Realism vs Idealism
Reinhold Niebuhr explained why it’s so hard to build a better world. But he still has much to teach us.
This piece is by Mark Braund, whose writing I always value for its clarity, humanity and moral seriousness. I particularly especially the way he takes big, difficult ideas and connects them back to the political and moral choices we are still wrestling with today.
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.1
These words by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, written in 1944, neatly articulate the reason for the gap between the moral aspirations of millions of people worldwide and the current, troubled reality. It was the subject to which he devoted his life.
Niebuhr was just ten when he decided to follow his father into the church. At twenty, his graduation from Eden Theological Seminary coincided with his father’s death, and he was immediately installed as Pastor of the church in Lincoln, Illinois where his father had preached. He subsequently attended Yale Divinity School.
But while he retained a deep commitment to the church; religion, at least as conventionally practised, was never enough for the young Niebuhr. In its failure to acknowledge the complex realities of social and economic life, he thought the church’s teaching on the importance of Christian love was an inadequate response to the problem of social injustice.
Two ways of looking at the world
In his early work, Niebuhr emphasised the importance of seeing the world through two concurrent lenses: pluralist and structuralist. The world is divided into both nation states, which are always in competition with each other; but it is also divided along class lines, with the same antagonistic class relations replicated within every nation.
In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, he examined the implications of this duality, concluding that in the process by which the moral aspirations of individuals were aggregated into a collective, or national, interest; those aspirations, which make for an effective glue in binding communities and nations together, lost out to stronger sentiments of self-interest. And it was these that defined the basis of relations between nations. The best we could hope for at inter-group level was justice, a process by which the rightness or otherwise of an act is adjudicated after the event; unlike morality, which serves to prevent unjust acts ahead of time.
This persuaded Niebuhr that efforts to improve relations between nations that failed to acknowledge the necessarily immoral nature of human groups were bound to fail.
But a century on, might we not be better placed to understand what happens when our aspirations are aggregated, and to find a way to project our hopes for a world in which nations cooperate towards mutually beneficial ends, into the collective, national consciousness? Might it even be possible to create an effective internationalist conscience that transcends our historical preference for group loyalty?
Cooperation over Competition
Today’s world is very different to that of 1932, when Niebuhr’s generation was struggling to come to terms with the global consequences of the Wall Street Crash. We know what followed. But post-1945, as a result of World War II and the Holocaust, some nations were able, for a period at least, to put aside their competitive instincts and create institutions that brought a degree of economic stability and so helped avoid a repeat of the mid-century moral catastrophe.
If Niebuhr were alive today, he would doubtless respond by saying yes, but look what happened next: from the 1970s onward, both capitalism and the international order reverted to type: politicians failed to adhere to the requirements of the post-war economic settlement; the United States pursued an unwinnable war in Vietnam; and electorates were persuaded that efforts to make society more inclusive were counterproductive, and to vote in support of economic arrangements that would ultimately lead to the biggest financial crash since 1929, and usher in a new era of robber barons.
Niebuhr was a realist, and he warned against the kind of idealism that believes in the inevitability of progress, or the notion that fundamental human decency will ultimately win through. But idealism is essential in the struggle for improved social justice. If we do not permit ourselves to dream big, then the smallest improvements will remain beyond us. By eschewing idealism, we place invisible handcuffs on our moral ambition.
As Dr Martin Luther King said, ‘Niebuhr kept us from being naive about the evil structures of society’. But it is also revealing that Niebuhr called Dr King ‘one of the greatest religious leaders of our time’. For Niebuhr, awareness of the structural evils that arose in complex societies, and which favour minority power and mitigate against greater inclusion, was crucial. But that awareness was an essential tool in the struggle for a better world, not a reason to give up on it.
Religion vs Rationalism
Niebuhr was the inspiration for many of the liberal thinkers who devoted their lives to moving society forward in the post-war period. John Rawls was one: his seminal work, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971, the year Niebuhr died.
As Eric Gregory has written,
Niebuhr and Rawls were realist defenders of a liberal tradition that is wary of perfectionism in politics yet tries to sustain hope in the face of injustice. Rawls took his inspiration from Kantian philosophy. Niebuhr turned to Augustinian theology.2
Perhaps the origins of morality in humans are neither exclusively religious nor rational. Some of us, like Niebuhr, learn what we might call essentially human values in a religious environment. Sometimes they survive into adulthood in the universalised form necessary for people to transcend the compulsion to identify exclusively with members of their own group. But those values can be equally effective when learned in a secular context. Maybe it depends on the quality of the preacher, or the teacher.
John Rawls’ undergraduate thesis, written in 1942, but only recently re-discovered in the library at Harvard, reveals him to have been deeply religious as a young man. But by the time he made his name, in the process eclipsing Niebuhr as America’s leading political philosopher, he had shed his religious upbringing and become the century’s leading rationalist.
Perhaps Rawls’ journey is a metaphor for the one we have all taken over the last century. We don’t need religious instruction to learn what is right and wrong, nor to develop the sense of empathy that is clearly part of our evolutionary heritage. Nor do we need it to develop the capacity to identify with all human beings and become aware of the causes of other people’s suffering. Religious instruction can certainly help, as can a good grounding in the ideals of the enlightenment philosophers. And, of course, those values can also be inculcated as a result of thoughtful parenting.
