The Irony Of American Righteousness - Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. After studying at Yale Divinity School, he began his pastoral work in Detroit in 1915, where he spent thirteen years witnessing the harsh realities of industrial capitalism. Beneath the shadow of Henry Ford’s factories, Niebuhr saw workers exploited and discarded. These experiences shaped his entire theological outlook and dispelled the optimistic Social Gospel theology in which he had been trained.

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At the core of Niebuhr’s ideas is a paradox: human beings can strive for justice but are also prone to injustice. In his 1944 key work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr provided what might be the most insightful one-sentence defense of democracy ever written: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

His 1932 book *Moral Man and Immoral Society* made a key distinction: individuals can sometimes go beyond self-interest through love and reason, but groups almost never do. Collectives like nations, corporations, or movements tend to combine individual selfishness into a “collective egoism” that is far more resistant to moral constraints than any person’s conscience. This idea became his main theme: the danger of self-righteousness. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people,” he warned, “but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

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Later, Niebuhr used his theological ideas to analyze American identity. He argued that the United States had developed an “innocent self-image” that made it blind to its own moral faults. America thought it was immune to the corruptions affecting other great powers.

The irony of American history, Niebuhr argued, is that the nation’s virtues turn into its vices. The work ethic that built prosperity becomes worship of money. The faith that held communities together turns into theocratic pretension. The confidence that led to victories in war gives rise to imperial hubris. “No laughter from heaven,” he wrote, “could possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.” When political rallies resemble worship services and when a partisan victory is declared to be divine approval, we have entered territory that Niebuhr mapped decades ago.

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Niebuhr famously defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” This straightforward formulation offers both warning and hope. The warning: human problems are never permanently resolved. The hope: even without final solutions, we can develop workable arrangements that balance competing interests and limit concentrated power. 

What would Niebuhr advise for our current times? First, humility truly involves recognizing that we are limited, flawed, and self-deceived. Second, engaging without self-righteousness means making difficult choices among imperfect options while acknowledging that choosing involves us in the complexities of power. Third, a revival of irony, not cynical detachment, but the ability to see tragedy in victory and grace in defeat. Finally, forgiveness: “the recognition that our actions and attitudes are inevitably seen in a different light by friends and foes than we see them.”

- More Here

Martin Luther King, Jr. Struggled With Reinhold Niebuhr's Pessimism on Human Nature

This is an old article I re-read here on the blog, it's brilliant. No question, I am with Reinhold Niebuhr on human nature. It's so ironic that Reinhold although a Christian pastor was a realist when it comes to human nature and didn't confuse it magical thinking.

Gandhi and King were lucky to have had the support from Brits and Americans during their respective even before they even existed. They knew about these support pillars before embarking on a non-violent path.  They confused that with magical thinking and human nature.

The basic question is here about human nature. Reinhold Niebuhr got it right. Read King's biased analysis of finding a way to "include magic" into reality. Too much religion in everyday life is prone to overfit the thinking into confirmation bias of magic (his phrase divine-human nature is nothing but a joke).

But my intellectual odyssey to nonviolence did not end here. During my last year in theological school, I began to read the works of Reinhold Niebuhr. The prophetic and realistic elements in Niebuhr's passionate style and profound thought were appealing to me, and I became so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote.
About this time I read Niebuhr's critique of the pacifist position. Niebuhr had himself once been a member of the pacifist ranks. For several years, he had been national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.* His break with pacifism came in the early thirties, and the first full statement of his criticism of pacifism was in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Here he argued that there was no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance. The social consequences of the two methods were different, he contended, but the differences were in degree rather than kind. Later Niebuhr began emphasizing the irresponsibility of relying on nonviolent resistance when there was no ground for believing that it would be successful in preventing the spread of totalitarian tyranny. It could only be successful, he argued, if the groups against whom the resistance was taking place had some degree of moral conscience, as was the case in Gandhi's struggle against the British. Niebuhr's ultimate rejection of pacifism was based primarily on the doctrine of man. He argued that pacifism failed to do justice to the reformation doctrine of justification by faith, substituting for it a sectarian perfectionism which believes "that divine grace actually lifts man out of the sinful contradictions of history and establishes him above the sins of the world."

At first, Niebuhr's critique of pacifism left me in a state of confusion. As I continued to read, however, I came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position. For instance, many of his statements revealed that he interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive nonresistance to evil expressing naive trust in the power of love. But this was a serious distortion. My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
In spite of the fact that I found many things to be desired in Niebuhr's philosophy, there were several points at which he constructively influenced my thinking. Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. These elements in Niebuhr's thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man's potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.

