Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
Chapter 10: The Self and the Dramas of History
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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.
the test of predictability which is the hallmark of any exact science.
Historical patterns are in a category of reality which can not be identified with the structures of nature, they are to be sharply distinguished from natural structures because they represent a compound of freedom and necessity.
History is the more complex because one pattern is superimposed upon another: the dramatic pattern of a national history for instance, upon the dramatic pattern of a whole culture. Who can answer the question definitively, whether America is involved in the history of a culture which may be defined as "Western"; or whether the peculiar conditions of American history, our virgin soil, our continental economy, our heterogeneous population and our youthful energies separate our destiny from that of European culture?
It is because historical causation is endlessly complex, and historical dramas overlap one another in bewildering confusion, that history is not subject to the generalizations of either the scientists or the philosophers, who insist on trying to comprehend its multifarious themes in terms of either natural or ontological necessity. There are, of course, valid social or historical sciences. They are most legitimate when the scientists know themselves to be historians, rather than natural scientists; and therefore recognize that their generalizations are hazardous and speculative. The real historians have an instinct for the peculiar quality of history and know the hazards of predictions of the future. Economics, which began under physiocratic illusions, has, in these latter years, become more and more conscious of the endless historical contingencies which it must take into account in its predictions. Economists have therefore become
increasingly modest, in contrast to some other social sciences, burdened with more physiocratic illusions about so-called "laws of nature."
Historical facts can be dealt with most "scientifically" when the field of inquiry is reduced to some manageable set of uniformities or recurrences in the behavior of individuals, subject to the same set of natural or historical circumstances — to the attitudes of adolescents or
convalescents, for instance, or the behavior of industrial or agricultural labor, or to the
conditions of urban life or to the effect of boarding-house existence upon family life. In such, and similar cases, statistical evidence may support generalizations; and uniformities of behavior may be distinguished from the historically variable factors. Sometimes predictions are
inaccurate, even in these modest undertakings; in some cases because the unpredictable
freedom of man is not taken into account, but more frequently because not enough attention has been given to variable conditioning circumstances. Efforts to predict elections in previous decades failed miserably because sample opinions were taken from people listed in telephone directories; and their ideological bias did not accurately typify the whole political spectrum.
Now the samplings are undertaken more scientifically, that is, with due regard for the various groups of a community and their characteristic biases, based on economic and other interests.
But no science can determine whether a Polish worker of Hamtramck, Michigan, will vote according to the prevailing opinion in the CIO, or according to his convictions about the
adequacy of an administration policy in clearing up the wartime mystery of the murders in the Katyn forests in Poland. If wider generalizations are attempted, as, for instance, covering groups in the same economic class but under differing historical environment, they become more hazardous. What nonsense history made of the Marxist slogan: "Workers of the World Unite." It mistakenly assumed the equal disinheritance of industrial laborers in every nation, and incidentally the primacy of their economic interest. There are, no doubt, legitimate
generalizations about the character of bourgeois communities as contrasted with agrarian ones.
But will any such generalizations do justice to the variables in the middle-class life of France and Britain, of Australia and America?
In any event, no scientific investigations of past behavior can become the basis of predictions of future behavior. Even if an historian is able to establish causal sequences after the event, he can not make any generalizations about the past the basis of predictions of future actions and events.
He can not do so, not only because he has insufficient knowledge of the complex causes of the past; but because he can not predict which one of the many tendencies and forces which
determine actions, may have a dominant place in the life of individuals and nations. Only one historian, Jacob Burckhardt, was able to foretell the rise of twentieth-century tyrannies in the nineteenth century. And no one, as late as the beginning of this century, predicted the nightmare which eventuated from the Marxist dreams of heaven on earth. Marx would certainly have been surprised by contemporary realities. These surprising historical events are a refutation of all purely scientific or metaphysical efforts to interpret the drama of history and to reduce its seeming confusion to some kind of simple meaning.
