Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 22 September 2021

 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Beyond the confines of neo-Platonic philosophy, the special significance of the value triad of goodness, truth, and beauty has also been recognized by a wide diversity of significant writers such as Aquinas, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, Schelling, Tolstoy, Whitehead, Freud, Gandhi, Sorokin, and Einstein, to name a few. Many spiritual teachers, in both the East and the West, have also extolled this triad of values, including Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner, Thich Nhat Hanh, Cardinal Newman, and Osho Rajneesh. Sri Aurobindo, for example, describes goodness, truth, and beauty as the “three dynamic images” through which one makes contact with “supreme Reality.” The leading secular writer currently championing this triad is Howard Gardner, whose book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (New York: Basic Books, 2012) [referenced in the main text].

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field. Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Nixon’s career, whatever else one could say of it, had been at least as consistent as Kennedy’s—as that of the liberal hot-cold warrior, Catholic secularist, McCarthyite civil-libertarian, who changed flags often and deftly. Indeed, it was Kennedy’s ease of adjustment that saved him from his own campaign promises and initial vision of the presidency. He had come to that office preaching cold war as a crusade. Domestic satisfaction seemed almost too complete under Ike; the country was affluent, snoozy, no New Deal rhetoric could rouse it; poverty was undiscovered, and black unrest just stirring. Kennedy, with his call for escape from the Eisenhower narcolepsy, had to reduce everything to a contest with Khrushchev.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

It [the "immune system" to certain attitudes] was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

[A]s Socrates urged against Glaucon, the individual character considered in isolation from its environment is an abstraction, not a really existing thing. What a man does depends only to a limited extent on what kind of man he is. No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world will conquer him.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In De Cive (1651), Hobbes wrote of the sovereign’s duty to keep a firm grip on the universities lest they turn out seditious thinkers who, if clever, would cloud “sound doctrine” on which civil peace depended, or, if stupid, would stir up the ignorant from the common pulpit. Spinoza, who mistrusted clerics and churches, argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that although a person’s beliefs were private and could not be controlled from outside, worship in public was a social matter. “If we want to obey God rightly,” he wrote in chapter, “the external practice of religion must be accommodated to the peace of the republic.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[H]eaven help the elected official who, in the manner of Edmund Burke, tries to argue against the personal interest of his or her constituents or to communicate bad news.

Escaping Cultural Hypnosis - Startling Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

A hypnotic reality is any 'pseudo reality' (secondary reality) that exists in the mind of an individual or groups of individuals only: it has no supporting proof; it is founded on ideas and not experience.

The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization & Barbarism by R.G. Collingwood, rev. ed. David Boucher

The last work by Collingwood published before his death

The New Leviathan is the last book Collingwood published before his death at age 53 in early 1943.  Collingwood had suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes secondary to uncontrolled high blood pressure (for which doctors at the time could only prescribe "the rest cure"). In a race against death, Collingwood attempted to make sense of the political world in which he was then living, marred as it was by fascism and war. He did so by taking the architectonic work of modern political thought, The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, as his model. Let me introduce my brief consideration of this work with Collingwood's reflection on his project of building an understanding of politics from the ground up. I find it quite pertinent today.

12. 9. Our favourite nightmare in the twentieth century is about our powerlessness in the giant grip of economic and social and political structures; the nightmare which Professor Arnold Toynbee calls ‘The Intractableness of Institutions’.  

12. 91. The founders of modern political science made it clear once for all that these Leviathans are ‘Artificial Animals’, creatures formed by the art of man, ‘for whose protection and defence’ they were intended. 

12. 92. This is the ground of the nightmare. Oppression and exploitation, persecution and war, the torturing to death of human beings in vast helpless masses, are not new things on the face of the earth, and nobody thinks they are; nor are they done in the world on a greater scale or with more refinement of cruelty than they have been done in the past; nor have we grown more sensitive, to shrink, as men once did not, from blood.  

12. 93. But Hobbes (and others, but especially Hobbes) has for the first time in history held up a hope that there would be ‘protection and defence’ against these things; and by now the hope has sunk into our common consciousness; so that when we find it to be precisely the agents of this longed-for safety that are the chief authors of the evils for whose ending we have made them, hope turns to despair and we are ridden by another Frankenstein-nightmare, like Samuel Butler’s nightmare of humanity enslaved to its own machines, only worse.  

12. 94. But the despair, once more, is parasitic upon the hope.  

12. 95. If the hope went, the despair would go too. If we believed Marx’s monstrous lie that all States have always been organs for the oppression of one class by another, there would be nothing to make all this fuss about.  