Many pacifists, I felt, failed to see this. All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness. It was my revolt against these attitudes under the influence of Niebuhr that accounts for the fact that in spite of my strong leaning toward pacifism, I never joined a pacifist organization. After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts.

The next stage of my intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence came during my doctoral studies at Boston University. Here I had the opportunity to talk to many exponents of nonviolence, both students and visitors to the campus. Boston University School of Theology, under the influence of Dean Walter Muelder and Professor Allen Knight Chalmers, had a deep sympathy for pacifism. Both Dean Muelder and Dr. Chalmers had a passion for social justice that stemmed, not from a superficial optimism, but from a deep faith in the possibilities of human beings when they allowed themselves to become co-workers with God. It was at Boston University that I came to see that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature. His pessimism concerning human nature was not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature. He was so involved in diagnosing man's sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace.

Wisdom Of The Week

This era more or less will be defined in the annals of history as the era of Dawn of Artificial Intelligence:

This improvement is not a lucky coincidence; it is cause and effect. Things have gotten better because there are more people, who in total have more good ideas that improve our overall lot. The economist Julian Simon was one of the first to make this optimistic argument, and he advanced it repeatedly and forcefully throughout his career. He wrote, “It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.”

We do have one quibble with Simon, however. He wrote that, “The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.” We agree about the fuel but disagree about the brake. The main impediment to progress has been that, until quite recently, a sizable portion of the world’s people had no effective way to access the world’s stock of knowledge or to add to it.

Now, its only common sense to heed to intelligent critics like John Gray who warns us against mindless progress and utopianism (note: we are not taking about alarmists but a very valid and rational caution):

If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

The distance between human and animal silence is a consequence of the use of language. It is not that other creatures lack language. The discourse of the birds is more than a human metaphor. Cats and dogs stir in their sleep, and talk to themselves as they go about their business. Only humans use words to construct a self-image and a story of their lives. But if other animals lack this interior monologue, it is not clear why this should put humans on a higher plane. Why should breaking silence and then loudly struggling to renew it be such an achievement?

Today the good life means making full use of science and technology - without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable, or even sane. It means seeking peace - without hoping for a world without war. It means cherishing freedom - in the knowledge that it is an interval between anarchy and tyranny.

F.A. Hayek warned us decades ago quoting Friedrich Höderlin his famous book The Road to Serfdom:

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

I think, the most disparity is caused during progress because the optimist's mostly use more of numeracy and less of literacy filter and the other side uses more of literacy and less of numeracy filter. But both sides almost never use Garrett Hardin's Ecolacy filter:

WE CAN NEVER DO MERELY ONE THING which is now known as Hardin's Law. The language that we have used to describe the effects of our actions demonstrates the reality that Hardin's Law draws our attention to. We talk about effects and side effects, products and wastes.

Hardin contends that since we cannot do just one thing we must always ask and answer the question and  THEN WHAT? when we try to ascertain the benefits and costs of proposed courses of action on both the individual as well as social levels. The ecological systems way of thinking employs modern scientific theories and knowledge to study a world of interlocking processes characterized by many reciprocal cause effect pathways. The ecological systems way of thinking has to become an integral part of the thinking of the well educated person if we are to adequately control technology rather than fall victim to the forces we generate and are unable or unwilling to control. Ecological systems thinking provides well educated persons with the opportunity to act more rationally, because they have learned a more comprehensive and more accurate way of estimating the probable costs and benefits of their actions.

During this era of AI, I think its prudent to remind ourselves of those wise words from Hardin and start using those three filters together so we all can benefit from progress in the long run.

And finally, a wise man named Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned us few decades ago about the political delusional innocence of this young country but it also applies to social, cultural and technical progress:

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).

Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Library of Theological Ethics)" (1932); "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")

The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952, resound more than a half-century later. "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

Quote of the Day

The illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny from any particular standpoint in history, always involves … miscalculations about both the power and the wisdom of the managers and of the weakness and the manageability of the historical ‘stuff’ which is to be managed.

