Full text of "The Irony Of The American History"

Reinhold Niebuhr

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The irony of American history.

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THE IRONY OF
AMERICAN HISTORY

REINHOLD NIEBUHR

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK

A-1.62CC]
Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons

TO CHRISTOPHER

PREFACE

The substance of this volume consists of two series of lec-
tures. The first was given at Westminster College, Fulton, Mis-
souri, in May 1949, under the auspices of the John Findley
Green Foundation. The second was given in January 1951 at
Northwestern University under the auspices of the Shaffer Lec-
tureship. Both lectureships dealt with the position of our na-
tion in the present world situation, as interpreted from the
standpoint of the Christian faith. The Westminster and North-
western lectures are embodied in Chapters II to VII.

The first and the last chapters, in which I seek to explain the
framework of "irony" within which I have sought to interpret
American history, make explicit, what was only implicit in my
original lectures. Since, however, I have postponed a full ex-
position of the concept of "irony" as it is used in these pages
to the last chapter it may be appropriate to anticipate some of
the explanations of that chapter in this brief introduction.

We frequently speak of "tragic" aspects of contemporary
history; and also call attention to a "pathetic" element in our
present historical situation. My effort to distinguish "ironic"
elements in our history from tragic and pathetic ones, does not
imply the denial of tragic and pathetic aspects in our contem-
porary experience. It does rest upon the conviction that the
ironic elements are more revealing. The three elements might
be distinguished as follows: (a) Pathos is tjiat.eJ^menlLin^a.n
historic situation which jslicitsjprPF, butjneither deserves^ad-
miration nor warrant eonffi^

cross-purposes jand confusions in lifSTor which ncTreason can
be given, or guilt ^aslortb^dr^uffenng" caused By ^'MfglrJ^feal
evil is the clearest instance ^^^^'"^1^ (b) The

trlgjcusI^^QLin a human situation is constituted of conscious
chqices of eviOor the sake oflgood. If men or nations do evil
in a~good cause ; it they cover themselves with guilt in order to
fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice some high
value for the sake of a higher or equal one they make a tragic
choice. Thus the necessity of using the threat of atomic de-
struction as an instrument for the preservation of peace is a
tragic element in our contemporary situation. Tragedy elicits
admiration as well as pity because it combines nobility with

vii

'PREFACE

guilt, (c) Irrayj^ngis^
in Jif e whic? ajreidiscovei^

i^relf^^ Incongri^^ It_eligits

la^ugEteE^This elen^^LM^QfiS^d^ia^
inated^Jrom_kony. But ironjLis^mmfilM^^
A comic^, situation is praved-4oJae_ajLJr^^
relation is discovered in the4Bcangcuity . If virtue becomes vice
oEae. hidden ddeoLittJthfijai^^

ma^prompt
~

becomes folly because it does notjknow^jte^^

such cases Iffi^^EiaSqnjsJiOT^ Thgigonic situation ^igjdis-

tinguished from a patEetic^i^^

" bears_some respon^ib^^Jorjt. It is _ditf er entiated
f rom^agiBy^by the . f acFffiSOHe

n unconscious weakness rather thaqjio^jjsonscious resolution.
Ele a pathetic or a tFagic situation ^ijj5Qjgiai5Eecr^ien a

-a

uation must dissolve, if men or nation^ a,rQ p^^dfi ^WPt re of their
co'Splj^^nTl^) 8uch awareness involves some realization of
tKe~luffden vanity or pretension by which comedy is turned
into irony. This realization either must lead to an abatement
of the pretension, which means contrition ; or it leads to a des-
perate accentuation of the vanities to the point where irony
turns into pure evil.

Our modern liberal culture, of which American civilization
is such an unalloyed exemplar, is involved in man^ i konic_refu-
tations_of its original, pretensions ofjvirtu^jo^doffl^
Insofar as communism has already elaborated some of these
pretensions into noxious forms of tyranny, we are involved in
the double irony of confronting evils which were distilled from
illusions, not generically different from our own. Insofar as
communism tries to cover the ironic contrast between its orig-
inal dreams of justice and virtue and its present realities by
more and more desperate efforts to prove its tyranny to be
"democracy" and its imperialism to be the achievement of uni-
versal peace, it has already dissolved irony into pure evil.

Whether these concepts are fruitful principles for the inter-
pretation of current history must be left to the reader to judge,
after perusing the chapters of this volume. I must add that I

viii

PREFACE

have no expert competence in the field of American history;
and I apologize in advance to the specialists in this field for
what are undoubtedly many errors of fact and judgment.

I express my gratitude to the Presidents and the committees
of Westminster College and Northwestern University for many
courtesies during my visits to these institutions. I am also
deeply grateful to my wife, Professor Ursula Niebuhr, to Pro-
fessor Edmond Cherbonnier of Barnard College, for careful
reading of my manuscript and for many suggestions for its
improvement and to Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., of Har-
vard who read most of the chapters and suggested important
amendments. Naturally, none of my critics must be held re-
sponsible for defects in my basic thesis or in its detailed
elaboration.

REINHOLD NIEBUHR
New York City
January, 1952

CONTENTS

PREFACE vii

I. The Ironic Element in the American Situation 1

II. The Innocent Nation in an Innocent World 17

III. Happiness, Prosperity and Virtue 43

IV. The Master of Destiny 65
V. The Triumph of Experience Over Dogma 89

VI. The International Class Struggle 109

-fVTL The American Future 130

4-VIIL The Significance of Irony 151

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

CHAPTER I

The Ironic Element in the
American Situation

Jjl VERYBODY understands the obvious meaning of the
Jy world struggle in which we are engaged. We^ are de-
fending freedom against tyranny and are trying to. pre-
serve justice against a system which has, demonically,
distilled injustice and cruelty out of its original promise
of a higher justice. The obvious meaning is analyzed for
for us in every daily journal; and the various facets of
this meaning are illumined for us in every banquet and
commencement-day speech. The obvious meaning is not
less true for having become trite. Nevertheless it is not
the whole meaning.

We also have some awareness of an element of tragedy
in this struggle, which does not fit into the obvious pat-
tern. Could there be a clearer tragic dilemma than that
which faces our civilization? TTaoug^ ^LXi r "

tue, it must yet hold atomic bombs ready for use so as to
prevent a possible world conflagration. It may actually
make the conflict the more inevitable by this threat; and
yet it cannot abandon the threat. Furthermore, if the

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

conflict should break out, the non-communist world
would be in danger of destroying itself as a moral cul-
ture in the process of defending itself physically. For no
one can be sure that a war won by the use of the modern
means of mass destruction would leave enough physical
and social substance to rebuild a civilization among either
victors or vanquished. The victors would also face the
"imperial" problem of using power in global terms but
from one particular center of authority, so preponderant
and unchallenged that its world rule would almost cer-
tainly violate basic standards of justice.

Such a tragic^ dilemma is an impressive aspect of our
contemporary situation. But tragic elements in present
history are not as significant as the ironic ones. Pure
tragedy elicits tears of admiration and pity for the hero
who is willing to brave death or incur guilt for the sake
of some great good. Irony however prompts some laugh-
ter and a nod of comprehension beyond the laughter ; for
irony involves comic absurdities which cease to be alto-
gether absurd when fully understood. Oyoge jsJnvohzed
in irony because so man^jdrea,rp.s.of ounnation have been
sojjruelly refuted by4iistory.lQur dreams of a pure virtue
are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to
exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community
of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the
atomic bomb. And the irony is increased by the frantic
efforts of some of our idealists to escape this hard reality
by dreaming up schemes of an ideal world order which
have no relevance to either our present dangers or our
urgent duties.

Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history

THE IRONIC SITUATION

under the control of the human will are ironically re-
futed by the fact that no group of idealists can easily
move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of
peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical
drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckon-
ing. Oux^own^ation, always a vivid symbol of the most
characteristic attitudes of a bourgeois culture, is_less
potent todo what it wants in the hour_of^its^ greatest
streHgtH than it was in the days of its infancy. The infant
is more secureTnTns world than the mature man is in
his wider world. The pattern of the historical drama
grows more quickly than the strength of even the most
powerful man or nation.

Our situation of historic frustration becomes doubly
ironic through the fact that the jaower of recalcitrance
against omJgndestJiojDe^ re-

ligio-political creedjvhich had^veiLMl^^^Jioti? 118 than
we of finding^^ jnan's

strength ani-weaJbiess. For communism believes that it
is possible for man, at a particular moment in history,
to take "the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm
of freedom." The cruelty of communism is partly derived
from the absurd pretension that the communist move-
ment stands on the other side of this leap and has the
whole of history in its grasp. Its cruelty is partly due to
the frustration of the communist overlords of history when
they discover that the "logic" of history does not con-
form to their delineation of it. One has an uneasy feeling
that some of our dreams of managing history might have
resulted in similar cruelties if they had flowered into ac-
tion. But there was fortunately no program to endow our

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

elite of prospective philosopher-scientist-kings with ac-
tmil political power.

/Modern man's confidence in his power over historical
destiny prompted the rejection of every older conception
of an overruling providence in history.' Modern man's con-
fidence in his virtue caused an equally unequivocal rejec-
tion of the Christian idea of the ambiguity of human
virtueyin the ^liberal world the evils in human nature and
history were ascribed to social institutions or to ignorance
or to some other" manageable defect in human nature or
environment Again the communist doctrine is more ex-
plicit M'cFtKeref ore more dangerous. It ascribes the origin
of evil to the institution of property. The abolition of this
institution by communism therefore prompts the ridicu-
lous claim of innocency for one of the vastest concentra-
tions of power in human history. This distillation of evil
from the claims of innocency is ironic enough. But the
irony is increased by the fact that the so-called free world
jrnust cover itself with guilt in order to ward off the peril
of communism. The final height of irony is reached by
the fact that the most powerful nation in the alliance of
free peoples is the United States. JPor. every illusion of a
liberal culture has achieved a special emphasis in the
United States, .even while its power grew to phenomenal
proportions.

We were not only innocent a half century ago with the
innocency of irresponsibility; but we had a religious ver-
sion of our national destiny which interpreted the mean-
ing of our nationhood as God's effort to make a new be-
ginning in the history of mankind. Now we are immersed
in world-wide responsibilities; and our weakness has

THE IRONIC SITUATION

grown into strength. Our culture knows little of the use
and the abuse of power; but we have to use ..power in
global terms. Our idealists are divided between those who
would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake
of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are
ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our
actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken
in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous. We
take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous"ac-
tions to preserve pur civilization. We must exercise our
power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is
capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor
become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exer-
cise of power is legitimatized. Communism is a vivid ob-
ject lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral com-
placency about the relation of dubious means to sup-
posedly good ends.

The ironic nature of our conflict with communism
sometimes centers in the relation of power to justice and
virtue. The communists use power without scruple be-
cause they are under the illusion that their conception of
an unambiguously ideal end justifies such use. Our own
culture is schizophrenic upon the subject of power. Some-
times'it" pretends that a liberal society is a purely rational
fiaS^iji^I. interests. Sometimes [jit achieves a tolerable
form of justice by a careful equilibration of the powers
and vitalities of society, tEough it is without a conscious
philosophy to justify" these policies of statesmanship.
Sometimes it verges on that curious combination of cyni-
cism and idealism which characterizes communism, and is

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

prepared to use any means without scruple to achieve its
desired end.

The question of "materialism" leads to equally ironic
consequences in our debate and contest with communism.
The communists are consistent philosophical materialists
who believe that mind is the fruit of matter; and that
culture is the product of economic forces. Perhaps the
communists are not as consistently materialistic in the
philosophical sense as they pretend to be. For they are
too Hegelian to be mechanistic materialists. They have
the idea of a "dialectic" or "logic" running through both
nature and history which means that a rational structure
of meaning runs through the whole of reality. Despite
the constant emphasis upon the "dignity of man" in our
own liberal culture, its predominant naturalistic bias fre-
quently results in views of human nature in which the
dignity of man is not very clear.

It is frequently assumed that human nature can be
manipulated by methods analogous to those used in phys-
ical nature. Furthermore it is generally taken for granted
that the highest ends of life can be fulfilled in man's
historic existence. This confidence makes for Utopian vi-
ions of historical possibilities on the one hand and for
rather materialistic conceptions of human ends on the
other. All concepts of immortality are dismissed as the
fruit of wishful thinking. This dismissal usually involves
indifference toward the tension in human existence,
created by the fact that "our reach is beyond our grasp,"
and that every sensitive individual has a relation to a
structure of meaning which is never fulfilled in the vicis-
situdes of actual history.

THE IRONIC SITUATION

The crowning irony in this debate about materialism
lies in the tremendous preoccupation of our own technical
culture with the problem of gaining physical security
against the hazards of nature. Since our nation has car-
ried this-preoccupation to a higher degree of consistency
than any other we are naturally more deeply involved in
the irony. Our orators profess abhorrent of ;fche cxxoa-
munist creed of "materialism" but we are rather more
successful practitioners of materialism as a working creed
ts, who have failed so dismally in rais-

ing the general standards of well-being.

Meanwhile we are drawn into an historic situation in
whictuthe paradise of QP r HrnnftRtAc security . is suspended
in a heS of global insecurity; and the conviction of the
perfect compatibility of virtue and prosperity which we
have inherited from both our Calvinist and our Jeffer-
sonian ancestors is challenged by the cruel facts of his-
tory. For our sense of responsibility to a world community
beyond our own borders is 9iJ^L*H5? even though, it i&
p^rtly_derived from the prudenLmid^^
own. interests. ButTEisvirtue does not guarantee our ease,
comfort, or prosperity.
responsibilities whichjT&Jaear. And the
ouj:.desireilaxe, jnixed j^%~f rn

Sometimes ifoe.imay in our Mskoc^^

y- ....... ~~ . . .

from tb_e:2Llaaaz2g^ our culture upQnjbhe

value^.andjdignity. of ihaindividnal aTicLupoB. i
liberty as J^(^fiiiaIjya.1iiLiJ^ Our
indiyiduali^n are L jr^al_enough; and we are ri
ferring death to their annulment. But our exaltationjof
the individual involves us in somje^very ironic contradic-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

1 tipns. On the one hand L pur ; culture does not really value
the . i^\TBhi^^muA asjit pretends; on the qther^hand,
if^3ligQjs to be maintained and^ survival assured,
we cannot Ssike inividual liberty a$ u^qu^lifiBdlj^the

A culture which is so strongly influenced by both sci-
entific concepts and technocratic illusions is constantly
tempted to annul or to obscure the unique individual.
Schemes for the management of human nature usually
involve denials of the "dignity of man" by their neglect
of the chief source of man's dignity, namely, his essential
freedom and capacity for self-determination. This denial
is the more inevitable because scientific analyses of hu-
man actions and events are bound to be preoccupied with
the relations of previous causes to subsequent events.
Every human action ostensibly can be explained by some
efficient cause or complex of causes. The realm of free-
dom which allows the individual to make his decision
within, above and beyond the pressure of causal sequences
is beyond the realm of scientific analysis. Furthermore
the acknowledgment of its reality introduces an unpre-
dictable and incalculable element into the causal sequence.
It is therefore embarrassing to any scientific scheme.
Hence scientific cultures are bound to incline to deter-
minism. The various sociological determinisms are rein-
forced by the general report which the psychologists make
of the human psyche. For they bear witness to the fact
that their scientific instruments are unable to discover
that integral, self-transcendent center of personality,
which is in and yet above the stream of nature and time
and which religion and poetry take for granted.*

THE IRONIC SITUATION

Furthermore it is difficult for a discipline, whether phil-
osophical or scientific, operating, as it must, with general
concepts, to do justice to the tang and flavor of individ-
ual uniqueness. The unique and irreplaceable individual,
with his

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

(BEOWNING)

with his private history and his own peculiar mixture of
hopes and fears, may be delineated by the poet. The
artist-novelist may show that his personality is not only
unique but subject to infinite variation, in his various
encounters with other individuals; but all this has no
place in a strictly scientific account of human affairs. In
such accounts the individual is an embarrassment.

If the academic thought of a scientific culture tends
to obscure the mystery of the individual's freedom and
uniqueness, the social forms of a technical society fre-

*In his comprehensive empirical study of human personality Gardner
Murphy nicely suggests the limits of empiricism in dealing with the self.
He declares: "We do not wish to deny the possibility suggested by James
Ward that all awareness is colored by selfhood. . . . Least of all do we wish
to attempt to set aside the still unsolved philosophical question whether
the process of experiencing necessitates the existence of a non-em-
pirical experiencer . Nothing could be gained by a Gordian-knot solu-
tion of such a tangled problem. We are concerned solely with the im-
mediate question : Should the student of personality at the present stage
of research postulate a non-empirical entity distinct from the organism
and its perceptual responses? ... To this limited question a negative an-
swer seems advisable." Gardner Murphy, Personality, p. 491, There can
of course be no "non-empirical entity." But there may be an entity
which cannot be isolated by scientific techniques.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

quently endanger the realities of his life. The mechan-
ically contrived togetherness of our great urban centers
is inimical to genuine community. For community is
grounded in personal relations. In these the individual
becomes most completely himself as his life enters organ-
ically into the lives of others. Thus^^^
practice tendj}ojst^

BuFlTour academic thought frequently negates our
individualistic creed, our social practice is frequently
better than the creed. The justice which we have estab-
lished in our society hasTbeen achieved, not by pure in-
dividualism, but by collective action. We have balanced
collective social power with collective social power. In
order to prevail against our communist foe we must con-
tinue to engage in vast collective ventures, subject our-
selves to far-reaching national and international disci-
plines and we must moderate the extravagance of our
theory by the soberness of our practice. Many young
men,. who^iave, been assured that only the individual
counts among us, havejlied upon foreign battlefields.

. tMiJmmc .refutation of . ,our
i^too individualistic

to jngasure the social dimenaon_ofj.umaii existence and
tocLOptimistic to gaugeJJxeLhazards tojustice which, exist
injeverjnconimunity,, particularly in the international one.
it"5f necessary to Ee~wiser than our creed if we would
survive in the struggle against communism. But for-
tunately we have already been somewhat better in our
practice than in our quasi-official dogma. If we had not
been, we would not have as much genuine community and
tolerable justice as we have actually attained. If the pre-

THE IRONIC SITUATION

vailing ethos of a bourgeois culture also gave itself to
dangerous illusions about the possibilities of managing
the whole of man's historical destiny, we were fortunately
and ironically saved from the evil consequences of this
illusion by various factors in our culture. The illusion was
partly negated by the contradictory one that human his-
tory would bear us onward and upward forever by forces
inherent in it. Therefore no human resolution or con-
trivance would be necessary to achieve the desired goal.
We were partly saved by the very force of democracy.
For the freedom ^>f democw^^
fusion in defining ^j^mlj^^^^
move"; lindrT;K<[^^

vefrts"ajay grougjpf .^w^ddj^a^ a

monopoly ofjgower.

These ironic contrasts and contradictions must be ana-
lyzed with more care presently. Our immediate prefatory
concern must b^^e^ double character of our ironic ex-
perience. ^Contemporary Mstory^notjga^
refutation" of some ofj^j^a^ illu-

sions aEoiiit^^

the refutation^ js j)j3cj,&ioned~Ji^^ a foe.. who

has transmuted i^eaJsjiiuIJ^
cherish, into cruel realities which we most fervently abhor.

