Leon Wieseltier: What would Niebuhr do?
[Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.]
Democratic realism, progressive realism, ethical realism--the pageant of the paradoxes goes on. The adjectives betray a bad conscience about the noun, they cleanse the noun of its brutality, and raise it up, so that it may be possible to be edifying without being stupid. The war in Iraq, and its plenitude of unanticipated consequences, has raised a suspicion that idealism might be stupid; and there is no denying the hallucinatory quality of a large part of the administration's analysis of the war. These days realism can mean nothing more than lucidity. And there is nothing really paradoxical about any of the above coinages: realism is not always the servant of cynicism, and more people have died at the hands of idealists than at the hands of realists. Moreover, there is no justification of power that cannot become a justification of evil. These are all commonplaces, but they were not always so: they were introduced into the American understanding largely by Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest thinker about morality and power in the modern era. Niebuhr is the new god of Bush-era liberals. They could do worse, though I wish they would stop skipping all the religious stuff. (He was a professor at the Union Theological Seminary, not a fellow at the Center for American Progress.) It was not until very recently that I was made to appreciate the deep affinities between the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr and the thought of Brent Scowcroft.
The children of light are being sloppy. They treat all that is useful to their argument against the war, all the anti-Bush authorities, as essentially the same. I am confident that Niebuhr would have opposed the war in Iraq, but I am confident also that he would have despised Scowcroft, who is the most eminent representative of unethical realism in America. Niebuhr's opposition to the war would have been based, I think, on his principled distaste for Bush's style of nationalism, which he would have regarded as auto-idolatry, and on his insistence that the legitimacy of such an enterprise must be conferred by international institutions. It may be Niebuhr's teachings about the love of country that hold the most stinging rebuke to Bush's jingoism. "We are the most powerful nation on earth," he observed, in a typical passage, in Christianity and Society in 1950. "We are also sufficiently virtuous to be tempted to the assumption that our power is the fruit of our virtue." The president surrendered to that temptation long ago. He is contentedly blind to what Niebuhr, in another essay, called "the immoral elements in all historical success."
The Bush years are a fine time to rediscover the place of self-criticism in patriotism, the corruption of nationalism by self-love. And yet the liberal construction of Niebuhr's idea disturbs me. A connection is angrily made between the heartlessness of much of Bush's domestic policy and the thoughtlessness of much of Bush's foreign policy, to the effect that we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place. Our power is neutralized by our imperfection. Now, whatever one's opinion of the Iraq war, this was not Niebuhr's view of the relation of morality to force. More generally, it is an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. So I do not see what bearing the reform of Congress or the repeal of the tax cut will have upon the objectives and the methods of our struggle against Islamism. Green yourselves all you want, they will still wish to kill you. When I hear liberals synchronizing all things, I am reminded not of Reinhold Niebuhr but of his very opposite among the intellectuals of his time, the charismatic and repulsive Simone Weil. She wrote in 1939 that France's colonial possessions could disqualify it from the fight against the Third Reich, because "there must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France." In 1939! Weil hated totalitarianism, but she loved purity. Niebuhr insisted that in politics purity is a sin. The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. Policy is not the work of monists. The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.
Read entire article at New Republic
Democratic realism, progressive realism, ethical realism--the pageant of the paradoxes goes on. The adjectives betray a bad conscience about the noun, they cleanse the noun of its brutality, and raise it up, so that it may be possible to be edifying without being stupid. The war in Iraq, and its plenitude of unanticipated consequences, has raised a suspicion that idealism might be stupid; and there is no denying the hallucinatory quality of a large part of the administration's analysis of the war. These days realism can mean nothing more than lucidity. And there is nothing really paradoxical about any of the above coinages: realism is not always the servant of cynicism, and more people have died at the hands of idealists than at the hands of realists. Moreover, there is no justification of power that cannot become a justification of evil. These are all commonplaces, but they were not always so: they were introduced into the American understanding largely by Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest thinker about morality and power in the modern era. Niebuhr is the new god of Bush-era liberals. They could do worse, though I wish they would stop skipping all the religious stuff. (He was a professor at the Union Theological Seminary, not a fellow at the Center for American Progress.) It was not until very recently that I was made to appreciate the deep affinities between the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr and the thought of Brent Scowcroft.
The children of light are being sloppy. They treat all that is useful to their argument against the war, all the anti-Bush authorities, as essentially the same. I am confident that Niebuhr would have opposed the war in Iraq, but I am confident also that he would have despised Scowcroft, who is the most eminent representative of unethical realism in America. Niebuhr's opposition to the war would have been based, I think, on his principled distaste for Bush's style of nationalism, which he would have regarded as auto-idolatry, and on his insistence that the legitimacy of such an enterprise must be conferred by international institutions. It may be Niebuhr's teachings about the love of country that hold the most stinging rebuke to Bush's jingoism. "We are the most powerful nation on earth," he observed, in a typical passage, in Christianity and Society in 1950. "We are also sufficiently virtuous to be tempted to the assumption that our power is the fruit of our virtue." The president surrendered to that temptation long ago. He is contentedly blind to what Niebuhr, in another essay, called "the immoral elements in all historical success."
The Bush years are a fine time to rediscover the place of self-criticism in patriotism, the corruption of nationalism by self-love. And yet the liberal construction of Niebuhr's idea disturbs me. A connection is angrily made between the heartlessness of much of Bush's domestic policy and the thoughtlessness of much of Bush's foreign policy, to the effect that we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place. Our power is neutralized by our imperfection. Now, whatever one's opinion of the Iraq war, this was not Niebuhr's view of the relation of morality to force. More generally, it is an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. So I do not see what bearing the reform of Congress or the repeal of the tax cut will have upon the objectives and the methods of our struggle against Islamism. Green yourselves all you want, they will still wish to kill you. When I hear liberals synchronizing all things, I am reminded not of Reinhold Niebuhr but of his very opposite among the intellectuals of his time, the charismatic and repulsive Simone Weil. She wrote in 1939 that France's colonial possessions could disqualify it from the fight against the Third Reich, because "there must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France." In 1939! Weil hated totalitarianism, but she loved purity. Niebuhr insisted that in politics purity is a sin. The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. Policy is not the work of monists. The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.