Both lectures discussed the situation of our nation in the current world situation, explained from the point of view of the Christian faith. Our culture knows little about the use and abuse of power; but we must use power in a global sense. Meanwhile, we are drawn into a historic situation in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in the hell of global insecurity; and belief in the perfect.
The various sociological determinisms are reinforced by the general account that psychologists make of the human psyche.
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr
The Innocent Nation in an Innocent World
We had found great spaces for the satisfaction of human desires instead of busy Europe. Loyalty to the community is therefore only morally acceptable if it includes values broader than those of the community. Our lack of lust for power renders the fulminations of our enemies against us exceedingly incapable.
Other idealists believe that giving up the use of atomic weapons would free us from the dilemma.
Happiness, Prosperity and Virtue
Whatever the beginning of the world may be, the end will be glorious and heavenly beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.” It is even more difficult to make a true estimate of the effect of these standards on the spiritual and cultural quality of our society.For Jefferson the favorable economic circumstances of the New Continent were the clear purpose of the providential decree.
From that day to this, it has remained one of our nation's most difficult achievements. 34;capitalism remained much less developed in some neighboring colonies, the later southern states of the United States. Consideration of the American prosperity cult cannot be dismissed without looking at another aspect of this phenomenon.
Because in this abundance, the least privileged members of the community are still privileged, compared to less privileged communities. The inventions of writing and printing represent two of the most important chapters in cultural history. There is no neat harmony between the conscious ends of life and the physical instruments for their attainment; for the health of the body is weak and uncertain.
He cannot find fulfillment outside community; but he also cannot find full fulfillment in society. He may man a bombing plane and suffer the pricks of conscience of the damned so that the community might survive.
The Master of Destiny
He has made us master organizers of the world to create a system where chaos reigns. But the American experience represents a particularly unique and ironic refutation of the illusion in all such dreams. According to communist belief, this monopoly is achieved by a remarkable coincidence between providence and the determined will of the proletariat.
In the liberal versions of the dream of managing history, the problem of power is never fully explored. The realm of politics, with its vast unaccountable power, is a terra incognita for it. In this lesson, the course of American history is a neat and ironic parable for the whole meaning of the liberal dream.
They were right insofar as there was implicit in the democratic conception (though not always fully understood) a modest awareness of this. This success requires a modest awareness of the contingent elements in the values and ideals of our commitment, even when they seem universally valid. It is the rejection of the reality of original sin in the minds of the controllers of the social process that has brought about either cruelty or confusion.
Most attempts to manage the historical process would actually destroy creativity with destructiveness. Lust for power contains spiritual elements mixed with the natural survival impulse of the natural world.
The Triumph of Experience Over Dogma
Addressing some of the key issues in the debate between Marxism and liberal society can shed light on the paradox of American social policy, which is usually theorized. This cheerful confidence in the possibilities of social harmony arises both from one of the great achievements of commercial culture and from a natural illusion about such a culture. In the shift of motive from the former to the later bourgeois man, there is an inevitable degradation of liberal dogma.
Market reciprocity was too simply equated with social harmony. It attributed economic power solely to ownership and thus concealed the power of the manager and manipulator. Madison was much more aware than Jefferson of the dangers of what he called "faction" in the community.
It knows nothing of simple harmony in society, analogous to the supposed reciprocity of the free market. It was a pragmatic movement born out of the need to oppose organized power to organized power in a technical society. It gradually became aware of the fact that economic power is trying to bend the government to its goals.
Property is the instrument of justice in the creed of the bourgeois world; and the source of all evil in Marxist interpretation. But it is not sustainable to place the institution of ownership in the domain of the sacred.
The International Class Struggle
The primary cause of the resentment that causes revolt in the non-industrial world is the fact that the first impact of a technical society on a non-technical one was exploitative. Ironically, our own nation, which became the residual legatee of these resentments, was not at the forefront of the imperial enterprise. The second reason for the rebellion of the non-industrial world is the plight of the poor in the non-technical world.
Moreover, few of the non-industrial nations have sufficiently high standards of honesty to make democratic government viable. One of them is certainly that the great traditional cultures of the East never inculcated an individual sense of responsibility in the larger community. Liberal opinion in the Western world rightly emphasizes the necessity of technical assistance to increase the productivity of the entire non-industrial world.
Communism is a historically dynamic religion that comes to hopeless people in the East as a harbinger of great hope. It also enables the identification of the beginning and end of the thinking process, which is especially close to the human heart. This ultimate pretension has no validity in the Western world, since technical achievements clearly predate the proclamation of communism.
Bourgeois versions of the concept of the dignity of the individual are often flawed. So there is no spiritual basis in the Orient for what we know as the "dignity of the individual."
The American Future
Significantly, the same world that only yesterday feared our possible return to adolescent irresponsibility is now alert to the possibilities of misuse of our power. That idealism is too oblivious to the ironic dangers to which human virtue, wisdom, and power are subjected. The second aspect embodies the temptation to become impatient and defiant of the slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history.
We could bring disaster to ourselves and the world if we forgot that even the most powerful nations and even the wisest planners of the future remain both creatures and creators of the historical process. There will be even more hope for the peace and justice of the world community if a fragmented Europe achieves unity, to speak with greater unanimity in the councils of nations than is now possible. It is also to be hoped that the Asiatic world will gain enough voice in the councils of free nations to correct in the same way the inevitable bias of the Western nations.
The tendency "to give to each his due" is indeed one of the aims of such discipline. Only this realization can allow the strong to use the lives of the weak as instruments of their own self-realization. The most important of these is the fact that human communities are never simply artifacts of the human mind and will.
The certainty of the enemy's continued intransigence appears to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. The realm of mystery and meaning that includes the perplexing configurations of history and ultimately makes sense of history is not identical to any scheme of rationality.
The Significance of Irony
They are related to each other by some weakness of the person involved in both. Comic incongruity is converted into irony, when one element in the contrast is found to be the source of the other. But he is also not necessarily involved with evil because of his relationship to the necessities and contingencies of the world of nature.
However, it is obvious that the power of Zeus is essentially a power of nature. The tragic motif is subordinated to the ironic in any case, since evil and destructiveness are not seen as inevitable consequences of the exercise of human creativity. These pretensions are the source of ironic contrasts of strength leading to weakness, wisdom emerging.
The force of these judgments against us derives in part from a perversion of the biblical interpretation of irony. For the Lukan version alone would make poverty a guarantee of virtue, especially of the virtue of humility, which it is not. In the Marxist apocalypse, one error is piled upon another regarding the virtue of the poor.
Tolstoy was happy to demonstrate that the conscious intention of the participants in the struggle had little to do with its deeper meaning. However, his imagined sense of charity came from a religious awareness of a different dimension of meaning than at.