One of the great works of art in the western tradition,
which helped to laugh the culture of chivalry and the
ideals of medieval knight errantry out of court, was Cer-
vantes' Don Quixote. Quixote's espousal of the ideals of
knighthood was an absurd imitation of those ideals; and

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

it convicted the ideals themselves of absurdity. The me-
dieval knights had mixed Teutonic class pride and the
love of adventure of a military caste with Christian con-
ceptions of suffering love. In Quixote's imitation the love
becomes genuine suffering love. Therefore, while we
laugh at the illusions of this bogus knight, we finally find
ourselves laughing with a prof ounder insight at the bogus
character of knighthood itself.

Our modern civilization has similarities with the cul-
ture of medieval knighthood. But its sentimentalities and
illusions are brought to judgment, not by a Christ-like
but by a demonic fool; and not by an individual but a
collective one. In each case a mixture of genuine idealism
with worldliness is disclosed. The medieval knights mixed
pride in their military prowess with pretenses of coming
to the aid of the helpless. However, the helpless were not
those who really needed help but some fair ladies in
distress. Our modern commerdaLcivilizatk^

tian idealif liri)eii^^

Everything in the

Eich points to ultimate and transcendent
possibilities is changed into simple historical achieve-
ments. The religious vision of a final realm of perfect
love in which life is related to life without the coercion
of power is changed into the pretension that a community,
governed by prudence, using covert rather than overt
forms, of power, and attaining a certain harmony of bal-
anced competitive forces, has achieved an ideal social
harmony. A society in which the power factors are ob-
scured is assumed to be a "rational" rather than coercive
one. The knight of old knew about power. He sat on a

THE IRONIC SITUATION

horse, the symbol of military power. But the power of
the modern commercial community is contained in the
"counters" of stocks and bonds which are stored in the
vaults of the banki Such a community creates a culture
in which nothing is officially known about power, how-
ever desperate may be the power struggles within it.

The Christian ideal of the equality of all men before
God and of equality as a regulative principle of justice
is made into a simple historical possibility. It is used by
bourgeois man as a weapon against feudal inequality;
but it is not taken seriously when the classes below him
lay claim to it. Communism rediscovers the idea and gives
it one further twist of consistency until it becomes a
threat to society by challenging even necessary func-
tional inequalities in the community. The Christian idea
of the significance of each individual in God's sight be-
comes, in bourgeois civilization, the concept of a discrete
individual who makes himself the final end of his own
existence. The Christian idea of providence is rejected for
the heady notion that man is the master of his fate and
the captain of his soul.

Communism protests against the sentimentalities and
illusions of the bourgeois world-view by trying a little
more desperately to take them seriously and to carry
them out; or by opposing them with equally absurd con-
tradictory notions. The bourgeois world is accused of not
taking the mastery of historical destiny seriously enough
and of being content with the mastery of nature. To
master history, declares Engels, requires a "revolu-
tionary act." "When this act is accomplished," he insists,
"when man not only proposes but also disposes, only

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

then will the last extraneous forces reflected in religion
vanish away/' That is to say, man will no longer have
any sense of the mystery and meaning of the drama of
history beyond the limits of his will and understanding;
but he will be filled with illusions about his own power
and wisdom.

For the bourgeois idea of a society in which the morally
embarrassing factor of power has been pushed under the
rug, communism substitutes the idea of one final, resolute
and unscrupulous thrust of power in the revolution. This
will establish a society in which no coercive power will
be necessary and the state will "wither away/' The notion
of a society which achieves social harmony by prudence
and a nice balance of competitive interests, is challenged
by communism with the strategy of raising "class an-
tagonisms" to a final climax of civil war. In this war the
proletariat will "seize the state power" and thereby "put
an end to itself as a proletariat" (Engels). This is to say,
it will create a society in which all class distinctions and
rivalries are eliminated.

For the liberal idea of the natural goodness of all men
it substitutes the idea of the exclusive virtue of the pro-
letariat, who, according to Lenin, are alone capable of
courage and disinterestedness. Thus it changes a partially
harmful illusion about human nature into a totally nox-
ious one. As if to make sure that the illusion will bear
every possible evil fruit, it proposes to invest this al-
legedly virtuous class with precisely that total monopoly
of power which is bound to be destructive of every virtue.

Communism challenges the bourgeois notion of a dis-
crete and self-sufficing individual with the concept of a

THE IRONIC SITUATION

society so perfect and frictionless that each individual
will flower in it, and have no desires, ambitions and. hopes
beyond its realities. It thinks of this consummation as
the real beginning of history and speaks of all previous
time as "pre-history." Actually such a consummation
would be the end of history; for history would lose its
creative force if individuals were completely engulfed in
the community. Needless to say the change of this dream
into the nightmare of a coercive community, in which
every form of individual initiative and conscience is sup-
pressed, was an inevitable, rather than fortuitous, de-
velopment. It proved that it is even more dangerous to
understand the individual only in his social relations than
to deny his social substance.

In every instance communism changes only partly
dangerous sentimentalities and inconsistencies in the
bourgeois ethos into consistent and totally harmful ones.
Communism is thus a fierce and unscrupulous Don
Quixote on a fiery horse, determined to destroy every
knight and lady of civilization; and confident that this
slaughter will purge the world of evil. Like Quixote, it
imagines itself free of illusions; but it is actually driven by
twofold ones. Here the similarity ends. In the Quixote of
Cervantes the second illusion purges the first of its error
and evil. In the case of the demonic Quixote the second
illusion gives the first a satanic dimension.

Our own nation is both the participant and the victim
of this double irony in a special way. Ql all thelTmights"
of bourgeois cultur^ is the most imjx)mg and

our horse tbejleekest and most impressive. Our armor is
the shiniest (iFlFlirTBg^ atom bombs

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

with a knight's armor) ; and the lady of our dreams is
most opulent and desirable. The lady has^beeja turned
into "Prosperity." We have furthermore been persuaded
by our success to formulate the creed of our civilization
so passionately that we have suppressed its inconsisten-
cies with greater consistency tha^anyjof^our allies. We
stand before the enemy in the^first line of battle but our
ideological weapons are frequently as irrelevant^ as" were
the spears of the knights, when gunpowder challenged
their reign.

Our unenviable position is made the more difficult be-
cause the heat of the battle gives us neither the leisure
nor the inclination to detect the irony in our own history
or to profit from the discovery of the double irony be-
tween ourselves and our foe. If only we could fully
understand that the evils against w;hich we contenc^ are
frequently the fruit of JU^on^^bich are similarjto our
^ might be better prepared to save a vast uncom-
^

oursdvesjand^ commumsmj from being engulfed by this
noxious creed.

CHAPTER II

The Innocent Nation in an
Innocent World

PRACTICALLY all schools of modern culture, what-
ever their differences, are united in their rejection of
the Christian doctrine of original sin. This doctrine as-
serts the obvious fact that all men are persistently in-
clined to regard themselves more highly and are more
assiduously concerned with their own interests than any
''objective" view of their importance would warrant.
Modern culture in its various forms feels certain that, if
men could be sufficiently objective or disinterested to
recognize the injustice of excessive self-interest, they
could also in time transfer the objectivity of their judg-
ments as observers of the human scene, to their judg-
ments as actors and agents in, human history. This is an
absurd notion which every practical statesman or man
of affairs knows how to discount because he encounters
ambitions and passions in his daily experience, which re-
fute the regnant modern theory of potentially innocent
men and nations. There is consequently a remarkable
hiatus between the shrewdness of practical men of affairs

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

and the speculations of our wise men. The latter are fre-
quently convinced that the predicament of our possible
involvement in an atomic and global conflict is due pri-
marily to failure of the statesmen to heed the advice
of our psychological and social scientists.* The statesmen
on the other hand have fortunately been able to disregard
the admonition of our wise men because they could still
draw upon the native shrewdness of the common people
who in smaller realms have had something of the same
experience with human nature as the statesmen. The
statesmen have not been particularly brilliant in finding
solutions for our problems, all of which have reached
global dimensions. But they have, at least, steered a
course which still offers us minimal hope of avoiding a
global conflict.

But whether or not we avoid another war, we are
covered with prospective guilt. We have dreamed of a
ffurely rational adjustment of interests in human society;
and we are involved in "total" wars. We have dreamed
of a "scientific" approach to all human problems; and
we find that the tensions of a world-wide conflict release
individual and collective emotions not easily brought
under rational control We had hoped to make neat and

H., t > ,

*One of them writes: "While the scientific method has been applied
wholeheartedly to everything which has to do with material advance
it has been only applied haltingly and tentatively to the social and
psychological problems which the advance has brought to the fore.
Moreover while even the most conservative manufacturer is quick to
take the advice of the chemist or engineer, the legislator rarely pays
attention to the findings of the social scientist. Someone has said that
in this age of wireless and airplanes the legislator typically keeps his
ear to the ground." Ralph Linton in The Science of Man in the World
Crisis, p. 219.

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

sharp distinctions between justice, and injustice; and we
discover that even the best human actions involve some
guilt.""

This vast involvement in guilt in a supposedly inno-
cent world achieves a specially ironic dimension through
the fact that the two leading powers engaged in the strug-
gle are particularly innocent according to their own of-
ficial myth and collective memory. The Russian-Com-
munist pretensions of innocency and the monstrous evils
which are generated from them, are the fruit of a variant
of the liberal dogma. According to the liberal dogma men
are excessively selfish because they lack the intelligence
to consider interests other than their own. But this higher
intelligence can be supplied, of course, by education. Or
they are betrayed into selfishness by unfavorable social
and political environment. This can be remedied by the
growth of scientifically perfected social institutions.

The communist dogma is more specific. Men are cor-
rupted by a particular social institution: the institution
of property. The abolition of this institution guarantees
the return of mankind to the state of original innocency
which existed before the institution of property arose, a
state which Engels describes as one of idyllic harmony
with "no soldiers, no gendarmes, no policemen, prefects
or judges, no prisons, laws or lawsuits."

The initiators of this return to innocency are the pro-
letarian class. This class is innocent because it has no
interests to defend; and it cannot become "master of
the productive forces of society except by abolishing their
mode of appropriation." The proletarians cannot free
themselves from slavery without emancipating the whole

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

of mankind from injustice. Once this act of emancipation
has been accomplished every action and event on the
other side of the revolution participates in this new free-
dom from guilt. A revolutionary nation is guiltless be-
cause the guilt of "imperialism" has been confined to
"capitalistic" nations "by definition." Thus the lust for
power which enters into most individual and collective
human actions, is obscured. The priest-kings of this new
revolutionary state, though they wield inordinate power
because they have gathered both economic and political
control in the hands of a single oligarchy, are also, in
theory, innocent of any evil. Their interests and those
of the masses whom they control are, by definition, iden-
tical since neither owns property.

Even the vexatious and tyrannical rule of Russia over
the smaller communist states is completely obscured and
denied by the official theory. Hamilton Fish Armstrong
reports Bukharin's interpretation of the relation of com-
munist states to each other as follows: "Bukharin ex-
plained at length that national rivalry between Com-
munist states was 'an impossibility by definition/ What
creates wars/ he said, f is the competition of monopoly
capitalisms for raw materials and markets. Capitalist
society is made up of selfish and competing national units
and therefore is by definition a world at war. Communist
society will be made up of unselfish and harmonious units
and therefore will be by definition a world at peace. Just
as, .capitalism cannot live without war, so war cannot
live with Communism/ "*

It is difficult to conceive of a more implausible theory
*Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Tito and GoUath, p. ix.

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

of human nature and conduct. Yet it is one which achieves
a considerable degree of plausibility, once the basic as-
sumptions are accepted. It has been plausible enough, at
any rate, to beguile millions of people, many of whom are
not under the direct control of the tyranny and are there-
fore free to consider critical challenges of its adequacy.
So powerful has been this illusory restoration of human
innocency that, for all we know, the present communist
oligarchs, who pursue their ends with such cruelty, may
still be believers. The powers of liu:paaji self -deception
are seemingly endless. The communist tyrants may well
legitimatize their cruelties not only to the conscience of
their devotees but to their own by recourse to an official
theory which proves their innocency "by definition."

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would
seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics.
At any rate, he understood the human situation well
enough to have stated a theory which comprehended what
we now see in communism. "Power/ 3 he wrote, "always
thinks it has a great soul and vast Views Beyond ! the" cpm-
^fehen^n^^of^ the weak and that it ij ( dob]yg w God's
service when it is violating all His 'laws. ; Our^passions,
ambitions, avarice, love and resentment^ etc v jpossessjp
much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering
eloquence that they^ insinuate themselves into the under-
standing and the conscience and cohverFBoiliE^loTEST
party." Adams's understanding of tKe power of the seBTs"
passions and ambitions to corrupt the self s reason is a
simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all
theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility
of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Chris-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

tian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated
the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason
when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at
conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and mo-
tives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of
ideology is that it foolishly and self -righteously confined
the source of this taint to economic interest and to a par-
ticular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing
all the corruptions of ambition and power which would
creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.

In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-
political movement which generates more extravagant
forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the preten-
sions of innocency than we have ever known in human
history.

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is
filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension.
Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils,
partly because they are not as consistently held; and
partly because we have not invested our ostensible "in-
nocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous
amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself
in American culture, our political institutions contain
many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power
which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to
the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to
the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man
and little to the reservations about human nature which
emanated from the Christianity of New England. But
fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitu-
tion which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

all the world give mortall man no greater power than they
are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And
they that have the liberty to speak great things you will
find that they will speak great blasphemies/'*

But these reservations of Christian realism in our cul-
ture cannot obscure the fact that, next to the Russian
pretensions, we are (according to our traditional theory)
the most innocent nation on earth. The irony of our
situation lies in the fact that we could not be virtuous
(in the sense of practicing the virtues which are implicit
in meeting our vast world responsibilities) if we were
really as innocent as we pretend to be. It is particularly

*From Perry Miller's The Puritans, p. 213.

James Bryce gives the following estimate of tlie philosophy which in-
formed our constitution: "Someone has said that the American govern-
ment and constitution are based on the theology of Calvin and the
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This at least is true that there is a
hearty puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the in-
strument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin
and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they
could possibly shut. . . . The aim of the constitution seems to be not
so much to attain great common ends by securing a good government
as to avert the evils which will flow not merely from a bad government
but from any government strong enough to threaten the pre-existing
communities and individual citizens." James Bryce, The American Com-
monwealth, Vol. I, p. 306.

"The doctrine of the separation of powers," declared Mr. Justice
Brandeis, "was adopted by the convention of 1787 not to promote ef-
ficiency but to preclude the arbitrary exercise of power not to avoid
friction but by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribu-
tion of governmental powers among these departments to save the
people from autocracy." "Brandeis dissenting, in Myers vs. United
States," 272, IL S. 52, 293.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

remarkable that the two great religious-moral traditions
which informed our early life New England Calvinism
and Virginian Deism and Jeffersonianism arrive at re-
markably similar conclusions about the meaning of oui
national character and destiny. Calvinism may have held
too pessimistic views of human nature, and too mechan-
ical views of the providential ordering of human life
But when it assessed the significance of the American
experiment both its conceptions of American destiny and
its appreciation of American virtue finally arrived at con-
clusions strikingly similar to those of Deism. Whethei
our nation interprets its spiritual heritage through Massa-
chusetts or Virginia, we came into existence with .the
sense ,i)i J^Ing^j^ . .us-

ing to make, a Jiew beginning f or ^mankind. We had re-
nounced the evils of European feudalism. We had escaped
from the evils of European religious bigotry. We had
found broad spaces for the satisfaction of human desires
in place of the crowded Europe. Whether, as in the case
of the New England theocrats, our forefathers thought
of our "experiment" as primarily the creation of a ne^
and purer church, or, as in the case of Jefferson and his
coterie, they thought primarily of a new political com-
munity, they believed in either case that we had been
called out by God to create a new humanity. We were
God's "American Israel." Our pretensions of innocence
therefore heightened the whole concept of a virtuous hu-
manity which characterizes the culture of our era; and
involve us in the ironic incongruity between our illusions
and the realities which we experience. We find it almosl
as difficult as the communists to Believe that anyone

14,, , ,a^-Tw#

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

could think ill of us, since we are as persuaded as they
that our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice
could prompt criticism of any of our actions.

The New England conception of our virtue began as
the belief that the church which had been established on
our soil was purer than any church of Christendom. In
Edward Johnson's Wonder Working Providence of Zion's
Saviour (1650) the belief is expressed that "Jesus Christ
had manifested his kingly office toward his churches more
fully than ever yet the sons of men saw." Practically
every Puritan tract contained the conviction that the
Protestant Reformation reached its final culmination
here. While the emphasis lay primarily upon the new
purity of the church, even the Puritans envisaged a new
and perfect society. Johnson further spoke of New
England as the place "where the Lord would create
a new heaven and a new earth, new churches and a new
commonwealth together." And a century later President
Stiles of Yale preached a sermon on "The United States
elevated to glory and honor" in which he defined the
nation as "God's American Israel."

Jefferson's conception of the innocency and virtue
of the new nation was not informed by the Biblical
symbolism of the New England tracts. His religious faith
was a form of Christianity which had passed through the
rationalism of the French Enlightenment. His sense of
providence was expressed in his belief in the power of
"nature's God" over the vicissitudes of history. In any
event, nature's God had a very special purpose in found-
ing this new community. The purpose was to make a
new beginning in a corrupt world. Two facts about

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

America impressed the Jeffersonians. The one was Jhafc
we had broken^ with. tyranny. The other was that the wide
economic opportunities of the new continent would ^pre-
vent the emergence of those social vices . which^ Char-
acterised the social life of an overcrowded Continent of
Europe.

^^flAftd

ffie European minds r which could not be equaled in Eu-
rope in centuries. "If all the sovereigns of Europe?'" he
declared; ""were to set themselves to work to emancipate
the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance
and prejudice and that as zealously as they now attempt
the contrary a thousand years would not place them on
that high ground on which our common people are now
setting out."*

One interesting aspect of these illusions of "new be-
ginnings" in history is that they are never quite as new
as is assumed, and never remain quite as pure as when
they are new. Jefferson regarded the distinction between
American democracy and European tyranny as an abso-
lute one. "Under the pretense of governing/' he declared
in describing the European nations, "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."**
This was an understandable judgment of the state of
political justice in the period of the decay of feudal so-
ciety. But it was hardly a fair judgment of the potentiali-

*Writings, II, p. 249.
^Writings, VI, p. 58.

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

ties for democracy which were embodied in the settlement
which brought William and Mary to the throne of Eng-
land in 1689. It was, furthermore, generative and typical
of many subsequent American judgments which obscured
developments of democratic justice in Europe, particu-
larly those which proceeded without disturbing the in-
stitution of monarchy. For monarchy remained a simple
symbol of injustice to the American imagination.

The Jeffersonian poet, Freneau, used Biblical sym-
bolism, despite his rejection of orthodox faith, to describe
the significance of America's break with the traditions
of tyranny. While still a student at the College of New
Jersey he gave poetic expression to his faith :

Here independent power shall hold sway

And public virtue warm the patriot's breast.

