Niebuhr (cont.), new realities and the liberal self

The world has changed in ways that would make it practically unrecognizable to Reinholt Niebuhr and his contemporaries. In Moscow, the ten minute walk between the Kremlin and the Lenin Library now passes through an American-style shopping mall with your choice of familiar fast food outlets. South Africa has its second black president. Europe has its own parliament. So does Scotland. The alleged leader of the most dangerous force arrayed against the combined military might of the Western democracies is purported to live in a cave somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reinnie would think that we have gone crazy.

But Niebuhr’s past analyses are more than a series of astute observations that he made about the events of his time. His work rested both on paying careful attention to events and on a theological understanding of human nature and history that transcends its application to his own times. Certain key ideas in that understanding are easily summarized: The human being is both a finite, limited creature and an image of God. The final judgment on human history lies beyond history, and it falls equally on every particular human project, no matter how good or how evil that project may appear within history. Precisely because of that eschatological judgment, relative good and evil are real and make a difference within history. And, we are human beings, not God.

Niebuhr’s balanced realism, however, anticipated neither the systematic defense of liberal democracy nor the intense moral criticism of it that developed in the three decades following his death. His vindication is insufficiently appreciative for a Rawlsian liberal, and yet from the perspective of the cohesive moral community of Aladair MacIntyre or Stanley Hauerwas, Niebuhr’s idea of democracy is insufficiently coherent to vindicate anything.

A realist who is also a moral skeptic will not be particularly troubled by this. A realist who is also a moral skeptic will say, “Of course public discourse is moral gibberish. It isn’t supposed to mean anything. It’s merely cover for the self-interested, power-driven decisions that political actors make. Realism is designed to explain what people in politics do. What they say while they are doing it is irrelevant.”

But not all realists are moral skeptics. Many of them make claims like MacIntyre’s claims, based on a substantive notion of the human good and the perennial requirements of human community. That is why Niebuhr’s elaboration of those moral base points in the Christian tradition had such resonance with so many of them. So realists, especially religious realists, feel a certain affinity for the Hauerwas/MacIntyre critique of liberalism, despite the fact that Hauerwas and MacIntyre say unkind things about realism that suggest that realism is just a particularly sloppy way of being a liberal. Realists suspect that the procedural rules of liberal political discourse are too abstract to trace the complex interaction of interests and ideals that shapes real politics. Liberal reasons fall too neatly into categories of public and private reasons, religious reasons and secular reasons. The liberal self is too clearly an intellectual construct.

The liberal self is, to put it briefly, unrealistic.

~ by Natalie on 14 March.