Three

The Divine License to Kill *

American liberal thought has, by and large, provided the doctrinal underpinnings for the construction and maintenance of the postwar international order, and the conception of democracy and freedom that has animated it, the two major themes of these essays. With their pragmatic tendencies and skepticism about overarching theory, these intellectual currents are often best understood through their application in particular cases, rather than in foundational studies, generally eschewed. But there are some exceptions. One intellectual figure particularly stands out as the source of wisdom on these matters, Reinhold Niebuhr, who was regarded with respect approaching reverence by many of those most influential in shaping the contemporary world order. For this reason alone, his thinking merits careful attention. In particular, given the concerns of these essays, it is of some interest to inquire into the source of his influence and the high regard for his intellectual contributions and moral stature. The appearance of a recent biography and collection of his essays offers a good opportunity to address these questions.1

Niebuhr has been described as “one of the leading intellects and social critics of the century” (David Brion Davis), “probably the most influential single mind in the development of American attitudes which combine moral purpose with a sense of political reality” (McGeorge Bundy). He “is one of the saints of modern American liberalism” who “attained a revered status in the American liberal community” (Paul Roazen), “a man of formidable mental powers” (Christopher Lasch), “a towering figure among the American intellectuals and a major force in defining both theological and political liberalism” (Alan Brinkley). Hans Morgenthau is said to have considered him “the most important American political thinker since Calhoun” (Kenneth W. Thompson).

According to Arthur Schlesinger, Niebuhr was “one of the most penetrating and rewarding of twentieth-century minds,” a “penetrating critic of the Social Gospel and of pragmatism” who “ended up, in a sense, the powerful reinterpreter and champion of both.” His “remarkable analysis . . . took what was valuable in each, rescued each by defining for each the limits of validity, and, in the end, gave the essential purposes of both new power and new vitality.” He “remains the great illuminator of the dark conundrums of human nature, history and public policy.” His work and his writing “helped accomplish in a single generation a revolution in the bases of American liberal political thought” with its “searching realism” that “gave new strength to American liberal democracy, or, rather, renewed sources of strength which had been too often neglected in the generations since the American revolution.”

From World War II through the Kennedy years, Niebuhr was “the official establishment theologian” (Richard Rovers). He was featured in Time, Look, Readers Digest, and The Saturday Evening Post, a figure familiar to the general public, the state managers, and the intellectual community, which regarded him with great respect if not awe, as these few references indicate.

Richard Fox’s well-crafted study is, as Roazen comments, “a fine biography of Niebuhr the intellectual,” but the reader—at least, this reader—is left with many questions as to why his work had the impact it apparently did. Fox often does not spell out the contents of this work in much detail. As David Brion Davis puts the matter, Fox “is less successful in conveying the power and profundity of Niebuhr’s best work, especially The Nature and Destiny of Man”; indeed, he devotes only a few pages to the actual contents of this much-acclaimed two-volume expansion of the 1939 Gifford lectures. Here, Davis alleges, Niebuhr “made a convincing case for the doctrine of original sin and suggested a way to conceive life’s relation to eternity without retreating into mysticism or a belief in supernatural salvation.” One therefore turns with anticipation to the text itself. But there is no convincing case here for anything; if readers are convinced, it is not by force of argument or array of fact, for these are absent.

The case that Niebuhr presents will hardly convince those who are not overly impressed with attempts “to conceive life’s relation to eternity” or with the significance of Niebuhr’s central theme: “The double aspect of grace, the twofold emphasis upon the obligation to fulfill the possibilities of life and upon the limitations and corruptions in all historic realizations” (Nature and Destiny, II, 211).2 It may be, as Niebuhr holds, that “There is no social or moral obligation which does not invite us on the one hand to realize higher possibilities of good and does not on the other reveal the limits of the good in history.”

But the secular “rationalists” (as Niebuhr sometimes terms them) to whom this message is addressed will find it banal. They will see little force in the assertion—there is no identifiable argument—that in “divine transcendence the spirit of man finds a home in which it can understand its stature of freedom” and also “the limits of its freedom,” that “God’s creation of, and relation to, the world . . . prove that human finiteness and involvement in flux are essentially good and not evil” (Nature and Destiny, I, 126–27). They will regard “human finiteness” as obvious, and human “involvement in flux” to be an equally obvious moral obligation. But they will seek no “proof” that this finiteness and engagement are “essentially good,” for they are not, and will find Niebuhr’s “proof” no more compelling than other obiter dicta presented throughout in lofty and sometimes memorable rhetoric.