No traces shall remain of tyranny

And laws and patterns for the world beside

Be here enacted first.

A new Jerusalem sent down from heaven

Shall grace our happy earth.

In common with the Enlightenment Jefferson some-
times ascribed our superior virtue to our rational freedom
from traditional prejudices and sometimes to the favor-
able social circumstances of the American Continent.
"Before the establishment of the American States/' he
declared, "nothing was known to history but the man
of the old world crowded within limits either small or over-
charged and steeped in vices which the situation gen-
erates. A government adapted to such men would be one
thing, but a different one for the man of these States.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Here every man may have land to labor for himself; or
preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact
for it such compensation as not only to afford a com-
fortable subsistence but wherewith to provide a cessation
from labor in old age."*

The illusions of a unique innocency were not confined
to our earliest years. De Toqueville was made aware of
them again and again on the American frontier :"If I say
to an American/ 7 he reported, "that the country he lives
in is a fine one, aye he replies and there is not its equal in
the world. If I applaud the freedom its inhabitants enjoy
he answers 'freedom is a fine thing but few nations are
worthy of it.' If I remark on the purity of morals that
distinguishes the United States he declares 'I can imagine
that a stranger who has witnessed the corruption which
prevails in other nations would be astonished at the dif-
ference/ At length I leave him to a contemplation of
himself. But he returns to the charge and does not desist
until he has got me to repeat all I have been saying. It
is impossible to conceive of a more troublesome and gar-
rulous patriotism."**

Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride. These
examples of American self-appreciation could be matched
by similar sentiments in other nations. But every nation
also has its peculiar version. Our version is w that our

nation turned itg M .JbE(^ w upQ^. ll ^7y:^?.^ ^ Europe and
made a new beginning. T

*TKe Jeffersonian conception of virtue, had it not over-
stated the innocency of American social life, would have

^Writings, XIII, p. 401. (Letter to John Adams on natural aristocracy.)
**De Toqueville, American Democracy, Vol. II, p. 225.

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

been a tolerable prophecy of some aspects of our social
history which have distinguished us from Europe. For it
can hardly be denied that the fluidity of our class struc-
ture, derived from the opulence of economic opportuni-
ties, saved us from the acrimony of the class struggle in
Europe, and avoided the class rebellion, which Marx
could prompt in Europe but not in America. When the
frontier ceased to provide for the expansion of oppor-
tunities, our superior technology created ever new fron-
tiers for the ambitious and adventurous. In one sense the
opulence of American life has served to perpetuate Jef-
fersonian illusions about human nature. For we have thus
far sought to solve all our problems by the expansion of
our economy. This expansion cannot go on forever and
ultimately we must face some vexatious issues of social
justice in terms which will not differ too greatly from
those which the wisest nations of Europe have been forced
to use.*

*0n the occasion of Thomas Huxley's visit to America he made this
significant prophecy: ". . . To an Englishman landing upon your shores
for the first time, travelling for hundreds of miles through strings of great
and well-ordered cities, seeing your enormous actual, and almost infinite
potential, wealth in all commodities, and in the energy and ability which
turn wealth to account, there is something sublime in the vista of the fu-
ture. Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly under-
stood by national pride. I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree
impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not
grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about
which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what
are you going to do with all these things? What is to be the end to which
these are to be the means? You are making a novel experiment in
politics on the greatest scale which the world has yet seen. Forty mil-
lions at your first centenary, it is reasonably to be expected that, at the
second, these states will be occupied by two hundred millions of Eng-
lish-speaking people, spread over an area as large as that of Europe,

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The idea that men would not come in conflict with one
another, if the opportunities were wide enough, was partly
based upon the assumption that all human desires are
determinate and all human ambitions ordinate. This as-
sumption was shared by our Jeffersonians with the French
Enlightenment. "Every man," declared Tom Paine,
"wishes to pursue his occupation and enjoy the fruits
of his labors and the produce of his property in peace
and safety and with the least possible expense. When
these things are accomplished all objects for which gov-
ernments ought to be established are accomplished."*
The same idea underlies the Marxist conception of the
difference between an "economy of scarcity" and an
"economy of abundance." In an economy of abundance
there is presumably no cause for rivalry. Neither Jeffer-
sonians nor Marxists had any understanding for the
perennial conflicts of power and pride which may arise
on every level of "abundance" since human desires grow
with the means of their gratification.

and with, climates and interests as diverse as those of Spain and Scan-
dinavia, England and Russia. You and your descendants have to ascer-
tain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of a
republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether state
rights will hold out against centralisation, without separation; whether
centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised monarchy;
whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy;
and as population thickens in your great cities, and the pressure of
want is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk among you, and
communism and socialism will claim to be heard. Truly America has
a great future before her; great in toil, in care, and in responsibility;
great in true glory if she be guided in wisdom and righteousness; great
in shame if she fail." Thomas H. Huxley, American Addresses, New York,
D. Appleton and Co., 1877, p. 125 f.
*Thomas Paine, The Eights of Man, Part II, Ch. 4.

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

One single note of realism runs through Jefferson's
idyllic picture of American innocency. That consists in
his preference for an agricultural over an urban society.
Jefferson was confident of the future virtue of America
only in so far as it would continue as an agricultural na-
tion. Fearing the social tensions and the subordination
of man to man in a highly organized social structure, his
ideal community consisted of independent freeholders,
each tilling his own plot of ground and enjoying the fruits
of his own labor. "Dependence begets subservience/' he
wrote in extolling the life of the farmer. "It suffocates the
germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the design of
ambition."*

There is a special irony in the contrast between the
course of American history toward the development of
JJarge-scale industry and Jefferson's belief that democracy^
was secure only in "an agrarian economy. America has
become what Jefferson most feared; but the moral con-
sequences have-not been as catastrophic as he anticipated.
While democracy is tainted by more corruption in our
great metropolitan areas than in the remainder of our
political life, w^jiaye managed to achieve a tolerable,
justice in the collective relatioMTifln^
power against power and equflffiratii^
peting social forces of society. The rise of th^laborjcaove-
ment has been ^particularly important m aA^
result; for its organization of the power of the workers
was necessary to produce the counter-weight to the great
concentrations of economic power which justice requires.

*Writings, IE, p. 229. "Those who labor in the earth," said Jefferson,
"are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people," Ibid.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

We have engaged in precisely those collective actions for
the sake of justice which Jefferson regarded as wholly
incompatible with justice.

The ironic contrast between Jeffersonian hopes and
fears for America and the actual realities is increased by
the exchange of ideological weapons between the early and
the later Jeffersonians. The early Jeffersonians sought to
keep political power weak, discouraging both the growth of
federal power in relation to the States and confining polit-
ical control over economic life to the States. They feared
that such power would be compounded with the economic
power of the privileged and used against the less favored.
Subsequently the wielders of great economic power
adopted the Jeffersonian ma^dm that the best possible
government is the least possible government. The Ameri-
can democracy, as every other healthy democracy, had
learned to use the more equal distribution of political
power, inherent in universal suffrage, as leverage against
the tendency toward concentration of power in economic
life. Culminating in the "New Deal," national govern-
ments, based upon an alliance of farmers, workers and
middle classes, have used the power of the state to es-
tablish minimal standards of "welfare" in housing, social
security, health services, etc. Naturally, the higher in-
come groups benefited less from these minimal standards
of justice, and paid a proportionately higher cost for them
than the proponents of the measures of a "welfare state."
The former, therefore, used the ideology of Jeffersonian-
ism to counter these tendencies; while the classes in so-
ciety which had Jefferson's original interest in equality
discarded his ideology because they were less certain than

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

he that complete freedom in economic relations would
inevitably make for equality.

In this development the less privileged classes devel-
oped a realistic appreciation of the factor of power in
social life, while the privileged classes tried to preserve the
illusion of classical liberalism that power is not an im-
portant element in man's social life. They recognize the
force of interest; but they continue to assume that the
competition of interests will make for justice without
political or moral regulation. This would be possible only
if the various powers which support interest were fairly
equally divided, which they never are.

Since America developed as a bourgeois society, with
only remnants- of the older feudal culture to inform its
ethos, it naturally inclined toward the bourgeois ideology
which neglects the factor of power in the human com-
munity and equates interest with rationality.

Such a society regards all social relations as essentially
innocent because it believes self-interest to be inherently
harmless. It is, in common with Marxism, blind to the
lust for power in the motives of men; but also to the
injustices which flow from the disbalances of power in
the community. Both the bourgeois ideology and Marx-
ism equate self-interest with the economic motive. The
bourgeois world either regards economic desire as inher-
ently ordinate or it hopes to hold it in check either by
prudence (as in the thought of the utilitarians) or by
the pressure of the self-interest of others (as in classical
liberalism). Marxism, on the other hand, believes that
the disbalance of power in industrial society, plus the
inordinate character of the economic motive, must drive

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

a bourgeois society to greater and greater injustice and
more and more overt social conflict.

Thus the conflict between communism and the bour-
geois world achieves a special virulence between the two
great hegemonous nations of the respective alliances, be-
cause America is, in the eyes of communism, an exemplar
of the worst form of capitalistic injustice, while it is, in
its own eyes, a symbol of pure innocence and justice. This
ironic situation is heightened by the fact that every free
nation in alliance with us is more disposed to bring
economic life under political control than our traditional
theory allows. There is therefore considerable moral mis-
understanding between ourselves and our allies. This
represents a milder version of the contradiction between
ourselves and our foes. The classes in our society, who
pretend that only political power is dangerous, frequently
suggest that our allies are tainted with the same corrup-
tion as that of our foes. European nations, on the other
hand, frequently judge us according to our traditional
theory. They fail to recognize that our actual achieve-
ments in social justice have been won by a pragmatic
approach to the problems of power, which has not been
less efficacious for its lack of consistent speculation upon
the problems of power and justice. Our achievements in
this field represent the triumph of common sense over
the theories of both our business oligarchy and the specu-
lations of those social scientists who are still striving for
a "scientific" and disinterested justice. We are, in short,
more virtuous than our detractors, whether foes or allies,
admit, because we know ourselves to be less innocent
than our theories assume. The force and danger of self-

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

interest in human affairs are too obvious to remain long
obscure to those who are not too blinded by either theory
or interest to see the obvious. The relation of power to
interest on the one hand, and to justice on the other, is
equally obvious. In our domestic affairs we have thus
builded better than we knew because we have not taken
the early dreams of our peculiar innocency too seriously.

Our foreign policy reveals even more marked contradic-
tions between our early illusions of innocency and the
hard realities of the present day than do our domestic
policies. We lived for a century not only in the illusion
but in the reality of innocency in our foreign relations.
We lacked the power in the first instance to become in-
volved in the guilt of its use. As we gradually achieved
power, through the economic consequences of our richly
stored continent, the continental unity of our economy
and the technical efficiency of our business and industrial
enterprise, we sought for a time to preserve innocency
by disavowing the responsibilities of power. We were, of
course, never as innocent as we pretended to be, even as
a child is not as innocent as is implied in the use of the
child as the symbol of innocency. The surge of our infant
strength over a continent, which claimed Oregon, Califor-
nia, Florida and Texas against any sovereignty which may
have stood in our way, was not innocent. It was the ex-
pression of a will-to-power of a new community in which
the land-hunger of hardy pioneers and settlers furnished
the force of imperial expansion. The organs of govern-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ment, whether political or military, played only a secon-
dary role. From those early days to the present moment
we have frequently been honestly deceived because our
power availed itself of covert rather than overt instru-
ments. One of the most prolific causes of delusion about
power in a commerical society is that economic power is
more covert than political or military power.

We believed, until the outbreak of the First World
War, that there was a generic difference between us and
the other nations of the world. This was proved by the
difference between their power rivalries and our alleged
contentment with our lot. The same President of the
United States who ultimately interpreted the First World
War as a crusade to "make the world safe for democracy"
reacted to its first alarms with the reassuring judgment
that the conflict represented trade rivalries with which
we need not be concerned. We srere

f national interest, which we hardly
,,^^^ Our European critics may,

however, overshoot the mark if they insist that the slogan
of making "the world safe for democracy" was merely
an expression of that moral cant which we seemed to have
inherited from the British, only to express it with less
subtlety than they. For the fact is that every nation is
caught in the moral paradox of refusing to go to war
unless it can be proved that the national interest is im-
periled, and of continuing in the war only by proving
that something much more than national interest is at
stake. Our nation is not the only community of mankind
which is tempted to hypocrisy. Every nation must come
to terms with the fact that, though the force of collective

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

self-interest is so great, that national policy must be based
upon it ; yet also the sensitive conscience recognizes that
the moral obligation of the individual transcends his
particular community. Loyalty to the community is
therefore morally tolerable only if it includes values
wider than those of the community.

More significant than our actions and interpretations
in the First World War was our mood after its conclusion.
Our "realists' 3 feared that our sense of responsibility to-
ward a nascent world community had exceeded the canons
of a prudent self-interest. Our idealists, of the thirties,
sought to preserve our innocence by
main force of isolationism "came from "the '"reaEsts," as
the slogan "America First" signifies. But the abortive
effort to defy the forces of history which were both creat-
ing a potential world community and increasing the
power of America beyond that of any other nation, was
supported by pacifist idealists, Christian and secular, and
by other visionaries who desired to preserve our inno-
cency. They had a dim and dark understanding of the
fact thalTpo^^ without "guilt7*smce

it is never transcendent over interest, ercn'wEea it tries
to subject itself to universal stanjar^^
under" tEeT control of ^ns^je&t-^od^
Thej^did^not understand that the disavowal of

nsibni^^ or na-

tion in even more grievous guilt, ._ ^ ~~

There are two ways of denying our responsibilities to
our fellowmen. The one is the way of imperialism, ex-
pressed in seeking to dominate them by our power. The
other is the way of isolationism, expressed in seeking to

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

withdraw from our responsibilities to them. Geographic
circumstances and the myths of our youth rendered us
more susceptible to the latter than the former temptation.
This has given our national life a unique color, which is
not without some moral advantages. No powerful nation
in historyjias ever been more reluctant to acknowledge
tK^osition ITKaSlLchreved in the worH^ffian^we'' The
moral advantage lies in the fact that we do not have a
strong lust of power, though we are quickly acquiring
the pride of power which always accompanies its posses-
sion. Our lack of the lust of power makes the f ulminations
of our foes against us singularly inept. On the other hand,
we have been so deluded by the concept of our innocency
that we are ill prepared to deal with the temptations of
power which now assail us.

The Second World War quickly dispelled the illusions
of both our realists and idealists; and also proved the
vanity of the hopes of the legalists who thought that
rigorous neutrality laws could abort the historical tend-
encies which were pushing our nation into the center
of the world community. We emerged from that war the
most powerful nation on earth. To the surprise of our
friends and critics we seemed also to have sloughed off
the tendencies toward irresponsibility which had char-
acterized us in the long armistice between the world wars.
We were determined to exercise the responsibilities of
our power.

The exercise of this power required us to hold back the
threat of Europe's inundation by communism through
the development of all kinds of instruments of mass de-
struction, including atomic weapons. Thus an "innocent"

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

nation finally Drives at the ironic climax of its history.
It_find^ itself the custodian of the ultimate weapon
which perf ectTy" embodies and symbolizes" the naorai am-
biguity; of physical warfare. We could not disavow the
possible use of the weapon, partly because no imperiled
nation is morally able to dispense with weapons which
might insure its survival. All nations, unlike some indi-
viduals, lack the capacity to prefer a noble death to a
morally ambiguous survival But we also could not re-
nounce the weapon because the freedom or survival of
our allies depended upon the threat of its use. Of this at
least Mr. Winston Churchill and other Europeans have
assured us. Yet if we should use it, we shall cover our-
selves with a terrible guilt. We might insure pur survival
in a w r ld in which it might be better not to be alive/
Thus the moral predicament in ir which, alL.hiamm,. striving
is involved has teen raised to a final^pitch for a culture
and for a nation which thought it an easy mattery to dis-
tinguish between justice and injustice and believed itself
to be peculiarly innocent. In this way the perennial moral
predicaments of human history have caught up with a
culture which knew nothing of sin or guilt, and with a
nation which seemed to be the most perfect fruit of that
culture.

In this as in every other ironic situation of American
history there is a footnote which accentuates the incon-
gruity. This footnote is added by the fact that the great-
ness of our power is derived on the one hand from the
technical efficiency of our industrial establishment and
on the other from the success of our natural scientists.
Yet it was assumed that science and business enterprise

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

would insure the triumph of reason over power and pas-
sion in human history.

Naturally, a culture so confident of the possibility of
resolving all incongruities in life and history was bound
to make strenuous efforts -to escape ..the. tragic ,,

in which we find ourselves. These^efforts,, f aH-into,
categories, idealistic and realistic. JQ^eJde^
believe that. we- cauld escape the dilemma if we made
sufficiently str^uous rational and moral efforts; 'if"76f
instance we tried to establish a world government. Un-
fortunately the obvious necessity of integrating the global
community politically does not guarantee its possibility.
And all the arguments of the idealists finally rest upon
a logic which derives the possibility of an achievement
from its necessity. Other idealists beli$Y, that ^,xemm-
ciation, of the use of &tQmic,w^^^

the dilemma. But this is merely the old pacifist escape
from the'cDlemma of war itself.

The r&lM^ ( on the other hand are inclined to argue
that a gopd^ cause will hallow any weapon. Ttey are con-
vinced that the ,evil$ of cpmrnpni^m^re, sp,reatEarwe
are justified in using any weapon against them. Thereby

JfeSLS^

inadequacy of both types of escape from oiTFTiioral

dilemma proves that there is no purely moral solution
for the ultimate moral issues of life ; but neither is there
a viable solution which disregards the moral factors. Men
and nations must use their power with the purpose of
making it an instrument of justice and a servant of in-
terests broader than their own. Yet they must be ready
to use it though they become aware that the power of

INNOCENT NATION INNOCENT WORLD

a particular nation or individual, even when under strong
religious and social sanctions, is never so used that there
is a perfect coincidence between the value which justifies
it and the interest of the wielder of it.

One difficulty of a nation, such as ours, which mani-
fests itself long before we reach the ultimate dilemma of
warfare with weapons of mass destruction, is that we
have reached our position in the world community
through forms of power which are essentially covert
rather than overt. Or rather the overt military power
which we wield has been directly drawn from the eco-
nomic power, derived from the wealth of our natural
resources and our technical efficiency. We have had little
experience in the claims and counter-claims of man's
social existence, either domestically or internationally.
We therefore do not know social existence as an en-
counter between life and life, or interest with interest
in which moral and non-moral factors are curiously com-
pounded. It is therefore a weakness of our foreign policy,
particularly as our business community conceives it, that
we move inconsistently from policies which would over-
come animosities toward us by the offer of economic as-
sistance to policies which would destroy resistance by the
use of pure military might. We can understand the neat
logic of either economic reciprocity or the show of pure
power. But we are mystified by the endless complexities
of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic
loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and
fears which enter into the policies of nations, and which
lie at the foundation of their political cohesion.

In our relations with Asia these inconsistencies are par-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ticularly baffling. We expect Asians to be grateful to us
for such assistance as we have given them; and are hurt
when we discover that Asians envy, rather than admire,
our prosperity and regard us as imperialistic when we are
"by definition" a non-imperialistic nation.