12. 96. To strengthen the hope until it overcomes the nightmare, what must be done is to carry on the work, sadly neglected since Hobbes and a handful of successors began it, of constructing a science of politics appropriate for the modern world.  

12. 97. Towards such a science this book is offered as a contribution.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (All quotes to numbered paragraphs are in the Revised Edition edited by David Boucher published in 1992.)

Collingwood is known to most readers--if he's known at all--for his work in the philosophy of history. But his most comprehensive publication work in that field, The Idea of History, wasn't published until 1945, and it was in some measure incomplete because of the editorial choices of Collingwood's literary executor, T.M. Knox. Collingwood had also published in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics (and archeology). In short, in some ways--but not in others--he was a traditional academic philosopher, educated and then later employed at Oxford University, finishing his career as the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. But in the late 1930s, his attention turned to the political world around him, which was marked by the rise of fascism and increasing violence. He shocked and disturbed some of his more staid colleagues by growing a beard and declaring in his Autobiography (1939), his intention to dive into contemporary political issues. He closed his Autobiography with these words: 

I am writing a description of the way in which those events [the rise and response to Fascism] impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight. 

Collingwood, R. G. An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Having laid down his gauntlet, and in the face of his declining health, Collingwood embarked on his final work, which became The New Leviathan.  

In approaching this work, I have to admit I was a bit puzzled at the choice of Hobbes's great work as a model. My admittedly incomplete reading and knowledge of Hobbes pegged his work as solitary, nasty, brutish, but not short. And absolutist to boot. But Collingwood has earned my respect, and he addresses the issues concerning his role-model up-front. In his Preface, Collingwood writes: 

A READER may take the title of this book in whichever way he pleases. If he is one of those who think of Hobbes’s Leviathan as the classical exposition of a classical type of despotism, namely seventeenth-century absolutism, the portrait and anatomy of ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall’, he may take it to mean that I have set out in this ‘New Leviathan’ to portray and anatomize the new absolutism of the twentieth century, based (like that which Hobbes described) on the will of a people who in thus setting up a popular tyrant gave into his hands every right any one of them has hitherto possessed. For the immediate aim of this book is to study the new absolutism and inquire into its nature, causes, and prospects of success or failure; success, I mean, in either destroying all competitors and becoming the political form of the future, or at least contributing to the political life of the future some positive heritage of ideas and institutions which men will not forget.

Collingwood continues to defend his choice:

If he thinks of the Leviathan as a book which is unique in dealing with the entire body of political science and approaches its colossal subject from first principles, that is, from an examination of man, his faculties and interests, his virtues and vices; a book dealing first with man as such, then with political life as such, then with a well-ordered political life or a ‘CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH’, and lastly with an ill-ordered political life or ‘KINGDOME OF DARKNESSE’; then he may take my title to mean, not that I have in fact dealt with these vast subjects exhaustively, but that in this book I have set out to deal with the same groups of problems in the same order, calling the four parts of my book ‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’. Readers of the second school (though I have no quarrel with the others) will of the two be nearer to my own way of thinking. It is only now, towards the middle of the twentieth century, that men here and there are for the first time becoming able to appreciate Hobbes’s Leviathan at its true worth, as the world’s greatest store of political wisdom. I say that this is only now beginning to happen. From the time of its publication, when it impressed every reader with a force directly proportional to his own intelligence as the greatest work of political science the world had ever seen, but pleased nobody because there was no class of readers whose corns it left untrodden upon or whose withers it left unwrung, it fell more and more deeply into disfavour beneath a rising tide of ethical and political sentimentalism. Hardly a single political writer from the seventeenth century to the present day has been able so to clear his mind of that sentimentalism as to look Hobbes in the face and see behind those repellently grim features what manner of man he was; or to see behind the savage irony of his style how deeply he understood himself and his fellow men.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (Revised ed. ilx-lx)

(I'd apologize for the long quotes, but Collingwood is also a master prose-stylist whose pithy remarks I have a hard time trimming.) 

Collingwood thus proceeds to build his New Leviathan from the ground up, beginning with "Man," his term for individual psychology. In taking this course, Collingwood follows Hobbes's example in delving into the basics of the human animal. Unlike any of his earlier works, Collingwood works in numbered paragraphs (similar, for instance to Wittgenstein's Tractatus but without the austerity of style and expression). (One may see the numbered paragraphs in my quotes from this work, except in the Preface.) It is as if Collingwood wanted to make sure that he completed his foundation before moving on to the next level; he wanted to denote his thoughts as if they were a part of a schematic or engineering diagram. Happily, while this keeps his thoughts somewhat artificially separate and short, it doesn't necessarily reduce the felicity of his prose, metaphors, and analogies, which he deploys with such great effect. But it does serve to remind the reader of what a careful and thorough construction Collingwood is providing his reader. When needed, Collingwood can analyze and talk logic with the best of them. 

