If anyone was born to theology, it was Reinhold Niebuhr. His father Gustav was a pastor, his mother Lydia was the daughter of a missionary, his sister Hulda took a divinity professorship in Chicago, and his brother Richard became a famous theological ethicist. Clearly Reinhold had the blood of Christ.
He went to Yale Divinity school, at 23 became a pastor in Detroit in 1915 in the heyday of the automobile boom, and in 1916 began writing regular articles on current events to supplement his pastor’s income and support his mother. From then, he began to develop his own strand of christian theology which, in the context of a secularizing U.S., became stunningly influential in foreign and domestic policy through the first decades of the Cold War. He has been cited as a major influence by Jimmy Carter, Madeleine Albright, McCain, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and more; by many of his generation’s most important political scientists/historians: Kenneth Waltz, Hans Morgenthau, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, etc; and by a motley group that I’m going vaguely lump together as “religious activists”: Martin Luther King Jr., Cornel West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Seymour Siegel, and more.
And yet for all that, Niebuhr is hardly read today. Like so many American public intellectuals of the past (Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey), he lingers only as a shadowy figure in our national memory, a phantasm in the wings of our historical theater. His most lasting writing is the ‘Serenity Prayer’ used in AA meetings nationwide. But I believe his political writings still have great relevance for us today, and as such I will be reviewing his major work of foreign policy: The Irony of American History (1952).
Already I worry that I’ve lost many readers at the word ‘theology’. A cynical atheist may reasonably ask “Is he trying to convert me?” Not to worry. Reinhold Niebuhr is not trying to convert you. He is no missionary. His theological background intrudes very little upon his political writings. I admit that he does like Christianity (as his life and family tree should suggest) and he thinks it has useful insights for the world of practical politics. But generally he has no evangelical bent.
Cynic: Sure, but are you trying to convert me?
Me: Not at all. Not at all. Let me assure all readers that I am a good atheist. I’ve never lost any sleep over whether there’s a god or an afterlife or a reincarnation. I even used to love watching those New Atheist youtube debates, but I’ve come to feel that there are interesting and valuable ideas in religion, even if these insights ought to be divorced from their mystical foundations (similar to the way Tu Youyou won a Nobel for synthesizing artemisinin from traditional Chinese herbal cures for Malaria).
The reasons I’m interested in Niebuhr are threefold. At minimum, Niebuhr is important because he has influenced important people (see list of politicians above). The American democratic center doesn’t really espouse a coherent ideological framework (to say the least). Therefore, any common influence is valuable for shedding light on what still seems to be the dominant political force in the country.
Cynic: I don’t buy that these politicians are actually influenced by Niebuhr. They were probably just name dropping a theologian to get the Christian centrist vote.
Me: Fair enough. I personally think some politicians are genuinely influenced by him, but admittedly it's hard to tell what politicians actually believe.
So the second interest is historical. Niebuhr’s thought may or may not still have influence within the Democratic party today, but he certainly had a verifiable influence on policy during the Cold War. Many of the academics he influenced (Kennan, Morgenthau, Schlesinger) became direct consultants for various presidential administrations. We ought to read Niebuhr if only to better understand American history.
Presentist Cynic: Yeah but who cares about the past?
Me: (Mutters something about being doomed to repeat history) Fine, fine. Finally, I have to admit that I think Niebuhr is useful today. And The Irony of American History can help us specifically with what I like to call the ‘dilemma of foreign policy’. Simply put, the dilemma is this: if you live in a democratic country or otherwise have any small influence over your nation’s actions, you have at least a slight obligation to make sensible decisions with that power. Now I find wading through the details of domestic policy hard enough, but every difficulty is amplified tenfold in foreign policy. At minimum, we feel we ought to know something about China, Russia, the E.U., the entire Middle East, Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan, and North Korea. But then minor Archdukes always find a way of being assassinated and the Baltic politics of Sarajevo will trigger the next world war. Or Cuba will manage to almost be the starting point of a civilization ending nuclear holocaust. Or a generational plague will sweep through and… well you get the idea.