Nations are hardly capable of the spirit of fprgiyg-
nessT^vfafo^^ human rela-

tions and which rests upon the contrite recognition that
our actions and attitudes are inevitably interpreted in a
different light by our friends as well asJF peg than w;e
interpret them. Yet it is necessary to acquire a measure
of this spirit in the collective relations of mankind. Na-
tions, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their
own esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts.
The whole world suffers from the pretensions of the com-
munist oligarchs. Our pretensions are of a different order
because they are not as consistently held. In any event,
we have preserved a system of freedom in which they
may be challenged. Yet our American nation, involved
in its vast responsibilities, must slough off many illusions
which were derived both from the experiences and the
ideologies of its childhood. Otherwise either we will seek
escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable
guilt, or we will be plunged into avoidable guilt by too
great confidence in our virtue.

CHAPTER III

Happiness, Prosperity
and Virtue

1THE Declaration of Independence assures us that "the
JL pursuit of happiness 7 ' is one of the "inalienable rights"
of mankind. While the right to its pursuit is, of course,
no guarantee of its attainment, yet the philosophy which
informed the Declaration, was, on the whole, as hopeful
that all men, at least all American men, could attain hap-
piness as it was certain that they had the right to pursue
it. America has been, in fact, both in its own esteem and
in the imagination of a considerable portion of Europe,
a proof of the validity of this modern hope which reached
its zenith in the Enlightenment. The hope was that the
earth could be transformed from a place of misery to
an abode of happiness and contentment. The philosophy
which generated this hope was intent both upon elimi-
nating the natural hazards to comfort, security and
contentment; and upon reforming society so that the
privileges of life would be shared equitably. The passion
for justice, involved in this hope, was of a higher moral
order than the ambition to overcome the natural hazards

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

to man's comfort and security. It is obviously more noble
to be concerned with the pains and sorrows which arise
from human cruelties and injustices than to seek after
physical comfort for oneself- Nevertheless it is one of the
achievements of every civilization, and the particular
achievement of modern technical civilization, that it
limits the natural handicaps to human happiness progres-
sively and gives human life as much comfort and security
as is consistent with the fact that man must die in the
end.

All the "this-worldly" emphases of modern culture,
which culminated in the American experiment, were jus-
tified protests against the kind of Christian "other-
worldliness" which the "Epistle of Clement," written in
the Second Century, expressed in the words: "This age
and the future are two enemies ... we cannot therefore
be friends of the two but must bid farewell to the one
and hold companionship with the other."

Contrary to modern secular opinion this consistent de-
preciation of man's historic existence does not express the
genius of Christianity. In contrast to Oriental faiths it
laid the foundation for the historical dynamism of the
western world precisely by its emphasis upon the good-
ness and significance of life in history. Ideally the Chris-
tian faith strives for a balance of "a sufficient other-
worldliness without fanaticism and a sufficient this-world-
liness without Philistinism."*

Whether it was this ideal balance or the defeatist dis-
tortion which was challenged in Renaissance and En-
lightenment, inevitably the decay of traditional and un-^

*Friedridi von Htigel, Eternal Life, p, 255.

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

just political institutions and the remarkable success of
the scientific conquest of nature unloosed the hope that
all impediments to human happiness would be progres-
sively removed. In the words of Priestley, "Nature, in-
cluding both its materials and its laws, will be more at
our command; men will make their situation in this
world abundantly more easy and comfortable, they will
prolong their existence in it and grow daily more happy.
. . . Thus whatever the beginning of the world the end
will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond that our imagina-
tions can now conceive."

These hopes of the past centuries have not all been
disappointed. But the irony of an age of science produc-
ing global and atomic conflicts; and an age of reason
culminating in a life-and-death struggle between two
forms of "scientific" politics must be admitted. This gen-
eral pattern of history concerns us particularly as it is
exemplified in American life and gives our American con-
temporary experience a peculiarly ironic savor.

The prosperity of America is legendary. Our standards
of living axe beyond the dreams of avarice of most of the
world. We are a kind of paradise of domestic security
and wealth. But we face the ironic situation that the
same technical efficiency which provided our comforts
has also placed us at the center of the tragic develop-
ments in world events. There are evidently limits to the
achievements of science; and there are irresolvable con-
tradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and
between happiness and the "good life" which had not
been anticipated in our philosophy. The discovery of
these contradictions threatens our culture with despair.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

We find it difficult to accept the threats to our "happi-
ness" with a serenity which transcends happiness and
sorrow. We are also offended by the contumely of allies
as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as
fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be
ths consequence of our vulgar Philistinism. We are there-
fore confronted for the first time in our life with the
questions: whether there is a simple coordination be-
tween virtue and prosperity; and whether the attainment
of happiness, either through material prosperity or social
peace is a simple possibility for man, whatever may be
his scientific and social achievements.

It is difficult to isolate and do justice to the various fac-
tors which have contributed to the remarkable prosperity
and the high standards of comfort of American civiliza-
tion. It is even more difficult to make a true estimate of
the effect of these standards upon the spiritual and cul-
tural quality of our society. Both the Puritans and the
Jeffersonians attributed the prosperity primarily to a
divine providence which, as Jefferson observed, "led our
forefathers, as Israel of old, out of their native land and
planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries
and comforts of life." Among the many analogies which
our forefathers saw between themselves and Israel was
the hope that the "Promised Land" would flow with
"milk and honey."

Despite the differences between the Calvinist and the
Jeffersonian versions of the Christian faith, they arrived

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

fc remarkably similar conclusions, upon this as upon
ther issues of life. For Jefferson the favorable economic
jcumstances of the New Continent were the explicit
urpose of the providential decree. It was from those
rcumstances that the virtues of the new community
-ere to be derived. For the early Puritans the physical
rcumstances of life were not of basic importance. Pros-
erity was not, according to the Puritan creed, a primary
roof or fruit of virtue. "When men do not see and own
k>d," declared Urian Oakes (1631), "but attribute suc-
BSS to the sufficiency of instruments it is time for God
) maintain His own right and to show that He gives
ad denies success according to His own good pleasure."
art three elements in the situation, of which two were
erived from the creed and the third from the environ-
lent gradually changed the Puritan attitude toward the
qpanding opportunities of American life.
The third was the fact that, once the first hardships had
een endured, it became obvious that the riches of the
few Continent promised remarkably high standards of
ell-being. These were accepted as "uncovenanted mer-
ies." As Thomas Shepard (1606-49) put it: "To have
iventured here upon the wildernesses, sorrows wee ex-
ected to have withall; though wee must confess that
le Lord hath sweetened it beyond our thoughts and ut-
iost expectations of prudent men." John Higginson, in a
irmon preached to the General Court of the Massachu-
stts Colony in 1663 was able to assess this "sweetening"
rocess across some successful decades. He expressed the
irly faith as follows: "When the Lord stirred up the
Dirits of so many of his people to come over into the

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

wilderness it was not for worldly wealth or better liveli-
hood for the outward man. The generality of the people
that came over, professed the contrary. Nor had they
any rational grounds to expect such things in such a
wilderness. Thou God hath blessed His poor people and
they have increased here from small beginnings to great
estates. That the Lord may call His whole generation to
witness. generation see! Look upon your towns and
fields, look upon your habitations shops and ships and
behold your numerous posterity and great increase in
blessings of land and see. Have I been a wilderness to
you? We must need answer, no Lord thou hast been a
gracious God, and exceeding good unto thy servants,
even in these earthly blessings. We live in a more com-
fortable and plentiful manner than ever we did expect."
This is a true confession of the lack of material motives
among the first Puritans and a healthy expression of
gratitude for the unexpected material favor of the new
community. From that day to this it has remained one
of the most difficult achievements for our nation to recog-
nize the fortuitous and the providential element in our
good fortune. If either moral pride or the spirit of ra-
tionalism tries to draw every element in an historic situa-
tion into rational coherence, and persuades us to establish
a direct congruity between our good fortune and our
virtue or our skill, we will inevitably claim more for our
contribution to our prosperity than the facts warrant.
This has remained a source of moral confusion in
American life. For, from the later Puritans to the
present day we have variously attributed American pros-
perity to our superior diligence, our greater skill or (more

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

recently) to our more fervent devotion to the ideals of
freedom. We thereby have complicated our spiritual prob-
lem for the days of adversity which we are bound to
experience. We have forgotten to what degree the wealth
of our natural resources and the fortuitous circumstance
that we conquered a continent just when the advance-
ment of technics made it possible to organize that con-
tinent into a single political and economic unit, lay at
the foundation of our prosperity.

If it is not possible for modern man to hold by faith
that there is a larger meaning in the intricate patterns
of history than those which his own virtues or skills sup-
ply, he would do well to emphasize fortune and caprice
in his calculations. On the other hand, a simple belief in
providence also does not rescue us from these perils of
a false estimate of our own contributions. Of this, the
course of Puritanism in our history is proof.

There were two elements in the Calvinist creed, which
transmuted it from a faith which would take prosperity
and adversity in its stride to a religion which became
preoccupied with the prosperity of the new community.
The Puritans became as enamored with it as the Jeffer-
sonians. The latter regarded "useful knowledge" as the
only valuable knowledge and defined such knowledge (to
use the words of the "American Philosophical Society
for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge," a focus of Jef-
fersonian thought) as knowledge "applied to common
purposes of life, by which trade is enlarged, agriculture
improved, the arts of living made more easy and com-
fortable and the increase and happiness of mankind pro-
moted."

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The one element was the emphasis upon special provi-
dence. The other element was the belief that godliness
is profitable to all things, including prosperity in this
life. Any grateful acceptance of God's uncovenanted mer-
cies is easily corrupted from gratitude to self -congratula-
tion if it is believed that providence represents not the
grace of a divine power, working without immediate re-
gard for the virtues or defects of its recipients (as illus-
trated by the sun shining "upon the evil and the good
and the rain descending upon the just and the unjust") ;
but rather that it represents particular divine acts di-
rectly correlated to particular human and historical situa-
tions. Inevitably this means that providence intervenes
to punish vice and to reward virtue.

Such a theory of providence means that every natural
favor or catastrophe has to be made meaningful in im-
mediate moral terms. Thus an early Puritan, Michael
Wigglesworth, saw the judgment of God upon New Eng-
land in the great drought of 1662. In his "God's Con-
troversy with New England" he warned:

This O New England has thought got by riot

By riot and excess

This hast thou brought upon thyself

By pride and wantonness

Thus must thy worldliness be whipt.

They that too much do crave

Provoke the Lord to take away

Such blessings as they have.

Naturally in a community so greatly favored as the
New Colony there were bound to be more signs of favor

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

than of judgment. The theorpthat a divine pleasure and
displeasure expressed itself in these historical vicissitudes
inevitably leads to the strong conviction that our conduct
must have been very meritorious. Thus confidence in
"special" providence supported the belief in the complete
compatibility between virtue and prosperity which char-
acterized later Calvinist thought. William Stoughton
(1631-1703) expressed it as follows in "New England's
True Interest": "If any people have been lifted up to
advantages and privileges we are the people. . . . We
have had the eye and hand of God working everywhere
for our good. Our adversaries have had their rebukes and
we have had our encouragements and a wall of fire round
about us."

In Calvinist thought prosperity as a mark of divine
favor is closely related to the idea that it must be sought
as part of a godly discipline of life. "There is no ques-
tion," declared Calvin, "that riches should be the portion
s>i the godly rather than the wicked, for godliness hath
the promise in this life as well as the life to coma" We
are long since familiar with Max Weber's thesis in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the
"intra-mundane asceticism" of Calvinism was responsible
for creating the standards of diligence, honesty and thrift
which he at the foundation of our capitalistic culture.
Actually Weber draws some of his most significant con-
clusions from American evidence. He finds it particularly
interesting that "capitalism remained far less developed
in some of the neighbouring colonies, the later Southern
States of the U. S. A., in spite of the fact that these latter
were founded by large capitalists for business motives^

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

while the New England colonies were founded by preach-
ers ... for religious reasons."*

At any rate, the descent jrom Puritjtmsm^
inlGn^ rapid one,, ,JPiopjrijy which had

been sought in the service ;'of God was now sought I
own .",paeV "''TKe^ante^ were very ap^redative
promise in Deuteronomy: "And thou shalt do that which
is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may
be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess
the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers 7 '
(Deuteronomy 6, 18). A significant religious reservation
about the relation of achievement to prosperity, which
the Book of Deuteronomy also contains, was not heeded :
"For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land,
a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths. . . .
When thou hast eaten and art full, . . . Beware that
thou forget not the Lord thy God. . . . Lest when thou
. . . hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and
when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver
and thy gold is multiplied . . . then thine heart be lifted
up ... and thou say in thine heart, My power and the
might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deu-
teronomy 8, 7-17).

Such religious awe before and gratitude for "unmerited"
mercies was dissipated fairly early in American life. It
remains the frame of our annual presidential thanksgiv-
ing proclamations, which have however contained for
many years a contradictory substance within the frame.
They have congratulated God on the virtues and ideals

*Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p.
55, Engl transl.

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

people, which have so well merited the

~ rf " u "*"' .....

In short, our American Puritanism contributed to our
prosperity by only a slightly different emphasis than Jef-
fersonianism. According to the Jeffersonians, prosperity
and well-being should be sought as the basis of virtue.
They believed that if each citizen found contentment in
a justly and richly rewarded toil he would not be dis-
posed to take advantage of his neighbor. The Puritans
regarded virtue as the basis of prosperity, rather than
prosperity as the basis of virtue. But in any case the
fusion of these two forces created a preoccupation with
the material circumstances of life which expressed a more
consistent bourgeois ethos than that of even the most ad-
vanced nations of Europe.

In 1835 De Toqueville recorded his impressions of this
American "this-worldliness" as it had developed from
the earliest Puritanism to the "American religion" of the
nineteenth century. "Not only do Americans," declared
De Toqueville, "follow religion from interest but they
place in this world the interest which makes them follow
it. In the middle ages the clergy spoke of nothing but the
future state. They hardly cared to prove that Christians
may be happy here below. But American preachers are
constantly referring to the earth. ... To touch their
congregations they always show them how favorable re-
ligious opinion is to freedom and public tranquillity; and
it is often difficult to ascertain from their discourses
whether the principal object of religion is to obtain
eternal felicity or prosperity in this world."*

*De Toqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, p. 127.

THE IRONY OF, AMERICAN HISTORY

Perhaps one of the difficulties of this problem is ex-
hibited in De Toqueville's own contrast between "eternal
felicity" and "prosperity in this world/' The real choice
does not lie between religions which promise future bliss
at the expense of indifference toward the joys and sorrows
of our present life; and those which are concerned with
material security and comfort. The real question is
whether a religion or a culture is capable of interpreting
life in a dimension sufficiently profound to understand
and anticipate the sorrows and pains which may result
from a virtuous regard for our responsibilities; and to
achieve a serenity within sorrow and pain which is some-
thing less but also something more than "happiness." Our
.difficulty as a nation is that we must now learn that pros-
perity is not simply coordinated to virtue, that virtue is
not ^rnply Coordinated to historic destiny and that hap-
piness is no simple possibility of human existence.

There is an ironic aspect in the communist indictment
of a religious culture, particularly when applied to Amer-
ica. According to communism, religion is a consolation for
weak hearts who have failed to master life's "extraneous
forces." It will vanish away when man learns not only
to "propose" but to "dispose" over "the extraneous forces
which control men's daily lives." Actually all the healthy
western nations who have managed to throw off the
poison of communism have been prompted by both re-
ligious and secular motives to conquer nature and reform
society in the interest of man's comfort and security.
They have succeeded rather better than communism in

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

bringing "abundance" to the people. They have erred not
so much in despising the comforts of this life as in promis-
ing men more comfort in life than can be fulfilled, par-
ticularly since the same technics which provide the com-
fort also create the weapons by which the enmity between
ourselves and our brothers is sharpened.

Consideration of the American cult of prosperity can-
not be dismissed without viewing one additional facet of
the phenomenon. If the alleged preoccupation of the
American people with living standards is primarily de-
rived from the breadth of opportunity on a new continent
and from Calvinist and Jeffersonian conceptions of reli-
gion and virtue, it also has other, less observed, roots. It is
Spengler's thesis that the extravert interests, related to
the scientific, technical and social problems of a civiliza-
tion, are released when the death of a culture has chilled
the intravert interests, which create philosophical, reli-
gious and aesthetic disciplines. Thus American "go-get-
ting" would be related to the flowering of Western Euro-
pean civilization as Roman bridge and road building was
related to the spring-and-summer-time of Grseco-Roman
culture. In each case it represents the winter of decay.
De Toqueville suggests a similar thesis in his observations
of American life, when he contrasts the extravert activi-
ties of our "democracy" with the purer culture of the
more traditional world. "A democratic state of society,"
he declared, "keeps the greater part of man in a constant
state of activity; and the habits of mind which are suited
for the active life are not always suited for a contempla-
tive one. . . . The greater part of men who constitute
these (the democratic) nations are extremely eager in the

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

pursuit of actual and physical gratification. As they are
always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy
and are always free to leave it, they think of nothing but
the means of changing their fortune or increasing it."*
In ascribing preoccupation with the material basis of
life to democracy De Toqueville may not do justice to
all aspects of the issue, but he does place his finger upon
an unsolved problem of our democracy. For it is certainly
the character of our particular democracy, founded on a
vast continent, expanding as a culture with its expanding
frontier and creating new frontiers of opportunity when
the old geographic frontiers were ended, that every ethical
and social problem of a just distribution of the privileges
of life is solved by so enlarging the privileges that either
an equitable distribution is made easier, or a lack of
equity is rendered less noticeable. For in this abundance
the least privileged members of the community are still
privileged, compared with less favored communities. No
democratic community has followed this technique of
social adjustment more consistently than we. No other
community had the resources to do so. It would be quite
unjust to make a purely cynical estimate of this achieve-
ment. For the achievement includes recognition by Amer-
ican capitalists (what French capitalists, for instance,
have not learned) that high wages for workers make mass
production efficiency possible. Perhaps it ought to be
added that this insight was not a purely rational achieve-
ment. It was forced upon the industrialists by the pres-
sure of organized labor; but they learned to accept the
policy of high wages as not detrimental to their own in-

*Ibid., pp. 42-45.

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

terests somewhat in the same fashion as monarchists
learned the value of constitutional monarchy, after his-
toric pressures had destroyed the institution of monarchy
in its old form.

Yet the price which American culture has paid for this
amelioration of social tensions through constantly ex-
panding production has been considerable. It has created
moral illusions about the ease with which the adjustment
of interests to interests can be made in human society.
These have imparted a quality of sentimentality to both
our religious and our secular, social and political theories.
It has also created a culture which makes "living stand-
ards" the final norm of the good life and which regards
the perfection of techniques as the guarantor of every
cultural as well as of every social-moral value.

