THE BINDING:

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense: Chapter 2: The Individual and the Community (Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944, Charles Scribner’s Sons)

A free society is justified by the fact that the indeterminate possibilities of human vitality may be creative. Every definition of the restraints which must be placed upon these vitalities must be tentative; because all such definitions, which are themselves the products of specific historical insights, may prematurely arrest or suppress a legitimate vitality, if they are made absolute and fixed. The community must constantly re-examine the presuppositions upon which it orders its life, because no age can fully anticipate or predict the legitimate and creative vitalities which may arise in subsequent ages.

The limitations upon freedom in a society are justified, on the other hand, by the fact that the vitalities may be destructive. We have already noted that the justification of classical laissez-faire theories was the mistaken belief that human passions were naturally ordinate and limited. It must be added that there are also some types of social theory, which understand the boundless character of man’s vitalities and yet advocate unlimited freedom. In the nineteenth century Darwinian, rather than physiocratic, presuppositions frequently furnished the rationale of laissez-faire social theory.4 The physiocrats trusted the pre-established harmony of nature. The Darwinians attributed a moral historical significance to the struggles of nature. They failed to understand that human society is a vast moral and historical artifact, which would be destroyed if natural conflicts and contests between various vitalities were not mitigated, managed and arbitrated. Both the intensity and the breadth of social cohesion have been historically created. A conflict against the background of this historical cohesion is never, as in the natural world, a limited conflict between two simple or individual units of vitality. A contest between monopolistic and smaller units of economic power, for instance, is not a "natural" contest. The unequal power of one contestant is the product of the tendency toward centralization of power in the processes of a technical civilization. The power is a social and historical accretion; and the community must decide whether it is in the interest of justice to reduce monopolistic control artificially for the sake of reestablishing the old pattern of "fair competition," or whether it is wiser to allow the process of centralization of economic power to continue until the monopolistic centers have destroyed all competition. But, if the second alternative is chosen, the community faces the new problem of bringing the centralized economic power under communal control. These historical contests of power must be managed, supervised, and suppressed by the community, precisely because they do not move within the limits of "nature." The battleground is the human community and not the animal herd; and the contestants are armed with powers which have been drawn from the historical and communal process.

Modern libertarian doctrines, all of which implicitly or explicitly look forward to an anarchistic culmination of the historical process, are not limited to those theories which reduce the community to the dimensions of nature and which regard either the conflicts or the harmonies of nature as normative. Many of them place their trust in a developing reason, as the force which will progressively eliminate social tension and conflict and obviate the use of coercion in maintaining order. Reason is provisionally an organ of the universal, as against the particular, interest; and growing rationality has thus undoubtedly contributed to the extension of human communities. Even practical reason has contributed to this end; for it has furnished the technical and political instruments which bind larger communities together in one unit of mutual dependence.

Yet there is no evidence that reason is becoming progressively disembodied. It always remains organically related to a particular center of vitality, individual and collective; and it is therefore always a weapon of defense and attack for this vitality against competing vitalities, as well as a transcendent force which arbitrates between conflicting vitalities. A high perspective of reason may as easily enlarge the realm of dominion of an imperial self as mitigate expansive desires in the interest of the harmony of the whole. No community, whether national or international, can maintain its order if it cannot finally limit expansive impulses by coercion.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 28, 2009 8:59 AM