In other words, being accurate about matters of foreign policy is hard. In the field of U.S. medicine, I think it is both admirable and rational to follow Scott’s method: look at various studies, try to understand the logic behind the methodology, compare the data, apply common-sense and historical experience, and make a decision. I think this works very well in many areas of domestic policy. But in international relations, there is simply too much information for one to be an expert about more than a region, the decisions are made too quickly to become well informed, and, even when we are not specialists, we are still called to weigh in broadly on issues about which we can have only a limited understanding at best.
Cynic: So why even bother with foreign policy?
Me: Because foreign policy is also one of the most consequential aspects of our government from any moral perspective. Just about the worst thing that a President or Prime Minister or Ayatollah can do is start an unnecessary war. Second place would be either to indirectly cause vast regional instability or to just to support policies that lead to stagnating standards of living for millions.
Therefore I think a heuristic that can be broadly applied to matters of foreign policy is essential. Many of my close friends use a heuristic that might be summarized as “Never war”. And this heuristic really is mostly right. Only there are major exceptions (Third Reich or the slave-owning South) where a policy would be morally disastrous. So I think a somewhat more flexible and sophisticated heuristic is in order. And that’s where Niebuhr comes in. I believe he still offers today one of the most reasonable and useful frameworks for thinking about and analyzing foreign policy from a general perspective.
Apologies for the long overture, but I felt that a theologian needs more justification than most when being presented to a modern audience.
The Preface
In the brief preface to the work, Niebuhr introduces his framework for interpreting American foreign policy: namely irony (there are other elements to his philosophy, but these more in the background of this work. I’ll touch on these other elements at the end).
Irony is a way of interpreting problems in the world. Niebuhr distinguishes irony from two other modes of interpretation: pathos and tragedy. He explains:
“Pathos is that element in a historic situation which elicits pity, but neither deserves admiration nor warrants contrition. Pathos arises from fortuitous cross-purposes and confusions in life for which no reason can be given.”
Pathos might arise from, say, an unforeseeable natural disaster, or a ship sinking in a storm.
Whereas “The tragic element in a human situation is constituted of conscious choices of evil for the sake of good.”
One classical example of a tragic decision is Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter to prevent the destruction of the Greek army. The modern example that Niebuhr uses is that the U.S. is forced to maintain a terrible nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against other terrible nuclear arsenals.
Both of these are distinct from irony:
“Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous.”
It’s not the catchiest formulation so here are some concrete examples:
“If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits — in all such cases the situation is ironic.”
Why irony? Why is it useful to think about events in this way? Because the major difference between irony on the one hand and tragedy or pathos on the other, is that the recognition of tragedy or pathos doesn’t prompt any change in action. If you recognize a pathetic or tragic situation, you may feel an emotional tug at your heart-strings, you may make sympathetic remarks at the dinner table, but there is no recognition that anyone has actually done anything incorrectly. In contrast, the recognition of an ironic flaw naturally prompts a change in action. If we realize that we have weakened ourselves through overconfidence, we will stop being overconfident, or so Niebuhr’s theory goes.
Cynic: What about people who don’t change even after recognizing they are wrong?
Me: For Niebuhr this is very terrible and extremely dangerous, but it’s still useful to at least try to point out the truth and get them to change.
Cynic: What about if people in power are just selfish and callous and egotistical? And nations and rulers only do whatever serves their own narrow interests?
Me: Well I think that Niebuhr is actually responding to this position implicitly throughout the book. Niebuhr acknowledges the strength of self-interest, and even human evil. But I believe he is attempting to understand ruling decisions through a more psychologically realistic framework. I.e. People in power rarely see themselves as purely selfish. They have adopted some ideology which, yes, justifies their own self-interest but it’s also one they genuinely believe in. The racist southerner of the past wanted privileges and rights over black people, but probably he also truly felt that integration would be a disaster for one reason or another. Blindness to self-interest is one of the major sources of irony.
