Reinhold Niebuhr: The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics

Moral Man and Immoral Society (1934)

Any political philosophy which assumes that natural impulses, that is, greed, the will-to-power, and other forms of self-assertion, can never be completely controlled or sublimated by reason, is under the necessity of countenancing political policies which attempt the control of nature in human history by setting the forces of nature against the impulses of nature. If coercion, self-assertion and conflict are regarded as permissible and necessary instruments of social redemption, how are perpetual conflict and perpetual tyranny to be avoided? If self-interest cannot be checked without the assertion of conflicting self-interests, how are the counter-claims to be prevented? What is to prevent the instruments of today’s redemption from becoming the chain of tomorrow’s enslavement?

A too consistent political realism would seem to consign society to perpetual warfare. If social cohesion is impossible without coercion, and coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice, and the destruction of injustice is impossible without the use of further coercion, are we not in an endless cycle of social conflict? If the mistrust of political realism in the potency of rational and moral factors in society is carried far enough, an uneasy balance would seem to be the highest goal to which society could aspire. If such an uneasy equilibrium of conflicting social forces should result in a tentative social peace or armistice it would be fairly certain that some fortuitous dislocation of the proportions of power would ultimately destroy it.

The last three decades of world history would seem to be a perfect and tragic symbol of the consequences of this kind of realism, with its abortive efforts to resolve conflict by conflict. The peace before the war (WWI) was an armistice maintained by the balance of power. It was destroyed by the spontaneous combustion of the mutual fears and animosities which it created. The new peace is no less a coerced peace; only the equilibrium of social and political forces is less balanced than it was before the war and certain to be destroyed by the resentments which their power creates.

This unhappy consequence of a too consistent political realism would seem to justify the imposition of the counsels of the moralist. He seeks peace by the extension of reason and conscience. He affirms that the only lasting peace is one which proceeds from a rational and voluntary adjustment of interest to interest and right to right. He believes that such an adjustment is possible only through a rational check upon self-interest and a rational comprehension of the interests of others. He points to the fact that conflict generates animosities which prevent the mutual adjustment of interests, and that coercion can be used as easily to perpetuate injustice as to eliminate it. He believes, therefore, that nothing but an extension of social intelligence and an increase in moral goodwill can offer society a permanent solution for its social problems.

Yet the moralist may be as dangerous a guide as the political realist. He usually fails to recognize the elements of injustice and coercion which are present in any contemporary social peace. The coercive elements are covert because dominant groups are able to avail themselves of the use of economic power, propaganda, the traditional processes of government, and other types of non-violent power. By failing to recognize the real character of these forms of coercion, the moralist places an unjustified moral onus upon advancing groups which use violent methods to disturb a peace maintained by subtler types of coercion.

Nor is he likely to understand the desire to break the peace, because he does not fully recognize the injustices which it hides. They are not easily recognized, because they consist of inequalities which history sanctifies and tradition justifies. Even the most rational moralist underestimates them if he does not actually suffer from them. A too uncritical glorification of co-operation and mutuality therefore results in the acceptance of traditional injustices and the preference of the subtler types of coercion to the more overt types.

An adequate political morality must do justice to the insights of both moralists and political realists. It will recognize that human society will probably never escape social conflict, even though it extends the areas of social co-operation. It will try to save society from endless cycles of futile conflict, not by an effort to abolish coercion in the life of collective man, but by reducing it to a minimum, by counseling the use of such type of coercion as are most compatible with the moral and rational factors in human society and by discriminating between the purposes and ends for which coercion is used.

It is important to insist first of all, that equality is a higher social goal than peace. It may never be completely attainable but it is a symbol of the elimination of the inequalities of power and privilege which are frozen into every contemporary peaceful situation. Violence may tend to perpetuate injustice, even when its aim is justice. But it is important to note that the violence of international wars had usually not aimed at the elimination of an unjust economic system. It has dealt with the real of fancied grievances of nations which were uniformly involved in social justice. If reason is to make coercion a tool of the moral ideal it must not only enlist it in the service of the highest causes but it must choose those types of coercion which are most compatible with, and least dangerous to, the rational and moral forces of society.

The technique of non-violence will not eliminate these perils but it will reduce them. It will, if persisted in with the same patience and discipline attained by Mr. Gandhi and Dr. King, achieve a degree of justice which neither moral suasion nor violence could gain. There is no problem of political life to which religious imagination can make a larger contribution than this problem of developing non-violent resistance. The discovery of elements of common human frailty in the foe and, concomitantly, the appreciation of all human life as possessing transcendent worth, creates attitudes which transcend social conflict and thus mitigate its cruelties. It binds human beings together by reminding them of their common roots and similar character of both their vices and their virtues. The attitudes of repentance which recognize that the evil in the foe is also in the self, and the impulses of love which claim kinship with all men in spite of social conflict are the peculiar gifts of religion to the human spirit. Secular imagination is not capable of producing them, for they require a sublime madness which disregards immediate appearances and emphasizes profound and ultimate unities.

The insights of the Christian religion have become so sentimentalized that the disinherited, who ought to avail themselves of their resources, have become so conscious of the moral confusions which are associated with them, that these insights are not immediately available for the social struggle in the Western world. If these are not made available, Western civilization, whether it drifts toward catastrophe or gradually brings its economic life under control, will suffer from cruelties and be harassed by animosities which destroy the beauty of human life. Even if justice should be achieved by social conflicts which lack the spiritual elements, something will be lacking in the character of the society so constructed.

There are both spiritual and brutal elements in human life. The perennial tragedy of human history is that those who cultivate the spiritual elements do so by divorcing themselves from or misunderstanding the problems of collective man, where the brutal elements are the most obvious. To the end of history, the peace of this world, as Augustine observed, will be gained by strife. It will therefore not be a perfect peace. But it can be more perfect than it is.

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Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Reformed theologian, ethicist, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. Niebuhr was one of America's leading public intellectuals for several decades of the 20th century and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. A public theologian, he wrote and spoke frequently about the intersection of religion, politics, and public policy, with his most influential books including Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man.

Coming Next: Czeslaw Milosz: Religion - To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (2001)