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| Reinhold Niebuhr, 20th century American |
In my prior post on this topic, I touched on the history of
Christian political thought up to the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, after which (roughly
speaking) the weight of thought veers in a different direction after
Machiavelli and Hobbes. I now want to jump forward to the 20th
century and to the thinker whom I’ve found most informative and persuasive in
his analysis of politics and the problems of ethics: Reinhold Niebuhr. Taking a
cue from Protestant ministers who would announce the text upon which they would
base their homily, my text for this blog post will be Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of
Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its
Traditional Defense, published in 1944.
Niebuhr was an American theologian and political thinker active in public life from the 1920s to the 1960s. In a very helpful
introduction to my edition of The
Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Gary Dorrien (Reinhold
Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, and Professor
of Religion, Columbia University) provides a useful account of Niebuhr’s
thinking over his long career. Dorrien also provides a succinct statement of
some of Niebuhr’s most important themes and insights about politics and ethics:
- the problems of human “fallibility, sin, and ambiguity”;
- the understanding that human groups will always place self-interest first and foremost and therefore a struggle for power will ensue;
- occasionally individuals could overcome self-centeredness when motivated by love; and
- Jesus provides no direction with the issue of political ethics.
In a quote that should rival Churchill’s for its pithy and
ironic defense of democracy, Niebuhr wrote: “Man's capacity for justice makes
democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy
necessary.” Id. (Forward to the First Edition (1944)). Niebuhr identifies
democracy with the rise of the bourgeois in Europe and then in America. It
arose because individuals wanted to protect themselves and their property. So a
new balance was struck, one in which freedom from constraint and arbitrary
exercise of power became of the utmost importance. But Niebuhr also realized
the larger issues of freedom and community that arise from this background. He
writes:
Democracy can therefore
not be equated with freedom. An ideal democratic order seeks unity within the
conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order. Man
requires freedom in his social organization because he is “essentially” free,
which is to say, that he has the capacity for indeterminate transcendence over
the processes and limitations of nature. This freedom enables him to make
history and to elaborate communal organizations in boundless variety and in
endless breadth and extent. But he also requires community because he is by
nature social. He cannot fulfill his life within himself but only in
responsible and mutual relations with his fellows.
Id. (pp. 3-4)
Niebuhr is not a simple cheerleader for bourgeois democracy;
to the contrary, he is a sharp critic of it and of capitalism as a social and
economic system. He states:
Bourgeois individualism
may be excessive and it may destroy the individual's organic relation to the
community; but it was not intended to destroy either the national or the
international order. On the contrary the social idealism which informs our
democratic civilization had a touching faith in the possibility of achieving a
simple harmony between self-interest and the general welfare on every level.
Id. (p. 7)
But it is this faith that Niebuhr spurns, the belief in
progress and the inevitability of social improvement endorsed by those he terms
“the children of light”. Niebuhr describes the children of light:
Those who believe that
self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law could then
be termed “the children of light.” This is no mere arbitrary device; for evil
is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole,
whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total
community of mankind, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the
other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels. Devotion to a
subordinate and premature “whole” such as the nation, may of course become
evil, viewed from the perspective of a larger whole, such as the community of
mankind. The “children of light” may thus be defined as those who seek to bring
self-interest under the discipline of a more universal law and in harmony with
a more universal good.
Id. (pp. 9-10)
He then describes the “children of darkness”: “The children
of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise,
though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest.” Id. (p. 10). Where
the children of light are naïve, the children of darkness are knowing. Niebuhr
argues that for the children of light to succeed in bringing about a better
world, they must learn the ways of their cynical counterparts. And in what may
shock some contemporary readers, Niebuhr includes Marxists (at least some)
among the children of light: idealistic in believing self-will and conflict can
be finally resolved. He writes:
The Marxists, too, are
children of light. Their provisional cynicism does not even save them from the
usual stupidity, nor from the fate, of other stupid children of light. That
fate is to have their creed become the vehicle and instrument of the children
of darkness. A new oligarchy is arising in Russia, the spiritual
characteristics of which can hardly be distinguished from those of the American
“go-getters” of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And in the
light of history Stalin will probably have the same relation to the early
dreamers of the Marxist dreams which Napoleon has to the liberal dreamers of
the eighteenth century.
