Strange that small Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, should be the site of statements by which an epoch is marked. It was there, in March of 1946, that Winston Churchill declaimed (and Churchill always declaimed): “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” And it was there that three years later Reinhold Neibuhr gave the lectures which, revised and published in 1952, formed the substance of The Irony of American History.
The epoch was called the cold war. It is still called that. Some speak of it in the past tense, although it is not clear what might have succeeded the cold war. Others speak of a continuing cold war, while yet others say ours is a time of the second cold war. Among most people who talk about these matters, “cold war” is a term of opprobrium and “cold warrior” is an epithet by which we dismiss our conservative (or neo-conservative) opponents. This is emphatically the case in establishment worlds of religious discourse. But more than thirty years later it is worth asking, I believe, whether the terminology can be or should be retired.
Does not “cold war” still reflect more or less accurately the fundamental relationship between the two great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and the nations associated with them? There are alternatives to cold war, of course. There is the alternative of an all-out nuclear hot war which, thank God, we have been spared to date. There is the alternative of regionally contained or proxy wars, through which the superpowers contend short of direct confrontation between them. (It might well be argued that this is not really an alternative to cold war but is contained within the definition of cold war.) And there is, at least conceptually, the alternative of an increasing convergence of interests resulting in a stable, if not harmonious, coexistence. The last alternative was thought by many to be portended by what was called detente.
Whatever may be the changes in the future—changes both ominous and hopeful—I suggest that cold war terminology is still surprisingly, and depressingly, apt in describing our present moment. In 1952 Reinhold Neibuhr wrote against the background of what might be described as the post-triumph cold war. America and its allies were flushed by the victory of World War II. Former enemies, now friends, were experiencing the fruits of reconstruction. It was not hard to believe then that this was to be what Henry Luce had declared it to be, “The American Century.” If 1952 was the post-triumph cold war, ours is the post-trauma cold war. The trauma can be summed up in one word, although that one word has confusing connotations beyond numbering. The word is Vietnam.
My purpose here is not to rehearse “The lessons of Vietnam.” Those “lessons” are drawn and promulgated to dramatically different effect. Opponents of America’s alleged militarism and the Secretary of Defense are equally insistent that there must not be “another Vietnam.” The more interesting purpose is to inquire into the similarities and differences between thirty years ago and now, between the post-triumph and post-trauma moments. And for that purpose I propose to use Neibuhr’s The Irony of American History. One could of course choose to highlight writings by other thoughtful actors in that earlier moment. As one could also concentrate on later writings by Neibuhr, who, before his death in 1971, continued to have his mind changed by historical experience. To focus on this one book rather than upon his life work is a “snapshot” approach best suited to our comparative purposes. In disagreement with some students of Neibuhr’s thought, I do not believe that the later Neibuhr substantively changed his mind on the issues pertinent to our discussion.
All three components of our theme—religion, ideology and politics—were for Neibuhr fraught with ambiguity. (Indeed, next to “realism” no word so readily leaps to mind at the mention of Reinhold Neibuhr as the word “ambiguity.”) Ambiguity, he wrote, takes the form of irony. Irony is, in turn, to be carefully distinguished from both pathos and tragedy. “Pathos is that element in an historic situation which elicits pity, but neither deserves admiration nor warrants contrition. Pathos arises from fortuitous cross-purposes and confusions in life for which no reason can be given, or guilt ascribed. Suffering caused by purely natural evil is the clearest instance of the purely pathetic.” Pathos is, in sum, the sadness of things.
Tragedy is different.
The tragic element in a human situation is constituted of conscious choices of evil for the sake of good. If men or nations do evil in a good cause; if they cover themselves with guilt in order to fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice some high value for the sake of a higher or equal one they make a tragic choice. Thus the necessity of using the threat of atomic destruction as an instrument for the preservation of peace is a tragic element in our contemporary situation. Tragedy elicits admiration as well as pity because it combines nobility with guilt.
Irony is different once again. “Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous.” Irony is not the same as comic incongruity, such as the fat man wearing a top hat who slips on a banana peel. In the ironic we discover “a hidden relation” in the incongruity. “If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits—in all such cases the situation is ironic.” The ironic situation differs from the pathetic in that we bear some responsibility for it, and from the tragic because it is inadvertent and not a matter of decision.