It is “by the mercy and power of God,” Niebuhr tells us, that “man’s insignificance as a creature, involved in the process of nature and time, is lifted into significance.” The “primal sin”—“original sin”—is man’s “inclination to abuse his freedom, to overestimate his power and significance and become everything.” “Without the presuppositions of the Christian faith the individual is either nothing or becomes everything” (Nature and Destiny, I, 92). Niebuhr’s secular antagonist is unlikely to be surprised at the discovery of “abuse of freedom” or to have been tempted to believe that “the individual is either nothing or becomes everything,” so that the appeal to Christian faith to overcome this malady will seem unwarranted at best.

Niebuhr urges that “the taint of sin upon all historical achievements does not destroy the possibility of such achievements nor the obligation to realize truth and goodness in history.” This is “the paradox of grace,” perhaps Niebuhr’s leading idea and most influential. The paradox holds of all human activity, and “The fulfillments of meaning in history will be the more untainted in fact, if purity is not prematurely claimed for them.”

The quest for truth and the struggle for justice both fall under this “paradox of grace.” The quest for truth is “invariably tainted with an ‘ideological’ taint of interest, which makes our apprehension of truth something less than knowledge of the truth and reduces it to our truth” (Nature and Destiny, II, 213–14). As Niebuhr later develops the point, the social and historical sciences may find “patterns of historical development,” but the attribution of causes is “hazardous not only because of the complexity of the causal chain but because human agents are themselves causes within the causal nexus.” There is, furthermore, no firm ground of objectivity. History is interpreted by “selves rather than minds,” and “no scientific method can compel a self to cease from engaging in whatever rationalization of interest may seem plausible to it.” We must search for truth but anticipate error, and always retain a tolerance for other perceptions and conclusions. We must not “ever despair of an adequate scientific method mitigating ideological conflicts in history, but must, on the other hand, recognize the limits of its power” (“Ideology and the Scientific Method,” 1953; Nature and Destiny, II, 220ff.).

The same holds of “the struggle for justice,” which is “as profound a revelation of the possibilities and limits of historical existence as the quest for truth.”

Here too, the Christian faith teaches us that “History moves towards the realization of the Kingdom [of God] but yet the judgment of God is upon every new realization,” upon “the evil, which taints all (human) achievements” (Nature and Destiny, II, 244, 286). We must recognize both human possibilities and human finiteness. To ignore the first leads to skepticism (“in the field of culture”) and to an immoral refusal of engagement (in the social world); to ignore the second leads to “fanaticism,” which Niebuhr perceives in the “pretensions” of the social sciences and in the “religious faiths” of liberalism and Marxism, the thesis and antithesis that run through his work, to be overcome by the synthesis more specifically, the “synthesis of reformation and renaissance” offered by the Christian faith, the doctrines of original sin and atonement that he develops.

Niebuhr proceeds to show how these often plausible contentions about human possibilities and limits can be embedded in a version of Christian faith. Whether this intellectual apparatus is helpful in understanding the issues or fortifying the conclusions is another question. That his conclusions can only be grounded or comprehended in these terms is mere conceit. That he has “proven” any of this, as he often claims, is—to use his favored polemical term—“absurd.”

The discussion is peppered with such words as “prove” and “consequently,” suggesting that an argument has been offered. Thus we read in a critique of naturalism: “If, however, the eternity to which the individual flees is an undifferentiated realm of being, which negates all history and denies its significance, the individual is himself swallowed up in that negation, as the logic of mysticism abundantly proves. Consequently it is only in a prophetic religion, as in Christianity, that individuality can be maintained” (Nature and Destiny, I, 69).