If the analysis of uniformities and recurrences of behavior under like conditions may be defined as the scientific component of historiography, the biographic pinnacles of history are the most vivid reminders of its dramatic character which defies scientific analysis. The career of an eminent contemporary statesman, Sir Winston Churchill, will illustrate how human character rises by gradual stages from the necessities of nature, through historic destinies until it reaches the height of a highly individual and unique response to the unique events of its history. Sir Winston Churchill owes some of his "character" to the fact that he was born an Englishman in the Victorian period, and others to the fact that he was born in the aristocracy of that era. His characteristic differences from Mr. Chamberlain are partly due to his aristocratic background, for instance. Some of the influences upon his life are due to his descent from the Duke of Marlborough and some to the fact that he did not stand in the direct line of descent. The Dukes of Marlborough were inconspicuous country gentlemen. Mr. Churchill’s ambition was
undoubtedly fired by his lack of an assured place in the scheme of things as a son of a second son. Was the example of his father the determining factor? Or perhaps the neglect by his engrossed father and mother? It would have ruined a less robust lad, but it did not prompt resentment in him toward either his father or mother. It merely encouraged him to seek fame in order to be worthy of a father who ignored him, but whom he adored. One could go on to
multiply the multifarious chain of causes which played upon his life. Any conclusions about the relative importance of any set of factors would be highly speculative. Nor would any analysis of
his antecedents help to explain how a man, so obviously ambitious, did not involve himself in the self-defeat in which ambition usually becomes involved. "How vain are the calculations of self-interest," said Mr. Churchill, in surveying the pathetic life of the French Admiral Darlan.
Why was this observation not true of Mr. Churchill? And what forces in his history caused the extraordinary degree of magnanimity in so resourceful a fighter? None of these questions about Mr. Churchill or any other character can be answered "scientifically," in the sense that one can establish a rationally compelling correlation of causes which lead to a given result. Biography is significantly an art. It is related to the art of portraiture. This latter art has not been superseded by the more exact science of photography. The reason is that portraiture spurns the science of reproducing the exact facial lineaments of a given moment for the art of seeing the quite essential character above and behind momentary expressions of mood. History is more of a science than biography because it can correlate and compare more facts and establish trends under seemingly unique events. But historiography can never be an exact science. The real historians know this and leave it to some modern social scientists to cherish this illusion.
It is interesting to note that Aristotle, who did not have modern science’s knowledge of the evolution of historic as tell as natural forms, and lived under the illusion that the structures of both nature and history were fixed, made a sharp distinction between science which would analyze the "constants," and "phronesis" (practical wisdom) which must deal with contingent elements in life and history. The fact is that the sharpest distinction must be made between processes in which things "come to be" and "pass away" within a fixed structure of reality and the whole realm of human history, culminating in biography. In this realm there is a subordinate dimension in which events follow in a "necessary manner" as, for instance, the growth of a child through adolescence to maturity.
The radical freedom of the self and the consequent dramatic realities of history are naturally embarrassing to any scientific effort, either to understand or to master history. There is a consequent tendency in the psychological and social sciences to suppress these inconvenient facts about man, and to emphasize the various facts which "determine" his actions and destinies.
History is indeed full of these determining conditions of geography and climate, of social and economic conditions, of environment and heredity. They lend plausibility to the various
determinisms, sociological and psychological, which negate some of the obvious "facts" about man and his history in order to comprehend them "scientifically," which, sometimes ironically connotes "empirically."
The impulse to falsify the facts in order to bring them into a comprehensible pattern assails the scientists who try to manage detailed facts and small patterns. Another analogous temptation assails the philosophers and ontologists who try to make sense out of the larger patterns of history and to comprehend the whole drama of history as meaningful. Naturally the mind is baffled by the seeming confusion of the historical drama, devoid of the neat endings, whether tragic or happy, which art gives to the various dramas of history in order to endow them with comprehensible conclusions.
It is significant that working historians have an instinctive reaction to the ambitions of the philosophers and to their pretension that they have discovered a larger ontological pattern behind, within and above the phantasmagoria of history. "Men wiser and more learned than I,"
writes the great historian H. A. L. Fisher in the preface to his History of Europe, "have
discerned in history a plot, a rhythm a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I see only one emergency following upon another, as wave follows on wave; only one great fact, with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and unforeseen."
