Word: niebuhrs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Protestantism's foremost theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.*has written a thoughtful and hardheaded essay on his country's political philosophy. The Irony of American History (Scribner; $2.50) is an odd-sounding title-most native commentaries on U.S. politics stress such words as "challenge," "promise" or "hope." Niebuhr uses his word advisedly. Not so final as tragedy, not so hopeless as pathos, the ironic view is a Christian study of the "unconscious weakness" by which classic American strengths and virtues have subtly developed into shortcomings...
...ironies in the U.S. position, as Historian Niebuhr sees them, are sad and deep. There is "the irony of an age of science producing global and atomic conflicts and an age of reason culminating in a life-and-death struggle between two forms of 'scientific' politics . . . We are drawn into a situation where the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity . . . Our own nation . . . is less potent to do what it wants in the hour of its greatest strength than it was in the.days of its infancy." Connecting all of these incongruities...
...American Israel. Niebuhr finds that the roots for this idealism, ironically, were planted by Thomas Jefferson and John Calvin. In the days of the Founding Fathers, the Jeffersonians, good disciples of the French Enlightenment, believed that "nature's God" would always favor a nation which had broken with the tyranny of the Old World to live by the light of reason in the New. The Calvinist...
...mind of the U.S. came to harbor the classic defect of the "liberal culture," a tendency "to regard the highest human possibilities as capable of simple historical attainments." There was nothing in life, by this standard, which American scientists could not measure. Man in the U.S. long ago fulfilled Niebuhr's definition of an "ironic creature"-one who "forgets that he is not simply a creator, but also a creature...
...ground swell is strong and deep: Adler, Hutchins & Co. are only part of it. The atom bomb, more than anything else, showed the U.S. that (in Adler's words) "the more science we have the more we are in need of wisdom to prevent its misuse." Reinhold Niebuhr expressed a growing uneasiness in the U.S. conscience over confused and slipshod morality. Arnold Toynbee found wide response when he attacked the easy optimism which regards history as an endless escalator to progress rather than a continuing struggle between good & evil. The Harvard report on U.S. education (TIME...