Progress of a Christian Realist

...In our generation, of course, the dominant Utopian strain has been Marxist and its casualties are everywhere around us among the disappointed, embittered, often reactionary ex-admirers of the working class...

...The book is remarkable not only for its author's powerful intellectual position but also for its revelation of one man's nature...

...The conservative student of international politics is not astonished by the ruthlessness of the sophisticated Athenians to the unhappy Melians, of the 19th century libertarian English to the Jamaicans, of the rationalist French to the rebellious Algerians, or, for that matter, of the moralistic Americans to the natives of Vietnam...

...It remains true that ordinary sensitivity to the pain of others, individual instincts of altruism, the very willingness to assign a common humanity to other men and women is powerful for one's family, but that this humanity grows progressively weaker the larger the group and the more distant its habitation...

...It is also one more stage in the spiritual progress of a noble human being...

...In all generations conservatives have naturally embraced one version or another of the first judgment...

...For power is every nation's desideratum, and altruism and ideology, to the conservative, are no more than two masks which scarcely cloak the unbridled egotism of nations...

...Human institutions are equally mixed in nature...

...To the conservative poverty is the product of sloth, cruelty the effect of evil instinct, and injustice the natural expression of the invariable behavior of the strong to the weak...

...To the alert eye Man's Nature and His Communities is a continuation of a personal struggle whose firm significant record was the memorable 1929 Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic...

...Conservatives tend to view relations among nations-with a good deal of evidence on their side-as magnifications ana expressions of these human characteristics...

...Utopians are often frustrated: Condorcet was executed by the very revolutionaries he had yearned to create...

...The young Lutheran preacher who in 1928 was so "impressed with the superior sensitiveness of the Jewish conscience in social problems" in 1965 has so broadened the scope of his personal ecumenism as to confess an "increasing admiration for the Catholic faith" not because he is the less critical of the inflexibility of natural law moral theory but because he is more appreciative of and grateful for the natural law emphasis upon "justice as the relevant norm.' Man's Nature and His Communities is a wise, frail, compassionate man's reflections on man, society, and nation...

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Throughout his long, productive, and influential career, Reinhold Niebuhr has, with only occasional lapses, evaded two tempting simplifications of the human condition on earth: first, that man is so steeped in original sin no substantial improvement in his enlightenment and his capacity for justice is to be hoped for, and second, that man is, if not perfect, at least capable of perfection and, accordingly, it is only society which is vile...

...What makes it difficult to be a Christian realist, even at times for Reinhold Niebuhr, is not these general concepts but the attempts to apply them to specific issues and problems...

...But if the fruits of a belief in human evil are cynicism and pessimism, the consequence of the companion error of excessive confidence in human virtue is not really much happier...

...The irony and the ambiguity of political virtue could scarcely have found a better illustration...

...The very dinner which celebrated the Silver Anniversary of Christianity and Crisis, the distinguished journal which Niebuhr founded, heard an impassioned defense of American Vietnam policy by the Vice President of the United States -in the immediate wake of a solemn editorial in Christianity and Crisis condemning that very policy...

...But Hubert Humphrey had been invited a long time beforehand, as politics go, in recognition of his valiant fight for the passage of the Civil Rights Act...

...Man's Nature and His Communities ranges freely over such themes as these, drawing its apposite illustrations from many periods and many national histories...

...It is no accident that the words which so many commentators have applied to Niebuhr are "ambiguity," "irony," and "tragedy," and that the titles of his books, for example Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Pious and Secular America, and the latest volume Man's Nature and His Communities, express overtly or implicitly clashes within human natures, warfare between spirit and animal impulse, or conflicts between individuals and their societies...

...That paradox consists, on the one hand, in the obvious unity and common humanity of men, derived from their rational freedom over nature and the indeterminate creative possibilities of that freedom, which distinguishes them from other animals and constitutes the human race as one single species...

...Too often, it seems to these disenchanted souls, the pure-hearted proletarians of the 1930s have become the paunchy, middle-class, selfish trade unionists of the 1960s, just as attached to their own immediate interest, just as reluctant to sacrifice a moiety of that interest in behalf of justice to minorities, as so many realtors and industrialists...

...Such a sensibility is unlikely to discover absolute good or absolute evil in the acts of any nation or any individual...

...It consists, on the other hand, in the fact that this supposedly rational creature is able to recognize a common humanity only in the uncommon and unique marks of a tribal 'we group,' which therefore comes to be the basis of all parochial-or more recently, 'national'-communities in which the dignity of man is respected and his rights are acknowledged and enforced...

...Here is Niebuhr's statement of the tendency as it has operated in our treatment of Negroes: "The difficulties America has experienced in acknowledging the common humanity with a racial minority marked by observable racial identification of dark color and by historically caused cultural backwardness gives us a vivid example of the basic paradox of man's inhumanity to man...

...Thus it has ever been, thus it will ever be...

...These ex-radicals, ex-Utopians, ex-believers in virtuous human nature and sinful human institutions are the natural allies of the conservatives...

...All of Reinhold Niebuhr's work has been graced by an element of autobiography in the sense that its extraordinary openness, its confessions of the author's own egotism, its free admission of past error, its evident willingness to contemplate the possibility of present error, and, as in this book, its widening charity, reflect an interplay between a strong intellect and a passionate nature...

...It is evidently very hard to accept the fact that human beings are flawed and imperfect but they are capable also of altruism and virtue, of acts of generosity as astounding as their miserable transgressions against justice...

...Reinhold Niebuhr's evolution of this position has been labeled Christian realism, although nothing in it is unacceptable on unchristian or secular terms...

...while others, lacking these obvious marks of tribal identity, whether racial, linguistic, cultural, or religious, are treated brutally as if they were not part of a common human race...

...William Godwin was over-shadowed by Malthus...

...Enlightened impulse and bureaucratic perversity uneasily coexist...

...Institutions are radically imperfect, but they too contain a potentiality for improvement...

...even Robert Owen, the very practical philanthropist of New Lanark, lived long enough to see his model New World communities disintegrate and his hopes for England come to little...