Id. (pp. 32-33)
Note that Niebuhr wrote this during the war, when Stalin led
one of our allies in a great titanic struggle and when Roosevelt believed he
could woo Stalin into joining a liberal post-war world. While Niebuhr’s equivalence
of American “go-getters” with the leaders of the Kremlin seems far-fetched, his
comparison of Stalin to Napoleon and crushed dreams is prescient.
Niebuhr sums up his brief for the children of light:
The preservation of a
democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness
of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the
children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the
power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification.
They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and
restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the
community.
Id. (pp. 40-41).
Niebuhr recognized the modern nation-state as the primary
actor in international politics. About it, he writes: “The morally autonomous
modern national state does indeed arise; and it acknowledges no law beyond its
interests. The actual behaviour of the nations is cynical. But the creed of
liberal civilization is sentimental.” Id. (p. 33). Thus a conflict, especially
open and obvious (and continuing) in American history between the idealists
(Wilsonians we may say) and the moral realists (of whom Niebuhr is perhaps the
most articulate). This dichotomy in American practice runs all through American
history in the twenthiecentury. Our most “Machiavellian” president[i],
Richard Nixon, admired Wilson and saw himself carrying on the Wilson legacy
while he proved himself a master of geopolitical realism in the American
interest. President Obama, who cited Niebuhr as his “favorite philosopher”,
walks a fine line between brutal realism, Niebuhr-like caution, and American
idealism, sentimentality, and nationalism.
Lest one think Niebuhr too pessimistic, we should note that
he supports efforts to limit conflict and build institutions: “The problem of
overcoming this chaos and of extending the principle of community to worldwide
terms has become the most urgent of all the issues which face our epoch.” Id. (p.
153). In fact, that we may think of a “world community has two important
sources that allow such a concept to enjoy any reality. The first source is
religion. Niebuhr writes:
While the religions of
the east [earlier referring to the Confucian and Daoist traditions of China and
the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India] were generally too mystic and
otherworldly to give historic potency to universal ideals, their emerging
universal perspectives must be counted as added evidence of the fact that there
has been a general development in human culture toward the culmination of
religions and philosophies in which the meaning of life and its obligations
were interpreted above and beyond the limits of any particular community.[ii]
Id. (pp. 156-157).
Niebuhr identifies the developments in the technical realm
as the other impetus toward a world community. Taken together, the reality of a
single world community is more than a liberal pipe dream. Yet, against this,
Niebuhr identifies the centrifugal force and predicts that “international
politics of the coming decades will be dominated by great powers who will be
able to prevent recalcitrance among the smaller nations, but who will have
difficulty in keeping peace between each other because they will not have any
authority above their own powerful enough to bend or deflect their wills.” Id.
(p. 171).
In making these observations, Niebuhr criticizes realism in
international relations almost as harshly as liberal institutionalism:
It is indicative of the
spiritual problem of mankind that these realistic approaches [to international
relations] are often as close to the abyss of cynicism as the idealistic
approaches are to the fog of sentimentality. The realistic school of
international thought believes that world politics cannot rise higher than the
balance-of-power principle. The balance-of-power theory of world politics,
seeing no possibility of a genuine unity of the nations, seeks to construct the
most adequate possible mechanism for equilibrating power on a world scale. Such
a policy, which holds all factors in the world situation in the most perfect
possible equipoise, can undoubtedly mitigate anarchy. A balance of power is in
fact a kind of managed anarchy. But it is a system in which anarchy invariably
overcomes the management in the end. Despite its defects the policy of the
balance of power is not as iniquitous as idealists would have us believe. For
even the most perfectly organized society must seek for a decent equilibrium of
the vitalities and forces under its organization. If this is not done, strong
disproportions of power develop; and wherever power is inordinate, injustice results.