The “pride and power of man, who surprises himself by the influence of his decisions upon history and the power of his actions upon nature, who discovers himself as a creator,” is a “this-worldly version” of “the Christian idea of the significance of each man in the sight of God,” as is “proved by the fact that neither the non-Christian nations nor the Catholic nations, in the culture of which Christianity was modified by classical influences, participated in any large degree in the dynamics of modern commercial-industrial civilization” (Nature and Destiny, I, 66). Since God’s creation of and relation to the world “prove that human finiteness and involvement in flux are essentially good and not evil,” it follows that “[a] religion of revelation is thus alone able to do justice to both the freedom and the finiteness of man and to understand the character of the evil in him” (Nature and Destiny, I, 127, my emphasis throughout).

Whatever sense or value there may be to such pronouncements, it is difficult to find in the exposition anything that merits such terms as “prove” or “consequently.” The citations also illustrate Niebuhr’s rather casual way with history. In his intellectual biography, Richard Fox reviews his casual way with the doctrines of his adversaries, who will barely recognize their thought in his version of it, not only in brief articles where simplification is to be expected, but in lengthy treatises. Niebuhr is, Fox writes, a “Christian apologist” who throughout his work begins “by erecting unacceptable alternatives to the Christian faith” but in the manner of “the debater’s ancient ploy of presenting the opposition in simplistic terms, then rejecting their stance as simplistic.” His books and papers on historical topics and contemporary affairs are also sparing in factual reference.

Evidently, many found his intellectual contributions to be highly compelling, but this effect cannot be traced to their factual content, documentation, or enlightening selection of factual materials; or to sustained rational argument, which is rarely to be discerned. It must lie somewhere else. An interesting question, then, is: where? Throughout Niebuhr’s work, we find that much the same is true. Thus, he repeatedly emphasizes that the “thesis” and “antithesis” that he combats are in reality religious faiths, though deficient ones. “Strictly speaking,” he asserts,

there is no such thing as secularism. An explicit denial of the sacred always contains some implied affirmation of a holy sphere. Every explanation of the meaning of human existence must avail itself of some principle of explanation which cannot be explained. Every estimate of values involves some criterion of value which cannot be arrived at empirically. Consequently the avowedly secular culture of today turns out upon close examination to be either a pantheistic religion which identifies existence in its totality with holiness, or a rationalistic humanism for which human reason is essentially god, or a vitalistic humanism which worships some unique or particular vital force in the individual or the community as its god, that is, as the object of its unconditioned loyalty.3

The statements I have emphasized are plausible on a charitable reading, though typically presented without argument. Both of the spheres of human activity that he delineates—the quest for truth and the struggle for justice—rely on principles of explanation and criteria of value that are far from fully grounded in fact or reason, perhaps inevitably. Recognition of such “human finiteness” is hardly a novel insight, and does not entail any of the consequences he spells out, nor need these unexplained principles and criteria be “affirmed” as a “holy sphere.” Niebuhr’s Deweyite and other adversaries may regard them as either tentative, to be refined as the quest for truth and the struggle for justice proceed, or as elements of our intrinsic nature, providing a framework for our thought, action, achievement, and understanding. Such disavowal of “the sacred” leads to no new form of worship. Insofar as these ideas are reasonable, they should be considered virtual truisms, deriving from the seventeenth-century response to the skeptical crisis and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

“The conflict between rationalists and romanticists has become one of the most fateful issues of our day, with every possible religious and political implication,” Niebuhr asserts in opening his Gifford lectures. The “rationalist,” whether “idealistic” or “naturalistic,” is confronted with “the protest of the romantic naturalists who interpret man as primarily vitality and who find neither a pale reason nor a mechanical nature an adequate key to man’s true essence.” “Modern man, in short, cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence. Thus some of the certainties of modern man are in contradiction with one another; and it may be questioned whether the conflict can be resolved within terms of the presuppositions with which modern culture approaches the issue.”

Niebuhr goes on to assert that it is not only questionable but false, and that only his prophetic Christian faith offers the resolution of the alleged contradiction. “The fact is, that it is not possible to solve the problem of vitality and form, or fully to understand the paradox of human creativity and destructiveness within the limits of the dimension in which modern culture, whether rationalistic or romantic, views this problem. Within these limits modern culture is forced to choose between four equally untenable viewpoints”: the road to fascism, liberalism, Marxism, or the despair that “contents itself with palliatives, as in Freudianism” (Nature and Destiny, I, 20–21, 53).