Every philosophical effort to understand history is based on the assumption that in some depth of reality a pattern may be found in which that which seems "contingent and unforeseen" takes its place as a "necessary’‘ development, as a servant of the hidden logic which underlies and informs all things.
In the history of Western civilization the efforts to comprehend history ontologically have been many; but they all fall into two primary categories: (A) the classical idea of the historical cycle and (B) the modern idea of historical development. This modern idea which has been elaborated since the Renaissance takes such various forms as the Hegelian dialectical view of historical development and the supposedly unmetaphysical and purely scientific idea of development in the thought of the social Darwinists. All these ideas of "progress" express the historical
optimism of modern man. In various metaphysical and scientific garbs they present themselves as the effective religion of modern man. He endows his own life with meaning because he can set it into the frame of a simply meaningful history.
The two ideas of the cycle and of development actually define two basic facts of historical occurrences. The cycle defines the birth, life and death of the organisms which participate in the historical stream. Since nations, cultures and civilizations are not organisms, in the exact sense of the word, and have no definitely allotted time span of biological organisms, the classical analogy between biological and historical cycles was therefore partly erroneous. The error did not become apparent until the Aristotelian concept of a fixed historical structure was challenged by the idea of historical development. Nevertheless, it contains a modicum of truth. For
historical cultures, civilizations and communities are mortal, though their decay and death is never a fate ordained by their nature, but is always partly the result of historic mistakes and miscalculations.
The modern progressive view is just as true and just as false as the cyclical view. It is just as true because it corresponds to one indubitable fact about history. That fact is that there has been a steady growth of man’s control of the natural forces which furnish the basis of history. This development has proceeded throughout the rise and fall of particular civilizations. It has culminated in the development of technics, which have altered the possibilities of cohesion in
the community as well as changing the physical basis of historical existence. Growing technics include means of communication which have made larger units of cohesion possible; and the development in weapons of warfare which have culminated in the fearfully lethal atomic weapons of our day. This growth in technics has been so phenomenal that it has prompted the modern illusion of progress. But it becomes daily more apparent that man’s technical mastery over nature has not seriously altered either his spiritual or intellectual endowments nor changed his social stature as both creator and creature in history. Technical development has therefore not changed history from its essence as a drama to a course of predictable development.
The two patterns of the cycle and the forward movement are therefore not so much dramatic patterns as they are the two dimensions of the stage upon which the drama is played. They have only negative significance for the meaning of history.
Confusion results when positive meaning is ascribed to these two dimensions of the stage of the drama. Spengler’s and Toynbee’s efforts to restore the cycle as a bearer of positive meaning prove both, the possibilities and the limits of fitting the drama of history into the cyclical mold.
The endless variety of dramatic themes which are superimposed upon the historical cycles and the fact that their life, growth and death do not follow the necessities of the natural cycle but are due to human ingenuity and human failure, make the cycle impossible as a bearer of positive meaning. It may be inevitable that every culture or civilization should die. But it is possible that this death should prove to be the transmutation into another kind of life. This is at least one reason why historical cycles are not analogous to natural cycles, and why they can be bearers of a positive interpretation of the historical drama.
In the same manner historical development is not really analogous to natural growth. The basic fact of historical development is probably caused by man’s increasing mastery of nature, and not upon any law of the "survival of the fittest" nor upon some obscure historical dialectic such as Hegel discerns. Certainly the ideas of progress, whether pretending to be "scientific" or
"philosophical," tend to obscure the interplay between freedom and necessity which gives the human drama such a bewildering complexity. Yet there is historical development. Problems do recur in ever widening dimensions, as, for instance, the problem of community, which has reached global proportions in our day. But no "progress" can assure the solution of these ever wider and more complex problems. The forward movement can give history no more positive meaning than the cycle. Both describe, not patterns, but conditions for the historical drama.
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return to religion-online
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.