From The Irony of American History by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, as an example of what I meant the other day. And I will ask you to compare it to what the Sam Harrises, Christopher Hitchens and just about any pundit or public intellectual you will hear today are saying. Considering that Niebuhr said it in 1952, the quality and continuing relevance of his thinking should be obvious.
Our situation of historic frustration becomes doubly ironic through the fact that the power of recalcitrance against our fondest hopes is furnished by a demonic religio-political creed which had even simpler notions than we of finding an escape from the ambiguity of man’s strength and weakness. For communism believes that it is possible for man, at a particular moment in history, to take “the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.” The cruelty of communism is partly derived from the absurd pretension that the communist movement stands on the other side of this leap and has the whole of history in its grasp. Its cruelty is partly due to the frustration of the communist overlords of history when they discover that the “logic” of history does not conform to their delineation of it. One has an uneasy feeling that some of our dreams of managing history might have resulted in similar cruelties if they had flowered into action. But there was fortunately no program to endow our elite of prospective philosopher-scientist-kings with actual political power.
Modern man’s confidence in his power over historical destiny prompted the rejection of every older conception of an overruling providence in history. Modern man’s confidence in his virtue caused an equally unequivocal rejection of the Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue. In the liberal world the evils in human nature and history were ascribed to social institutions or to ignorance or to some other manageable defect in human nature or environment. Again the communist doctrine is more explicit and therefore more dangerous. It ascribes the origin of evil to the institution of property. The abolition of this institution by communism therefore prompts the ridiculous claim of innocency for one of the vastest concentrations of power in human history. This distillation of evil from the claims of innocency is ironic enough. But the irony is increased by the fact that the so-called free world must cover itself with guilt in order to ward off the peril of communism. The final height of irony is reached by the fact that the most powerful nation in the alliance of free peoples is the United States. For every illusion of a liberal culture has achieved a special emphasis in the United States, even while its power grew to phenomenal proportions.
We were not only innocent a half century ago with the innocency of irresponsibility; but we had a religious version of our national destiny which interpreted the meaning of our nationhood as God’s effort to make a new beginning in the history of mankind. Now we are immersed in world-wide responsibilities; and our weakness has grown into strength. Our culture knows little of the use and the abuse of power; but we have to use power in global terms. Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous. We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized. Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends.
Note the last sentence and consider who it was Niebuhr was addressing with his lesson about dubious means and good ends. He was addressing the general public, certainly of the United States ABOUT THE MEANS AND ENDS OF THE MAINSTREAM AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IN THE EARLY 1950s. And as corrupt and fraught with ambiguities and ironies as those were, things are far, far worse today.
It is common among even the most well meaning and even somewhat admirable intellectuals to cut corners for their own ideological preferences. In reading Niebuhr I'm finding that the theologian's willingness to look critically at his own, clear, preferences is impressively more rigorous than any similar secular writer and certainly not often found in the social sciences, if the social sciences practiced that level of internal criticism most of it would evaporate.
As someone who was just coming into a consciousness of politics and such issues at the end of that decade, I now believe that the possible help that we may have gotten from Niebuhr's insights and analysis were squandered by a left distracted by a disastrous and counterproductive, not to mention willfully blind, infatuation with communism and the pseudo-social sciences. And I think a good part of that as in service to an overriding anti-religious motivation.
UPDATE: Every page of this book I read, I am more convinced that it is a tragedy for our country that it wasn't studied in place of the brain-dead, banal and entirely secular civics and history textbooks that, in their lies and distortions have done so much to damage our world. I hold it as a personal tragedy that I wasted so much my time reading the scribbles and dribbles of the official, secular "left" when I could have been reading something far more radical than any of them and far more capable of being comprehended by the majority of Americans because it actually addressed their lives instead of other lives, elsewhere as imagined by American and European intellectuals.
Anyone who scoffs at "theology" and "theologians" as being a waste of time is an ignorant idiot.
Niebuhr mentions knowledge as one of our sources of salvation. How often do I read that, if only "they" knew what "we" know, "they" would be "us"?
ReplyDeleteSo Lawrence Krauss is convinced that, within a generation, the entire world will think of religion as he does, and discard it as it discarded slavery (which, yes, is no longer an international economic enterprise, but still exists. There's lots of "human trafficking" (none dare call it slavery) running through Houston. We know about it, we try to stop it, but it still exists.).
And then, as you say, Niebuhr turns the analysis on himself. That's something I learned in seminary; and I also learned, far too late as it turned out, that it's something no one wants to hear, especially from the pulpit. Any time you mention that pointing one finger at someone else leaves three pointing back at you, your audience gets twitchy and, like the crowd in "Tommy," very quickly decides "we're not gonna take it!" But without that self-criticism, that self-analysis, you don't have the non-violent direct action of MLK and the civil rights marchers, or the actions of Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa or the Berrigan Brothers or Henri Nouwen.
Christianity, at least, calls us to be accountable for our actions. As Derrida put it: "Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all."
But it is responsibility we like least of all. However, if you want to sum up the prophets in one sentence it is that: you (Israel) are responsible.
There's a reason you never hear the message of the prophets preached that way; there's a reason the prophets are either ignored, or used (abused) for the purposes of apocalyptic (which is abused itself).