Again, Niebuhr’s secular adversaries can find some meaning, and some sense, in this discussion, and the tendencies he discerns in modern thought do indeed exist. But the presuppositions of modern secular culture require no certainties and need find no contradiction between the uniqueness of human reason and the recognition that humans are part of nature. This culture will perceive problems where Niebuhr finds paradox and contradiction, and may even tentatively conclude that these problems lie in part beyond human intellectual capacity—hardly a surprising conclusion if humans are indeed part of the natural world. The appeal to Christian faith may provide spiritual sustenance to those who choose to follow Niebuhr’s path, but nothing more can be claimed, and one who does not feel comforted by arbitrary faith in this or that—and Niebuhr offers nothing more—will persist in seeking truth and justice, with full recognition of the fact—indeed, the banality of the observation—that much lies beyond our grasp, and that this condition will persist for all of human history. It is all too easy to mistake obscurantism for profundity.

Niebuhr won renown not only as a thinker but also as a participant in social and political affairs, and his life was indeed one of continuous engagement, in his writings, preaching and lecturing, and other activities. Turning to his writings in these domains, we find essentially the same qualities: no rational person could be convinced since evidence is sparse and often dubious, it is difficult to detect a thread of argument, and he keeps pretty much to the surface of the issues he addresses. No serious Marxists, for example, would be impressed by the insight that “an optimism which depends upon the hope of the complete realization of our highest ideals in history is bound to suffer ultimate disillusionment,” though they would be surprised to learn that “Marxianism is, in short, another form of utopianism.”4 Marx had little to say about the nature of communism and—rightly or wrongly—had only contempt for “utopianism,” including attempts to sketch out the detailed nature of communist society.

In his Reflections on the End of an Era (1934), Niebuhr wrote that “When the storms and fevers of this era are passed, and modern civilization has achieved a social system which provides some basic justice compatible with the necessities of a technical age, the perennial problems of humanity will emerge once more.” It is hard to imagine that he was not familiar with the very similar conceptions of the Deweyites and Marxists he condemns, for example, Sidney Hook, who, a year earlier, in a book expounding a Deweyite version of Marx, had written that Marx’s “dialectic method” “does not sanction the naive belief that a perfect society, a perfect man, will ever be realized; but neither does it justify the opposite error that since perfection is unattainable, it is therefore immaterial what kind of men or societies exist” (a secular version of Niebuhr’s later “paradox of grace”).5

Citing Marx’s words that “Granted the principle of the imperfection of man. . . . We know in advance that all human institutions are incomplete,” Hook went on to observe that for Marx, as for Hegel, cultural progress consists in transferring problems to higher and more inclusive levels. But there are always problems. “History,” he says, “has no other way of answering old questions than by putting new ones.” Under communism man ceases to suffer as an animal and suffers as human. He therewith moves from the plane of the pitiful to the plane of the tragic. The similarity to Niebuhr’s later views is clear, but neither such then-familiar work nor its antecedents prevented him from condemning Marxism and Deweyite liberalism as forms of “utopianism,” to be overcome in his Christian synthesis.

Fox finds Niebuhr’s “pivotal contribution to the intellectual life of the forties,” when his influence approached its peak, to be “the somber assertion of built-in limits to human existence.” As explained in the Gifford lectures and elsewhere, including his political writings, a person should seek truth and justice, recognizing the inevitability of the taint of interest, of evil in pursuit of good, and of the impossibility of “fulfillment” in human history. Again, the conclusions are plausible enough, though hardly noteworthy. But one will find little in Niebuhr’s work of the period that would, or should, convince anyone not already persuaded on other grounds.

When Niebuhr turns to substantive political issues, the results are less than overwhelming. His highly regarded defense of democracy in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) is a case in point. We may agree that “[a] free society requires some confidence in the ability of men to reach tentative and tolerable adjustments between their competing interests and to arrive at some common notions of justice which transcend all partial interests.” But the inquiry into contemporary democracy, or democracy as an ideal, does not end here, and is not furthered by the broad brush strokes that follow.

