Thoughts on the Bible (response to Bret Weinstein)

I wasn't sure where I was going with this at first, but we eventually get there anyway

Evolutionary biologist, podcaster, and all-around great guy, Bret Weinstein, recently posted a tweet that got my attention:

The New Testament is a major revision of an ancient cultural operating system.

The updated code is fundamental to the modern West which inevitably crashes without it.

Some who have retained the trappings of the prior version of the OS have quietly accepted the fundamentals of the updated system. Jews who adhere to the golden rule, and don’t believe in collective punishment, are an example. We are compatible with the West and do well in it without needing or wanting to rig the system in our own favor. We want a level playing field. But obviously many American Jews are not of this mindset. For golden-rule believing Jews, it is galling to be lumped in with those threatening the West by endlessly attempting to rig the system.

Some populations who initially applied the update, self-described Christians, are now applying patches that revert the core OS back to the pre-updated state. They are explicitly inclined to rig the system in favor of their lineages, despite that being a distinctly un-Christian thing to do. White nationalist Christians are an example of this. It’s an Old Testament mindset with Christian aesthetics and rhetoric.

As usual, Bret is onto something important here, but there’s a lot to unpack. The “ancient cultural operating system” he describes is summed up by the Arab proverb: I against my brother, I and my brother against my cousin, I, my brother, and my cousin against the world. This mentality is antithetical to the smooth functioning of the modern West’s chief institution, the nation state. In a previous essay, we discussed the difficulties faced by traditional societies trying to make the leap in Papua New Guinea.

The landscape of Papua New Guinea is extremely forbidding - high, steep mountains covered with thick tropical rainforests - and has long been an insurmountable natural barrier to political consolidation on the large island. The prospect of any single center of authority exercising power over the entire island was was nonexistent in premodern times when feet were the primary means of transportation... Even contact and interchange from one valley to the next was a tall task, and isolated microsocieties grew up all over Papua New Guinea. Over 900 mutually-incomprehensible languages are spoken on the island - one-sixth of all the world’s still-existing languages… In the Papua New Guinea highlands, most people will live their entire lives in the mountain valley in which they were born. Their social world consists of their segmentary lineage group (that is, those who share a common male ancestor), and the nearby lineages with whom their group is in dialogue or conflict.

These lineage groups, which may comprise a few dozen to a few thousand people, are called wantoks, a pidgin version of the English words “one talk” - people who speak the same language. Each wantok is led by a chief, a Big Man. Big Man is not an inherited office, but a position of responsibility and authority bestowed by community acclimation. If, in times of conflict, the Big Men tend to be physically-powerful warriors, in other times the position may be held by more physically average men who have garnered great respect and trust among their people, particularly for their ability to distribute pigs, shell money, and other goods to those who follow them.

Until the 1970s, Papua New Guinea was under the political control of Australia. When the colonizers departed, they thought to give the people a helpful shove along their path toward modernity by designing and empowering an elected multiparty parliamentary system of government. The result, as you might have guessed, was chaos.

Voters in Melanesia do not vote according to policy preferences or political ideology. They vote to install the Big Man of their wantok into the national parliament or some other position from which he will be able to direct state largesse back to his own people. The elected Big Man understands his duty to extract as many resources as possible to benefit his friends and family, without regard for the well-being of a larger nation state with which neither he nor his people feel any real sense of collective identity.

To people accustomed to a Western system of government, it is the definition of corruption for a politician to use his position to direct benefits to his friends and family; in Papua New Guinea, it is simply the way things are, and both voters and elected officials would have trouble comprehending why or how it would be otherwise.

This is the “ancient cultural operating system” at work. In Papua New Guinea, it is not only tolerated, but virtuous, to rig the system in favor of one’s own people. Bret correctly points out that this is incompatible with the modern West, but is it incompatible with the New Testament? After all, for 1,500 years, societies from Byzantium to Medieval Spain were founded on the principles of the New Testament without bearing any resemblance to the modern West. Although the principles Bret points to as the basis of the modern West - a level playing field, individual equality under the law, etc. - can, perhaps, be credibly derived from Christianity, what he is describing is merely liberalism. I asked Bret about this, and he said that he sees liberalism as the political instantiation of the New Testament system update. It brought to mind something I read by a Jewish writer - maybe Paul Berman, maybe an old Nathan Glazer bit, I can’t remember. Whoever it was, he said that the true religion of American Jewry is not Judaism, but liberalism. Or, according to Bret’s formulation, Christianity without Christ. That is what Bret means when he says that “some (Jews) who have retained the trappings of the ancient cultural operating system have quietly accepted the fundamentals of the updated system.”

Christianity without Christ sounds like an oxymoron, of course, but let’s play around with the idea a bit. After all, Jesus obtained his understanding without ever reading the New Testament, nor do the Gospels say that he became who he was by way of special revelation. In fact, Jesus was clear that everything necessary to know him was already present in the Jewish tradition in which he was raised. Christ could only have come from the Jews. Alone among all the world’s peoples, the Jews kept a record not only of their triumphs, but their defeats and catastrophes. Indeed, their defeats and catastrophes have more emotional valence in the minds of most Jews than their victories. Dwelling on your negative experiences can veer into the pathological, but empathy for the weak and victimized is most strongly rooted when you have a sense of what they’re going through - when you’re able to say, “That could’ve been me,” because at some point in the remembered past, it was you. No other society of which I’m aware went to such lengths to preserve the memory of their disasters. You read about the Assyrians, how they rose and drove their enemies before them until they were rulers of the known world, then you read about the Babylonians rising to destroy the Assyrian Empire. Next, you read about the rise of the Persians’ Achaemenid Empire, and their conquest of Babylon, and the Babylonians follow the Assyrians down the memory hole. Every defeat was told from the perspective of the victorious successor. Their traditions, the traditions of all the pagan nations, taught them to worship strength, despise weakness, and to view personal or collective suffering as a sign of the gods’ disfavor. This is what Paul meant when he said that the Gospel sounded like nonsense to the Gentiles, according to whose worldview a crucified criminal was by definition a loser, discarded by the gods and certainly unworthy of the sympathy of respectable people. I’m an old comparative religion nerd, so I find a lot to love about most of the world’s religions, but it’s a fact that only the Jews could have given us the sentiment expressed in Isaiah’s Songs of the Servant:

Who has believed what he has heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young shoot,

and like a root out of barren ground;

he had no form or majesty for which we should regard him,

and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces,

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our grief

and carried our sorrows;

yet we called him cursed,

smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that brought us peace,

and by his wounds are we healed.

We, like sheep, have gone astray;

We have turned, every one, to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him the inquiry of us all.

If you can write that, you can grok the Christian ethic without having to hear it from Jesus or the apostles. It was Christ who awakened the pagan nations to the suffering of the poor and downtrodden, and Christ is our necessary reminder that God is closest to those whom the world has abandoned and despised. Jews alone, I believe, were and are able to know these truths on their own - Christianity without Christ. After all, everything necessary to know and understand Jesus Christ is contained in that passage from Isaiah.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying. There is more to Christianity than the Christian ethic, so I’m not pushing some hackneyed dual covenant theology. (I’m not pushing anything at all, and I hope everyone always keeps that in mind. I’m not your pastor. We’re all friends here, just having a friendly conversation.) My point, though, is that the Jewish tradition contained all the necessary elements for the Christian worldview.