Welcome to another installment of the weekly discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society. Because of the "snow issues" on the East Coast, your scheduled host, Frank Cornish, has been having intermittent internet issues, so I'm taking up the slack. This week's chapter is The Morality of Nations.
If you're just joining us, you can get caught up by following the links to previous diaries.
Introducing the Reinhold Niebuhr Book Club
Introduction
Chapter 1: Man and Society: The Art of Living Together
Chapter 2: The Rational Resources of the Individual for Social Living
Chapter 3: The Religious Resources of the Individual for Social Living.
Niebuhr's overall thesis is that individuals are capable of morality at a higher level than communities or nations are. In this chapter, Niebuhr outlines the basic moral capacity of nations, a capacity that, according to Niebuhr, generally stops at hypocrisy.
Niebuhr first considers the relation of the individual to the nation, buttressed through national symbolism. The unity required for social cohesiveness already blunts the power of social critics to act effectively:
The nation is a corporate unity, held together much more by force and emotion, than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without the rational capacity of self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical. Even those tendencies toward self-criticism in a nation which do express themselves are usually thwarted by the governing classes and by a certain instinct for unity in society itself. For self-criticism is a kind of inner disunity, which the feeble mind of a nation finds difficulty in distinguishing from dangerous forms of inner conflict. So nations crucify their moral rebels with their criminals upon the same Golgotha. (88)
The relation of the individual to society manifests another paradox. That national solidarity brings people out of a narrow egoism into a larger egoism. That is, people are able to sacrifice and reach out to community members, but largely in the name of a national ideal that is simply a collective ego.
Loyalty to the nation is a high form of altruism when compared to with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervor that the critical attitude toward the nation is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations. That is why the hope of solving the larger social problems of mankind, merely by extending the social sympathies of individuals, is so vain. (91)
Niebuhr bluntly states that "perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy." (95) He sees this hypocrisy as testimony to both the power and powerlessness of reason in political thought - reason demands a fair-minded consideration of needs without regard to interest, and has the power to make people frame their thoughts in these terms. Yet the ease with which reason is distorted into rationalization for unethical ends points to the weakness of reason to make its dictates felt in practice.
National hypocrisy manifests itself most potently in the discrepancy between a nation's imperialist impulses and the high-minded ethical ideals that are in conflict with those impulses. Niebuhr notes that in practice, the imperialist impulses generally win out, while being cloaked in well-meaning ethical, or even religious, ideals. Niebuhr spends much of his chapter detailing how the rational revulsion at imperialism meets up with self-serving justifications for such imperialism in both European and American contexts.