Reinhold Niebuhr, then and now
Pt. I: What did Niebuhr actually believe? And what do I believe?
“There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man than the cruelty of righteous people.”
That tragic and true pronouncement comes in the final chapter of Reinhold Niebuhr’s An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, [1] first delivered as a lecture in 1934, with fascism’s writing on the wall, and reprinted again in the 1956, in the copy I cherish, having reread it the last several months, mining its treasures.
How do you frame 1934, or 1956 for that matter, now? I guess it depends on how old you are. Take the latter. The earlier years of the Cold War between the United States and its (willing or coerced) allies, vs. Soviet Russia and its satellites, seem quaint compared to present times.
Wait – that statement itself is dated and quaint, and it’s not even original. Scratch that. I’m just re-hashing someone else’s idea. Some Baby Boomer born before me said something like that already decades ago, after the honeymoon period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. They said that the Cold War, with its relatively simple bilateral conflict between two superpowers, was “quaint by comparison”.
I’m Gen-X – my crew were just navel-gazing then, listening to Alice in Chains and sniffing China White while the Bosnian War was getting underway in 1992. Our fear now, our ruefulness, is that we still are navel-gazing. So we fly low, except for the occasional outburst. We’re Cold War kids who never grew up in some respects, dutifully repeating someone else’s greatest hits. To be a Gen-X 50-something in 2026 is to be aware that your nostalgia for something quaint is not even your own, already by a few degrees. Yet this awareness is also (or so we imagine and hope) our virtue, our armor, dare I say, our humility: We know that all the Big Beautiful Ideas are not ours to claim – ideas about democracy, human rights, universal freedoms, social revolution. We know, furthermore, that they were never viable in the perfected in which terms they were stated, by the dreamers who put them forth.
But everyone knows that, right? Someone in their twenties now could rightfully say: “We know that too, old guy. You’re living proof.” Touché. Perhaps I am falsely valorizing my generation, to make us appear uniquely virtuous, or at least smart. If that’s the case, go ahead and take me down, youngblood. I just mean: in order to be truly idealistic, and not just a snot-nosed kid, but a grown up in the world, you have to rise, like a phoenix, from the ashes of your own cynicism. You have to get back your hope after you lose it. And if you were born into a simulacrum of conviction – that is, if you were born into the virtual landscape on which you are now reading this, the World Wide Web (well, that sounds almost quaint) – then you might find it more difficult to differentiate between your own absolute idealism and absolute cynicism.
In other words, you might lack self-irony. Self-irony in this context is the awareness that your deepest conviction is not wholly your own. On the other hand, within the negating logic of irony itself, when it remains exclusive, unto itself, with no counterforce, having a surplus of self-irony usually signals a lack of self-irony as well – it cannot be otherwise. Irony must be mediated by something else than itself, which is a true conviction, free of irony; otherwise, it will reach a dead-end of endlessness. You do not lay claim to such a conviction through your posture – ironic, sincere, whatever it may be. You do so through your actions. This tension between the ideal of an ethic, and its imperfect reality in praxis, is a constant theme in Niebuhr’s writing.
