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| Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) |
On September 24th, we took up an excerpt
from Niebuhr’s “The Children of the Light and the Children of the Darkness,”
first published in 1944. He analyzes the
crisis of democracy in the West. What he
terms “bourgeois democracy,” which resulted when the rising middle class wrested
political power from the aristocracy, appeared to be under serious threat after
years of depression and wars.
According to Niebuhr, democracy needs a rationale that
goes deeper than economic self-interest. He finds it in the contest between
good and evil in the world, as embodied in the Christian doctrine of original
sin: “Original Sin makes an important contribution to any adequate social and
political theory, the lack of which has robbed bourgeois theory of real wisdom,
for it emphasizes a fact which every page of human history attests.”
Niebuhr equates original sin with self-love. When we indulge in egoism, we inevitably enter
into “inordinate” types of aggressive behavior that aren’t accounted for in
traditional democratic theories (what he terms the “liberal creed”).
He writes, “the temptation to inordinate expressions
of the possessive impulse, created by the new wealth of a technical
civilization, stood in curious and ironic contradiction to the picture of
essentially moderate and ordinate desires which underlay the social philosophy
of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith.” (Physiocracy was a French school of
economic thought that stressed the importance of landed wealth.)
In order to
steer a middle ground between the overly optimistic views of the democratic
thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the “moral cynicism” of modern
totalitarian regimes, a “Christian view of human nature” is required.