- The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

Martin Luther King, Jr. Struggled With Reinhold Niebuhr's Pessimism

But my intellectual odyssey to nonviolence did not end here. During my last year in theological school, I began to read the works of Reinhold Niebuhr. The prophetic and realistic elements in Niebuhr's passionate style and profound thought were appealing to me, and I became so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote.
About this time I read Niebuhr's critique of the pacifist position. Niebuhr had himself once been a member of the pacifist ranks. For several years, he had been national chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.* His break with pacifism came in the early thirties, and the first full statement of his criticism of pacifism was in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Here he argued that there was no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance. The social consequences of the two methods were different, he contended, but the differences were in degree rather than kind. Later Niebuhr began emphasizing the irresponsibility of relying on nonviolent resistance when there was no ground for believing that it would be successful in preventing the spread of totalitarian tyranny. It could only be successful, he argued, if the groups against whom the resistance was taking place had some degree of moral conscience, as was the case in Gandhi's struggle against the British. Niebuhr's ultimate rejection of pacifism was based primarily on the doctrine of man. He argued that pacifism failed to do justice to the reformation doctrine of justification by faith, substituting for it a sectarian perfectionism which believes "that divine grace actually lifts man out of the sinful contradictions of history and establishes him above the sins of the world."

At first, Niebuhr's critique of pacifism left me in a state of confusion. As I continued to read, however, I came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position. For instance, many of his statements revealed that he interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive nonresistance to evil expressing naive trust in the power of love. But this was a serious distortion. My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
In spite of the fact that I found many things to be desired in Niebuhr's philosophy, there were several points at which he constructively influenced my thinking. Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. These elements in Niebuhr's thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man's potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil.

Many pacifists, I felt, failed to see this. All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness. It was my revolt against these attitudes under the influence of Niebuhr that accounts for the fact that in spite of my strong leaning toward pacifism, I never joined a pacifist organization. After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts.

The next stage of my intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence came during my doctoral studies at Boston University. Here I had the opportunity to talk to many exponents of nonviolence, both students and visitors to the campus. Boston University School of Theology, under the influence of Dean Walter Muelder and Professor Allen Knight Chalmers, had a deep sympathy for pacifism. Both Dean Muelder and Dr. Chalmers had a passion for social justice that stemmed, not from a superficial optimism, but from a deep faith in the possibilities of human beings when they allowed themselves to become co-workers with God. It was at Boston University that I came to see that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature. His pessimism concerning human nature was not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature. He was so involved in diagnosing man's sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

"The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code with make the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscious. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command."

- Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr

Why Niebuhr Now? - John Patrick Diggins

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?” 

Wisdom Of The Week

Andrew's beautiful post on Neibuhr's final form of love - Forgiveness:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.
Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.


And then one reads this story. A 27-year old Rais Bhuiyan was working at a gas station when a white supremacist enraged by 9/11 came in and shot him in the face. The attacker was on a spree of non-white killings and was captured, tried, and sentenced to die next month. Buiyan wants to commute his assailant's sentence, despite having his face almost destroyed and being blind in one eye. Here's why:


"I strongly believe he was ignorant," Bhuiyan explained to the audience. "He couldn't differentiate right from wrong. ... By executing him now, we are losing everything." His Muslim faith, he said, teaches forgiveness, not vengeance.


Nadeem Akthar, the brother-in-law of another of Stroman's victims, Hasan, spoke at the press conference as well. "The last 10 years have been a long 10 years," he told the audience. "We've been going through a lot of turmoil ... but we made it here." He quoted Sura 5, verse 32 from the Quran, something he said his sister, Hasan's wife, had wanted him to share. "If someone slays one person, he has slain mankind entirely," reads the verse. "And if someone has saved one person, he has saved mankind entirely."

The Grace of Doing Nothing vs Must We Do Nothing - Niebuhr on Humanitarian Intervention

Niebuhr's influence on the 44th is no secret; Niebuhr on humanitarian intervention - here (pdf):

All this does not prove, however, that we ought to apply the words Jesus, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," literally. If we do we will never be able to act. There will never by a wholly disinterested nation. Pure disinterestedness is an ideal which even individuals cannot fully achieve, and human groups are bound always to express themselves in lower ethical forms than individuals. It follows that no nation can ever be good enough to save another nation purely by the power of love. The relation of nations and of economic groups can never be brought into terms of pure love. Justice is probably the highest ideal toward which human groups can aspire. And justice, with its goal of adjustment of right to right, inevitably involves the assertion of right against right and interests against interest until some kind of harmony is achieved. If a measure of humility and of love does not enter this conflict of interest it will of course degenerate into violence. A rational society will be able to develop a measure of the kind of imagination which knows who to appreciate the virtues of an opponent's position and the weakness in one's own. But the ethical and spiritual note of love and repentance can do no more than qualify the social struggle in history. It will never abolish it.