Arthur Schlesinger comments (approvingly) that Niebuhr’s discussion here “sounded a good deal more like the mixed economy and open society of the New Deal than like socialism.” Schlesinger much exaggerates “Roosevelt’s brilliant invocation of democratic resources against the perils of depression and war.” It was wartime military Keynesianism, not the New Deal, that overcame the depression, and Roosevelt’s steps toward war, however one judges their merits, were hardly a model of democracy—as Charles Beard pointed out in contemporary work used to discredit him completely because it struck too close to home. And neither Schlesinger nor Niebuhr confronts the serious questions that at once arise when one proceeds beyond ringing phrases in “vindication of democracy” and asks, at either an abstract or concrete level, just how democracy is supposed to reach adjustments among “competing interests” when investment decisions are in private hands, with all of the consequences that flow from this fact with regard to the parameters set for public policy, not to speak of control of the state and the ideological institutions.

Niebuhr’s few historical comments in this regard are also, to say the least, surprising, for example, his conclusion that the “low standards of honesty” of “the great traditional cultures of the orient” and other non-industrial societies make democracy there unviable.6 He seems quite unaware of the impressive record of corruption in American democracy back to the days of the Founding Fathers and beyond.7 Fox comments that in his vague celebration of democracy, Niebuhr simply abandoned questions and insights familiar to him from his earlier years as a social activist and critic: “As the younger Niebuhr had insisted, reason was always the servant of interest in a social situation. Reason was shaped by interest in selecting some topics for attention, others for the dustbin”—to which serious questions concerning democracy were consigned as Niebuhr assumed the mantle of prophet of the establishment.

It is, incidentally, a bit more than “irony” that, just as he was writing about “tolerable adjustments,” etc., business interests were gearing up for a major propaganda assault, conducted with brilliant effectiveness in subsequent years, to undermine trade unions and the limited popular engagement in politics that had begun in the 1930s, and to place public policy firmly within the business-run “conservative” agenda, very much as they had done after World War I and were to do again in response to the “crisis of democracy”—that is, the threatening steps toward democracy—of the 1960s.

Niebuhr’s later work, hampered by severe physical disability, yields little further illumination. In his Irony of American History, we find much play with paradox, but little insight into American history. The “irony” is an incongruity between ends desired and results attained; it is “ironic” because it is not merely “fortuitous” but rather involves the responsibility of the actor, as distinct from “the tragic element” of “conscious choices of evil for the sake of good.”

Throughout, Niebuhr affirms the platitudes of the period. He opens by declaring that “Everybody understands the obvious meaning of the world struggle in which we are engaged. We are defending freedom against tyranny and are trying to preserve justice” against the depredations of the Evil Empire. It was obvious then, as it is now, that reality was not quite that simple. Only a year before, Hans Morgenthau had written that our “holy crusade to extirpate the evil of Bolshevism” concealed “a campaign to outlaw morally and legally all popular movements favoring social reform and in that fashion to make the status quo impregnable to change”8—a status quo highly favorable to the interests of the owners and managers of American society, and their intellectual retinue. Barely a glimmer of the evolving realities appears in Niebuhr’s diffuse and abstract presentation, just as there is hardly more than a hint that there was some slight taint in our historical “innocence.”

We were “innocent a half century ago with the innocency of irresponsibility,” he writes, and “Our culture knows little of the use and the abuse of power.” The year 1902, exactly “a half century ago,” was the year when the slaughter of Filipinos reached its horrendous peak, and the fate of the native population is not adequately captured in the single phrase, thirty pages later, that “The surge of our infant strength over a continent . . . was not innocent” (4–5, 35). Blacks, laborers, women, and others might also have had a word to say about “our innocence,” just as the victims in “our backyard,” at a further remove, had more than a little appreciation of our shrinking from “the use and the abuse of power.”

In completely conventional terms, Niebuhr reviews our “Messianic dreams,” which were “fortunately not corrupted by the lust of power” though “of course not free of the moral pride which creates a hazard to their realization” (71). There is nothing here about the fate of those who stood in “our” way, just as the “Messianic dreams” are not sullied by the actual thoughts of those who expressed them, for example, Woodrow Wilson, who urged that state power be used to create “the world as a market” for the trader and manufacturer: “the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down . . . even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process” (1907). At worst, for Niebuhr, such thoughts exhibit “moral pride.”