Additionally, Niebuhr often writes under the assumption that there are many outcomes which are good for both others and ourselves. Peace is generally good for everyone involved. But, ironically we often hinder our own self-interest in these matters through stupidity and short-sightedness, from blind devotion to an ideal. Therefore, because these ironies are more likely to hurt ourselves, people will be more willing to change their ways if they are pointed out.
1 The Ironic Element in the American Situation
In the first chapter, Niebuhr lists off all the ironies of the American position at the beginning of the 1950s. That the U.S. leaders accuse communist ideology of being too materialist, but that the main success of the U.S. system is in the material realm. That we espouse individualism, but our society is one of assembly lines and political parties. Plus, it’s actually in our communal actions that our individualistic society effectively resists communism (in war, in political alliances, in trade agreements). That if we were as pure and virtuous as we pretend, we could not have won the second world war.
Cynic: All this commie talk seems pretty irrelevant these days, no?
Me: Yes, the first chapter doesn’t age well because it’s basically tied to the cold war context of when it was written. Even if, say, nuclear deterrence is still a major factor in international politics, it’s just not on most people’s minds the way it once was. Niebuhr goes into many many other ironies on both the American and Soviet side of things, but I’ll skip over these.
The essential point that Niebuhr wants to make is that the American creeds of liberty, science, free enterprise, and individualism frequently contradict each other in practice (example: that we believe in personal liberty but that our scientists do not). Therefore, we must be wiser than our hodgepodge creed if we are to be virtuous in the world. The second is to recognize that the communists act under similar illusions that we must understand in order to effectively combat them:
“If only we could fully understand that the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruit of illusions which are similar to our own, we might be better prepared to save a vast uncommitted world.”
2 First Illusion: The Innocent Nation in an Innocent World
Niebuhr begins the analysis proper with by analyzing a series of American illusions. The first is the idea of national innocence.
Cynic: Wow, what a cliche.
Me: True, but I think Niebuhr deviates from the normal analysis. Normally when people bring up national innocence, it’s to point out America’s historic guilt, our original sins. Or it’s to talk about the national loss of innocence after a national disaster (Vietnam, 9/11, etc) when everyone first became so cynical about things.
But Niebuhr’s focus is on the idea of innocence as a mindset. As a way of thinking about your own moral goals and objectives. In Niebuhr’s framework, innocence is the idea that your own side is inherently good, inherently moral, or inherently right because evil is caused by something external.
“This vast involvement in guilt in a supposedly innocent world achieves a specially ironic dimension through the fact that the two leading powers [the U.S. and U.S.S.R.] engaged in the struggle are particularly innocent according to their own official myth and collective memory.”
This is not to say that these nations ignore the crimes of their history. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S. might freely admit to having been involved in wars in which people were killed, or even to using immoral methods to achieve future goals. However, Niebuhr wants to point out that neither side believes that evil could grow from their own system. The educated, liberal American of the era believed that all evil was caused by a lack of education and liberalism. The communist believed that private property caused all evil. Consequently, there is great danger on both sides due to their inability to recognize their own potential for evil. Historically, the great disaster of Marxism in Niebuhr’s eyes was that it never worried about or took steps to prevent the abuse of power from within its own movement.
Presentist Cynic: But again, how many soviets are there anymore? Or these “education will solve everything” liberals that might have existed back then?
Me: Well, even though the ideologies have changed, the error remains the same. Probably it will never fully disappear. Very few of the moral movements of our age ever appear to worry about dangers within the movements themselves. Rather, it can feel taboo to even raise questions. This is the kind of innocence that Niebuhr is talking about. That my side is not only good, but essentially incapable of real harm. Because evil can only arise from outside, its root is always elsewhere.