The progress of American culture toward hegemony in
the world community as well as toward the ultimate in
standards of living has brought us everywhere to limits
where our ideals and norms are brought under ironic in-
dictment. Our confidence in the simple compatibility be-
tween prosperity and virtue is challenged particularly in
our relations with Asia; for the Asians, barely emerging
from the desperate poverty of an agrarian economy, are
inclined to regard our prosperity as evidence of our in-
justice. Our confidence in the compatibility between our
technical efficiency and our culture is challenged, particu-
larly in our relations with Europe. For the European na-
tions, Erance especially, find our culture "vulgar/' and

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

pretend to be imperiled by the inroads of an American
synthetic drink upon the popularity of their celebrated
wines. The French protest against "Cocacolonialism" ex-
presses this ironic conflict in a nutshell. Our confidence
in happiness as the end of life, and in prosperity as the
basis of happiness is challenged by every duty and sac-
rifice, every wound and anxiety which our world-wide
responsibilities bring upon us.

The cultural aversion of France toward us expresses
explicitly what most of Europe seems to feel. In its most
pessimistic moods European neutralism charges, in the
words of Le 'Monde, that we are a "technocracy" not too
sharply distinguished from the Russian attempt to bring
all of life under technical control. It is doubly ironic that
this charge should be made against us by France. Europe
accuses us of errors of which^ ^e.wholQ,_s| >ti 5QLodem bour-
g^ggig-^jp^^^g'^guJJ^y anc j which we i^rely^developed
more consistently than European nations; for the cult of
technical efficiency was elaborated/^ong^us
checks which the ethos of a traditional
ture provided in Europe. On the other hand, there is a
measure of truth in the charge of similarity between our
culture and that of the pure Marxists because both are
offshoots of the ethos which had its rise, significantly, in
the same France which is now our principal critic in Eu-
rope. Marxism transmutes every illusion of a technical
society into an obvious corruption by giving a monopoly
of power to an elite, who desires to remold life within
terms of the simple limits which it has set for life's mean-
ing. Against such corruptions our democratic society of-
fers guarantees, and prevents the consistent application

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

of standards of technical efficiency to all the ends and
purposes of life.

But it cannot be denied that a bourgeois society is in
the process of experiencing the law of diminishing returns
in the relation of technics and efficiency to the cultural
life. The pursuit of culture requires certain margins of
physical security and comfort; but the extension of the
margins does not guarantee the further development of
cultural values. It may lead to a preoccupation with the
margins and obsession with the creature comforts. The
elaboration of technics is basic to the advancement of
culture. The inventions of writing and printing represent
two of the most important chapters in the history of cul-
ture. But the further elaboration of communications in
the arts of mass communication have led to the vulgariza-
tion of culture as well as to the dissemination of its richest
prizes among the general public. Television may represent
a threat to our culture analogous to the threat of atomic
weapons to our civilization. America is the home of Holly-
wood in the imagination of Europe; though Europe
hardly makes a fair appraisal of the relative involvement
of producer and consumer in the purveyance of vulgar or
sentimental art, holding us responsible for the production
of what its millions avidly consume. In this, as in other
respects, we must discount some of the European criti-
cisms. Europe's belief that a nation as fortunate as our
own could not possibly also possess and appreciate the
nobler values of life may sometimes hide frustrated
desire.

Yet we cannot deny the indictment that we seek a
solution for practically every problem of life in quantita-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

tive terms; and are not fully aware of the limits of this
approach. The constant multiplication of our high school
and college enrollments has not had the effect of making
us the most "intelligent" nation, whether we measure in-
telligence in terms of social wisdom, aesthetic discrimina-
tion, spiritual serenity or any other basic human achieve-
ment. It may have made us technically the most proficient
nation, thereby proving that technical efficiency is more
easily achieved in purely quantitative terms than any
other value of culture.

Our preoccupation with technics has had an obviously
deleterious effect upon at least one specific sector of our
classical cultural inheritance. No national culture has
been as assiduous as our own in trying to press the wis-
dom of the social and political sciences, indeed of all the
humanities, into the limits of the natural sciences. The
consequence of this effort must be analyzed more care-
fully in another context. It is worth noting here that,
when political science is severed from its ancient rootage
in the humanities and "enriched" by the wisdom of sociol-
ogists, psychologists and anthropologists, the result is fre-
quently a preoccupation with minutiae which obscures
the grand and tragic outlines of contemporary history,
and offers vapid solutions for profound problems. Who
can deny the irony of the contrast between the careful
study of human "aggressiveness" in our socio-psycho-
logical sciences, and our encounter with a form of aggres-
siveness in actual life which is informed by such manias,
illusions, historic aberrations and confusions, as could not
possibly come under the microscope of the scientific pro-
cedures used in some of these studies?

PEOSPEBITY AND VIRTUE

Happiness is desired by all men; and moments of it are
probably attained by most men. Only moments of it can
be attained because happiness is the inner cortcomitant
of neat harmonies of body, spirit and society; and these
neat harmonies are bound to be infrequent. There is no
simple harmony between our ambitions and achievements
because all ambitions tend to outrun achievements. There
is no neat harmony between the conscious ends of life
and the physical instruments for its attainment; for the
health of the body is frail and uncertain. "Brother Ass"
always fails us at some time; and, in any event, he finally
perishes. There is no neat harmony between personal de-
sires and ambitions and the ends of human societies no
matter how frantically we insist with the eighteenth cen-
tury that communities are created only for the individual.
Communities, cultures and civilizations are subject to
perils which must be warded off by individuals who may
lose their life in the process. There are many young Amer-
ican men in Korea today who Save beerTpromisedn3ie
"pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right. But the
possession of the right brings them no simple happiness,
Such happiness as they achieve is curiously mixed with
pain, anxiety and sorrow. It is in fact not happiness at
all. If it is anything, it may be what Lincoln called "the
solemn joy that must be yours to have laid so costly a
sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

There is no simple congruity between the ideals of sen-
sitive individuals and the moral mediocrity of even the
best society. The liberal hope of a harmonious "adjust-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ment" between the individual and the community is a
more vapid and less dangerous hope that the communist
confidence in a Motionless society in which aU individual
hopes and ideals are perfectly fulfilled. The simple fact
is that an individual rises indeterminately above every
community of which he is a part. The concept of "the
value and dignity of the individual" of which our modern
culture has made so much is finally meaningful only in
a religious dimension. It is constantly threatened by the
same culture which wants to guarantee it. It is threatened
whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and
ideals can be fitted with frictionless harmony into the
collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete.
He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community;
but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within so-
ciety. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he
must abate his individual ambitions. He must "die to
self" if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment
beyond every historic community he lives his life in pain-
ful tension with even the best community, sometimes
achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards
of the community with a resolute "we must obey God
rather than man." Sometimes he is involved vicariously in
the guilt of the community when he would fain live a
life of innocency. He will possibly man a bombing plane
and suffer the conscience pricks of the damned that the
community might survive.

There are no simple congraities in life or history. The
cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible
to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scien-
tific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and po-

PROSPERITY AND VIRTUE

litical triumph over historic injustice. But all such strate-
gies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character
of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not
the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of
serenity within and above it.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our
lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing
which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history; therefore we must
be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can
be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint
of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. There-
fore we must be saved by the final form, of love which
is forgiveness.

The irony of America's quest for happiness lies in the
fact that she succeeded more obviously than any other
nation in making life "comfortable/' only finally to run
into larger incongruities of human destiny by the same
achievements by which it escaped the smaller ones. Thus
we tried too simply to make sense out of life, striving for
harmonies between man and nature and man and society
and man and his ultimate destiny, which have provi-
sional but no ultimate validity. Our very success in this
enterprise has hastened the exposure of its final limits.
Over these exertions we discern by faith the ironical
laughter of the divine source and end of all things. "He
that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh" (Psalm 2, 4). He
laughs because "the people imagine a vain thing." The
scripture assures us that God's laughter is derisive, having
the sting of judgment upon our vanities in it. But if the

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

laughter is truly ironic it must symbolize mercy as well
as judgment. For whenever judgment defines the limits
of human striving it creates the possibility of an humble
acceptance of those limits. Within that humility mercy
and peace find a lodging place.

CHAPTER IV
The Master of Destiny

THE communist movement against which the whole
world must now stand on guard was intended as a
scheme for giving man complete control of his own
destiny. The supposed evils of its "materialism" and its
"atheism" are insignificant compared with the cruelties
which follow inevitably from the communist pretension
that its elite has taken "the leap from the realm of neces-
sity to the realm of freedom," and is therefore no longer
subject to the limitations of nature and history which
have hitherto bound the actions of men. It imagines itself
the master of historical destiny. Some of the cruelty of
the communist elite arises inevitably from the delusions
of grandeur in such a conception. Some is the consequence
of the fury of frustration when the supposed masters of
history are confronted and opposed by recalcitrant forces
in history. These have not conformed to the communist
logic; their strength has not been sapped by their "inner
contradictions" and they have not been forced to capitu-
late to communist power.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The "realm of freedom/' which according to communist
thought is achieved when the proletariat acts under the
guidance of the party to overturn the old order, is not the
freedom of the individual in society. It is the freedom of
man per se. Of course, man per se does not easily act with
a single mind or will. But the logic of history has given
the "working class" a very special position in the his-
torical process, because "they cannot become masters of
the productive forces of society except by abolishing their
own previous mode of appropriation. . . . All previous
movements were movements of minorities. The prole-
tarian movement is the self-conscious movement of the
immense majority" which cannot act without acting for
the whole of mankind, which "cannot stir, cannot raise
itself without the whole superincumbent strata of society
being sprung into the air" (Communist Manifesto). This
class, which is potentially mankind itself, does, however,
require tutelage. Without the aid of its "vanguard," the
party, it would not, according to Lenin, rise above "trade
union psychology." That is to say, it would be content to
pursue moderate and proximate goals in history. It re-
quires the wisdom of the party, repository of the oracles
of God (in this case the wisdom of "Marast-Leninist
science") to understand the grand strategy of a secu-
larized providence which has marked it out for so mo-
mentous a task and for so remarkable a triumph.

This whole conception has, as many observers have re-
marked, the character of religious apocalypse. But it is a
very modern kind of religious apocalypse; for it contains
the dearest hope of all typical moderns, Marxist or non-
Marxist. That hope is that man may be deEvered from

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

his ambiguous position of being both creature and creator
of the historical process and become unequivocally the
master of his own destiny. The Marxist dream is dis-
tmguidied from the_ liberal dreaSHo^^
precise definition of the elite which is^ix^actas"sun r ogate
for manlond; by more specific schemes for endowing this^
eHteTwith actual political power; by its fanatic certainty
TEaVit knows the end toward which history must move;
and by its consequent readiness to sacrifice every value
of life for the achievement of this end. The liberal culture
has been informed by similar hopes since the eighteenth
century. It has been as impatient as Marxism with the
seeming limitations of human wisdom in discerning the
total pattern of destiny in which human actions take
place, and the failure of human power to bring the total
pattern under the dominion of the human will. "If man
can predict with almost complete certainty/ 3 asked Con-
dorcet, "the phenomena of which he knows the laws, if
. . . from the experience of the past he can forecast with
much probability the events of the future, why should
one regard it as a chimerical undertaking to trace with
some likeness the future destiny of the human species in
accordance with the facts of history?" Condorcet was not
only certain that the future could be known but that he
knew it. "Our hopes for the future state of the human
species/' he continued, "may be reduced to three im-
portant points: the destruction of inequality between
nations, the progress of equality among the common peo-
ple, and the growth of man toward perfection' 1 required
no more than that "the vast distance which divides the
most enlightened people . . . such as the French and

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Anglo-Americans" from those people who are "in servi-
tude to kings" should "gradually disappear."*

Obviously the idea of the abolition of the institution
of monarchy as the most important strategy for the re-
demption of mankind was as characteristic of the peculiar
prejudices of middle-class life as the idea of the abolition
of the institution of property was of the unique view-
point of propertyless proletarians. In each case they iden-
tified all evil with the type of power from which they
suffered and which they did not control; and they re-
garded particular sources of particular social evils as the
final source of all evil in history. Neither Condorcet, nor
Comte in his subsequent elaborations of similar hopes,
placed all their trust in this single strategy. The liberal
world has always oscillated between the hope of creating
perfect men by eliminating the social sources of evil and
the hope of so purifying human "reason" by educational
techniques that all social institutions would gradually be-
come the bearers of a universal human will, informed by
a universal human mind. These ambiguities, which have
saved the Messianic dreams of the liberal culture from
breeding the cruelties of communism, must be considered
more fully presently. At the moment it is worth record-
ing that the Frenchman, Condorcet, envisaged the French
and the "Anglo-Americans" as the Messianic nations.
Here we have in embryo what has become the ironic
situation of our own day. The French Enlightenment con-
sistently saw the American Revolution and the founding
of the new American nation as a harbinger of the perfect
world which was in the making. Though Comte, almost

^Condorcet, Dixieme $poqne, p. 236.

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

a century later, rigorously clung to the idea of French
hegemony in the coming Utopia and fondly hoped that
French would be its universal language, France has fallen
by the wayside as a nation with a Messianic conscious-
ness, its present mood being characterized by extreme
skepticism rather than apocalyptic hopes.

This leaves America as the prime bearer of this hope
and dream. JVc^,.tlie..^

present moment, there iaja. deep layer of Messiaaie $on-

We nevei\ dreamed

that we would jiaye as much political power as we,pos^ess
joda^l nor for that matter .cjid .w&.floiiapate^
most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an jronic
refutation of its dreams of mastering history /Ibr our in-
"cf eased power related our will and purpose to a vaster
and vaster entanglement with other wills and purposes,
which made it impossible for any single will to prevail or
any specific human goal of history easily to become the
goal of all mankind.

We were, as a matter of fact, always vague, as the
whole liberal culture is fortunately vague, about how
power is to be related to the allegedly universal values
which we hold in trust for mankind. We were, of course,
not immune to the temptation of believing that the uni-
versal validity of what we held in trust justified our use
of power to establish it. Thus in the debate on the an-
nexation of Oregon, in which the imperial impulse of a
youthful nation expressed itself, a Congressman could
thunder: "If ours is to be the home of the oppressed, we
must extend our territory in latitude and longitude to
the demand of the millions which are to follow us; as

TEE MASTER OF DESTINY

well for our own posterity as for those who are invited to
our peaceful shores to partake in our republican insti-
tutions."

Generally, however, the legitimization of power was
not the purpose of our Messianic consciousness. We felt
that by example and by unexplained forces in history our
dream would become the regnant reality of history.

We have noted in anQi^r^connection that in both the
. Jeffersorrian .concept _cJ, our national
ay".at the- beginning upon provi-
had proposed

for the seal of the United States a picture of "the chil-
dren of Israel, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire
by night/' Washington declared in his first inaugural that
""the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the
destiny of the republican model of government are justly
considered, perhaps as deeply, as finally staked on the
experiment intrusted to the hands of the American peo-
ple." Most significant was the assurance that we were
acting as surrogates, as trustees for mankind. As Dr. Priest-
ley put it in 1802: "It is impossible not to be sensible
that we are acting for all mankind."

This concept of America as the darling of divine provi-
dence did not of course exclude the idea of fulfilling its
destiny by actions which would help in the universal
Realization of the democratic ideal of society. The Puri-
tans, as we have seen, gradually shifted from their em-
phasis upon a divine favor to the nation, to an emphasis
upon the virtue which the nation had acquired by divine
favor. Even a very early Puritan was certain that "God
had sifted a whole nation that he might send choice

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

grain into the wilderness" (William Stoughton, 1668).

President Johnson in his message to Congress in 1868
expressed the most popular form of our Messianic dream.
"The conviction is rapidly gaining ground in the Ameri-
can mind," he declared, "that with increased facilities for
inter-communication between all portions of the earth the
principles of free government as embraced in our con-
stitution . . . would prove sufficient strength and breadth
to comprehend within their sphere and influence the
civilized nations of the world." Except in moments of
aberration we do not think of ourselves as the potential
masters, but as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to
perfection.

Such Messianic dreams, though fortunately not cor-
rupted by the lust of power, are of course not free of the
moral pride which creates a hazard to their realization.
"God has not been preparing the English-speaking and
Teutonic peoples," declared Senator Beveridge of In-
diana, "for a thousand years for nothing but vain and
idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. He has made
us the master organizers of the world to establish system
where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adept in gov-
ernment that we may administer government among sav-
age and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force this
world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all
our race he has marked the American people as his chosen
nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world."
The concept of administering "government among savage
and senile peoples" does of course have power implica-
tions. But the legitimization of power is generally sub-
ordinate in the American dream to the fact that the con-

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

cept that a divine favor upon the nation implies a com-
mitment "to lead in the regeneration of mankind."
Among us, as well as among communists, an excessive
voluntarism which finally brings human history under the
control of the human will is in tentative, but not in final,
contradiction to a determinism which finds historical
destiny favorable at some particular point to man's as-
sumption of mastery over that destiny. The American
dream is not particulari^unique.
TiairEa3~a version^f jtjL*

But the American experience represents a particularly
unique and ironic refutation of the illusion in all such
dreams. * he illusions about the possibility of managing
historical destiny faomjx^ ji^^cuiar standpoint in his-
to^^Iwa^Tayplve, as already noted, '^scalculatlQii^
about both the power and the wisdom of the managers

.' .*-*, ^j,, , ,,,-. , Ai . .-*. , \ fi: ^ , K ,,,,, , ,,, rcfcM ,, iyrT , s ^, 1J/f t^ *.,'* -.-p^.;' " -* i.'.W'iW*'*"'" '**<'-""'

and of the weato'e^"'attdlma^
torical a stuff 3 ^ which is to be managed.

Consistent with the general liberal hope of redeeming
history, the American Messianic dream is vague about
the political or other power which would be required to
subject all recalcitrant wills to the one will which is in-
formed by the true vision. We have noted that much of

*See Lionel Curtis' Civitas Dei for the British version. Fichte had a
vision of the German nation becoming a Menschkeitsnation. Mazzini
artfully combined national pride with the hope of Italy's peculiar con-
tribution to the development of mankind. Russia has always been filled
with Messianic illusions. In Nicholas Berdyaev's posthumously pub-
lished The Russian Idea, he analyzes these Messianic illusions humor-
ously and comes to the conclusion that the Soviet Messianism is not an
ideal but yet a tolerable culmination of all these Messianic dreams.

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

the virulence of communism arises from the fact that its
program provides for the investment of a class and a
party with a monopoly of power. According to the com-
munist creed this monopoly is achieved by a remarkable
concurrence between providence and the resolute will of
the proletariat. Providence (i.e., the historical dialectic)
insures the progressive weakening of the "expropriators"
and the strengthening of the "expropriated"; but, at a
final climax of history, human action must support and
affirm the historical logic. The proletariat must seize all
political power and deny it to all of its enemies. This
monopoly of power, which is to insure the victory of jus-
tice, actually becomes the root of the cruelty and injus-
tice of communism.

In the liberal versions of the dream of managing his-
tory, the problem of power is never fully elaborated. Be-
ginning with the physiocrats one version of the dream
assumes that history would flow inevitably to the goal
of an ideal humanity, if only the irrelevancies of political
power were removed. But another version of the dream
assumes some kind of elite. Beginning with Comte modern
social scientists and geneticists frequently hint vaguely
at the necessity of Platonic philosopher-kings, trans-
muted, of course, into scientist-kings. The least that
seems required is that the men of power should have
social and psychological scientists at their elbows to pre-
vent "irrational prejudices" from entering into their cal-
culations and to persuade them not "to have their ears
to the ground." But there is, of course, no political pro-
gram for investing an elite with power.