Nurturing Moral Potential
Today we recognise that a positive early years’ environment, one full of love, kindness, security and fairness, is essential to being able to internalise these values. If we are to solve the problem that Niebuhr identified: why individual moral aspiration is transformed into a collective lack of caring, even when the aggregating is done via participation in democratic processes, then we must find ways to ensure more people are not stripped of their moral potential before they get to vote for the first time.
Niebuhr believed human beings to be inherently flawed. As late as 1965, he wrote that ‘the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith’.3 This was the basis of his doctrine of Christian Realism with which he challenged the laziness of traditional Christian teaching. How did the church expect people to follow its moral teachings if, at the same time, it was suggesting that agitating for change in this life was pointless as a better world — the Kingdom of God — is only attainable after death? Social justice was worth fighting for, but the struggle had to be grounded in the realities of human moral frailty if progress was to be made.
The idea that we are all inherently flawed requires further qualification. Yes, all humans are flawed, but some are more flawed than others. And throughout history, the most flawed among us have all too frequently risen to positions of political power. If we can improve democratic institutions to keep psychopaths away from public office; if we can increase our efforts to ensure fewer young people are exposed to the kinds of harm that makes them distrustful of others; and if we can create conditions in which more people emerge into adulthood with a stronger sense of universal empathy, then it should be possible to narrow the gap between moral individuals and immoral society.
Capitalist Realism
Reading about Niebuhr’s Christian Realism reminded me of the more recent work of the British philosopher Mark Fisher, who coined the term Capitalist Realism. Fisher showed how, despite its shortcomings, capitalism has been successful not only in its capacity for generating wealth, but also in the way it has infiltrated almost every aspect of culture to convince nearly everyone that it’s the only show in town. Not only is there no alternative, but capitalism, specifically in its current form, is inalienable.
Fisher shared with Niebuhr the belief that unless we work tirelessly to prevent it, the cultural embedding of inequality and injustice will proceed apace, and democracy will itself be subverted in the cause of minority wealth and privilege.
In 2007, Barack Obama said that Niebuhr was one of his favourite philosophers. Obama might well have been one of Niebuhr’s favourite presidents had he lived to see him take office. Not only did he have huge respect for people of genuine religious faith, but he was also a decent man who believed in the power of democracy to create a more inclusive world. But Niebuhr would not have been surprised when, at the end of his second term, Obama was obliged to hand the keys to the White House to Donald Trump; proof, as if any were needed, that the struggle for a better world is a marathon, not a sprint; and further, that the course is littered with hurdles that will bring down even the most enlightened of politicians.
To return to the quote that opened this piece: yes, it is our desire for justice that makes democracy possible; and yes again, it is the frequency with which we do injustice to others, directly or indirectly, that makes democracy necessary. But today, democracy’s power to prevent injustice is being steadily eroded by means Niebuhr would have found depressingly familiar.
Universal Serenity?
Reinhold Niebuhr is perhaps best known as the originator of The Serenity Prayer4:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
At the level of the individual, this is a great piece of advice for anyone concerned with living a good life, maintaining their sanity, or trying to stay sober. But when applied collectively, it appears to imply, as Niebuhr did in much if his writing, that there are insurmountable obstacles to creating conditions in which steadily more people are able to achieve economic security and make the most of their lives. That may have been the case when Niebuhr was writing, but we would be failing in our duty to future generations to let him have the last word.
The obstacles he cited clearly remain to this day. As we engage in our own continuing struggle to create a world fit for all human beings, we still have much to learn from him. But nothing would give Reinhold Niebuhr greater pleasure than to be proved wrong about the inevitability of an immoral society.
You might also enjoy the first two posts in this series on 20th century thinkers, which discuss the work of John Rawls and Lawrence Kohlberg.
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 1944.
Eric Gregory. Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls, in The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Jun., 2007)
Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence, Scibners, 1965.
Others have attributed the common formulation of the prayer to Winnifred Wygal.
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Great piece, Mark. Neo-liberalism can be viewed as a ravaging societal menace that escaped its confines once we lost the moral controls of the religious life. We are still struggling over how to create the good society without religion - to, as you put it, "sustain hope in the face of injustice" without this cultural and psychological prop.
We are "inherently flawed" but also inherently empathic - a painful duality that Panglossian rationalists and political progressives are inclined to reject. But if we accept this nuance of human nature, we could build 'the good society' on the compassion that flows from empathy - 2 critical human values that have been debased and submerged by the power interests of masculism. To finally give moral thinking the upper hand, we must place compassion at the centre of our actions and policy-making.
We already know how to do this. I've nothing new to say on it. It's through effective parenting, moral education, fair economics and a culture that fosters both collective and personal worth, etc. We just need leaders with the integrity, vision, courage and steadfastness to face up to malign actors, then get on, and do it.
Interesting piece but swerved Obama’s ‘kill list’ drone war which amplified American exceptionalism rather than any Christian ‘values’.