The incongruity of the ironic situation is “dissolved” when we become aware of its irony. But it can be dissolved in either of two directions. We can recognize the falsity in our vanities and pretensions, and thus be led to contrition. Or, if our world contains no possibility of forgiveness, the recognition of irony “leads to a desperate accentuation of the vanities to the point where irony turns into pure evil.” The whole of Neibuhr’s work might be understood as a ministry to America and to the democracies generally, attempting to lead them to contrition and amendment of life. The urgency of this work was motored by his clear recognition of the other direction that the dissolution of irony can take. “Insofar as communism tries to cover the ironic contrast between its original dreams of justice and virtue and its present realities by more and more desperate efforts to prove its tyranny to be ‘democracy’ and its imperialism to be the achievement of universal peace, it has already dissolved irony into pure evil.” Neibuhr had no problem with viewing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” to use a recent presidential phrase. Unlike some who might share that view, however, Neibuhr understood that the opponents of pure evil are not therefore the embodiment of pure virtue.
As are so many others who have thought hard and long about religion, ideology and politics, Neibuhr was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln knew that “the Almighty has his own purposes,” and even his most unqualified moral condemnation of slavery is followed by the scriptural caution, “But let us judge not, that we be not judged.” Neibuhr writes: “This combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free civilization on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle.” This “double attitude” of engagement and critical distance can proceed, he writes, “only from a broken spirit and a contrite heart.”
Niebuhr was unapologetically anti-communist. “Modern communist tyranny is certainly as wrong as the slavery which Lincoln opposed,” he wrote. Toward the end of the book in question he deplores “cheap efforts which are frequently made to find some simple moral resolution of our conflict with communism.” The conflict is not over one party being more equalitarian and the other more libertarian.
The hope that the conflict is no more than this and could be composed if only we could hold a seminar on the relative merits of equalitarian and libertarian democracy, is, in fact, an expression of sentimental softness in a liberal culture and reveals its inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God in history.
The last point is critical. Playing God in history is precisely what the historical dialectic of Marxism presumes to do, according to Neibuhr. In some ways our conflict is more severe than Lincoln’s. We cannot say, “Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” Therefore, says Neibuhr, “we are dealing with a conflict between contending forces which have no common presuppositions.” This does not mean that it is a struggle between the God-fearing and the godless. “The communists are dangerous not because they are godless but because they have a god (the historical dialectic) who, or which, sanctifies their aspiration and their power as identical with the ultimate purposes of life.”
The democracies have no such absolute sanctification of their aspiration and power. In our case irony is to be dissolved by “a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves.” These insights of religious faith do not weaken us in our “purpose and duty of preserving our civilization.” “They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it. For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”
Needless to say, much has changed in three decades. But now as then it is the consciousness of the ironic that can dissolve the ironic situation. It is no easier now than it was thirty years ago, or in Lincoln’s day, to cultivate successfully the “double attitude” of engagement and critical distance. In fact I suspect that religion is less effective today in helping us cultivate that attitude toward conflicting ideological claims and political passions. And one reason for that, ironically, may be the uses to which Reinhold Neibuhr has been put. At least in those religious communities that value critical consciousness, Neibuhr’s debunking of democratic dogma has been turned into the dogma of debunking. Neibuhr qualified the pretensions of the democratic proposition, but now the qualifier has become the proposition. The criticism of democratic orthodoxy has become the new orthodoxy. Of course this is not the case in those religious communities that do not pride themselves on their critical consciousness. Rejecting all complexification, they unambiguously affirm Christian America as being identical with—indeed the singular instrument of—God’s purposes in history. But that is not our community. In our community it is sometimes said, with Neibuhr, that our pretensions can undermine “our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization.” It is perhaps more frequently said that the idea of “our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization” is itself a pretension that the world can no longer afford.
Ronald Stone, Neibuhr’s biographer, has written, “Protestant thought ought not to ignore Neibuhr’s thought nor return to alternatives which he destroyed during his career.” The alternatives he presumably destroyed are Marxism, secular liberal idealism and pacifism. Clearly, the report of their death is greatly exaggerated. In curious ways all three are now ecumenically combined in assaulting as a pretension the democratic idea that Neibuhr tried to save from its pretensions. Marxism is very much alive in varieties of liberation theology which are, in some instances, allied with Marxist-Leninist “praxis.” Secular (and not so secular) liberal idealism thrives in peace movements premised upon the notion that the cold war is the result of unhappy misunderstandings which will dissolve under the force of reason, good will and irenic gestures. And today’s pacifism is, in its substantive argumentation, not significantly different from the pacifism against which Neibuhr contended in the 1930s: One is tempted to say, Plus ca change…, and let it go at that. But of course much has changed.