The American national version of the dream had this

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

same fortunate vagueness. American government is re-
garded as the final and universally valid form of political
organization. But, on the whole, it is expected to gain
its ends by moral attraction and imitation. Only occa-
sionally does an hysterical Vt'^tesman 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.

The first element of irony lies in the fact that our
nation has, without particularly seeking it, acquired a
greater degree of power than any other nation of history.
The same technics, proficiency in the use of which lies at
the foundation of American power, have created a "global"
political situation in which the responsible use of this
power has become a condition of survival of the free
world. It is not surprising that the communist elite should
be filled with fury when they behold the unfolding of
this power, marked by their "logic" for self-destruction
through its "inner contradictions."

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 ex-
tended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven
our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought
us into a vast webb of history in which other wills, run-
ning in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, in-
evitably 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. Even in the greatness of our power we

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

are thwarted by a ruthless foe, who is ironically the more
recalcitrant and ruthless because his will is informed by
an impossible dream of bringing happiness to all men if
only he can eliminate our recalcitrance.

But we are thwarted by friends and allies as well as
by foes. IQur dream of the umversal good is sufficiently
valid to bring us in voluntary alliance with many peoples,
who have similar conceptions of the good life* But neither
their conceptions of the good, nor their interests, which
are always compounded with ideals, are identical with
our own. In this situation it is natural that many of our
people should fail to perceive that historical destiny may
P^^g-,^^ transfiguredTby" human policy^

but that it cannot be coerced. They become impatient and
want to use the atomic bomb (symbol of the technical
efficiency upon which our world authority rests) not only
to put an end to the recalcitrance of our foes but to elimi-
nate the equivocal attitudes of the Asian and other-peo-
ples, who are not as clearly our allies as we should Jike
them to be. Yet on the whole, we have as a nation learned
the lesson of history tolerably well. We have heeded the
warning "let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let
not the mighty man glory in his strength." Though we
are not without vainglorious delusions in regard to our
power, we are saved by a certain grace inherent in com-
mon sense rather than in abstract theories from attempt-
ing to cut through the vast ambiguities of our historic
situation and thereby bringing our destiny to a tragic con-
clusion by seeking to bring it to a neat and logical one.

Significantly the elements in our population which are
most prone to defy the limits of power, possessed by any

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

particular agent in history, and to seek a resolution of
our difficulties by a sheer display of military power, are
frequently drawn from a bourgeois-liberal tradition which
was, until recently, unconscious of the factor of power in
political life. It is the nature of a business community that
it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life
and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity
of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to
the motive of the lust for power as an element in human
nature. It is quite conscious of the force of self-interest
in life; but it imagines that this force is nicely checked
and contained by prudence on the one hand and by the
balance of competing interests on the other. The realm
of the political with its vast imponderables of power is a
terra incognita to it. When experience suddenly thrusts
the facts and perils of this world upon it, it is inclined
to exchange the sentimentalities and pretensions of
yesterday, which obscured the power element in life, for
the cynicism of today. This is the greater temptation for
elements in the American business community because
American world authority rests so directly upon our mili-
tary power; and this in turn is drawn so immediately
from our economic strength. We have had so little ex-
perience in managing or participating in the conscious
and quasi-conscious power struggles of life and in fathom-
ing the endlessly complex compounds of ethnic loyalties,
historic traditions, military strength and ideological hopes
which constitute historic forms of power, that we would
fain move with one direct leap from the use of economic
to the use of military power. These are the political and
moral hazards of a great commercial nation, moving di-

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

rectly and precipitately into the baffling currents of world
politics. Despite the hazards, we have managed to achieve
some patience and shrewdness and have avoided the ul-
timate error of trying to bring the historic process to what
would seem to us to be its ultimate conclusion*

If the democratic world has refused, with an unconscious
or inherited wisdom, to invest its supposed elite with a
monopoly of power it has not been equally wise in under-
standing the limits of wisdom among any supposed bear-
ers of the Messianic vision, or in anticipating the illogical
and unpredictable emergence of wisdom and virtue among
those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries, rather
than the benefactors, of the management of historical
destiny. In this lesson the course of American history is
a neat and ironic parable for the whole meaning of the
liberal dream. How pure our democratic virtue seemed
in the eighteenth century, compared with that of the be-
nighted devotees and victims of "monarchy." That is why
our American experiment seemed to be the "last best
hope of mankind." That is why our founding fathers
regarded our constitution as a veritable axk of the cove-
nant of democracy.

But meanwhile there were many more thousands in
Europe who had not "bowed their knees to Baal" than
our American Elijah imagined. The hated institution of
monarchy was gradually brought under parliamentary
control by the rising power of democracy in Europe. Xfeg
combination of constitutional ^monarchy and parliamen-
tary government lias proved to poss^Tiatne

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

virtues wM^jthe^ystem of checks and balances in our
reji^li^^ The institution of mon-

archj^shorn^of Jts absolute power, was founcTto possess
virtues which neitheF tKe" ^proponents nor the opponents
of its original form anticipated. It became the symbol
of the continuing will and unity of a nation as dis-
tinguished from the momentary will, embodied in specific
governments. The power of pariiament on the^ other hand
became a more flexible exprgssioij ,qf the national will
than our more unwieldy system. , In some European na-
tions this flexibility is not matched by steadiness. But
in the smaller north and west European nations, as well
as in Britain, instruments of democratic society, devel-
oped out of the older feudal forms, lack no virtue pos-
sessed by the American system; and they exhibit some
of the wisdom inherent in the more organic forms of
society, which the more rationalistic conceptions of a
purely bourgeois order lack.

In whatever way we estimate the relative merits and
virtues of the European form of democracy in compari-
son with our own, it is evident that the original concep-
tion of a sharp distinction between a virtuous new demo-
cratic world and a vicious tyrannical older world was
erroneous. The paths of progress in history have in this,
as in many other instances, proved to be more devious
and unpredictable than the putative managers of history
could understand. The course of history refused to con-
form to the logic prescribed for it. The democratic dream-
ers were almost as wrong as the communist planners.
They were right in so far as there was implicit in the demo-
cratic conception (though not always fully understood)

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

some modest awareness of the many sources of virtue,
wisdom, and power in history and of the necessity to come
to terms with them. The course of history cannot be
coerced from a particular point in history and in accord-
ance with a particular conception of its end.

Today the success of America in world politics depends
upon its ability to establish community with many na-
tions, despite the hazards created by pride of power on
the one hand and the envy of the weak on the other. This
success requires a modest awareness of the contingent
elements in the values and ideals of our devotion, even
when they appear to us to be universally valid; and a
generous appreciation of the valid elements in the prac-
tices and institutions of other nations though they deviate
from our own. In other words, our success in world politics
necessitates a disavowal of the pretentious elements in
our original dream, and a recognition of the values and
virtues which enter into history in unpredictable ways
and which defy the logic which either liberal or Marxist
planners had conceived for it.

This American experience is a refutation in parable
of the whole effort to bring the vast forces of history under
the control of any particular will, informed by a par-
ticular ideal. All such efforts are rooted in what seems
at first glance to be a contradictory combination of volun-
tarism and determinism. These efforts are on the one
hand excessively voluntaristic, assigning a power to the
human will and a purity to the mind of some men which
no mortal or group of mortals possesses. On the other hand
they are excessively deterministic since they regard most
men as merely the creatures of an historical process.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Sometimes the historical process is conceived as a purely
natural one, in which case all men are regarded as merely
the instruments and fruits of the process. But generally
it is assumed that some group of men has the intelligence
to manipulate and manage the process. The excessive
voluntarism which underlies this theory of an elite, ex-
plicit in communism and implicit in some democratic
theory, is encouraged by the excessive determinism, which
assumes that most men are creatures with simple de-
terminate ends of life, and that their "anti-social 7 ' tend-
encies are quasi-biological impulses and inheritances
which an astute social and psychological science can over-
come or "redirect" to what are known as "socially ap-
proved" goals.

In a letter to the journal Science this naive belief,
widely held particularly in America, is succinctly ex-
pressed: "For.ii by. empbying the inethod&^af.scieixo^^
menjsaa 0me40 uiMlemfcandaaad coatrol the jttow, there
is reasonable likelihood that Jhe^
learn and control ta is

quite within reasonable probability that social science
can provide the tecffiics (for keeping the pe^ej if Itis
given'"aTIEe" to the physical

sciences in deve^opon^

This belief which has found classic expression in the
philosophy of John Dewey, pervades the academic dis-
ciplines of sociology and psychology.** Underlying this

*Quoted by Leslie A. White in The Science of Culture, p. 342.

**It would be absurd to claim any degree of unanimity in these dis-
ciplines, for frequently a debate rages between excessive determinists
and excessive voluntarists. In the field of anthropology which has lately

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

whole view of history is the assumption that the realm
of history is only slightly distinguished from the realm
of nature. All the complexities arising in human history
from the fact that human agents, who are a part of the
process of history, are also its creators, are obscured. The
historical character of man as both agent in, and creaJSre
of, history is - T ^^^~~ OT ^

entered the lists in the study and direction of contemporaiy culture, a
strong school of cultural determinists challenges the voluntarists. The
determinists rightly recognize that man is the creature of his culture
and fail to see that he is also the creator of it. Thus a cultural de-
tenni'nist may rather amusingly challenge the excessive voluntarism of
a psychologist. Leslie White in The Science of Culture quotes Professor
Gordon Allport as observing : "The United States spent two billion dol-
lars in the invention of the atomic bomb, and asks 'What is there absurd
in spending an equivalent sum if necessary on the discovery of the
means of control?' " Obviously such reasoning assumes that the vast
and complex processes of action and interaction between human wills
and desires can be brought "under control" if only sufficient money is
spent on the enterprise.

Mr. White, who regards this view as "unsound," proceeds to challenge
it with an equally unsound view: "Wars are struggles between social
organisms, called nations," he declares, "for survival, struggles for the
possession and use of the resources of the earth, for fertile fields, coal,
oil, and iron deposits. ... No amount of understanding will alter or
remove the basis of this struggle any more than an understanding of
the ocean's tides will diminish or terminate the flow" (Leslie A. White in
The Science of Culture, p. 343).

There is an absolute contradiction between these two theories in so
far as one assumes and the other denies that there can be an elite group
with minds pure enough to transcend the "struggle between social or-
ganisms" and powerful enough to compose the struggle.

But the theories have much in common, in each case the historical
process is regarded as similar in kind with the natural process. The
wars of history are regarded as perfectly analogous to "the ocean's
tides." What men think about the peril of an atomic bomb is regarded
as equally manageable with the physical forces which produce the bomb.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Man as an historical creature never has as pure and
disinterested a mind and his "values" and "socially ap-
proved goals" are never as universally valid as the pro-
spective managers and manipulators of historical destiny
assume theirs to be. This is true of the communist oli-
garchs as tutors of a disinterested proletariat. They are
blind not only to their own lust of power, but also to the
partial and particular viewpoint of the disinherited, and
the special interests of a Russian nation as well as to
every other historical contingency which taints the purity
of their position. But it is also true of an American na-
tion, or any other nation with Messianic illusions. It is
particularly true of the host of modern social, psycho-
logical or anthropological scientists, who think it an easy
matter to match the disinterestedness of the natural
scientist in the field of historical values. They all forget
that, though man has a limited freedom over the his-
torical process, he remains immersed in it. None of them
deal profoundly with the complex "self" whether in its
individual or in its collective form. This self has a reason ;
but its reason is more intimately related to the anxieties
and fears, the hopes and ambitions of the self as spirit
and to the immediate necessities of the self as natural
organism than the "pure" reason of the natural scientist;
for he observes forces of nature which do not essentially
challenge the hopes and fears of the self.*

If one speaks of a "collective form" of selfhood, one

*In Ms address at the Convocation of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, March 30, 1949, Mr. Winston Churchill declared: "The
Dean of the humanities spoke with awe f of an approaching scientific
ability to control men's thoughts with precision/ I shall be very con-
tent to be dead before that happens."

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

need not enter into the inconclusive debate whether hu-
man communities can be said to possess "personality."
They obviously do not have a single organ of self-tran-
scendence, though a political community has an inchoate
organ of will in its government. Yet they do have the
capacity to stand beyond themselves, observe and es-
timate their behavior, and trace the course of their his-
tory in terms of some framework of meaning which gives
them a sense of continuing identity amidst the flux of
time. These estimates are made not by a single mind but
by competing "minds" and "schools" of thought, so that
every nation or other community is involved in a con-
tinuous debate about what it is or ought to be. But even
this debate, which sharply distinguishes the collective
self from the more integral individual self, has analogies
in individual life. For the individual is also involved in
a perpetual internal dialogue about the legitimacy of his
hopes and purposes, and the virtue or vice of his previous
acts. In this dialogue contrition and complacency, pride
of accomplishment and a sense of inadequacy, alternate
in ways not too different from the alternation of moods
in a community.

In any event, the significant unit of thought and ac-
tion in the realm of historical encounter is not a mind
but a self. This unit has an organic unity of rational,
emotional and volitional elements which make all its ac-
tions and attitudes historically more relative than is
realized in any moment of thought and action. The in-
evitability of this confusion between the relative and the
universal is exactly what is meant by original sin. It is
the rejection of the reality of original sin in the mind

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

of the controllers of social process which has bred either
cruelty or confusion. It has bred cruelty if the elite man-
aged to achieve power proportioned to their pretensions
and confusion if they only wistfully longed for it.

But if the mind or the will which pretends to control
historical destiny is more "historical" than is realized in
one sense of the word, the lives and persons, the forces
and emotions, the hopes and fears which are to be man-
aged and controlled are more "historical" in another sense
of the word. For man as an historical creature has desires
of indeterminate dimensions. Unique human freedom, in
even the simplest peasant, transfigures nature's imme-
diate necessities. This freedom imparts a stubborn recal-
citrance to his actions which make him finally "unman-
ageable/' It transmutes all of nature's necessities into
indeterminate ambitions which traditional societies have
actually held within bounds more successfully than mod-
ern societies. But they will always prevent that simple
social harmony which is the Utopia of both democratic
and communist idealists. This unique freedom is the
generator of both the destructiveness and the creativity
of man. Most^of the efforts to manage t the ^historical proc-
ess would actu2^^^troy r tlje, qreativitj with the "3e-
gtractiveness.* ""

Thereare strong ironic aspects in the tremendous labors

*In a naive psychologist's view of Utopia, B. F. Skinner's Walden II,
we are presented with the vision of an ideal community of six hundred
souls who have been conditioned to a life of perfect harmony, free of
all excessive ambition or jealousy. The psychologist who has created
this community admits that he has "managed" the development of the
individual components of the harmonious community and that there
are, therefore, similarities between him and the notorious dictators of

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

of our contemporary wise men to isolate the roots of
human aggressiveness, to determine how frustration may
be related to racial prejudice and to study the cause of
"social tensions" everywhere. For all their labors axe
based upon the assumption that they are dealing pri-
marily with measurable forms of insecurity or "anti-
social" tendencies or "irrational" behavior which will
yield to some special technique. Meanwhile the world is
confronted by a mania which represents the corruption
of a characteristically historic tendency in "man. Com-
munism is compounded of Messianism and a lust for
power. The Messianism is a corrupt expression of man's
search for the ultimate within the vicissitudes and hazards
of time. The lust for power contains spiritual elements
mixed with the natural survival impulse of the world of
nature. Neither element in the compound can be meas-
ured either in the communist theories of human nature
or in those of most "liberals" who are trying to save us
from communism.

Elaborate theories are also evolved about the roots of
human aggressiveness. The anthropologists have a par-
ticular penchant for discovering those roots in the early
toilet training or in the methods of mothers for swaddling
children.* The Germans, the Japanese and the Russians
have all been analyzed in the hope of discovering the

^Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, The People of Great Russia, and
an article by Ruth Benedict, "Child Rearing in Certain European Coun-
tries," in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1949.

our day. But he feels that there is a great distinction between Mm and
them- because he has done what he has done for the good of the com-
munity. The community meanwhile lacks the heroic and noble ele-
ments in human nature as completely as destructive animosities.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

secret of their aggressive behavior in their traditions of
child training. Significantly it has not been determined
whether collective aggressiveness is merely the cumula-
tion of individual forms of aggressiveness or whether it
is the fruit of an undue docility among the individuals
of a nation which provides fodder for the aggressiveness
of its leaders.

A very noted psychiatrist, head of the World Health
Organization, thinks_^at^ human aggressiveness is de-
rived from the "Set that "we are "civilized too early" wEich
is to say that we" are prompted to regard our "natural
human urges as bad." Thus we ^'distrust 'and hate bur-
selves" and from this self -hatred arises "aggressive feel-
ings against others/' This aggressiveness could be cured
very easily if mothers' clinics were established which
would teach mothers that "babies need, not just want
but need, uncritical love, love whose manifestations are
quite independent of the babies' behaviour." Such love
will create the feeling of "belonging" which in a "suc-
cessful development process should spread gradually to
include family, friends and fellow citizens and in the
little world this has become it can no longer safely stop
at national boundaries." We must now have "large num-
bers of people who have grown emotionally beyond na-
tional boundaries" and we, therefore, need a greater
emphasis on "uncritical love" and "freedom from the
'conviction of sin/ "*

It is not explained how both liberal and Marxist
civilizations which have long since disavowed doctrines

*Brock Chialholm in an article, "Social Responsibility," in Science, Jan.
14, 1949.

THE MASTER OF DESTINY

which Dr. CMsholm abhors should have generated so
much "aggresiveness".

A survey of much of the current literature of our
modern wise men must impress the reader with the ironic
deterioration of wisdom, consequent upon this pretension
of wisdom. Everything that is really historical in both
the true aspirations and the monstrous ambitions of men
is obscured And these animadversions are carried on
while we face a threat arising from depths in the human
soul which are not subject to these measurements, and
from aberrations which are strikingly similar to those of
our deliverers.

Sometimes our modern wise men move illogically from
the real world of history to the dream world of "natural
instincts." Thus Bertrand Russell, who has disavowed his
earlier pacifism and has recently counseled America not
to be too squeamish in using our atomic weapons against
the Russians, sometimes thinks in another frame of mean-
ing in which all our military expenditures are seen as
"due to impulses incorporated into human nature by long
ages of training and natural selection/'*

*Bertrand Russell in an article, "The Modern Mastery of Nature/ 1
Listener (London), May, 1951. "What a nation can spare from increas-
ing its own numbers," declares Mr. Russell, "it devotes only in part
to its own welfare. To a very great extent it devotes its energies to
killing other people. . . . The United States government has announced
that in the coming year 20% of its total production is to be spent on
armaments." Mr. Russell's facts are indisputable. But the idea that the
American people bear this tremendous burden because they are blinded
by "impulses incorporated into human nature by long ages of training
and natural selection" is rather naive, particularly in the light of Mr,
Russell's belief that we must be armed against communism and must
not even, be too squeamish about the bomb.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY
Perhaps the real difficulty in both the communist and

a 'Nationally or3"OT^hjstoiic proc-
ess is that the^ modern man lacks the humility to accept
the fact th^tth^ whole drama of Eistory is enacted in a
frame of meaning too large for human comprehension
or management It is a drama in ^i^ w yf^ments^y
meanings can Be discerned within a penumbra of mys-
tery; and in which specific duties and responsibilities can
be undertaken within a vast web of relations which are
beyond our powers.

