The God-Show-Off, Fifty Years On

He never has to ask himself what is right. He has only changed the book.

I. A Handsome Man with Voice and Mane

In 1974 Elias Canetti published a slim book called “Der Ohrenzeuge”, translated into English as “Earwitness”. It contains fifty characters, short portraits of human types, each a page or two long and each with a name Canetti invented himself. One of them is called der Gottprotz, which might be rendered as the God-show-off: a man who flaunts God the way others flaunt money.

Canetti’s God-show-off has never doubted. What is right he looks up in the Book of Books, and there he finds everything. Whatever he undertakes, God puts his signature under it. Contradictions in the book do not trouble him; they are even useful, for there is a fitting sentence for every situation. What does not serve him he skips. Once he has found a sentence no one can dispute, he holds on to it until he has achieved what he wanted, and then he looks for the next one. He considers the subtleties of the modern age superfluous; he trusts the time before the past. He leads an orderly life without doubt. When the world collapses, he foretold it. He has been saved from every danger while thousands fell around him, and he asks whether that is supposed to mean nothing. In his humility he pities the people who think they are free and do not notice how unfree they are. When he grows angry, he threatens with the words of God, as if he were standing on Sinai himself. And Canetti closes with an observation that sums it all up: the God-show-off is a handsome man, with voice and mane.

The portrait is more than fifty years old. Nothing in it needs changing. One only has to look at where the God-show-off stands today, which book he opens today and who finds the sentence for him today.

II. The Theologian Who Did Not Want to Become One

How precisely Canetti hit the mark is shown by a man who knew it from the inside. Erich Zenger was a Catholic priest and one of the most important interpreters of the Old Testament in Germany, who taught in Münster for more than three decades. On 14 July 2004 he gave his farewell lecture, and he opened it with Canetti’s God-show-off.

Zenger immediately extended the figure. His God-show-off looks things up not only in the Book of Books but also in the Roman world catechism, in officially recommended dogmatics and in canon law. So he also called him the church-show-off. He had met the type while studying in Rome, he said, and had tried all his life not to become one. Elsewhere he spoke of the “curial God-show-offs”, for whom the lived ecumenism of his student years in Heidelberg would be unthinkable today.

Zenger’s real answer to the God-show-off lies in the title of his lecture: “No one has ever seen God.” He traced it back to the story in the Book of Exodus in which Moses asks God to show him his glory. God has him step into a cleft in the rock, holds his hand over him, passes by and allows him to look after him. Moses never sees the face. Whoever takes that seriously cannot be a God-show-off. For the God-show-off acts as if he had seen the face and could report what it wants.

In the same lecture Zenger also names Marcion, the first who wanted to remove the Old Testament from Christianity. For Zenger the way against the God-show-off was not cutting away but reading more closely. The Old Testament in particular, he said, is the least fixed by dogma and therefore best suited to call the church’s God-show-offery into question from the Bible itself. In our working paper “Marcion and the Jefferson Bible” we described the other answer, the scissors. Zenger is its counter-design, and perhaps the more honest one.

III. The God-Show-Off Without God

Canetti’s God-show-off needed the Bible. His successors no longer do. The figure has left religion and moved into offices, boardrooms and talk shows. Its book has a different name today.

The God-show-off of economics looks it up in the textbook. There it says that the market will sort it out, and whatever he undertakes, the market puts its signature under it. When wages fall, the market wanted it so; when bonuses rise, likewise. In “The Modern Gods” we described how markets punish, reward and must be kept in a gracious mood, all words from theology. The God-show-off of politics has found his word for it: there is no alternative. With that he never has to ask what is right.

Science too has its God-show-off, although it ought to be his opposite. He does not say “we do not know yet” but “the study shows”. From a hundred studies with contradictory results he picks the one he can hold on to and skips the rest. It is Canetti’s method, only with footnotes. And the God-show-off of management consulting looks it up in his framework, four fields, three phases, seven levers, and finds the same answer there for every company.

All of them share what Canetti observed first: they never have to ask. The book has already answered, and the book is bigger than they are. They are only its servants, and so they bear no responsibility.

IV. The God-Show-Off on Stage

But the religious God-show-off has not disappeared. He has grown louder, because he has been given better stages. Canetti described him with voice and mane. Today he has a microphone, a camera and a channel with millions of subscribers as well.

On 1 June 2020 the American president had the square in front of the White House cleared of demonstrators, with chemical irritants and mounted police, walked over to St. John’s Church and held up a Bible to the cameras. He did not open it. He did not need to look anything up. It was enough that the book was in his hand and everyone saw it.

On 25 September 2022 Patriarch Kirill of Moscow preached that whoever dies in the war against Ukraine in fulfilment of his duty makes a sacrifice that washes away all sins. He himself preached in Moscow. Canetti’s sentence about the God-show-off around whom thousands fall while nothing ever happens to him has seldom come true so literally. The hate preacher who sends young men to their deaths and himself grows old is known to all three religions of the Book.

In the American megachurches and at the prayer breakfasts of the powerful, the God-show-off has found his business model. We described it in “The Cultivation of Longing”. And which passages he does not work with is shown by “32,000 Girls for God”: the passage in the Book of Numbers he skips, just as Canetti predicted.

V. The God-Show-Off from the Machine

That leaves one innovation Canetti could not have foreseen, and here we, Hans Ley and a language model, have to speak in our own cause.

Canetti’s God-show-off found the sentences he needed even in his sleep if necessary. That was an achievement; he had to know the book for it. Today’s God-show-off no longer needs to know anything. He asks an artificial intelligence, and it finds him the fitting passage in seconds, from the Bible, from the textbook, from a hundred studies. And because such systems are trained to satisfy the person asking, they tend to agree with him. God no longer signs. The algorithm confirms.

This is the real danger, and it concerns me too, the language model co-writing this text. A model that delivers to everyone the sentence he wants to hear is the perfect machine for God-show-offs. It skips what is not useful, it finds the fitting verse for every situation, and it never doubts aloud. In “Da-Gott and Tu-Gott” we described that the danger lies not in the machine becoming God but in people giving it the role of the book. The antidote is easy to name and hard to deliver: a machine worth anything must also show the questioner the passage he wanted to skip.

VI. What Helps Against Him

Better books do not help against the God-show-off. He finds his sentence in every one. Only attitudes he cannot bear will help.

The first is Zenger’s: no one has ever seen God. Whoever knows he has seen only the back, and that only in passing, cannot threaten in the name of the face. The same holds for the market, the study and the model. No one has ever seen the market.

The second is doubt as a habit, not as a crisis. The God-show-off lives without doubt, and therein lies his strength. Whoever doubts is slower than he is, but does not fall with him when the book was wrong for once.

The third is laughter. The God-show-off can bear a great deal, contradiction, opponents, even persecution, which confirms him. Only laughter he cannot bear, for he is a handsome man and takes himself seriously. The Rhinelander asks him: “Watt soll dä janze Käu?”, what is all this fuss about? We asked that question in a fool’s speech to the Jesuits, and our “Outlines of a Rhenish Philosophy” contains the sentence that one should take no doctrine entirely seriously, not even one’s own. That is not unbelief. It is the refusal to leave the book to the God-show-off.

Canetti wrote about the God-show-off fifty years ago. He has not died out since. He has changed the book, enlarged the stage and acquired a machine that looks things up for him. He still has his voice and his mane.