For one thing, what Neibuhr called the “pure evil” of communism has been historically demonstrated far beyond the dimensions apparent in 1952 or even, for that matter, at Neibuhr’s death in 1971. The monstrous extent and tenacity of the “Gulag Archipelago” is now evident to all but the willfully blind. The genocidal liquidation of tens of millions of Chinese under Mao and of millions of Cambodians at the hands of the Khmer Rouge is no secret. The picture of hundreds of thousands of boat people fleeing their “liberation” by Hanoi is etched upon the conscience of all who have a conscience. In East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, brave efforts to construct “socialism with a human face” are brutally crushed. Illusions about the non-aggressive nature of Soviet power have been shattered by Afghanistan. The idea that the Soviets are defensively concerned only about their own “sphere of influence,” a sphere presumably granted them by Yalta, has been falsified as they have directly and through Cuban proxy extended their power in Ethiopia, Angola and elsewhere, including, many thoughtful analysts believe, in Nicaragua.
As Neibuhr understood, it is hard for those of us of a democratic habit of mind to believe that we have adversaries who are adversaries in principle. Their ambitions are accentuated because they cannot, in principle, acknowledge the irony of their expanding slavery in the name of liberation. Their ironic situation cannot be “dissolved” because it admits no transcendent point of reference by which anything can be saved following the admission of wrong. Therefore wrong dare not be admitted. But there is irony also in the situation of the democracies, in that, as the evil becomes more manifest and more assertive, we become more reluctant to speak of it.
At the start of the 1960s an American president spoke of freedom’s “long twilight struggle” while acquiescing in the construction of a Berlin Wall designed to imprison an entire people. In the late Seventies another president cautioned us against our “inordinate fear of communism” and then professed himself to be shocked by the invasion of Afghanistan. In the Eighties yet another president speaks of an “evil empire” while financially underwriting the empire’s suppression of freedom in Poland. The new thing is not the accommodation of evil but that the president who does the accommodating is pilloried for naming the evil. As Jean-Francois Revel has recently written, “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is working to destroy it.” Without the naming of the evil the irony cannot be acknowledged and thereby dissolved. Perhaps these leaders had to do what they did, in which case their actions may have the nobility of the tragic. But to hide from ourselves what it is that we are doing is, in Neibuhr’s terms, to turn the irony into the evil that we would resist.
Neibuhr had no doubt that communism is a religion and, while all religion is ambiguous, this one is most dangerous because it has subsumed the very language and sentiments by which it might be criticized. “In every instance,” he wrote, “communism changes only partly dangerous sentimentalities and inconsistencies in the bourgeois ethos into consistent and totally harmful ones. Communism is thus a fierce and unscrupulous Don Quixote on a fiery horse.” The high idealism associated with the image of Don Quixote is key to understanding what Neibuhr means by irony. The struggle for “liberation,” for constructing “the new man in the new society,” for “the kingdom of freedom” impassions the communist virtue to which all other understandings of virtue must give way. Liberal idealists assure us that Marxist-Leninists are sincere in their desire for peace as they define peace. They undoubtedly are sincere, which is the cause for deepest concern. It is little comfort that most people in Marxist societies are not Marxists. What matters is that those in control and those who benefit most from the system, the Nomenklatura as they have been called, have no other way to justify their power, no other religion, no other course but the accentuation of the vanities by which the irony of their situation is hidden from themselves.
“If we fully understand,” Neibuhr writes, “the deep springs which feed the illusions of this religion [of communism], the nature of the social resentments which nourish them and the realities of life which must ultimately refute them, we might acquire the necessary patience to wait out the long run of history while we take such measures as are necessary to combat the more immediate peril.” But of course we are impatient with talk about the long run of history. In the long run, it is fashionable to observe, we are all dead. To be sure, there are alternatives to waiting out the long run while combatting immediate peril. There is the alternative of surrender, whether straightforward or finessed by gradualism. And there is the alternative of getting it all over with in a cataclysm of nuclear confrontation.
Admittedly, this is a stark reading of our historical moment. Much too stark, many will object. There are, we are assured, new developments which transcend the harsh polarities of Neibuhr’s “cold warrism.” No longer, for example, do we have a nuclear monopoly. The parity, if not superiority, of the Soviets makes absurd all talk about the tragic nobility in a policy of nuclear deterrence, or so some argue. Others assure us that the East-West polarity of that older cold war has been, or should be, replaced by a focus on North-South disparities. And, we are told, history has thrown up other and more humane models of Marxist socialism, although those who tell us this are somewhat reticent in citing examples. And yet others tell us that the oppressiveness of undemocratic states with which the democracies (notably America of course) are allied makes nonsense of any talk about defending “the free world.” In addition, we are instructed that any illusions about the beneficent role of democracies in helping “the poor and oppressed of the Third World” to political or economic development have been shattered by hard experience. With respect to economic development, proponents of “dependency theories” inform us that we are in fact perpetrating “the development of underdevelopment” (Andre Frank).