A sane life requires that we have some clues to the
mystery so that the realm of meaning is not simply re-
duced to the comprehensible processes of nature. But
these clues are ascertained by faith, which modern man
has lost. So he hovers ambivalently between subjection
to the "reason" which he can find in nature and the
"reason" which he can impose upon nature. But neither
form of reason is adequate for the comprehension of the
illogical and contradictory patterns of the historic drama,
and for anticipating the emergence of unpredictable vir-
tues and vices. In either case, man as the spectator and
manager of history imagines himself to be freer of the
drama he beholds than he really is; and man as the crea-
ture of history is too simply reduced to the status of a
creature of nature, and all of his contacts to the ultimate
axe destroyed.

CHAPTER V

The Triumph of Experience
Over Dogma

IF the experiences of America as a world power, its re-
sponsibilities and concomitant guilt, its frustrations
and its discovery of the limits of power, constitute an
ironic refutation of some of the most cherished illusions
of a liberal age, its experiences in domestic politics repre-
sent an ironic form of success. Ou success in establishing

ngights j^^^a^^S^G^t^fe. Frequently

our success is due to social and political policies which
violate and defy the social creed which characterizes a
commercial society. America has developed a pragmatic
approach to political and economic questions which would
do credit to Edmund Burke, the great exponent of the
wisdom of historical experience as opposed to the abstract
rationalism of the French Revolution.

Marxism is engaged in two types of contest with the
bourgeois world. In the one it has become the fighting
creed of the peoples of decaying agrarian civilizations
in conflict with the democratic-industrial world. In the

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

other, parliamentary forms of Marxism inform the po-
litical parties of industrial workers in industrial nations
as these challenge the economic and political power of
capital and industry. In the international contest between
Marxism and the democratic world, it is ideologically un-
fortunate that the most powerful nation in the alliance
of free nations should also be most consistently bourgeois
in its attitudes. This gives the communist propaganda
some undue advantages as may be seen in the prejudices
of the Asian, world against our alleged capitalistic im-
perialism. In terms of their ancient resentments and of
their newfound communist creed, we are, by definition,
"imperialistic," and our very success and power seem to
give plausibility to the indictment.

But in the contest betwen Marxism and bourgeois
ideology within the confines of western civilization and
in the domestic politics of its several nations we play a
different role. We may be the most consistent bourgeois
nation; but we have established a degree of justice which
has prevented the Marxist movement from arising in our
society in either its milder or more virulent form. This
achievement may be due primarily to our highly favored
circumstances. For the wealth of our natural resources,
the unity of a continental economy and the efficiency of
our technology have, as we have previously noted, miti-
gated the severity of the social struggle in America.

But there are other reasons for this achievement. The
contest between Marxism and the bourgeois world is a
debate between two ideologies, each of which proceeds
confidently to certain conclusions upon the basis of pre-
suppositions which are only partly true. Marxism is so

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

formidable as a political creed precisely because it ex-
presses the convictions of those who have discovered the
errors in the liberal-bourgeois creed in bitter experience.
Marxism is so dangerous because in its consistent form
it usually substitutes a more grievous error for the error
which it challenges. In this debate between errors, or
between half-truth and half-truth, America is usually
completely on the side of the bourgeois credo in theory; !
but in practice it has achieved balances of power in the
organization of social forces and a consequent justice
which has robbed the Marxist challenge of its sting. No
one sings odes to liberty as the final end of life with
greater fervor than Americans. But in practice we heed
the warning of Edmund Burke: "I should therefore sus-
pend my congratulations on the new liberty of France
until I am informed how it has been combined with gov-
ernment, with public force, with the disciplines and obe-
dience of armies; with the collection of effective and well-
distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the
solidity of property; with peace and order. . . . Liberty,
when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, be-
fore they declare themselves, will observe the use which
is made of power."*

Britain has been, until recently, the home of pragmatic
politics, where "liberty broadened down from precedent
to precedent" ; where the complex relation of freedom to
order was so well understood that social policy moved
from case to case and point to point, informed by ex-
perience rather than consistent dogma; and thereby
avoiding a too great sacrifice of freedom to order or of

*Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, Chapter I.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

order to freedom. Britain has not lost its genius for the
empirical approach; but we may have exceeded her
achievements in some respects, partly because we had
margins of security which prevented the rise of consistent
dogmas. Our favored position may tempt us to reject
whatever truth is embodied in the Marxist creed too un-
reservedly; but British labor has become increasingly
inclined to meet disillusionments merely by a more con-
sistent application of its creed.

A consideration of some of the crucial issues in the de-
bate between Marxism and a liberal society may illumine
the paradox of American social policy, whose theory is
usually consistently on the one side of the debate while
its practice frequently strikes a creative synthesis. A
bourgeois society regards the achievement of social har-
mony as fairly easy. It tends to believe that it is only
necessary to remove irrelevant political restraints from eco-
nomic activity; and then the "natural system of liberty "
will become effective. It believes that the self-interest of
each individual is checked and balanced by that of every
other individual. If this check is not sufficient, an "en-
lightened" self-interest which knows how to find the
point of concurrence between the interests of self and
those of the community will ostensibly supply the de-
ficiency. This serene confidence in the possibilities of
social harmony is derived both from one of the great
achievements of a commercial culture, and from a natural
illusion of such a culture. The achievement was the dis-

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

covery that men could be brought most effectively into
the vast system of mutual services in a complex society
by engaging their "self-interest" rather than their "be-
nevolence." The cobbler would make shoes and the farmer
would raise wheat and the tailor would fashion a coat;
and they would exchange their several products. Each
would gain in the exchange; for it permitted a specializa-
tion of labor which improved the efficiency of each. Each
would seek his own gain, or rather that of his family;
but each would be prompted to serve the other in the
system. There are elements of truth in this discovery of
classical economics which remain a permanent treasure
of a free society, since some forms of a "free market" are
essential to democracy. The alternative is the regulation
of economic process through bureaucratic-political deci-
sions. Such regulation, too consistently applied, involves
the final peril of combining political and economic power.
On the other hand, the liberal society never achieved
the perfect harmony of which it dreamed because it over-
estimated the reciprocity of the free market and also
equated economic competition with all encounters in so-
ciety. It overestimated the reciprocity of the market be-
cause it was oblivious both to the elements of power in
society, and to the disproportions of power in economic
life. Powe^^

man, is political. He believes that it must be reduced to
earlier bourgeoisaw^

nate politi<&I~powe^

old aristocracy had Qj^JmxL The

, T ^a^'*^ w *'*** s * w ^ ******* j*,iu ,

wants to reduce it to a minimum

because it "represents the effort of a democratic society
* ~__ .

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

to bring disproportions of economic power under control.
In the shift of motive from earlier to later bourgeois man
lies the inevitable degradation of the liberal dogma.
Marxism was bound to challenge the dogma, and to find
the later form particularly vulnerable.

The reciprocity of the market was too simply equated
with the social harmony of the community because self-
inierest was restricted to the economic motive. ^The false
abstraction of "economic man" remains a permanent de-
fect in all bourgeois-liberal ideology. It seems to know
nothing of what Thomas Hobbes termed "the continual
competition for honor and dignity' 7 in human affairs. It
understands neither the traditional ethnic and cultural
loyalties which qualify a consistent economic rationalism ;
nor the deep and complex motives in the human psyche
which express themselves in the desire for "power and
glory/ 1 All the conflicts in human society involving pas-
sions and ambitions, hatreds and loves, envies and ideals
not recorded in the market place, are beyond the com-
prehension of the typical bourgeois ethos.

Inevitably this meant that social realities would de-

^ ^j ie cree( j % The strong

not wise or stronglinougK to Heter them. The earlier in-
dusteialisiaHrS aggravate, ratiier than mitigate,, thejat-ol
the poor, ^certainly as it accemtuate^^
of power existing in traditional societies. Reason which,
according to the liberal creed, would always seek the point
of concurrence between the interests of the self and of
the other, could not function consistently in this manner.
Rather it conformed to Thomas Hobbes' conception of

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

the function of reason. It would make demands upon the
community which seemed reasonable to the claimant and
inordinate from the standpoint of the community.

In these social realities the Marxist challenge arose.
In place of the picture of an actual or potential social
harmony in bourgeois society it put the idea of a class
conflict, running through the whole of human history
and reaching its climax in the very society which, in its
own esteem, had created a potential social harmony by
its system of "natural liberty." More conscious of the
power element in life than liberalism, Marxism made an
even greater error than liberalism in identifying the locus
of power. In^Maxxist thought political ^ajgretJa .always
subordinate to, and"tEeTooTo3f7 economic power. Govern-

{ge executive

committee of the propertied classes. This is an even more
grievous mistake than the liberal error of obscuring the
reality of economic power. Maoism added another mis-
take to this error. It ascribed economic power purely to
ownership, thus hiding the power of the manager and
manipulator. The consequence of these errors makes it
possible for consistent Marxism to create an oligarchy in
which the economic and political power in a community
are combined while no checks are placed upon such in-
ordinate concentration. According to the theory, the
checks are not necessary since no one owns property; and
ownership is the only source, both of the power and of
the self-interest which prompts power to defy the welfare
of the community.

The course of history has amply proved the miscalcula-
tions of the Marxist alternatives to a liberal society to

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

be even more grievously in error than the liberal ones.
Nevertheless, it is not possible to establish justice amidst
the vast concentration and competition of power in mod-
ern technical society if the illusions and miscalculations
of a liberal society are not radically qualified.

This qualification has actually taken place in the po-
litical practice of America even though its political theory
tends to conform to the general liberal creed. The early
American culture was not bereft of a realistic theory. We
have previously observed the two strains of thought, Cal-
vinist and Jeffersonian, which entered into our original
American heritage. On the problem of the resolution of
potential conflicts of interest and power in the com-
munity, the strain of thought most perfectly expressed
by James Madison combined Christian realism in the
interpretation of human motives and desires with Jef-
ferson's passion for liberty. The fellow Virginians, Madi-
son and Jefferson, were prevented by their common pas-
sion for liberty from seriously debating this issue between
them. The difference in the philosophies are, therefore,
more frequently illumined by the exchange of letters be-
tween Adams and Jefferson than between Madison and
Jefferson. Yet the difference is symbolized in the distinc-
tion between the presuppositions of the Declaration of
Independence and of the Constitution of the United
States, of which Jefferson and Madison are the respective
inspirers.

Jefferson, and his coterie including Tom Paine, had a
vision of an harmonious society in which government
would interfere as little as possible with the economic
ambitions of the individual. These ambitions were pre-
96

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

sumed to be moderate; and their satisfaction without
friction with the neighbor would be guaranteed by the
wide opportunities of the new continent. The subordina-
tion of man to man would be prevented by the simple
expedient of preferring agriculture to industry. Jefferson's
ideal society conformed perfectly to John Locke's con-
ception of men "mixing their labor" with nature, and
claiming the fruits thereof as their legitimate property.
Madison feared the potential tyranny of government
as much as Jefferson; but he understood the necessity of
government much more. The Constitution protects the
citizen against abuses of government, not so much by
keeping government weak as by introducing the principle
of balance of power into government. This idea may have
been derived from Calvin's suggestions in his Institutes*
by way of the teachings of John Witherspoon, Madison's
teacher at Princeton (then the College of New Jersey).
Whether this balance of power between executive, legis-
lative and judicial functions is actually the best method
of preventing the abuse of power is a question which is
not relevant in this context. European democracies have
found other methods of achieving the same end; and their
methods may be less likely to issue in a mutual frustra-
tion of a community's governing powers. The important
fact is that the necessity of a strong govSranenTwas
z*^

*Calvin's words are: "The vice or imperfection of men therefore
renders it safer and more tolerable for government to be in the hands
of many, that they may afford each other mutual admonition and as-
sistance and that if any one arrogate to himself more than his right,
the many may act as censors and masters to restrain his ambition."
Institutes, IV, 20, 8.

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ferson of the peril of what he called "faction" in the
community. He had no hope of resolving such conflicts
by simple prudence. With the realists of every age he
knew how intimately man's reason is related to his in-
terests. "As long as any connection exists," he wrote,
"between man's reason and his self-love, his opinions and
passions will have reciprocal influence upon each other."*
He even anticipated Marx in finding disproportions in
the possession of property to be the primary cause of
political and social friction: "The most common and
durable source of faction," he declared, "has been the
various and unequal distribution of property." He re-
garded this inequality as the inevitable consequence of
unequal abilities among citizens. One of Madison's most
persuasive arguments for a federal union was his belief
that a community of wide expanse would so diffuse in-
terests and passions as to prevent the turbulent form of
political strife, to which he regarded small communities
subject. The development of parties in America has partly
refuted the belief that interests could not be nationally
organized. Yet the interests which are organized in the
two great parties of America are so diverse as to prevent
the parties from being unambiguous ideological instru-
ments. Thus, history has partly justified his conviction.
In any event the political philosophy which underlies
our Constitution is characterized by a shrewd awareness
of the potential conflicts of power and passion in every
community. It knows nothing of a simple harmony in
society, analogous to the alleged reciprocity of the free
market.

^Federalist Papers, No. 10

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

Our political experience has enlarged upon this wisdom
without always being in conscious relation to its explicit
early formulation. The American labor movement was
almost completely berefOStT^
which the rebellious industrial masses of Europe carried.
In its inception it disavowed not ^ "only Matxist revolu-
tionary formulas but every kind of political program. It
was a pragmatic movement, born of the necessity of set-
ting organized power against organized power in a tech-
nical society. Grg^a^J^JDecame conscious j>f^ the fact
that economic power does try to bend government to its
own en<ds."It has ; therefore, decided tp^ph^engeja com-
bination of political and economic power with a like com-
bination Tof its own. These development^ haw "been Wry

]^^ ""' J "*" J "'

-~"]j^^ creed of a bourgeois com-

munity, as distinguished from the philosophy which in-
forms our Constitution, was arrayed against this develop-
ment. The right of collective bargaining was declared to
be a violation of the rights of employers to hire or fire
whom they would. Supreme Court decisions, directed
against the labor movement, were informed by the gen-
erally accepted individualistic creed.* But ultimately, in
the words of "Mr. Dooley," the court decisions "followed
the election returns." Long before the "New Deal" radi-
cally changed the climate of American political life the

*At the turn of the century a Supreme Court decision declared that,
"It is the constitutional right of the employer to dispense with the
services of an employee because of his membership in a labor union."
In another decision the Court declared, "To ask a man to agree in
advance to refrain from affiliation with a union is not to ask him to
give up any part of his constitutional freedom/*

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

sovereign power of government had been used to enforce
taxation laws which embodied social policy as well as reve-
nue necessities; great concentrations of power in industry
were broken up by law; necessary monopolies in utilities
were brought under political regulation; social welfare,
security and health and other values which proved to be
outside the operations of the free market were secured
by political policy. More recently, housing, medicine and
social security have become matters of public and po-
litical policy. All this has been accomplished on a purely
pragmatic basis, without the ideological baggage which
European labor carried.

The development of American democracy toward a
welfare state has proceeded so rapidly partly because the
ideological struggle was not unnecessarily sharpened. It
has proceeded so rapidly in fact that the question must
be raised in America, as well as in the more collectivist
states of Europe, whether the scope of bureaucratic deci-
sions may not become too wide and the room for the auto-
matic balances of unregulated choices too narrow.

These are misgivings which will confront every modern
democracy and may confront them till doomsday, since
there is no neat principle which will solve the relation
of power to justice and of justice to freedom. The sig-
nificant point in the American development is that here,
no less than in Europe, a democratic political community
has had enough virtue and honesty to disprove the Marx-
ist indictment that government is merely the instrument
of privileged classes. It has established sufficient justice
to prevent the outbreak of the social resentments which
have wrecked the less healthy European nations and have

100

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

created social acerbities exceeding our own in the best
of them.

We have, in short, achieved such justice as we possess
in the only way justice can be achieved in a technical
society: we have equilibrated power. We have attained
a certain equilibrium in economic society itself by setting
organized power against organized power. When that did
not suffice we used the more broadly based political power
to redress disproportions and disbalances in economic
society.

What has become of our social peace in this contest of
power? The acrimonies of party strife are considerable
among us. The absence of collectivist or revolutionary
ideology among the workers does not save them from
charges of being revolutionaries. Yet the business com-
munity accepts the general development of democracy in
America with a certain degree of practical grace even
while it wars against it ideologically. This is why we are
so completely misunderstood in Europe. For Europe
knows our semi-official ideology better than it knows our
practical justice.

It knows that our business men talk endlessly of liberty
in accents which Europeans, particularly Continentals,
associate with a decayed liberalism, transmuted into a
vexatious conservatism. But Europe seems not to know
that our business men sign five-year contracts with labor
unions, containing "escalator clauses" guaranteeing rising
wages with rising prices. American business in practice
has in short accepted the power of labor; it has even

101

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

incorporated the idea of the necessity of high wages as a
basis for mass production into its social philosophy. It
acknowledges the "right of collective bargaining" in the
various creeds of liberty by which it seeks to popularize
the "Amerieaia .... ... .......

Some of our social peace must be accredited to the
fluid class structure of American society. This has in-
fluenced the ethos of both worker and business man. The
Marxist class concept, designed for a class in industrial
society, has taken deep root only where a previous feudal
class structure has reinforced the social resentments
created by industrial injustice. The American business
community has frequently made the silly charge that
Marxists invented the class conflict or even the class
structure. The charge is the more absurd since it is quite
probable that j/he Ai^i^ai^^ will become^

more fixed as the nation moves towardjthe final Eimts_
"of an expaiiding econppay. It is true, nevertheless, that
Marxism obscures the complexity of the class structure
in an industrial society as certainly as the liberal creed
obscures the realities of class tensions. But if the dy-
namics of an industrial society are superimposed upon the
class distinctions of a feudal order, the psychological facts
correspond much more closely to the Marxist picture of
class antagonisms than they do in a purer bourgeois com-
munity such as our own. This is certainly one reason why
Britain, in many respects a more integral community
than ours and boasting of democratic achievements com-
parable with, or exceeding, our own, was bound to create a
political party more heavily loaded with Marxist ideology
than ours. The very achievements of British political

102

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

democracy, through which it was possible to move from
a feudal to a commercial and from a commercial to an
industrial society without a serious rent in the social or
cultural fabric, has the one serious disadvantage of pre-
serving a residual feudal class snobbishness, which even
an era of socialist politics has not eradicated.

The fluidity of the American class structure is primarily
a gift of providence, being the consequence of a con-
stantly expanding economy. But this good fortune has
been transmuted into social

only left the worker comparatively Jrea^^sociaL^
ments but also tends to make the privileged cla&ses^Jtess
TMransi|pnlC^^^ 'ffieTSng^SIag^ "The

absence of significant social resentments in American
life," declared a recent Continental visitor, "has left a
deeper impression upon me than any other American
characteristic." The higher British classes may yield more
gracefully than ours in the political struggle; but they
retain the weapon of social contempt to compensate for
their loss of political and economic power.

