The Irony of American History

Richard Niebuhr presents a theory of foreign relations based on the pretensions and misconceptions of man to control history. Man’s irony is, that not only can he create history, he is also created by history, leads to situations that thwart his futile attempt to shape history.Irony, defined by Niebuhr, is the incongruous outcomes of virtuous actions in which contributed to incongruities unknowingly and are discovered only after reflection. That is, we seek virtue by acting virtuously but unknowingly achieve something quite different. Irony is distinguished from tragedy where the incongruous outcomes are the result of evil actions performed to achieve virtue. Irony is also distinguished from “pathos” or pathetic outcomes where the actions resulting from pathos are not connected to the planned actions humans and lack both intent and guilt. Thus, in irony, we see humans acting for a good reason, but these good deeds cause unintended results.At the time this book was written, (1952,) America was confronting Communism. Niebuhr, an anticommunist, notes with some alacrity, that is was the dream of man to bring the whole of human history under control but that no idealist, communist or otherwise, has been able to move history towards either peace or justice. Idealist ideologies of utopia are Karl Mannheim’s “ideology of the poor.” Utopias are impossible to create and maintain. All governments start with a concept of utopia and ironically end up with something quite different as they confront the realities of history.The grand irony is that America combats the evils generated from the same illusions that America once had. The American goals for the world were Messianic: at creation, they escaped from European’s feudal tyranny. Jefferson stated, “Under the pretense of governing, they have divided their nations into two classes, the wolves and the sheep. I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe and to the general prey of the rich upon the poor.” America had the hope that it could transform its world from a place of misery to one of happiness and contentment. The Declaration of Independence states that one of the inalienable rights was “the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson’s picture of America was that of an agrarian society which guaranteed virtue by the hard work of owners producing the fruits of their land and insuring happiness and contentment in the enjoyment of those fruits. He believed that democracy was only safe in the agrarian economy.Such a society regarded itself innocent because it believed self-interest to be inherently harmless. But it was blind to man’s lust for power and the injustices that flowed from the imbalances of power within its communities. America became what Jefferson most feared: a large industrial country with large metropolitans rife with the opportunities for corruption, an irony on its merit.America carried its illusions of innocency into its foreign policy. It disavowed the need for power. However, it never was as innocent as it pretended to be particularly in the expansion Westward. Until World War I, Americans believed in a generic difference between Europe and itself. We entered into the war from considerations of national interests, interests that Americans would not acknowledge.The communists have their own Messianic vision: Men are corrupted singularly by the ownership of property. Abolition of property ownership returns man to his original state of innocence. The proletariat initiates this return because it has no interests to defend. Revolution is necessary to accomplish this ideal. A communist society would be harmonious and unselfish thereby defining a world at peace. Capitalism is defined to hold the guilt of “imperialism” as its relentless need for property forces the need for war.If one accepts the premises of communism, then the logic is intoxicating, so intoxicating that despite the cruelty of the actions of its leaders, they still profess belief in the logic! The irony is that the ideological taint to Marxist theory confines guilts to the economic interests of a particular class, blinding communists to the corruptions from its own human ambitions. Despite rejecting religion, it has become a religious apocalypse. It is a religion that teaches man is the master of his destiny and its “God” is “Dialectic History.” However, history does not and never has followed the logic of man.Niebuhr states that there are two ways to deny our responsibilities to the world: 1) seeking to dominate other nations by power and 2) to withdraw from the world stage by a policy of isolationism. Before World War II, America was perhaps the most reluctant powerful to acknowledge its responsibilities to the world politic. However, World War II dispelled that notion and had the result that the United States emerged the most powerful nation on the earth. The United States possessed a weapon so powerful that we could not ignore it. It was critical to the survival of the United States, but if the United States were to use it, America would be covered with terrible guilt.Some idealists believed that if we made strenuous rational and moral efforts toward a world government, we could escape the dilemma between guilt and innocence of war. Other idealists proclaimed that if we gave up atomic weapons, we would escape the dilemma. The realists (Niebuhr’s word, not mine,) believed that the evils already shown by communism justified the use of atomic weapons against them. Niebuhr claims, all of these positions demonstrated that there is no moral solution, but neither is there a solution which ignores moral factors.As Niebuhr states, “Perhaps the real difficulty in both communist and liberal dreams of a rationally ordered historic process is that modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or measurement.” Man is limited. Man’s original sin is challenging the limits which God placed on him. Man’s limitations are critical to Niebuhr’s theology and thesis. Niebuhr was the author of the “Serenity Prayer:”“O God and Heavenly Father,Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed;courage to change that which can be changed, andwisdom to know the one from the other,through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.”Niebuhr prescribes that the success of America in the world politic depends on its ability to establish a community of many nations. It requires that America appreciates the valid practices and institutions of those nations even though they are different from our own. We must disavow our previous pretensions of Messianism and recognize that virtue enters history in unpredictable ways. There is a temptation to withdraw from world politics as we did before World War II. We have an illusion that we can live our lives with too much regard for the harassed world. We transfer democracy to the world by our example.Few nonindustrial nations have sufficiently high standards of honesty to make a democracy viable. Furthermore, the relationship of capitalism to these nations is not guiltless: when technology from the developed nations was applied to these nations, it was to exploit them rather than improve their systems of virtues and justice. It is not possible to transmute an agrarian society into a technical one without massive dislocations of culture and society. In many cases, the wealth and standards of life in highly industrial nations are so beyond the imagination of the peoples in agrarian societies that they do not understand the requirements for democracy. Democracy is not immediately relevant to the ancient culture of the East or the primitive cultures of Africa, as is generally supposed by the Messianic proponents in America. It took for centuries of development in Europe to achieve democracy. A conclusion is that America will face tyranny in the world for decades to come, but, fortunately, the nonindustrial world lacks the technical resources to offer a mortal challenge to the society of America.The power of the United States can be misused. Much of the world fear this. For American power in service of American idealism, while not of malice or lust of power, could result in the ironic conversion of virtues into vices. There is no clear road to happiness for the world. Idealism blinds us to our vices. A second problem with idealism is that idealists are impatient in the development of virtues in others forcing our nation into rash decisions. Where elephants dance, pygmies cower. In our blind exuberance of power, we disregard the interests of the less powerful societies. One of the great fears of Europe is that America will engage in a war Europe wants to avoid. In its frustration of achieving ideals, America may consider a “preemptive war” to enforce its Messianic inclinations. This is singularly the one policy that America must avoid. There are no guarantees of democracy over tyranny or for a peaceful resolution of conflict once engaged. Often, America’s foreign policy has shown ignorance of this.There are those who claim our foreign policy should be based solely on national interests. According Niebuhr, this egotism is wrongheaded. The cure for pretentious idealism is not egotism but the concern for both self and others, and preserving the respect for the opinions of others derived from an awareness of one’s knowledge and power.Most importantly, we must, from time to time, step back and reflect on what virtues we were acting under and how they contributed to unintended outcomes. The knowledge of irony is often reserved for observers rather than the participants. Ironic interpretations are difficult but critical, not hostile, detachment is required. But, it is required for maturity in foreign relations.Niebuhr ends with “For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would only be a secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards and of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”Despite its brevity, this book is not an easy book to read. It is necessary to read, review and think about the predicates to gain appreciation for the tight logic used by Niebuhr. Not everyone will like this book: it does not fall into the neat “Conservative” and “Liberal” boxes of American politics today. But its message is still as valid today as they were in 1952 when Niebuhr wrote this text.