Niebuhr then goes on to discuss the origin of American innocence myths. He argues that America’s two dominant religious-moral traditions, Calvinism and Jeffersonianism, both conceived of America as a fresh start for humanity.
“Whether, as in the case of the New England theocrats, our forefathers thought of our "experiment" as primarily the creation of a new and purer church, or, as in the case of Jefferson and his coterie, they thought primarily of a new political community, they believed in either case that we had been called out by God to create a new humanity. We were God’s “American Israel.” Our pretensions of innocency therefore heightened the whole concept of a virtuous humanity which characterizes the culture of our era; and involve us in the ironic incongruity between our illusions and the realities which we experience. We find it almost as difficult as the communists to believe that anyone could think ill of us, since we are as persuaded as they that our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions.”
This sense of innocence frustrated our foreign policy as well. The inability to reckon with the possibilities of evil within will lead to clumsy and blundering international relationships. In American policy this innocence of evil takes three forms. The first is the desire to ignore America’s power and withdraw from the world. Niebuhr discusses this in the context of the isolationism in the Second World War.
“But the abortive effort to defy the forces of history which were both creating a potential world community and increasing the power of America beyond that of any other nation, was supported by pacifist idealists, Christian and secular, and by other visionaries who desired to preserve our innocency. They had a dim and dark understanding of the fact that power cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest, even when it tries to subject itself to universal standards and places itself under the control of a nascent world-wide community. They did not understand that the disavowal of the responsibilities of power can involve an individual or nation in even more grievous guilt.”
The second reaction is an idealist hope of solving all issues rationally (and therefore guiltlessly). When Niebuhr was writing, this took the form of a desire for world government, a U.N., or a league of nations. Although Niebuhr sympathizes with this goal, he believes that the proposals are too dependent on the illusion that all parties will act extremely rationally. He predicts that strong nations will dominate any collective world body, in the same way that strong factions can dominate a national one. Any hope of possible world government, Niebuhr argues, has to account for these natural weaknesses.
At the other ideological extreme are the “realists” who believe that “the evils of communism are so great that we are justified in using any weapon against them. Thereby, they closely approach the communist ruthlessness.”
The error in both cases is the same inadequate understanding of human evil. Power cannot be wielded without guilt, but that is no excuse for giving up on the relative good that we can accomplish. He concludes:
“Yet our American nation, involved in its vast responsibilities, must slough off many illusions which were derived both from the experiences and the ideologies of its childhood. Otherwise either we will seek escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable guilt, or we will be plunged into avoidable guilt by too great confidence in our virtue.”
3. Second Illusion: Happiness, Prosperity, and Virtue
America is wealthy. So, so wealthy. We are richer than the wildest fantasies of other countries. There they dream of castle chambers swimming with gold and precious jewels, but here that would only describe the servant’s quarters for the Bezos and Musk mansions. We have so much money that we give out millions to people for memorizing random facts, for living on islands, for eating bugs, or for demonstrating the knowledge of a fifth grader. People die when we go shopping on black Friday, and we count the deaths.
I would say money is at least as important now as it was in Niebuhr’s time. And for Niebuhr, America’s historic prosperity has come with its own dangerous illusions. He first traces America’s traditional relationship with prosperity again to Calvinist and Jeffersonian origins. Essentially, the puritans began with the assumption that any wealth came solely from the grace of God. After they started to grow more and more wealthy, they naturally began to feel that they must have a crazy amount of God’s grace. A lot of grace must mean they were really good and virtuous. And thus wealth became steadily intertwined with virtue as they became richer.
“For, from the later Puritans to the present day we have variously attributed American prosperity to our superior diligence, our greater skill or (more recently) to our more fervent devotion to the ideals of freedom. We thereby have complicated our spiritual problem for the days of adversity which we are bound to experience.”
One irony here is that the religion which Communism criticizes as an opiate of the masses helped in fact to create and justify more wealth than any atheist communism.