I find it impossible to envisage a society of pure love as long as man remains man. His natural limitations of reason and imagination will prevent him, even should he achieve a purely disinterested motive, from fully envisaging the needs of his fellow men or from determining his actions upon the basis of their interests. Inevitably these limitations of individuals will achieve cumulative effect in the life and actions of national, racial and economic groups. It is possible to envisage a more ethical society than we now have. It is possible to believe that such a society will be achieved partly by evolutionary process and partly by catastrophe in which an old order, which offers a too stubborn resistance to new forces, is finally destroyed.
It is plausible also to interpret both the evolutionary and the catastrophic elements in history in religious terms and to see the counsels of God in them. But it is hardly plausible to expect divine intervention to introduce something into history which is irrelevant to anything we find in history now. We may envisage a society in which human cooperation is possible with a minimum amount of coercion at all—unless, of course, human beings become quite different from what they now are. We may hope for a society in which self-interest is qualified by rigorous self-analysis and a stronger social impulse, but we cannot imagine a society totally without the assertion of self-interest and therefore without the conflict of opposing interests.

To say all this is really to confess that the history of mankind is a personal tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms. If there is a law in our members which wars against the law that is in our minds as individuals, this is even more true when we think of society. Individuals set the goal for society but society itself must achieve the goals, and society is and will always remain sub- human. The goal which a sensitive individual sets for society must therefore always be something which is a little outside and beyond history. Love may qualify the social struggle of history but it will never abolish it, and those who make the attempt to bring society under the dominion of perfect love will die on the cross. And those who behold the cross are quire right in seeing it as a revelation of the divine, of what man ought to be cannot be, at least not so long as he is enmeshed in the processes of history."

Circa 2011, Operation Odyssey Dawn:

"This is not an outcome that the United States or any of our partners sought. Even yesterday, the international community offered Muammar Qaddafi the opportunity to pursue an immediate cease-fire, one that stopped the violence against civilians and the advances of Qaddafi’s forces. But despite the hollow words of his government, he has ignored that opportunity. His attacks on his own people have continued. His forces have been on the move. And the danger faced by the people of Libya has grown.
I am deeply aware of the risks of any military action, no matter what limits we place on it. I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice and it’s not a choice that I make lightly. But we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and his forces step up their assaults on cities like Benghazi and Misurata, where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government.
So we must be clear: Actions have consequences, and the writ of the international community must be enforced. That is the cause of this coalition."

The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr

The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr

Quest for innocence in political journalism

I read this article early this year but didn't want to post it here because of politics.  I changed my mind now since the essence of it is not about political ideology but its grim remainder on how we forgot what journalism is all about.  In the chaos of  political hogwash, flash news et al we lost the journalistic sanctity. This is not only bad for democracy but it also dampens the standards of common sense of the crowds.

"This is original reporting at a very high level of commitment to public service; it is expensive, difficult, and increasingly rare in a news business suffering under economic collapse.

So I want to make it absolutely clear that I treasure this kind of journalism and indeed devoured Barstow’s report when it came online. (Although I wish it had been twice as long.) And I have no problem with his decision to confine himself to description of the movement, rather than evaluating its goodness or badness. The first task is to understand, and that is why we need reporters willing to go out there and witness the phenomenon, interview the participants, pore over the texts and struggle with their account until they feel they have it right."

One of most important thing I have learnt from Max is to look at the world with innocent eyes and to shed all the preconceived notions. It comes naturally to him but its a constant life long struggle for us. Nevertheless, its worth the effort since one gets to see the world in a completely new perspective.

Innocence is different from immaturity and ignorance. Reinhold Niebhur was against innocence but I believe its only because people were masquerading their laziness and perpetual adolescence as innocence. Very convenient right?

“That's what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end”
-Lise Hand

Reinhold Niebuhr Interview and Sermons

The only time I have watched Niebuhr was an old interview with Mike Wallace (here). Thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I got to listen to five enlightening lectures - here.

Second coming of Reinhold Niebuhr

I usually prefer to stay away any political hog-wash but I do have to disclose that my vote in the last presidential election was influenced by Reinhold Neibhur. Now with my self-credibility at stake in front of the man in the mirror, I tend to closely follow how much of Obama's doctrine is Neibhurian. To my big relief for the past 11 months, it has been spectacularly Neibhurian (esp. his foriegn policy). Starting from his inaguration speech to last weeks speech at West Point had Neibhurianism written all over it but so far it has been just rhetorical and for the first time in his presidency "Neibhurianist" action is glittering after his Afghan troop decision.
Fareed Zakaria writes
"Obama is said to admire the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. This approach—engaged in the world with a positive vision but cautious about overreaching—is Niebuhr in action."

and this by David Brooks:
"This style has never been more evident than in his decision to expand the war in Afghanistan. America traditionally fights its wars in a spirit of moral fervor. Most war presidents cast themselves as heroes on a white charger, believing that no one heeds an uncertain trumpet.
Obama, on the other hand, cloaked himself in what you might call Niebuhrian modesty. His decision to expand the war is the most morally consequential one of his presidency so far, yet as the moral stakes rose, Obama’s emotional temperature cooled to just above freezing. He spoke Tuesday night in the manner of an unwilling volunteer, balancing the arguments within his administration by leading the country deeper in while pointing the way out."

