By David Gushee
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One of the most bracing books I read for doctoral work was Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1932 classic, Moral Man and Immoral Society. I pulled it off the shelf this week while thinking about Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Michael Brown, Staten Island, Eric Garner, the Cleveland police and so on, and so on.
Written to pierce any surviving liberal optimism as the Roaring ’20s gave way to the disastrous ’30s, Niebuhr’s primary thesis concerns the effects of sin on human society and, in particular, on human collectivities or groups. Niebuhr says that all human life is marked by sin, especially in the forms of ignorance and selfishness, but at least the individual sometimes demonstrates the potential to rise above ignorance and selfishness to reach rational analysis and unselfish concern for others. Human groups, on the other hand, are both more stupid and more selfish than individuals. They seem especially impervious either to rational or moral appeal, easily prone to self-deception and demagoguery, and apparently needful of the imposition of a power greater than their own power if they are to accede to any changes that cut against their own self-interest.
In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr primarily analyzes economic problems and the great clash between privileged and proletarian classes. Moral appeals to the holders of great economic power and privilege are almost always fruitless, Niebuhr says. Their tremendous power must be countered by the effectively organized collective power of the workers, either in the form of revolution (which has its own dangers) or through political processes that gradually win gains for the proletariat through collective bargaining and government regulation to mitigate inequalities and ensure a measure of worker rights and economic security.
Already in 1932 Niebuhr recognized that racial injustice in America could be subjected to the same kind of analysis that he offers of the economic problem. Scattered throughout his book he offers some insightful, though not always satisfactory, commentary on the plight of black Americans (which he called Negroes, in the vernacular of his time) in a land of white privilege. Some of this commentary resonates deeply today.
For example, Niebuhr notes that “it has always been the habit of privileged groups to deny the oppressed classes every opportunity for the cultivation of innate capacities and then to accuse them of lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.” He then applies this insight to white attitudes toward black Americans, at the time the issue being white opposition to full voting rights for blacks based on the claim that they were incompetent to exercise said franchise. But Niebuhr’s insight here has a broader reach with deep applicability to the attitudes of many white Americans today.
Later Niebuhr writes: “It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him, merely be trusting in the moral sense of the white race.” That’s because, as Niebuhr writes throughout, groups which benefit from the existing structure of society have no particular interest in seeing that structure changed.
Moreover, privileged groups have an extraordinary ability to “identif[y] [their] interests with the peace and order of society.” Self-deception reigns among the privileged because, among other reasons, to see reality more truly would place an unbearable moral pressure on such groups to resign privilege in favor of greater justice. Instead, privileged groups call in the forces of state power in the purported interests of the “peace and order” of society as a whole, but in fact to suppress movements of the oppressed for social change and greater justice.
Knowing that only forceful resistance to white privilege has any hope of changing the existing structures of power, Niebuhr ponders whether that pressure will be more effective if it is violent or if it is nonviolent. Niebuhr refuses to draw an absolute distinction between these forms of pressure. He does conclude that “non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors. The emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy.”
With these words Niebuhr anticipated the nonviolent civil disobedience strategy that came to full flower in the civil rights movement and remain favored among Christian activists. But events in the last weeks and months here in the U.S. remind us that the same race-based injustices, and the same available repertory of strategies for confronting injustice, remain with us — with violence the response of those who become unconvinced that nonviolence is effective.
Niebuhr is often described as a cynic, or at least as a pessimist. Lines like this one help cement that reputation: “However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”
Friends, Niebuhr wrote those words 82 years ago. As recent events again tragically demonstrate, he was right. The power of white privilege, often incarnated in unjustified and unpunished state brutality against black people, then followed by white resentment that anyone could have a problem with the way things are, remains a reality. Its power must be broken, once and for all.