"theology is shit" - Hate Mail - With thanks to RMJ for Citing The Book Which I Just Started Reading

The most persistent error of modern educators and moralists is the assumption that our social difficulties are due to the failure of the social sciences to keep pace with the physical sciences which have created our technological civilisation.  The invariable implication of this assumption is that, with a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence our social problems will approach solution.  

"It is," declares Professor John Dewey, "our human intelligence and our human courage which is on trial  it is incredible that men who have brought the technique of physical discovery, invention and use to such a pitch of perfection will abdicate in the face of the infinitely more important human problem."

"What stands in the way (of a planned economy) is a lot of outworn traditions, moth-eaten slogans and catchwords that do substitute duty for thought, as well as our entrenched predatory self-interest.  We shall only make a real beginning in intelligent thought when we cease mouthing platitudes . . . Just as soon as we begin to use the knowledge and skills we have, to control social consequences in the interest of a shared, abundant and secured life, we shall cease to complain of the backwardness of our social knowledge ...  We shall then take the road which leads to the assured building up of social science just as men built up physical science when they actively used techniques and tools and numbers in physical experimentation."  (John Dewey,  Philosophy and Civilization [New York:  Minton, Balch], p. 329)  

In spite of Professor Dewey's great interest in and understanding of the modern social problem there is very little clarity in this statement.  The real cause of social inertia, "our predatory self-interest,"  is mentioned only in passing without influencing his reasoning and with no indication that he understands how much conservatism is due to the economic interests of the owning classes.

On the whole, social conservatism is ascribed to ignorance, a viewpoint which states only part of the truth and reveals the natural bias of the educator.  The suggestion that we will only make a beginning in intelligent thought when we "cease mouthing platitudes" is itself so platitudinous that it rather betrays the confusion of an analyst who has no clear counsels about the way to overcome social inertia.  The idea that we cannot be socially intelligent until we begin experimentation in social problems in the way that the physical scientists experimented fails to take account of an important difference between the physical and social sciences.  The physical sciences gained their freedom when they overcame the traditionalism based on ignorance, but the traditionalism which the social sciences face is based upon the economic interest of the dominant social classes who are trying to maintain their special privileges in society.  Nor can the difference between the very character of social and physical sciences be overlooked.   Complete rational objectivity in a social situation is impossible.  The very social scientists who are so anxious to offer our our generation counsels of salvation and are disappointed that an ignorant and slothful people are so slow to accept their wisdom, betray middle-class prejudices in almost everything they write.  Since reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest in a social situation, social injustice cannot be resolved by moral and rational suasion alone, as the educator and social scientist usually believes. 

Reinhold Niebuhr:  Moral Man and Immoral Society - Introduction

This was written in 1932, the movement which John Dewey considered himself a part of is today's conventional wisdom as can be seen in just about every newspaper and magazine article, as can be heard in just about every statement made in the media, that comes out of academia (including many who have been to divinity school and should have read Niebuhr's critique) and which finds its own status as "outworn traditions, moth-eaten slogans and catchwords that do substitute duty for thought, as well as our entrenched predatory self-interest."  Such is the success of John Dewey's ideological program that it has become what he condemned, incorporating everything which Reinhold Niebuhr said it did into that new orthodoxy.  

The past 87 years has only demonstrated that the theologian,  Niebuhr, clearly understood, not only his own field but the physical and social sciences better than the hero of conventional scientistic modernism, John Dewey and his followers. My only criticism of Niebuhr is that he was far too generous to the social sciences which have always been a fraud.  And I say that acknowledging that, though he was full of crap,  Dewey's devotion to the idea of democracy was sincere.   I hadn't thought of it but he might be a good specimen to study in how the left got it so wrong and has been led in the wilderness for so many decades, convinced it was on the right road that only goes round in circles, getting nowhere.  He is also quite generous in asserting that the physical sciences had achieved their goal of "overcoming the traditionalism based on ignorance."  As Max Planck had long before noted, that success was spotty, at best, even in the most rigorous of the sciences.  I would say that things have gotten steadily worse, since then.

I found what might be a pirated version of Niebuhr's book online, which I took this from.  I don't own it on paper.  I will be getting it, though.   Maybe I'm going to have to go back to my intention of reading his work, though I don't regret swapping him out for Walter Brueggemann, Elizabeth Johnson and, now Hans Kung.    It's one of my greatest regrets that I got suckered out of reading theology for so long by such idiots as gulled me into thinking it was pointless.  That's the complaint of someone who got gulled and swindled but who has only himself to blame for that.