Benjamin Franklin: But thrift and diligence obviously do create wealth. The man who saves his money and starts a business will definitely become wealthier than the person who spends their paycheck on beer or bonnets. This is only proper.
Me: I think many readers might agree with Ben’s not totally unreasonable theory of wealth, but the important distinction is that Niebuhr is talking about national wealth. I.e. America as a country did not become rich by being really thrifty or innovative, but because the land itself was extremely bountiful (and also killing the natives). Therefore the American conflation (virtue = prosperity) is too simplistic when we’re talking about nations.
The Jeffersonian theory inverts the order, but keeps the same basic equation. Here, prosperity creates the broad middle class that supports a healthy democracy. So prosperity creates virtue rather than virtue creating prosperity. But as before, there is the same association between wealth and virtue.
Niebuhr ends on a more spiritual diagnosis. That Americans themselves are beginning to feel that the wealth that has been held up as a goal ultimately fails to provide individuals with a full sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. His early warning does seem to anticipate the spiritual rebellion of the sixties, at the height of American prosperity.
4. The International Class Struggle
But back to foreign policy. This ideology of wealth is directly harming our foreign policy.
Here Niebuhr turns to the cold war struggle for the third world. The U.S. believes that its material prosperity is the major evidence of its superiority, but, ironically, this same prosperity becomes Exhibit A of America’s imperial guilt for third world Marxists. The U.S. has become the main international symbol of “Western” culture, and ironically takes on much of the blame for European imperialism. Even though historically the U.S. is much less at fault than the European empires, our wealth is attributed solely to the evils of empire.
“Therefore we confront the ironic situation in world politics that the most powerful and technically the most efficient modern nation is condemned in a court of public opinion, strongly influenced by Marxist dogma, not so much for its real sins as for achievements in which it takes an inordinate pride.”
Niebuhr then makes a very general cultural analysis of the South and East Asian civilizations and explains their susceptibility to communism. Broad generalizations about the anti-democratic nature of the Hindu or Confucian culture are not always very persuasive. But Niebuhr makes an important point that is often neglected these days. He argues that democracy is by no means a natural form of government. It takes a long time to develop and requires deep-rooted cultural foundations of literacy, mutual tolerance, and moderate material wealth. Therefore, Niebuhr cautions against over hasty democracy building in Asia. Instead we should have the “patience to wait out the long run of history while we take such measures as are necessary to combat the more immediate perils.”
Woke Cynic: This is just imperialist racism to believe that ‘some people’ aren’t ready for democracy. This has always been the justification for colonization.
Me: Perhaps, but the U.S.’s recent failures in the middle-east should at least partially vindicate Niebuhr’s skepticism about the immediate universality of democracy. Perhaps culture doesn’t matter, and all that counts is wealth and literacy, but still, those take time to grow. Many people criticize America for siding with various regional dictators around the world, calling it a gross hypocrisy, but Niebuhr would argue that any attempt to force democracy instantly and everywhere is an idealism that is doomed to fail. Democracies are difficult to achieve and take time when they do. Therefore, it is a reasonable expediency for America to work with monarchs, dictators, and sultans when there exist greater threats. Our interference with other countries should be essentially limited to international damage control.
5. Third Illusion: The Master of Destiny
This restriction to more limited goals is part of Niebuhr’s larger reaction against the possibility of managing history rationally. The American faith in rational control took two forms. In the first, early social scientists, represented for Niebuhr by John Dewey, assumed that the social sciences were going to be a straightforward as the sciences: “What men think about the peril of an atomic bomb is regarded as equally manageable with the physical forces which produce the bomb.”
For Niebuhr, the big problem is that these theories assume that the rational theorist is outside of history, but in truth these theories of the good are very dependent on their historical context. It’s not that these theories are necessarily bad, but any momentary theory is too historically provincial to make into a moral law.
The second error is that these movements are often too restrictive. Any attempt to govern man as if he were just an automaton following natural laws will too often suppress man’s natural creativity.
