Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
Chapter 8: The Self and Its Communities
The self’s physical and spiritual need of others is naturally satisfied not only in casual and transient but in permanent relationship. Man is a "social," or as Aristotle has it, a "political"
animal. Human communities rise from nature to every type of historical artifact. The simplest, most primordial and most persistent community is the family, which is rooted in nature, that is, in hetero-sexuality, providing for the basic sexual partnership and necessitating a guardianship by the parents in the human being’s long period of infancy. The long infancy, constantly
extended as civilization becomes more complex and the skills required for maturity more numerous, is not a fact of pure nature. It is because man is an historical creature that he comes upon the scene only partially equipped for life and requiring long tutelage for the acquisition of his various skills. The family lies naturally at the basis of the larger community, which is no more in primitive life than an enlarged family, with kinship feeling as the force of cohesion.
Civilization gradually welds these larger families together into more powerful communities.
The guile of priests and skill of warriors are operative in this enterprise signifying the place of organized physical force and of the ideological factor in the forces of social cohesion.
The relation of the individual to the community is a complex one which could be defined as consisting of vertical and horizontal dimensions. In the vertical dimension the individual is related to the community on two sharply contradictory forms. He looks up at the community as the fulfillment of his life and the sustainer of his existence. By its organization his physical and moral needs are met. Morally the community is, in the words of Hegel, the individual’s
"concrete universality." But there is another direction in which the individual may look in the vertical dimension, about which Hegel knew little because he, in common with most
rationalists, could not comprehend the heights of human selfhood above the dimension of reason. The individual looks down upon the community because he is, as it were higher than it.
It is bound to nature more inexorably than he. It knows nothing of a dimension of the eternal beyond its own existence. It therefore clings to its life desperately and may sacrifice every dignity to preserve its mere existence. The highest moral ideal to which it can aspire is a wise self-interest, which includes others in its ambition for security. Looking down at the community from his individual height the individual is embarrassed by the difference between the moral standards of the community and his own.
Much of the world’s progress has arisen from this embarrassment, for it has tended to lift the standards of the community. Whenever communities throttle the individual’s uneasiness and insist that the collective sense of the good is absolute, they sink, as does modern totalitarianism into a consistent brutality. On the other hand, the idea that the individual’s uneasy conscience about collective morality can be easily transposed into collective action leads to sentimentality.
This has been particularly apparent in the bourgeois ethos which erroneously imagined that communities were only provisional entities, to be dispensed with, as soon as the individual had become fully emancipated. Looked at from above, the community is the frustration of the individual, even as it is his fulfillment when looked at from below. No historical progress can change the twofold relation of the individual to the community in the vertical dimension. The community will always remain both the fulfillment and the frustration of the individual.
Historical progress may change, or enlarge, the community of primary loyalty; and make that community more complex with a competition of subordinate loyalties. The individual may achieve a degree of emancipation from the community by reason of these competitions, not characteristic of the more monolithic, usually agrarian, communities. But even the most democratic communities can not alter the tension between the individual and the community because it can not alter the difference between the individual and the collective desires and ambitions of men.
The social and political history of modernity is charged with tension between the individual and the community because a technical civilization has, on the one hand, emancipated the individual from his organic ties to the community; and has, on the other hand, given the community a greater cohesion and intensity than any which prevailed in the agrarian societies. Superficially the struggle has involved the agrarian classes, which championed the old organic forms, the bourgeois or trading and industrial middle class, which sought to exploit all the new and more flexible and mobile forms of power which came into their hands, and the industrial workers who sought a greater degree of collective planning to protect them against the hazards and insecurities of a technical civilization. But the struggle was more than a contest between the classes, in which each class tried to protect the securities, or expand the liberties, which were ideologically appropriate to its mode of life. It was also a struggle in the soul of each individual who was conscious, on the one hand, of his individual destiny and worth, and for whom the
presuppositions of a Christian interpretation of human dignity seemed to gain a new social and economic foundation. But, on the other hand, the same individual became dependent upon a greater and greater number of his fellow men for the maintenance of his life and the
preservation of his securities, and was more and more involved in the collective destiny of his nation or even his civilization. The emergency of collectivist economics, whether inspired by romantic or by Marxist ideals, were protests against an individualism in which the self became lost in a nameless crowd after its emancipation from the cohesions of an older organic society.
The tension between the equally forceful and equally dubious efforts to interpret life either in purely individual or in purely collectivist terms is derived from the contradictory consequences of technics upon the community. For they undoubtedly enlarge the intensity and extent of social cohesion on the one hand, while on the other they emancipate the individual from the close embrace in which organic communities held him.