The list of “new facts of life” could be extended at length. By virtue of these allegedly new realities, we are told, a great gulf has been fixed between our time and that of, say, 1952. Out of respect for a revered figure in American religious thought, some allow that a case can be made for Neibuhr’s argument in the context of 1952 but not in our new situation. Others, less reverent but more insightful, see that, if Neibuhr’s argument is to be discredited for today’s situation, it must also be discredited for the situation of the 1950s. These more radical critics have the acuity to recognize that the structure of the logic and of the relevant power realities has not changed that much in the past three decades. They know that the Niebuhrian thesis cannot be remedied by trimming; it must be attacked at its root.
Those whom Neibuhr called liberal sentimentalists are forever talking about changes in communism: about promising transitions of leadership groups, about the emergence of doves contending against the hawks, about experiments in liberalization, and on and on. Many liberals have been beguiled by such “promising changes” in communism at least since the 1920s. The radical critics agree with Neibuhr that such changes—even when they are not completely illusory—are epiphenomena. The core reality is to be discovered in the ideology and structure of the Marxist system. The significant disagreement is over what to make of this core reality. What Neibuhr deemed to be “the moral treasures of a free civilization” his radical critics perceive to be the bourgeois disguise of capitalist exploitation.
Neibuhr was remarkably prescient—although, to be sure, not omniprescient—with respect to today’s radical critiques. Perhaps more accurately, the logical structure of today’s critiques was well known to him and other thoughtful students of these matters for a long time. He understood the criticisms of the free market, and he understood also that “the alternative is the regulation of economic process through bureaucratic-political decisions. Such regulation, too consistently applied, involves the final peril of combining political and economic power.” He understood also the various ways in which the democratic idea would be set against the interests of the poor and oppressed. “Perhaps it is the crowning irony of our day that the virtues of the poor should thus have become a screen of sanctity for their not so virtuous resentments; that an oligarchy should have found a way to harness these resentments into engines of political power; and that this power should have been used for a program which not only despoils the rich but also defrauds the poor.” And he understood how nearly impossible is honest debate between those who disagree fundamentally about the core reality. If here or in other countries democracy and an open economy demonstrate their success by helping the poor to become non-poor, such instances are, by virtue of their very success, declared by our opponents to be part of the problem. Neibuhr wrote, “Thus, every effort we make to prove the virtue of our ‘way of life’ by calling attention to our prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof of our guilt.” Thus also, it might be added, every effort by the democracies to defend themselves is condemned as aggression against peace-loving and essentially defensive “experiments in socialist construction.”
The new thing that might surprise Neibuhr is the degree to which “the screen of sanctity” which covers today’s oppressions claims to be derived not from an alien ideology but from the Christian faith itself. And he may be surprised by the degree to which those whom he called the “enemies and detractors” of democracy are today teachers of theology and leaders in the churches. On the other hand, he may not be surprised at all, for there are striking similarities with the 1930s when he contended against those who were blind to “the depth of evil” in another totalitarianism, that of the Third Reich.
Niebuhr was not a determinist. He did not believe that we are locked into an everlasting and unchanging struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. On the basis of biblical faith he understood history to be the arena of contingency, of new things happening. He drew some modest hope from the observation that no totalitarianism ever succeeds in the totality of its ambition to control. He knew that an ideology of “pure evil” is never purely or securely embodied in any historical system, no matter how evil that system. Change toward the better is neither inevitable nor impossible. But he also understood the conceit of believing that our moment, just because it is our moment, must be the time of the new thing. This is the conceit that denies that we are part of the long run of history and that the great thing required of us is wisdom and courage for the long run.
Reinhold Neibuhr would have appreciated, I believe, the irony that some people have learned their Neibuhr too well. At least they have learned selected bits and pieces of Neibuhr. For a long time, some secular thinkers in the political arena who claimed Neibuhr as their father seemed to have learned nothing more from him than the radicality of human sinfulness. Understanding that all morality is subject to being corrupted by moralism, they drew the conclusion that morality must be excluded from the political sphere of power relations. Today there are those who claim to have learned from Neibuhr that democratic virtue is subject to pretense and self-deception, and that is indeed an important thing to learn. But instead of letting ironic recognition do its work of dissolving the incongruity between virtue in profession and vice in practice, they have determined to discredit the virtue. This, then, would be the great irony: If we in the democracies, moralistically trumpeting our humility, were to uncritically indulge democracy’s self-abasement and thus end up surrendering the poor and the oppressed and everyone else to the “pure evil” that knows nothing of the saving contrition that comes through the acknowledgment of the ironic.