The other side of this illusion are the religious or political leaders who invest America with a messianic role in world history. That the U.S. is destined to usher in an age of liberalism and democracy around the world. The old dream of the city on the hill.
For Niebuhr, it’s only passivity that has ironically saved the U.S. from this dream so far. A city on the hill is not as dangerous as a liberating army. So if some U.S. messianic dreams were misguided, we can at least take comfort that they were ineffectual. The danger, of course, is when the city on the hill starts to think it can spread its ideals by force.
“In either case, man as the spectator and manager of history imagines himself to be freer of the drama he beholds than he really is; and man as the creature of history is too simply reduced to the status of a creature of nature, and all of his contacts to the ultimate are destroyed”
6. Triumph of Experience
The success of America then, ironically comes from the fact that it historically ignored it’s people like John Dewey:
“Any modern community which establishes a tolerable justice is the beneficiary of the ironic triumph of the wisdom of common sense over the foolishness of its wise men.”
Rationalist Cynic: I don’t know man, Niebuhr sounds like a troglodyte.
Me: This is an important question. Is Niebuhr anti-intellectual, anti-science, or anti-rationalist? Is this a case of someone who thinks their Christian gut is smarter than some egghead theory? Well no. Niebuhr himself is clearly an intellectual. He associates with college professors in political science and international relations, he has many degrees, he devotes much of his time to theorizing about foreign policy. And I think he’s honestly pretty rational. Niebuhr can be better understood as a Christian skeptic. Why did the smartest and most educated people seem to get things so wrong in his time? Niebuhr suggests that it is because they underestimated human evil. They believed everyone could become as smart and educated as themselves. They assumed man’s inherent perfectibility and therefore were totally baffled by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe (It’s also useful to know that Niebuhr began talking about human evil back in 1932 in his first major work: Moral Man and Immoral Society. This was before it was fully clear to everyone just how insanely destructive Stalin and Hitler could be. Like most public intellectuals, he first came to fame by being ahead of the curve).
This idea of human fallibility and sinfulness is where Niebuhr believes Christianity as having historically useful insights.
Cynic: Can’t we have a secular theory of human evil? Just because the early social science was wrong doesn't mean we need to adopt a religious framework. We just need better science.
Me: I think this is true, and historically I think many of the political theorists who were influenced by Niebuhr adopted his emphasis on evil without converting to Christianity. Niebuhr is fine with this. But he also points out one danger in secular theories of evil. Which is that they can be too pessimistic about human nature and become a justification for dictatorship. Hobbes was a classic example of such atheistic pessimism, but his monarchical absolutism now seems way too extreme. Christianity for Niebuhr basically offers a stable intellectual balance between man’s capacity for both good and evil.
He also argues Christianity is useful because it offers a permanent absolute perspective against which any human theory is provisional and open to revision:
“A democratic society on the other hand preserves a modicum of justice by various strategies of distributing and balancing both economic and political power. But it is not tenable to place the institution of property into the realm of the sacrosanct. Every human institution must stand under constant review. The question must be asked, what forms of it are viable under what specific conditions?”
New Atheist Cynic: Aren’t religious people usually the most absolutist and zealous?
Me: Yeah. Hard to argue with this one. The most I can say in Niebuhr’s defense is that his idea of Christian skepticism is that one can never ever be sure that it is God’s voice and not the devil’s that they are hearing. So any religious absolutism is just another form of evil for him. The only difference for him between a rational Christian and a rational atheist is that a rational Christian believes “Love thy Neighbor” is the absolute law. However, even though the law itself is absolute, a rational Christian can never be sure that what they’re doing is the right method for following the law. They always have to think critically about whether their human actions truly align with this divine goal.