Niebuhr didn't believe too much in American expceptionlism, but I believe Obama believes in "Pragmatic" American expceptionlism (sans the machoness) more than Niebuhr ever did. That could be a crucial factor in his presidency and Damon Linker has a great piece today (thanks):
"For Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest exponent of Christian realism, this gets things exactly backward—and threatens to encourage the very aspect of America’s national character that most needs to be moderated or restrained. “Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride,” Niebuhr noted in The Irony of American History (1952), and the American version takes the form of the myth that “our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning”—a beginning marked by moral purity and the special favor of God. This uniquely American self-understanding has tended to inspire national over-confidence with regard to our virtue.

Niebuhr maintains that American over-confidence makes us a nation impatient with various limitations that are coeval with the human condition. We are, first of all, impatient with limits on our knowledge and power. Convinced that God is on our side, we lack the humility to accept that “the whole drama of human history is . . . too large for human comprehension or management.” We are likewise impatient with limitations on the degree of moral purity—especially our own—that is possible in political life.
Niebuhr rightly remarks that Americans nearly always mean well when they act in the world. Our moral perils are thus “not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power.” Yet the rules of the world are such that good intentions—even our own—often lead to unintended bad consequences. This is a lesson we seem incapable of learning, or remembering, so eager are we to deny that the actions of even “the best men and nations” are “curious compounds of good and evil.” And this leads to a third, distinctly American form of impatience—one that expresses itself in an attitude of impotent defiance toward “the slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history.” We desperately want to believe that we are contributing to the realization of God’s plans for humanity, but we find it exceedingly difficult to accept that the path humanity will take on the way to its appointed end is as obscure to us as the precise shape of the end itself.
In Niebuhr’s view America needs regularly self-administered doses of humility.

Then there is a different temptation—one that needs to be resisted by believing and skeptical politicians alike. This is the urge to use exceptionalist rhetoric and the hopes and expectations it raises to mold and manipulate public opinion for the sake of political gain.

Many American politicians, from George Washington to George W. Bush, have succumbed to these temptations. Yet the case of Barack Obama may be different. Not only does Obama follow Niebuhr’s teaching very closely, but in his public rhetoric he clearly strives to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln—the public figure Niebuhr singles out for having left behind a public meditation on American exceptionalism that lives on to teach us by example. In his second inaugural address, delivered as the Civil War was at long last drawing to a close, Lincoln somehow managed to step back from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the Union Army to achieve a broader perspective on the conflict as a whole. Rather than praising the North for its victory or denigrating the cause of the defeated South, Lincoln spoke in tones of irony—of each side’s invocation of the blessings of the divine against the other. If providence was at work in the slaughter of the Civil War, it could be seen not, or not simply, in the triumph of the Union, but in the incalculable suffering of soldiers and citizens on both sides—as divine retribution for the national sin of slavery. But Lincoln did not permit even this humbling thought to serve as a consolation. For not even this possible theological meaning of the slaughter, or its ultimate outcome, could be known with any certainty. All the nation could do was hope and pray for an end to the conflict—and humbly accept whatever providence might bring.

Lincoln thus managed to invoke the idea of American theological exceptionalism while avoiding the vices it so often encourages. Which is why Niebuhr described the speech as an “almost perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free civilization . . . while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle.” It was a considerable achievement—and one that our current president apparently wishes to emulate."

I sincerely hope Obama emulates it. The world can use considerable doses of humility and there never has been a surfeit of humility, in-fact more the merrier. Let's  keep a close watch every day to check if the dream or caution of that prudent theologian comes true.

Anyways, my Niebhurian lessons started from here, here and finally here.

Reinhold Niebuhr's Premonition

I am big fan of Reinhold Niebhur and it takes time to get adapted to his thoughts since it lacks sound bytes, myopia, blind and convenient patriotism and its always bipartisan (in other words, it only feeds the intellectual "dopamine"). His premonition in 1952 about the present state of political dissonance and perceptual animosity, which was beautifully written in last lines of his book,  The Irony of American History.

"If  we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

Here's David Brooks on Neibuhr