Niebuhr held in 1952 that now, after centuries of relative innocence, America faced the “irresolvable contradiction” between “prosperity and virtue.” “The discovery of these contradictions threatens our culture with despair.” “We are therefore confronted for the first time in our life” with the question “whether there is a simple coordination between virtue and prosperity” (45–46). It is difficult to know what to make of a study of American history—let alone “the irony” of this history—in which such words can be pronounced, quite apart from the reality then unfolding as the United States devoted itself, worldwide, to the single-minded defense of “freedom” and “justice.”

The United States does face “moral perils,” Niebuhr continues, but they are “not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power”; rather, “the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too complacently relied upon” (133). This is the lesson of American history and the postwar world. The United Nations, he felt, might help tame our excesses in pursuit of virtue, “as an organ in which even the most powerful of the democratic nations must bring their policies under the scrutiny of world public opinion” (136), a stance that was comfortable enough when American power sufficed to guarantee the discipline of the international organizations. Niebuhr cannot, of course, be faulted for failing to predict the general approbation for Washington’s contemptuous dismissal of international law and of the international institutions generally when they could no longer be controlled, for example, the near unanimity with which his contemporary disciples, and the intellectual community generally, approve of the refusal of the United States to agree to the demand of the International Court of Justice that it refrain from the “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua. But a student of the irony of American history might have remarked that very much the same thing happened under Woodrow Wilson, when the United States effectively dismantled the Central American Court of Justice, which it had established, when it ruled against the United States in the matter of Nicaragua. Again, there is more than “irony” here, and this care along with much else might have raised some questions about our willingness to face a “world public opinion” that escapes the control of US power.

Throughout, his picture of the American past and present is the merest sentimentality, uninformed by fact, blind to social and historical reality. Niebuhr criticizes European opinion that “knows our semi-official ideology better than it knows our practical justice” (101). But he too consistently interprets history not on the basis of the factual or documentary record, but in terms of professed ideals. This failure mars not only his account of US history, politics, and social life, but also his portrayal of our “ruthless foe, who is ironically the more recalcitrant and ruthless because his will is informed by an impossible dream of bringing happiness to all men” (75). How Lenin and Trotsky, let alone Stalin, can be described as guided by such a dream defies understanding. In fact, Niebuhr’s account of the Soviet system of tyranny and oppression is no less mystical and abstract than his discussion of American history in terms of its “dreams” and “Messianic vision” and “innocency” and “virtue”—always “ironically” tainted with the evil resulting from “human finiteness.”

In fact, Niebuhr does not offer sustained argument or convincing factual discussion, but rather moral precepts. It might fairly be argued that such precepts are inevitably mundane in content, however elegant they may be in expression, and that some may find them comforting, even inspiring, a helpful guide to action and inquiry. However this may be, they fall far short of rational analysis or argument. Fox observes that his work of the early 1930s, during his quasi-Marxist phase, “gave strong support to the reigning assumption on the American left in the 1930s that the social struggle would be decided by the most persuasive propaganda, not the most compelling argument” (the “reigning assumption” quite broadly, as Harold Lasswell, for one, emphasized in his advocacy of “propaganda” at the same time). The comment holds of his work throughout.

It is commonly remarked that Niebuhr always remained a preacher. To the extent that this is true—and it very largely is—the persuasiveness of his contributions is not to be judged, or to be explained, in terms of the way he uses factual or documentary evidence, or reaches the heart of the positions of his adversaries, or provides sustained argument for his conclusions. Rather, his writings are a form of exhortation, which, at best, brings to our attention ideas and perceptions that we recognize as valid or worthwhile from our own experience, or on the basis of our own intuitive judgments, but might have missed without this stimulus to our thought; and at worst, provides rationalization for the interests he emphasized but often failed to recognize. This is not a criticism as much as a categorization; it does not question the plausibility of his conceptions and conclusions, some of which—particularly, those that are more general and abstract—seem reasonable enough, if not particularly surprising, novel, or illuminating. It does, however, still leave open the question of the source of his influence, which many commentators and associates feel to have been immense and justly so.

During a long and active life, Niebuhr took stands on many important issues. In Detroit in the 1920s, he joined the Christian left in holding that “some kind of democratization of industry and some degree of socialization of property are the ultimate goals toward which our whole political and social life is tending.” He criticized the human cost of the industrial system and condemned “the tremendous centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few.” He was also critical of the cynicism of those “moral idealists” who profess pacifist values, in accord with “the tendency of those who have to extol the virtue of peace and order.” On racial issues, which were of paramount importance in Detroit as elsewhere, he took a distant stand, Fox records. By the 1930s, he underwent the transition to some version of Marxian socialism that was common among intellectuals, also adopting the fashionable view that the role of intellectuals is to provide “necessary illusion” for the “proletarian” because of the “stupidity of the average man.”

