hierarchy of loves (or the Hierarchy of Goods): we must love, desire, and value God above all, loving everything else for the sake of God. “Everything” does not imply merely “holy” things. “Everything” quite literally means everything, for Augustine also makes clear that insofar as something has being (ie. exists), it is good. Of course he delineates and elevates some goods over others, as God remains eternally the highest Good and earthly prestige, for instance, falls much lower on the hierarchy. Nevertheless, every other good which sits below God is sought after, desired, and loved as gratuitous; they are appreciated as gifts from God and to be used with, by, and for love. All this said, Christianity upholds that the goods of human life, conceptualized by Nietzsche and Freud as “drives,” must be integrated, not suppressed, resulting in harmonious psychological stability. Let me exemplify this by way of addressing Aquinas’ idols.
Christian morality demands that our hedonism, particularly the good of sexual pleasure (Freud’s central preoccupation) must be integrated into a sacramental marriage, bound by fidelity, love, and an openness to life. In this way, we aren’t called to ignore our desire for sexual gratification, nor does marriage diminish sexual pleasure by supposedly “cutting it off” from stimuli such as novelty and youthfulness. In contradistinction to such a short-sided yet understandable proposition, the good of sexual union finds its fullest expression in a covenantal marriage; it blossoms and grows to the extent that it is governed by self-sacrificial love. This in no way implies that this ideal is “easy” or requires little sacrifice. Far from it. Our concupiscence demands that we sacrifice the present for the future, cultivating a kind of spiritual maturation. We don’t simply say “no” to pleasure, but we sacrifice the hedonistic and self-serving dimensions of pleasure, in turn pursuing only what is highest, only the pleasure which is enjoyed for the sake of love.
Wealth remains another misunderstood reality. More often than not, Christianity carries with it an implicit belief that “money is bad” or “being rich is sinful.” Certainly, Christ warns against the potential dangers of wealth (e.g., Mat. 19:24, Luke 18:25, Mark 10:21, etc.), but this commonly held idea is a gross misappropriation of the Christian Tradition. You shouldn’t constrict any desire for wealth deep into the depths of your subconscious, because there is something in wealth which is inherently antithetical to saintliness. Instead, we need to understand our wealth and its respective standing within the hierarchy of goods; we must draw our wealth into a higher-oriented aim: the Kingdom of Heaven, Righteousness, Love of God. In other words, wealth cannot be your penultimate love, but it can be appreciated for the sake of the love of God. As Rerum Novarum holds, after basic needs are met, our wealth belongs to the poor; it is ‘owned’ by Christ. Thus, wealth is not intrinsically bad, but it demands that we integrate it into a transcendent aim.
The last two idols, power and prestige, are closely linked. It is important to cultivate and maintain an upstanding social reputation and respect, however, oftentimes for Christians, these goods connote vanity and corruption. Now, this remains true so long as we value “worldly” success as the end-all-be-all indicator of flourishing. But if your power and prestige is coupled with the love of God, it acquires the totality of its goodness. Christ claims that “to whom much is given, much is required,” which elevates the demand for virtue in accordance with your worldly influence (Luke 12:48). That is to say, power and prestige, while potential idols, are potent tools to spreading the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
LOVE IS NOT COMPETITIVE
If these ideas which I’ve learned from teaching ethics can be reduced to one key element, it has to go back to Augustine’s injunction that being is good, no exceptions, resulting in his conception of the hierarchy of goods. Without a hierarchy denoting worthiness, there would be no room for integration. More succinctly, without this hierarchy, our love would fragment, pitted against one another when two desires arise; we would be forced to choose between higher goods and lower goods: marriage or novelty, virtue or money. In this way, Nietzsche and Freud would be right: Christianity does “deny life” in particular ways. But the correlation between Being and goodness renders all things good, insofar as they are ordered toward the Summum Bonum.
A great image of this lie is portrayed and refuted in the DreamWorks movie The Boss Baby—an image I call upon frequently—and while the plot and setting is entirely fantastical and borderline absurd, it reveals the modern misapprehension of Christian ethics. Holding an abacus, “the boss baby” communicates to his brother, Tim Templeton, that there is only so much love to go around; that love is an exhaustible commodity like the limited number of beads on the abacus; either mom and dad love you or they can love me, he claims. In a similar way, modernity sees Christianity and the respective goods of the world as antithetical to each other. You cannot love pleasure and God, wealth and your neighbor. You must follow one and reject the other wholeheartedly. Such confusion has driven many away from the faith in despair, while others “follow God” but lament their all-too-great sacrifice. The movie ends as Templeton and his talking baby brother enter into a true friendship, both loving each other, a common goal, and revealing to them the true nature of love—both brothers can be loved by their parents, and the love they experience flourishes, not when it excludes the other brother, but precisely when it is shared. This perfectly corresponds to the hierarchy of love: all human goods are designed to be fully enjoyed when they are subordinated under and integrated into our love for God. Love is irreducible and allows for the integration things.
In my estimation, the pivotal critique (or at least misunderstanding) of Judeo-Christian ethics revolves around the assumption that they undercut and endanger the pleasures of human life, forcing faithful believers to suppress their human drives on earth for the sake eternal glory. This couldn’t be farther from the Truth. Everything that has being is good—a metaphysical axiom—furnishes the cosmos with beauty and establishes a hierarchy of goods, directing our freedom and ordering our souls toward God. Consequently, love is not a zero-sum-game, competitive, or fractionated, but you are called to truly love all things in proportion to their place within the hierarchy. It remains a difficult vocation, to be sure: If pleasure, wealth, power, or prestige characterize your highest desire, then they ruthlessly strip you of your freedom, becoming tyrannical forces within your soul. But if you love them as they ought to be loved—for the sake of God, the Highest Good— they flourish, reaching their fullest expression and leading to happiness through the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.