CROOKED TIMBER ON THE FRUITED PLAIN:

Reading Niebuhr Instead: A Christian realist for the reality-based community. (Scott Korb, Killing the Buddha)

When I first moved to New York I lived on a street named for Reinhold Niebuhr, the most renowned Christian ethicist ever to teach at Union Theological Seminary. As an evangelical Christian realist, he saw politics as the place to do ethics and refused to accept economic inequality, racism, and war as inevitable human conditions. [...]

Niebuhr was born in Missouri. Like his father, he became an evangelical minister, pastor of a Detroit parish that grew more than ten-fold during his thirteen-year tenure. That he spent the four subsequent decades living and teaching in New York City can hardly be held against him. Niebuhr was an avowed Christian who loved America. His was a nation that had, in less than a generation, arrived in ways no one could have expected; following the Second World War -- following the bomb -- America had become the most powerful nation in the world. It had an unmistakable, and uniquely ironic, place in history.

Yet for all his love of country, Niebuhr never learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. What he did love was that Americans, as a nation, really worried about the bomb. We knew our power, and understood that we were free, and suddenly capable, to exercise it -- but never without guilt. The irony of our history was based in knowing our real culpability in becoming a world power, in recognizing that we were far less innocent than our theories of democracy, free-market capitalism, militarism, and evangelicalism assumed. “Success in world politics,” Niebuhr contended, “necessitates a disavowal of the pretentious elements in our original dream, and a recognition of the values and virtues which enter into history in unpredictable ways.”

-ETEXT: The Irony of American History (Reinhold Niebuhr, 1952)

We frequently speak of "tragic" aspects of contemporary history; and also call attention to a "pathetic" element in our present historical situation. My effort to distinguish "ironic" elements in our history from tragic and pathetic ones, does not imply the denial of tragic and pathetic aspects in our contemporary experience. It does rest upon the conviction that the ironic elements are more revealing. The three elements might be distinguished as follows: (a) Pathos is that element in an 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 or guilt ascribed. Suffering caused by purely natural evil is the clearest instance of the purely pathetic. (b) The tragic element in a human situation is constituted of conscious choices of evil for the sake of good. If men or nations do evil in a good cause; if they cover themselves with guilt in order to fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice some high value for the sake of a higher or equal one they make a tragic choice. Thus the necessity of using the threat of atomic destruction as an instrument for the preservation of peace is a tragic element in our contemporary situation. Tragedy elicits admiration as well as pity because it combines nobility with guilt. (c) Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous. Incongruity as such is merely comic. It elicits laughter. This element of comedy is never completely eliminated from irony. But irony is something more than comedy. A comic situation is proved to be an ironic one if a hidden relation is discovered in the incongruity. 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. The ironic situation is distinguished from a pathetic one by the fact that the person involved in it bears some responsibility for it. It is differentiated from tragedy by the fact that the responsibility is related to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolution. While a pathetic or a tragic situation is not dissolved when a person becomes conscious of his involvement in it, an ironic situation must dissolve, if men or nations are made aware of their complicity in it. Such awareness involves some realization of the hidden vanity or pretension by which comedy is turned into irony. This realization either must lead to an abatement of the pretension, which means contrition; or it leads to a desperate accentuation of the vanities to the point where irony turns into pure evil.

Our modern liberal culture, of which American civilization is such an unalloyed exemplar, is involved in many ironic refutations of its original pretensions of virtue, wisdom, and power. Insofar as communism has already elaborated some of these pretensions into noxious forms of tyranny, we are involved in the double irony of confronting evils which were distilled from illusions, not generically different from our own. Insofar as communism tries to cover the ironic contrast between its original dreams of justice and virtue and its present realities by more and more desperate efforts to prove its tyranny to be "democracy" and its imperialism to be the achievement of universal peace, it has already dissolved irony into pure evil.

Niebuhr would have been an especially useful voice today because he would have been so scathing towards those on the Left who insist on absurd notions like : "We have no right to confront Saddam now because we helped him during his war with Iran in the '80s." Only those who don't comprehend Man's essential nature could insist on the kind of purity demanded in such formulations.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2005 4:15 PM