subject: Humanity, Evil, And International Relations [print this page] By Leslie Pratch By Leslie Pratch
June 5, 2010
In The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote:
"Lincolns brooding sense of charity was derived from a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning than that of the immediate political conflict. Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God. The prayers of both could not be answered that of neither has been answered fully. His thinking reflect the psychological autonomy and integrative capacity so fundamental to the active coping style. Posts speaking to these twin characteristics will appear later this year."
Lincolns awareness of the element of pretense in the idealism of both sides was rooted in his confidence in an over-arching providence whose purposes partly contradicted yet not irrelevant to the moral issues of the conflict. The Almighty has His own purposes. Yet he also saw that such purposes could not annul the moral purposes of men who were Firm in the right as God gives us to see the right. 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. Surely it was this double attitude which made the spirit of Lincolns, with malice toward none; with charity for all possible. There can be no other basis for true charity; for charity cannot be induced by lessons from copybook texts. It can proceed only from a broken spirit and a contrite heart.
Good and evil are always intertwined in history. Tragic choices and dilemmas abound. The Christian (and perhaps the Jewish though I would want to check out this surmise with a Jewish scholar) faith does not regard the tragic as the final element in human existence. Niebuhr believed that the tragic motif is subordinated to the ironic one because evil and destructiveness are not inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity. He believed that always there exists the ideal possibility that man will break and transcend the harmonies and necessities of nature yet not destroy the human race. For Niebuhr, the destructiveness in human life is primarily the consequence of exceeding, not the bounds of nature, but much more ultimate limits. The God of the Bible is jealous. Divine jealousy is aroused by mans refusal to observe the limits of his freedom. There are such limits, because man is a creature as well as creator. The limits cannot be sharply defined. Therefore, distinctions between good and evil cannot be made with absolute precision. But it is clear that the great evils of history are caused by human pretensions which are not inherent in the gift of freedom. They are a corruption of that gift. These pretensions are the source of the ironic contrasts of strength leading to weakness, of wisdom issuing in foolishness.
Reinhold Niebuhr admonishes us that irony must be distinguished as sharply from pathos as from tragedy. A pathetic situation is usually not as fully in the consciousness of those who are involved in it as a tragic one. A tragic choice is purest when it is deliberate. But pathos is constituted of essentially meaningless cross-purposes in life, of capricious confusions of fortune and painful frustrations. Pathos, as such, does not bestow nobility, though it is possible to transmute pathos into beauty by the patience with which pain is borne or by a vicarious effort to share the burdens of another. "The situation in a displaced persons camp may be essentially pathetic but it may be shot through with both tragedy and grace, through the nobility of victims of a common inhumanity in bearing each others' sorrows. One who is involved in a pathetic situation may be conscious of the pathos without thereby dissolving it since the participant does not bear responsibility for it. He is the victim of untoward circumstances; or he has been caught in the web of mysterious and fateful forces in which no meaning can be discerned and from which no escape is possible."
According to Reinhold Niebuhr, an ironic situation differs from a pathetic one by the fact that a person involved in it bears some responsibility for it. The fact that the responsibility is not due to a conscious choice but to an unconscious weakness. "Don Quixotes ironic espousal and refutation of the ideals of knight errantry may be detected by the reader whose imagination is guided by the artist-observer, Cervantes." But Don Quixote is as unconscious of the absurdity of his imitation of the ideals of chivalry as the knights are unconscious of the fraudulence of their ideals.
In this post I am indebted not only to Niebuhr and Murdoch but also to the collaboration of Anatol Lieven and John Huslman (2006), authors of Ethical Realism. Any paraphrasing is my own and if it distorts the meaning the authors noted intended, the error is mine and inadvertent. Please let me know and I will amend immediately.