But an equilibrium of power without the organizing and equilibrating force of
government, is potential anarchy which becomes actual anarchy in the long run.
The balance-of-power system may, despite its defects, become the actual
consequence of present policies. The peace of the world may be maintained
perilously and tentatively, for some decades, by an uneasy equilibrium between
the three great powers, America, Russia and Britain. [iii]
Id. (pp. 173-175)
Niebuhr goes on to consider the histories and practices of
particular nations: the U.S., Britain, Russia, and China, and how they will
relate the new order in the post-war world, displaying prophetic insight through his observations. He also notes (again) the tension between individual morality and political
realities that create tensions: “Hypocrisy and pretension are the inevitable
concomitants of the engagement between morals and politics. But they do not
arise where no effort is made to bring the power impulse of politics under the
control of conscience. The pretension that it has been brought completely under
control is thus the hypocritical by-product of the moral endeavour.” Id. (pp.
184-185). He sums up the quandary with this pronouncement: “The field of
politics is not helpfully tilled by pure moralists; and the realm of
international politics is particularly filled with complexities which do not
yield to the approach of a too simple idealism. Id. (p. 186). In the end,
Niebuhr concludes that we must strive for the impossible: a community where none
is fully realized peace where it is never final.
This book is less fundamental and comprehensive
than Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society,
but both works give us guidance as far as guidance can be found. As with
Buddhism, we have to conclude that we have no definitive standards for
conducting political life from the founders. The Christian tradition has built
theories (often conflicting), but none can fairly claim to have arisen directly
out of the Gospels or the New Testament. And we cannot turn to Niebuhr for
rules of ethics: he provides none. He opposed Roosevelt’s arms build-up before
Munich, and then he rallied in support of the fight against Fascism. In the
early 60’s he supported the U.S. effort in Vietnam, but he later became a vocal
critic of the war. Niebuhr’s thought is marked by ambiguity, irony, and
equivocation. One shouldn’t turn to it if you are looking for the answer to
whether a particular policy or course of political conduct meets a given test
of morality or ethics. There are no easy answers. For instance, should
the U.S. use drones on known Islamic terrorists plotting the death of Americans
when we know that innocents will be killed? Should we arm rebels and bomb because Americans have been murdered, even though the “collateral damage” (so Orwellian) will
claim innocent lives? The litany of tough practical and moral choices could
continue indefinitely. There is no existing answer book unless one takes a
position of absolutism.
Does the liberal-secular tradition provide a more reasoned, easily
identified set of answers? I hope to explore that in a future post, perhaps
considering Max Weber, Michael Ignatieff, and Michael Walzer. And for a
completely different take, I hope to consider the ideas of Gandhi about war and
peace, which may prove more nuanced than many would have thought.
[i] This
designation mischaracterizes both Machiavelli and Nixon. For a convincing
understanding of Machiavelli that goes beyond branding him a mere cynic (as
Niebuhr does), see Bobbitt, Garments of
Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made, which argues that
Machiavelli’s The Prince was a step
on the road to a republic and the unification of Italy and therefore a
provisional ethic. As to Nixon, he was more Shakespeare’s Richard III, who
sought to “set the murderous Machevil to school “(3 Henry IV, 3.2.16) with his personal ambition. Nixon had a
mixture of both. Kevin Spacey’s character Frank Underwood in House of Cards, likewise, is almost all
Richard III and no Machiavelli, at least in motive.
[ii] This
is an over generalization of “eastern” religions, and it overlooks that fact
that Christianity was—and is—an otherworldly religion.
[iii]See
Henry Kissinger's just published World
Order for a consideration and defense of a balance of power stance.
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