Because this is an architectonic work, it isn't easy to summarize. Each of the four parts into which he divides the book, "‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’" are set forth at length and sometimes include some intriguing digressions. But for purposes of this review, let me only point to a couple of highlights to give a sense of where Collingwood takes his readers. For instance, he borrows the terms "Yahoos" from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to great effect. (I've previously posted a series of quotes on this blog, beginning here.) In another section, he sets forth what he describes as the "Three Laws of Politics," which, when I first read them, struck me as a bit simplistic, but which, upon further reflection, strike me as capturing some essences of political life. Collingwood describes his three laws as follows: 

25. 7. The FIRST LAW OF POLITICS is that a body politic is divided into a ruling class and a ruled class.
25. 8. The SECOND LAW OF POLITICS is that the barrier between the two classes is permeable in an upward sense.
25. 9. This brings us to the THIRD LAW OF POLITICS: namely that there is a correspondence between the ruler and the ruled, whereby the former become adapted to ruling these as distinct from other persons, and the latter to being ruled by these as distinct from other persons. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Collingwood's use of the term "ruling class" may jar some ears, but if you chose, you can substitute "elites," but the point remains. To Collingwood the (classical) liberal and democrat, the key fact isn't the existence of a ruling class, but that it is "permeable in an upward sense." But it is the Third Law that strikes me as most important today: the existence of a "correspondence between the ruler and the ruled." Collingwood elucidates his Third Law in the following: 

25. 91. Working directly, or from the ruling class downwards, the ruler sets the fashion, and the ruled fall in with his lead.  

25. 92. But the Third Law also works inversely, from the ruled class upwards, and determines that whoever is to rule a certain people must rule them in the way in which they will let themselves be ruled.  

25. 93. Both setting the fashion and following it may be done either consciously or unconsciously; but the process is most likely to take the inverse form when it originates unconsciously in the mere, blind, unpolitical stupidity of the ruled, imposing limits on what their rulers can do with them.  

25. 94. An example of this law occurs when vigorous rulers teach the ruled to co-operate with them and to develop, under their tuition, a vigorous political life, a similarity in political enterprise and resource, like their own. In this way that portion of the ruled class which is more closely in contact with the ruling class receive a training for political action which enables them to succeed, in time, their rulers. Here the freedom whereby the rulers rule percolates, owing simply to the process of ruling, without any intention that it shall do so, downwards through the strata of the body politic.  

25. 95. But this only happens when the rulers are vigorous. Let the rulers be of a slavish sort, and what will percolate is slavishness.  

25. 96. When that happens in a body politic, it is hard to say whether the percolation is downward or upward; and the inquiry has little importance.  

25. 97. What is important is to know whether the process to which the body politic is subject is increasing or diminishing. Here is a ruling class, of one or more: to what does its rule tend? To the advancement of freedom, and therefore the ability to cope with political problems, or to its diminution? It is no use raising the question whether freedom is a good thing or not: freedom in the ruling class is nothing else than the fact that the ruling class rules, and the cry against freedom which accompanies the rise of Fascism and Nazism is a confused propaganda for the abolition of one thing (freedom for the ruled) where the distinction between that and another thing (freedom for the ruler) is overlooked. Of course no Fascist or Nazi protests against freedom for the ruler!  

25. 98. In Plato’s Republic the ‘tyrant’ is not a skilful and determined politician who seizes power for himself, but a piece of flotsam floating on the political waves he pretends to control, shoved passively into power by the sheer lowness of its own specific gravity. This is quite possible by the inverse working of the Third Law of Politics. Hitler, referring to Plato’s sense of the word ‘democracy’, claims to be a democratic ruler. He claims that he has been, so to speak, ejected by the automatic working of a mob, which elevates to a position of supremacy over itself whatever is most devoid of free will, whatever can be entirely trusted to do what is dictated by the desires which the mob feels. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

I can't read the words above without thinking about the current state of affairs in the U.S. without thinking about how our current "ruling class" (or the visible part of it), the Trump administration, has infected our entire body politic. When I first completed a reading of The New Leviathan in January 2016, I didn't know that the U.S. would elect a populist demagogue who would promote authoritarian values from the White House. I didn't appreciate the worldwide tide of authoritarianism abroad throughout the world. With this most recent reading, this book came alive to me in a new way. The words above (and others that I've quoted in earlier blog posts) speak to the world in which we live. Look again at Para. 25.98 (above) and tell me that you don't think of Trump! 

