This is why we all admire Neibuhr; John Partick Diggins's new book Why Niebuhr Now? (review here via Andrew):
Everyone seems to love Niebuhr these days, but not everyone gets him right. Especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy, where the stakes are often as high as they can be, intellectuals tend to get very serious. Niebuhr was of course serious, at times ponderous, himself. Yet he consistently warned against the kind of seriousness that dismisses the ironies inherent in human existence. Anyone who believes that either making war or making peace is relatively straightforward cannot appreciate the insights that Niebuhr left behind.
Diggins gets Niebuhr right because, like his subject, Diggins was never a person comfortable with the certainties of either anti-war leftism or triumphalist neo-conservatism. Progressivism, as the name implies, drew lines too straight for both men’s liking. At the same time, Diggins admired Ronald Reagan, the hero of many a neoconservative, but only because he believed that this most right-wing of presidents dreamed of a nuclear-free world. Whether or not Diggins was right about Reagan, he certainly writes in the same spirit as Niebuhr. With every rhetorical tool available to him, Niebuhr dismissed not only left-wing idealism but also the simplistic moralizing that passes for conservative foreign policy-making. For Niebuhr, as Diggins writes, “evil must be faced rather than denied”—but those determined to stare it down no matter what the consequences, like all of God’s creatures, suffer from the sin of pride. “Must we not warn victorious nations that they are wrong in regarding their victory as proof of their virtue,” Niebuhr wrote in 1948, “lest they engulf the world in a new chain of evil by their vindictiveness, which is nothing else than the fury of their self-righteousness?”
Everyone seems to love Niebuhr these days, but not everyone gets him right. Especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy, where the stakes are often as high as they can be, intellectuals tend to get very serious. Niebuhr was of course serious, at times ponderous, himself. Yet he consistently warned against the kind of seriousness that dismisses the ironies inherent in human existence. Anyone who believes that either making war or making peace is relatively straightforward cannot appreciate the insights that Niebuhr left behind.
Diggins gets Niebuhr right because, like his subject, Diggins was never a person comfortable with the certainties of either anti-war leftism or triumphalist neo-conservatism. Progressivism, as the name implies, drew lines too straight for both men’s liking. At the same time, Diggins admired Ronald Reagan, the hero of many a neoconservative, but only because he believed that this most right-wing of presidents dreamed of a nuclear-free world. Whether or not Diggins was right about Reagan, he certainly writes in the same spirit as Niebuhr. With every rhetorical tool available to him, Niebuhr dismissed not only left-wing idealism but also the simplistic moralizing that passes for conservative foreign policy-making. For Niebuhr, as Diggins writes, “evil must be faced rather than denied”—but those determined to stare it down no matter what the consequences, like all of God’s creatures, suffer from the sin of pride. “Must we not warn victorious nations that they are wrong in regarding their victory as proof of their virtue,” Niebuhr wrote in 1948, “lest they engulf the world in a new chain of evil by their vindictiveness, which is nothing else than the fury of their self-righteousness?”
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