These contradictory estimates have resulted in equally contradictory moral theories. According to the more conventional theory, conscience is purely a manifestation of the individual’s moral sense and its social character is obscured. But the more favored theory among psychologists and sociologists is absurdly collectivist and makes the moral sense merely an expression of the pressure of the community upon the individual. Actually, all moral judgements are expressed in tension between two viewpoints derived from the fact that the individual regards the community both as fulfillment and as frustration. Sometimes the individual is impressed by the claims of the community in comparison with his own private and parochial values. He may espouse the cause of the community freely in his conscience. At other times the individual is embarrassed by the morally mediocre standards of the community. He may be particularly exercised by this aspect of the community precisely when the community becomes coercive and tries to suppress his qualms of conscience. At such times the individual may rise to an heroic defiance of the community and thus refute all simple "social" interpretations of conscience. It is, of course, significant that the individual infrequently defies a community of primary loyalty without having his conscience informed by another community, religious or political; and that he may construct a community in his own imagination, as, for instance, the "community of mankind,"
though this community may have no direct contact with him.
The individual experiences his relation to the community horizontally, rather than vertically, whenever his community is in conflict with other communities. In moments of competition or conflict between communities, the individual tends to become identified with his community so that its pride and prestige become his own. Indeed its majesty is frequently a compensation for his own real or seeming insignificance. This fact makes the pride of national and racial
communities particularly attractive to individuals who suffer from various forms of individual frustration.
We have spoken of "the community" as if it were an exact entity. Actually there are
communities based upon every common interest, desire or destiny. The European Middle Ages had a plural communal life, with the small feudal community furnishing the basic loyalty. It
was in turn related to some larger community which ultimately became the nation. Both empire and Church tried to be an overarching community with universal pretensions. Modern Western life has been formed by the gradual dominance of the national community, which frequently tried to bring all other communities into subjection to it. But this growing nationalism is qualified by the endless elaboration of voluntary communities, rooted in economic interest, in artistic endeavors, or in religious commitment. The multiplicity of these communities has
served to emancipate the individual, for competition between communities for the loyalty of the individual served to bring out his individual decision into sharp relief. The recent growth of totalitarian regimes rooted in either a fanatic national community or in a pseudo-universal class community are rightly regarded as protests, though perverse ones, against the disintegration of community under the force of an excessive bourgeois individualism and under the
disintegrating forces of a technical civilization, particularly in its urban centers. The national community has become the community of most inclusive loyalty because it controls the state’s coercive power and because geographic contiguity, combined with ethnic or linguistic
homogeneity, are sufficient to overcome the potentially divisive forces of the subordinate communities. The supra-national integrations have the best chance of success in Western Europe where unity above the level of the national community has become the necessity of survival for those nations which bear the treasures of civilization against the perils of
totalitarianism. These pressures, rather than abstract constitutional schemes, are the forces of communal cohesion because community is always an organic, historical entity rather than a purely rational artifact.
It might be possible indeed to define community as that association of individuals which has coalesced through forces of history, operating upon the cohesive forces given in nature such as geographic contiguity and racial kinship. Human communities have one thing in common with persons. They are historical entities who have reacted to unique historical events. Their memory of these events is one of the basic forces of community. They express their consciousness of their uniqueness by their devotion to heroes, who represent dramatic and poetic embodiments of the peculiar "genius" of the nation. Thus Washington and Lincoln have a special position in the national "myth" which expresses the self-consciousness of our nation. The memory of critical events such as the granting of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, are also capable of sustaining and giving consistency to the
"spirit" of the community. Many communities below the level of the nation, such as racial minorities are more integral as communities if they have the treasure of common memories, particularly those which are centered in some heroic or tragic events. The human community is thus defined in a dramatic historical pattern, just as is the individual. This pattern may develop such a degree of consistency of action that it will be close to natural necessity or ontological fate. But these historical destinies never produce a pattern which could become the basis of confident future predictions. One may predict that the solidity of the British community (as contrasted, for instance, with the French nation) will make a civil war less likely in the one nation than in the other. But beyond that, one can not go. One can not predict how the British community may react to external or internal stresses in the future.
Much learned debate has been devoted to the question whether it is legitimate to ascribe
personality to communities. The debate remains inconclusive because communities lack, on the one hand, the integrity and the organ of self-transcendence which the individual person boasts, while, on the other hand, they have, analogous to that of the person, a consciousness of a continuing identity through the flux of historical events. In the case of the Jewish nation, for instance, the power of common memories of a dim historic past is strong enough to preserve the cohesion of the nation though it lacked until recently a physical and geographic basis for its life.
Even now, the new nation of Israel will not contain the whole of the Jewish "nation" which continues to live in the diaspora.
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The Self and the Dramas of History by Reinhold Niebuhr
Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. The Self and the Dramas of History, was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. This material prepared for Religion Online by Harry and Grace Adams.