Irony for Americans

U.S. Protestantism's foremost theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.*has written a thoughtful and hardheaded essay on his country's political philosophy. The Irony of American History (Scribner; $2.50) is an odd-sounding title--most native commentaries on U.S. politics stress such words as "challenge," "promise" or "hope." Niebuhr uses his word advisedly. Not so final as tragedy, not so hopeless as pathos, the ironic view is a Christian study of the "unconscious weakness" by which classic American strengths and virtues have subtly developed into shortcomings.

The ironies in the U.S. position, as Historian Niebuhr sees them, are sad and deep. There is "the irony of an age of science producing global and atomic conflicts and an age of reason culminating in a life-and-death struggle between two forms of 'scientific' politics . . . We are drawn into a situation where the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity . . . Our own nation . . . is less potent to do what it wants in the hour of its greatest strength than it was in the.days of its infancy." Connecting all of these incongruities--and the cause of some--is an unrealistic and complacent American "idealism," boastful of its superior virtue, and still dangerously confident that it can order events as neatly as its people can build a new factory or produce a Thanksgiving Day proclamation.

God's American Israel. Niebuhr finds that the roots for this idealism, ironically, were planted by Thomas Jefferson and John Calvin. In the days of the Founding Fathers, the Jeffersonians, good disciples of the French Enlightenment, believed that "nature's God" would always favor a nation which had broken with the tyranny of the Old World to live by the light of reason in the New. The Calvinist

Puritans of New England saw their country as "God's American Israel," where the Lord would create "a new heaven and a new earth." On this point, the two philosophies blended.

The early American conviction of divine sponsorship grew with the richness of the land and the vastness of the frontier. Prosperity was regarded as a divine right, to be worked for--but always ultimately awarded. The beloved combination of morals and mechanics called the "Pursuit of Happiness" became an article of national faith. So did a strange feeling of national "innocency." The Founding Fathers had permanently crystallized the images of "a virtuous new democratic world" and "a vicious tyrannical older world" of Europe. Down to the 20th century, Americans grew up with a feeling that a higher group morality, as well as a higher standard of living, distinguished them from the rest of mankind.

As their self-confidence grew, Americans squeezed most of the religion out of their idealism. Virtue and prosperity became gilt-edged synonyms, and the sky was the limit for a hustling fellow who believed in himself. The mind of the U.S. came to harbor the classic defect of the "liberal culture," a tendency "to regard the highest human possibilities as capable of simple historical attainments." There was nothing in life, by this standard, which American scientists could not measure. Man in the U.S. long ago fulfilled Niebuhr's definition of an "ironic creature"--one who "forgets that he is not simply a creator, but also a creature."

Innocence at Bay. The ironies in U.S. materialism became physically dangerous when the country was thrust, by its own power and success, into the leading position in world politics. Americans had always felt guilty about using power (except, of course, in an economic way); suddenly they found themselves forced to rely on an ultimate form of power, the atom bomb, to preserve peace. Americans had thought of themselves as the "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection," innocent of ulterior ambition or guile. Now they found themselves "condemned in a court of public opinion" by have-not nations, who regarded the virtuous prosperity of the U.S. as a sign of imperialism and international sin.

In the troubled world of 1952, the Pursuit of Happiness had brought no peace. The innocent nation suddenly found itself fighting world Communism, which proclaims its own innocency and purity of motive in even sharper shades of black & white. The Communists, in their way, held the same conviction as the American liberal idealists: that man or groups of men can make history jump through hoops. Where liberals said evil was caused by ignorance, bad social institutions or other "manageable" human defects, the Communists narrowed it down to the institution of property. For the liberal idea of the natural goodness of man, Communists substituted "the exclusive virtue" of the proletariat. "In every instance, Communism changes only partly dangerous sentimentalities and inconsistencies in the bourgeois ethos to consistent and totally harmful ones." This surface similarity made it hard at first for American liberals to realize the danger of Communism, especially since their philosophy did not allow them to comprehend the "evil" to which the Communist adapters stooped.

A Hidden Kinship. When the U.S., aroused to Communism's dangers, quickly took up the anti-Communist crusade of "good nations" against "bad nations," Niebuhr fears that it underestimated the attraction and the complication of the "utopian illusions" which Communism borrows from liberal society. The rise of Communism he compares to the rise of Islam and its challenge to Christian civilization in the Middle Ages. Communism, like Islam, has exploited many just and legitimate grievances against the society it found, and the fight against it is automatically complex and devious. It may be impossible to stamp it out. The U.S., like the Crusaders,*-may have to watch its enemy decline only through "its own inner corruptions."

Coping with Communism in this light demands great patience and moral staying power. Theologian Niebuhr is as worried as many Western Europeans that Americans do not possess those qualities in sufficient measure. Without faith, the classic U.S. idealist is the modern man who hovers between "subjection to the 'reason' which he can find in nature and the 'reason' he can impose on nature." He is now frustrated, fearful and impatient with his first experience of a great historical struggle which he cannot control. Warns Niebuhr: "There is no simple triumph over this spirit of fear and hatred. It is certainly an achievement beyond the resources of a simple idealism. For naive idealists . . . could not bear to be reminded that there is a hidden kinship between the vices of even the most vicious and the virtues of even the most upright."

He summarizes: "The ironic elements in American history can be overcome only if American idealism comes to terms with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historical configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue ... That idealism is ... too certain that there is a straight path toward the goal of human happiness, too confident of the wisdom and idealism which prompt men and nations toward that goal."

*Who was recovering in Manhattan this week from a cerebral thrombosis suffered in February. *Islam in the Middle Ages, like Communism, was near enough to its adversary in its preachments to confuse many good people. Liberals who confused democracy and Communism during the '303 can take comfort from the fact that Dante, writing The Divine Comedy 700 years after Mohammed's death, still mistakenly placed the prophet among the Christian "sowers of schism."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.