So every law and institution must be placed under constant review. This can be tricky, especially the more educated and intelligent someone is. The educated like concrete rules. We do not often trust the ‘wisdom of common sense’ in political matters. We are good at hypothesizing abuses of power and prefer strict rules that can’t be easily circumvented. Just recently Scott was trying to determine a rule for thinking about the self-determination of a people that would be concrete, reasonable, and yet also avoid giving Putin any justification for war. But for Niebuhr we can never make an absolute rule. Rules must always be revised to account for new historical data and situations. And a well-governed democracy must rely to a large degree on common sense for most of its judgments. It's unfeasible to draw a strict line that can divide evil on one side from good on the other, and any such absolute line is far more dangerous than the flexibility of common-sense (although Niebuhr is naturally aware of the dangers here as well). So for Niebuhr with a situation like Ukraine, it is ok to judge on a case by case basis whether it is justifiable for one group to demand political independence. Common sense should lead us to reasonable conclusions if not always rational ones.
7. The Significance of Irony
Niebuhr concludes with a meta-analysis of his own book. Is American history really ironic? Is this a useful way to think about the endless data of history? He acknowledges that one can never be sure about the truth of a historical theory. New events may always arise to refute it. But he argues that there are a few useful components to his ironic framework. First, an ironic view requires some detachment from the events. Irony implies a certain distance which is often useful to try to achieve. The framework of irony allows one to step away from the parade of historic events and achieve a new perspective.
It’s distant, but not hostile. Some people look at politicians and assume that there is nothing that anyone can do within the system to change the system. And certainly Niebuhr doesn’t believe everyone can be convinced to act morally. But irony often assumes that one has made a mistake about one’s own self interest, and therefore when irony appears it is something that can be corrected. For this reason at least, even if not every situation is ironic, the ironic mistakes are the ones we can fix.
And finally, because America is so powerful, our own mistakes are more practically dangerous than any action of our enemy.
“For 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.”
8. Heuristics:
At the beginning I promised a heuristic for foreign policy.
Cynic: Damn right. Irony and common sense is literally the opposite of a useful heuristic.
Me: I know, I know. I think irony is useful, but let’s make the core of Niebuhr’s worldview a little more concrete. I think his heuristic has three fundamental assumptions.
1) Man is inherently sinful.
New Atheist Cynic: Wait what?
Me: Yes I know, it seems crazy. There have been some hints of this idea in the review, but human sin is admittedly central to Niebuhr’s worldview. Still, let’s talk about what this practically implies. Human sinfulness leads Niebuhr to a few general conclusions.
Second tenet:
2) Man is free or, to put it more provocatively, Man has free will.
Modern Neuroscientist: Excuse me?
Me: Ok, let me finish all the assumptions first.
This second idea also comes with a couple conclusions.
And finally:
3) There is an ultimate standard of virtue. Specifically, “love thy Niebuhr neighbor”.
What’s funny and wonderful is that each individual assumption is highly questionable from a modern perspective. I think very few people would accept all of these assumptions. However a good rationalist judges a heuristic not by its assumptions, but by its results. Christopher Hitchens once said Orwell’s great achievement was that he was ultimately right about the three major ‘isms’ of the twentieth century: fascism, communism, and colonialism. I would like to propose a similar way of judging Niebuhr. I have read through a lot of his work for this book review, and I would like to submit his judgments on various trends as they were developing. I have divided these into moral and predictive judgments (although of course these are intertwined) and I provided the date (although many of these views he probably held before he made them public). Also note that Niebuhr was someone who was willing to change his views when more evidence became available. And finally, none of these were necessarily obvious predictions in his era. At the very least, he always made these assertions against a popular existing alternative belief.
Moral Judgments:
Some concrete Predictions:
Again, I hope no one converts to Christianity. But if, like me, you think Niebuhr demonstrated an admirable and rare moral compass throughout his life, then I think there may be something tangible to be gained from taking a secular look at the core beliefs by which he lived. His own Christian illusions seem to have allowed for a remarkable clear sightedness amidst the ambiguities of his era.