Niebuhr’s ascent to “official establishment theologian,” however, awaited his return to liberal orthodoxies, now seasoned with the doctrine of inevitability of sin. During World War II, he wrote in the Nation on “the greater measure of coercion” required during a national emergency. He condoned infringements on “the freedom of organizations to spread subversive propaganda” and actions “to eliminate recalcitrant and even traitorous elements,” a fairly conventional liberal position at the time. Similarly, during World War I he had demanded “out-and-out loyalty,” condemning even mild criticism of government censorship and holding that “I do think that a new nation has a right to be pretty sensitive about its unity.” The United States was not, of course, under attack by a superpower; the territorial United States had not been threatened since the War of 1812. Those with a taste for “irony” may wish to consider the performance of latter-day Niebuhrians, neoconservative to liberal, with regard to the measures of coercion undertaken by current enemies of the state, under far more dire circumstances, for which the irate critics share direct responsibility.

Niebuhr was “certain” in March 1948 that “the strategic measures which we are taking in Greece and Turkey” were “absolutely necessary”; he was referring to the murderous counterinsurgency campaign then being launched in Greece to restore the old order, including Nazi collaborators, under a fraudulent pretense of “defense” of Greece from Soviet aggression. He strongly approved of the actions of the Senate Internal Security Committee of Senators McCarran and Jenner, which were “superb”—“the Communists are really ferreted out”—in contrast to Joseph McCarthy, who vilified Niebuhr’s ADA associates as well as Communists, Fox observes. In 1956, he condemned Eisenhower’s critical stance toward the Israeli-French-British invasion of Egypt, which risked the loss of “strategic fortresses” such as Israel in the illusory interest of “‘peace in our time.” He maintained his approval of Israel’s 1956 aggression, observing in June 1967 that “Now that the Israelis have given Nasser and the Arab tribes (sic) their third resounding defeat,” he wished to “thank God for the little nation, which mixes historic faith with superiority in the arts of war.” It is easy to see why his attitudes would generally have endeared him to postwar intellectual opinion.

In his avoidance of fact and argument, and the praise that such practice elicited, Niebuhr was enjoying the luxury afforded anyone who remains firmly within conventional orthodoxies, playing the game by the rules. More exacting standards are demanded of those who prefer not to march in parades—to their benefit, one might add. The reverential awe his words evoked reflects, in part, the shallowness and superficiality of the reigning intellectual culture, a characteristic of all times and places, perhaps. But to explain his status as “official establishment theologian” we must also attend to the lessons drawn from his exhortations.

Fox comments that the Kennedy liberals did not so much “use” Niebuhr’s name as feel indebted to his perspective. He helped them maintain faith in themselves as political actors in a troubled— what he termed a sinful—world. Stakes were high, enemies were wily, responsibility meant taking risks: Niebuhr taught that moral men had to play hardball.

Here, indeed, is a useful lesson, one that Niebuhr had taught in earlier years as well. During his triumphal British visit of 1939, an “inspired limerick . . . became everyone’s favorite,” Fox writes: “At Swanwick, when Niebuhr had quit it/ A young man exclaimed ‘I have hit it!/ Since I cannot do right/ I must find out, tonight/ The right sin to commit—and commit it.’”

The inescapable “taint of sin on all historical achievements,” the necessity to make “conscious choices of evil for the sake of good”—these are soothing doctrines for those preparing to “face the responsibilities of power,” or in plain English, to set forth on a life of crime, to “play hardball” in their efforts to “maintain this position of disparity” between our overwhelming wealth and the poverty of others, in George Kennan’s trenchant phrase as he urged in a secret document of 1948 that we put aside “idealistic slogans” and prepare “to deal in straight power concepts.”

Herein lies the secret of Niebuhr’s enormous influence and success.

 

 

* From “The Divine License to Kill,” Grand Street, vol. 6, no. 2 (Winter 1987).