I intend to offer further reflect further upon Collingwood's The New Leviathan in a series of blog posts, but I want to address one other point before I close. As an undergraduate, I developed what I came to refer to as an "intellectual crush" on the work of Hannah Arendt. And with the election of Trump, I immediately turned to her work as a benchmark for attempting to come to grips with our predicament. Of late, this turn back to Arendt has been enhanced by joining a Virtual Reading Group sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. As to Collingwood, I didn't "discover" his work until around 2015, although I'd had a brief exposure as an undergraduate to his work in a Philosophy of History course. The exposure didn't take. (Dumb kid.) Now, as I've delved deeply into Collingwood's work, I perceive a number of similarities with Arendt's project. Both were what we might term "pure philosophers" during the early portions of their careers, but the events of the 1930s and 40s compelled both of them to turn their thoughts toward politics. Both were deeply schooled in the traditions of Greek and Latin antiquity, as well as modern philosophy. But most importantly, both emphasize the importance of speech, thought, and action in political affairs. I intend to explore the similarities between these two thinkers in the future. (N.B. I don't think that there are any direct connections between the two, but perhaps Arendt had some familiarity with Collingwood's work.) Both Arendt and Collingwood provide me with insights and models of politics that I find crucial in our dark times. 

sng 9 June 2020

Quotes from Ophuls, Pt. 3

The drama of modern politics is a tragedy in which the hero, his supposed enlightenment being but another name for hubris, has become the author of his own impending doom. 54

The inexorable tendency of all forms of polity based on liberal premises, as Hobbes himself made explicit, is to compensate for the decline in civic virtue of the individual by increasing the political power of the state – the story of modern politics in a nutshell. 55

The so-called American revolution was, in fact, a rebellion, reluctantly undertaken only after much brooding and many efforts to obtain a redress of grievances. Thus it was fought not to overturn colonial society but to overthrow Royal authority. Nor did the American aristocracy ever abandon its cultural and philosophical allegiance to the mother country or to European civilization in general. In fact, the Founding Fathers exemplified (and were seen by their European contemporaries as exemplifying) the best of the Enlightenment civilization, combining philosophical learning and high principles derived from natural religion with practical reason and political skill. 58

Quotes from Ophuls, Pt. 2

Despotism may govern without faith, liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral ties not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with the people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the deity?

Alexi de Tocqueville 29

[M]arx, as much biblical prophet as political philosopher, brokes decisively with Hobbes and the Enlightenment mainstream by brining religion back into politics. The Marxist sovereign has the duty to . . . end the class domination and social oppression that has marred all previous history. When this overweaning objective is joined to the general enlightenment drive for social perfection, the result is an ideological crusade for an earthly paradise – in effect, a secular religion. By resurrecting the eschatological element that Hobbbes had tried to exclude from politics, Marx unleased a new era of quasireligous warfare, both withing and between states. . . . As a political doctrine, Marxism therefore combines the autoritariansim of Hobbes with the very worst aspect of premodern politics: the religious element that Hobbes tried so hard to get rid of. 42

The usual way of putting it is to say that women have escaped an anomalous and inferior status to take their rightful place in the modern world. But it would probably be more accurate to say that capitalism has finally succeeded incorporating the last major class to resist the blandishments of the market system. 52

Buddha, Jesus & Socrates Need Help: Part 2 via Reinhold Niebuhr

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 20^th 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. 

This last proposition severs Niebuhr from the Social Gospel proponents with whom he once shared allegiance. In arguing that Jesus taught no political ethic, Niebuhr identified a central lacuna in the Gospels that later tradition sought to rectify. Thus, Niebuhr takes up issues that St. Augustine struggled with near the beginning of Christianity in Late Antiquity. Following the lead of Augustine, along with influences (theologically) from Luther and Calvin, Niebuhr develops a realist stance of Christian (and secular) ethics toward the political world. In his Introduction, Dorrien describes The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, as “written at midcareer as Niebuhr was coming fully into his own, is the most comprehensive statement of his political philosophy.” Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition (Introduction by Gary Dorrien). A careful consideration of this work suggests ways in which we can think about bridging the gap between individual ethics that require love and eschew violence against the realities of political power. 
 

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.

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[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.