"Simply put, [this] is the most important book ever written on American foreign policy." Thus writes Andrew Bacevich in his introduction to the newly reissued book written by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952. Bacevich is a Niebuhr scholar and author of the just published book, "The Limits of Power". He was largely responsible for getting "Irony" reissued.The timing of this book becoming available, as well as of Bacevich's own book, couldn't be better. Niebuhr was a pastor, teacher, activist, moral theologian and prolific author. He was a towering presence in American intellectual life from the 1930's through the 1960's. He was, at various points in his career, a Christian Socialist, a pacifist, an advocate of U.S. intervention in World War II, a staunch anti-communist, an architect of Cold War liberalism, and a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.The Irony of American History traces the course of American idealism and exceptionalism from its very beginnings in the providential thinking of the Pilgrims who settled Massachusetts. Written early in the Cold War, Niebuhr devotes much of his analysis to comparing and contrasting Marxian communism and the "bourgeois" liberalism, or liberal democracy of America. While he clearly argues that the liberal project of democracy offers more to the "common good" of the community than does Marxism, both have the seeds of their destruction in the illusions they hold. So-called "Niebuhrian realism" is the ability to see through such illusions as a condition for avoiding the worst pitfalls they carry.Alas, one of the greatest of these pitfalls is the American tendency to suppose that we can manage history. As Niebuhr writes: "The illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny from any particular standpoint in history, always involves, as already noted, miscalculations about both the power and the wisdom of the managers and of the weakness and the manageability of the historical 'stuff' which is to be managed." He goes on to point out that "In the liberal versions of the dream of managing history, the problem of power is never fully elaborated. ...On the whole, [American government] is expected to gain its ends by moral attraction and limitation. Only occasionally does an hysterical statesman suggest that we must increase our power and use it in order to gain the ideal ends, of which providence has made us the trustees."Is it not painfully evident that we reached one of those "occasional moments" after 9/11 when "hysterical statesmen" - Bush and Cheney, et al - argued for a profound increase in the power to gain the "ideal ends" of bringing "freedom" to Iraq and the Middle East since we are the obvious "trustees" of this freedom?Herein lies the element of "irony", the philosophical and spiritual core of Niebuhr's arguments. The first element of irony, Niebuhr points out, "is the fact that our nation has, without particularly seeking it, acquired a greater degree of power than any other nation of history" and we "have created a 'global' political situation in which the responsible use of this power has become a condition of survival of the free world."He continues: "But the second element of irony lies in the fact that a strong America is less completely master of its own destiny than was a comparatively weak America, rocking in the cradle of its continental security and serene in its infant innocence. The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the 'happiness of mankind' as its promise."In Iraq we have met the enemy and "it is us". Not enough of us understood that "we cannot simply have our way" in the exercise of American power, which is thought to be essentially military power, to head off the folly in which we are buried and the prospect of a war without end.Writing all this in 1952 with the cataclysmic dangers of the Cold War becoming a hot war, Niebuhr foresaw the increasing globalization of the world and the danger of not recognizing and accepting the limits of our power to bring freedom and happiness to the rest of the world, especially through military means.This slender book of 173 pages is loaded with these prescient observations warning us clearly of the catastrophic dangers that can follow from a failure to understand the limits of our power of our exceptionalism and of the illusion that we can manage all this history to accomplish our supposedly moral and "good" ends for other nations.When you finish reading this book you will then want to read Bacevich's book, "The Limits of Power", in which he essentially channels Niebuhr's understanding and traces the history of the last 60 years in which the Bush-Cheney foreign policy has become simply an extension of the direction American foreign policy has taken, primarily from the Reagan administration onward.

Interesting to map 1950s political thoughts to where we are today. Niebuhr was far ahead of his time. As a consultant to US Presidents he was very in-tune with real politics.