The achievement of America in developing social policies
which are wiser than its social creed and closer to the
truth than either Marxist or bourgeois ideology is subject
to two important reservations. First, the debate in the
western world on the institution of property was aborted
in America. Nothing in the conflicting ideologies of Marx-
ism and the bourgeois culture reveals the contrast between
them so much as their respective attitudes toward prop-
erty. Property is the instrument of justice in the creed

103

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

of the bourgeois world; and the source of all evil in the
Marxist interpretation. Both creeds miss the truth about
property. Since property is afoi^^

a su^^T of social ce and

For every form of power, when inordinate or irrespon-
sible, can be a tool of aggression and injustice. However,
sincejgioperty .4& .-fiet-the T cflpJy..tjpj^of power .^LSPfi^Sfaf
(not even of all economic power), it cannot ,be.the w sole
source of iniustice. Since some forms of property repre-
sent the security of the home, and others protect against
the hazards of the future and still others are instruments
for the proper performance of our social function, some
forms of property are obviously instruments of social jus-
tice and peace.

Clearly the Marxist and the bourgeois property ideolo-
gies are equally indiscriminate. The Marxist ideology has
proved to be the more dangerous because, under the cover
of its illusions, a new society has been created in which
political and economic power are monstrously combined
while the illusion is fostered that economic power has
been completely eliminated through the "socialization"
of property. A democratic society on the other hand pre-
serves a modicum of justice by various strategies of dis-
tributing and balancing both economic and political
power. But it is not tenable to place the institution of
property into the realm of the sacrosanct. Every human
institution must stand under constant review-TTfe "ques-
tion must" ' be 5sEe3," "what for^^'lt^
wtat specific conditions? In so far as the absence of a
jySslOi^^ES^^ our Culture has^^^^I^^Suiioix,
of property completely ^n3BSl;Sged we may have be-

104

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA
come the prisoners of a dogmatism which will cost us

( |g^

The second weakness in the American political and
'economic situation is that the lip service which the whole
culture pays to the principles of laissez-faire makes for
tardiness in dealing with the instability of a free economy,
when the perils of inflation or deflation arise. They are
finally dealt with pragmatically; but not before the con-
sequences of inaction have become very apparent. Some
believe that the lessons taught in the great depression
of 1929 have been so well learned that a recurrence of
such a catastrophe is impossible; but it is not altogether
certain that this is true. It is certainly true that the semi-
official ideology of the culture prevents adequate meas-
ures from being taken in time against the perils of in-
flation in periods of war production, such as the present
one. Thus, the American business community is inclined
to speak of our economy in terms of lyrical praise which
suggest that we have solved the ultimate problems of
both justice and stability. But the individual members
of the community speculate anxiously and endlessly over
the immediate prospects of one or other of the twin evils
of deflation and inflation. From the viewpoint of Europe,
whose economic health has become so dependent on the
American giant that a tremor in our system creates seri-
ous shocks in the world economy, we remain an irritat-
ingly incalculable element in world stability.

With these reservations we may claim that the unar-
ticulated wisdom embodied in the actual experience of
American life has created forms of justice considerably
higher than our more articulate unwisdom suggests.

105

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Any modern community which establishes a tolerable
justice is the beneficiary of the ironic triumph of the
wisdom of common sense over the foolishness of its wise
men. For the wise men are inevitably tempted to follow
either one or the other line of "rational" advance of which
the bourgeois and the Marxist ideologies are perfect types.
The one form of thought regards all social and historical
processes as self-regulating. In this case it is only required
to eliminate the foolish restraints and controls which
former generations have sought to place upon them. This
is, on the whole, the conception of rational politics and
economics of the bourgeois era since the French En-
lightenment. The alternative type of thought conceives
a social or historical goal, presumably desired by all hu-
manity, and seeks to "plan" for its achievement.

The debate between those who want to plan and those
who want to remove as many restraints as possible from
human activities transcends the limits of the political
controversy between the industrial workers and the mid-
dle class by which it is best known in modern life. But
that controversy offers a perfect illustration of the "ideo-
logical taint" which colors the reason of each type of
thought. Middle-class life came to power and wealth by
breaking aHSuaffrSffajnls ; and tEesTmore successful mid-
dle classes fear new restraints upon their sometimes quite
inordinate powers and privileges. They, therefore, speak
piously and reverently of "the Mw^bf nature^ wliich
inust not be violated; and they endow the unpredictable
Icfraina "of human Hstory with fixities of nature not to be
found there.

106

EXPERIENCE TRIUMPHS OVER DOGMA

The industrial classes, ..onjihe otiierJhLand, ^ oun d them-

tMs^'ceTeBraleSr

were involved in a vast'soSalmecKa-"
nism which periodically broke down; and they were not
consoled by the belief that these crises were necessary
for society's health. They lacked the personal skills to
enter on even terms in an individualistic competitive
struggle; and they were confronted in any case with con-
solidations of power which they could not match. In
fairly honest democracies they saw the possibility of
organizing both economic and political power to match
that of the more privileged classes. In the less healthy
democracies or undemocratic nations, their fears and
resentments found assuagement in the Marxist scheme
which envisaged not only a "plan" of justice for society
but of redemption for the whole of mankind. But these
political programs, even when they are only mildly Marx-
ist, are also bound to have their ideological weakness.
They are more or less oblivious to the many forms of
initiative in society which even the wisest plan may de-
stroy; and they are unconscious of the peril of combining
political and economic power which inheres in every plan.

The triumph of the wisdom of common sense over these
two types of wisdom is, therefore, primarily the wisdom
of democracy itself, which prevents either strategy from
being carried through to its logical conclusion. There is
an element of truth in each position which becomes false-
hood, precisely when it is carried through too consistently.
The element of truth in each creed is required to do full
justice to man's real situation. For man transcends the
social and historical process sufficiently to make it possible

107

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

and necessary deliberately to contrive common ends of
life, particularly the end of justice. He cannot count on
inadvertence and the coincidence of private desires alone
to achieve common ends. On the other hand, man is too
immersed in the welter of interest and passion in history
and his survey over the total process is too short-range
and limited to justify the endowment of any group or
institution of "planners" with complete power. The
"purity" of their idealism and the pretensions of their
science must always be suspect. Man simply does not
have a "pure" reason in human affairs; and if such reason
as he has is given complete power to attain its ends, the
taint will become the more noxious.

The controversy between those who would "plan" jus-
tice and order and those who trust in freedom to establish
both is, therefore, an irresolvable one. Every healthy so-
ciety will live in the tension of that controversy until the
end of history; and will prove its health by preventing
either side from gaining complete victory.

.The triumph of "common sense" in American history
is thus primarily the triumpli of tEe vitality of our demo-
cratic institutions. The ironic feature in it consists of
the fact that we have achieved a tolerable synthesis be-
tween two conflicting ideologies in practice while we
allowed the one to dominate our theory.

108

CHAPTER VI

The International
Class Struggle

THE hegemonic position of the United States in the
community of nations would have been morally pre-
carious, even if an international class war had not inter-
vened to aggravate the difficulties. It is not easy, as we
have seen, for an adolescent nation, with illusions of
childlike innocency to come to terms with the respon-
sibilities and hazards of global politics in an atomic age.
But all these perplexities have been heightened by the
fact that a class war, originally designed for industrial
society and aborted there, has become the dominant
pattern of international relations. This development is
partly due to the fact that Russia is at once a great center
of power and the holy land of a world-wide revolutionary
religion. But this fact alone would not have created the
hazardous situation which confronts us, if this revolu-
tionary religion had not taken root among the poor peo-
ples of non-industrial nations, particularly in Asia, and
if the portents were not so favorable for its continued

109

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

expansion there. The fact is that an ideology designed
for what Toynbee defined as the "internal proletariat 75
has been able to recoup its defeats in the healthy indus-
trial nations by becoming a remarkably "live option" for
the "external proletariat," the poverty-stricken peoples
of traditional agrarian economics.

In this situation the hegemony of America in the com-
munity of the free world creates some curious moral
hazards. We are ironically held responsible for disparities
in wealth and well-being which are chiefly due to differ-
ences in standards of productivity. But they lend them-
selves with a remarkable degree of plausibility to the
Marxist indictment, which attributes all such differences
to exploitation. Thus, every effort we make to prove the
virtue of our "way of life" by calling attention to our
prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof
of our guilt. Our experience of an ironic guilt when we
pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of
an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent. We
find these charges against us difficult to understand be-
cause we are the most consistently bourgeois nation on
earth. We are, therefore, not fully conversant with the
ethos in which the resentments of communism are gen-
erated.

While the dynamism of industrial civilization at first
heightened the feudal inequalities of privilege, it ul-
timately introduced complexities and fluidities into the
class structure which alleviated the hopelessness and
desperation of the poor. Thus it tended to make the or-
thodox Marxist interpretation of their lot implausible
and irrelevant. Marxism has been most successful in those

110

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

industrial nations of the West in which the realities of
industrial society did not efface the older feudal class
structure. It has been least successful among us, who had
no feudal past; or destroyed the remnant we had in our
civil war. Significantly, the only western European na-
tions in which communism is now a living creed, Italy
and France, are those in which the historical dynamism
of modern industrialism has never shattered the tradi-
tional feudal ethos. In France, where feudalism was os-
tensibly broken by the classic bourgeois revolution, the
bourgeoisie adopted the restrictive and undynamic social
attitudes of the older feudalism and created a society in
which the middle classes make no great efforts to increase
productivity and fight desperately to prevent the work-
ing classes from gaining a larger share of productive
wealth.

Since Marxism interprets political institutions in purely
cynical terms, regarding all government as merely the
"executive committee" of the privileged classes, therefore
wherever democratic government has the power and the
will to regulate economic forces for the sake of the general
welfare, a good part of the Marxist indictment becomes
otiose.

If those European nations, in which feudal and capi-
talistic injustices are compounded, are most receptive to
the communist seeds, it cannot be surprising that the
communist creed has become an even more attractive
option for the desperate peoples of impoverished agrarian-
feudal economies in the whole non-industrial world. It
has thus become the standard of revolt of the non-indus-
trial against the industrial world, though such a revolt

111

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

was originally considered possible only after capitalism
had raised the injustices of the feudal world to such a
pitch that the final climactic struggle between good and
evil in history could take place. That this religious
apocalypse, designed for industrial society, should be re-
garded as relevant for a non-industrial society, is partly
the achievement of Lenin. He reinterpreted the sacred
texts of Marxism to achieve this result. Through his
shrewdness the Marxist revolution gained its first suc-
cess in the semi- Asiatic, and almost wholly agrarian, cul-
ture of Russia. It is spreading from there into Asia and
into the whole non-industrial world.

But no degree of reinterpretation of texts could have
accomplished this result if the social and cultural forces
in the non-industrial world had not been propitious. It
is, therefore, necessary to enumerate and define some of
these forces and factors.

The primary cause of the resentments which generate
revolt in the non-industrial world is the fact that the first
impact of a technical society upon a non-technical one
was exploitative. The resentments created by this impact
of "imperialism" and "colonialism" remain operative,
even in a period in which the fading strength of the
colonial powers has led to the emancipation of millions
upon millions of former colonial peoples. The economic
consequences of imperialism were certainly not as un-
ambiguously evil as the Marxist propaganda claims; for
it introduced technical skills and education to the agrarian
world. Perhaps the most deleterious consequences of im-
perialism are in the spiritual rather than the economic
realm. For arrogance is the inevitable consequence of the

112

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

relation of power to weakness. In this case the arrogance
of power reinforced ethnic prejudices; for the industrial
world was "white" and the non-technical world was
"colored"

Ironically our own nation, which has become the re-
siduary legatee of these resentments, was not in the fore-
front of the imperial venture. Our economic base was so
vast and self-sufficient as to obviate significant im-
perial ventures. Our economic power produced a great
deal of covert imperialism. But we did not seek to govern
other peoples politically. This fact makes some of the
communist propaganda against us singularly irrelevant;
as, for instance, the charge of the Chinese foreign min-
ister that we are fighting in Korea in order to gain control
of "markets" there for our capitalists.

Imperialism is a perennial problem of human existence ;
for powerful nations and individuals inevitably tend to
use the weak as instruments of their purposes. If the am-
bitions of the powerful are not purely Exploitative, as
they frequently are not, they are nevertheless never as
purely paternal as they pretend. The Marxist theory, by
identifying this imperialist tendency with the capitalist
system, enables a new type of imperialism to relate itself
to the weakness of the non-industrial world, under the
cover of an ostensibly pure benevolence. In theory Rus-
sian politics are the expression of solidarity between the
sacred center of a political religion and its various mission
fields. Thus the Marxist channeling of the resentments
of the recently emancipated, or not yet fully emancipated,
colonial peoples not only accentuates the primary animus
of their rebellion but also, ironically, predisposes them

113

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

to court enslavement to a new master, under the illusion
that he is an emancipator.

The second reason for the rebellion of the non-indus-
trial world is the plight of the poor in the non-technical
world. This poverty has hardly been alleviated by po-
litical emancipation. Sometimes it has been aggravated
by the social and political confusion consequent upon
emancipation. This poverty has two sources: (a) feudal
injustice and (b) the low productivity of agrarian econ-
omies. These economies have in many instances not
reached the level of efficiency which European economies
enjoyed before the Industrial Revolution.

All recently emancipated nations suffer from more
grievous economic ills than the evils of political tutelage
from which they revolted. Landlordism and usurious in-
terest rates have been the engines of injustices in tradi-
tional cultures since the earliest agrarian civilizations of
Egypt and Babylon. While China, the one traditional
nation with a large number of freeholds, suffered less
from landlordism, the corruptions of a vast bureaucracy
produced analogous injustices. It is not at all certain
that India, despite its democratic constitution and the
idealism of its leaders, will be able to overcome the in-
justices of its feudal order in time to stave off a powerful
communist movement. Certainly the communist revolu-
tion in China gained its success because the previous
regime could not establish tolerable justice or order. The
whole Middle East is, moreover, in serious plight. For
there a decadent Mohammedan feudal order is visibly
disintegrating. The relation of western capitalism to these
traditional feudal systems of the agrarian world is, of

114

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

course, not guiltless. Sometimes, as in Indo-China,
strategic necessities in our conflict with communism
forced us into alliance with a discredited French colonial-
ism. In other cases, however, as in Indonesia, we may
well have acted more precipitately in favor of independ-
ence than was wise. In any case, the whole of the West,
and more particularly the American hegemonic power,
is held responsible for the post-imperial ills of the non-
technical cultures far beyond our deserts. One of the real
spiritual evils of imperialism is that it obsesses a nation
held in tutelage with the idea that all of its ills flow from
the imperial occupation. This is never the case, particu-
larly not if the colonial nation is deficient in capacities
for self-government so that political confusion and eco-
nomic chaos follow upon emancipation. But frustrated
hopes combine easily with communist propaganda to hold
the western nations as responsible for the ills which follow
upon emancipation as for those which preceded it.

Moreover, few of the non-industrial nations have suf-
ficiently high standards of honesty to make democratic
government viable. Corruption in their bureaucracies may
be a more potent source of injustice than the economic
system. Their low standards of honesty may have many
roots. One of them certainly is that the great traditional
cultures of the Orient never inculcated an individual sense
of responsibility to the larger community. They combined
very refined cultures with very low forms of social in-
tegration, the village and the family remaining the only
communities of significant loyalty. Dishonesty in the
Orient, therefore, usually means that any action advan-
tageous to the agent's family is morally justified. The

115

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

resulting corruption of government seems to make the
Marxist cynical interpretation of politics remarkably
relevant.

However, even the most grievous injustices of the
feudal world are not as responsible for the abject poverty
of its agrarian poor as the low efficiency of its economy.
Moreover, when industry is introduced, its first effect is,
as it was in Occidental nations, to heighten the injustices.
Liberal opinion in the western world rightly stresses the
necessity for technical assistance hi raising the produc-
tivity of the whole non-industrial world. But it usually
does not recognize that, even if every form of exploitation
is avoided in this development, it is not possible to trans-
mute an agrarian culture into a technical civilization
without vast cultural and social dislocations. To counter
the force of communism in the agrarian world we are
under the necessity of telescoping developments which
required four centuries in European history.

Meanwhile the difference between our wealth and the
poverty of the technically undeveloped world is inter-
preted by communist propaganda as irrefutable evidence
of the exploitative character of our economy. Wejsome-
times naively contribute to_the^effectiveness^of this propa-
ganda by unduly stressing the height of ou standard of
living as proof of our social .virtues. Our propaganda is
all the more ineffective because the standards" oFTrving
of a highly '"indiisiHaEzed riatioii ar e "so "iMpf 1 ObEbt e |p TSie
imagination of impoverished! peasants of 'KeT!]5?rent, that
ffiey'"'Cfaamot-iinpt^Sg ttedr social and

*Even non-communist socialism is capable of regarding differences in
standards of productivity as prima fade evidence of exploitation. In

116

TEE CLASS STRUGGLE

The net effect of all these aberrations is that the hege-
monic power of the non-communist world becomes the
symbol of every past and present injustice. It is held re-
sponsible for every ill inhering in the whole historic situa-
tion. The indictment against us achieves the greater plau-
sibility because the facts are interpreted through a
Marxist ideology. According to this ideology, poverty is
caused solely by exploitation. Such an explanation is no
more true than the contrasting bourgeois belief that dis-
tinctions of poverty and wealth are due primarily to dif-
ferences of skill, thrift and industry. The truth about
poverty and wealth is not fully disclosed by either theory.
But the Marxist theory has the advantage of satisfying
a deep instinct in the human heart. It places the blame
for an unfortunate situation entirely upon others.

Applied to the social realities of a particular national
economy it actually comes nearer to the truth, but
achieves less political relevance, than when applied to
distinctions of poverty and wealth between nations. A
national community is sufficiently integral to achieve
fairly equal standards of productive efficiency and also
to work toward the equalization of unequal privileges
by various political strategies. Great disparities of wealth
and poverty in a national community, therefore, rightly
arouse moral resentment. But since this moral resent-
ment can be effectively channeled into political action in
healthy modern societies, the Marxist indictment loses
its force in them. But differences in the living standards

the recent propaganda pamphlet of the Bevanites of the British Labor
Party, "One Way Only," these differences are presented as convincing
proof of nefarious elements in our politics.

117

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

of various nations are due primarily to disparities in
natural resources and in productive efficiency. The dis-
parities in technical efficiency have profound historical
roots which cannot be overcome in a decade or even a
century. The Marxist interpretation of inequalities be-
tween nations is, therefore, more untrue than its inter-
pretation of such inequalities within a particular nation.
But since the inequalities between highly industrialized
nations and low-grade agrarian economies are greater than
those within any particular nation, the Marxist theory
is politically more appealing, though less true, when ap-
plied internationally. Thus Marxist political illusions
have achieved a higher degree of plausibility in the "class
struggle" between nations than they achieved in do-
mestic politics. Therefore we gogjg^^
tion jin j^qrM^^ tech-

nically the most efficient modern^nation^is condemned in
a court oi public opinion, ^teongly influenced By ""Marxist
dogma, not so much for itsjreal sins,as,fo]r,^]iieyements
in which it takes an inordinate jpride. This is one of many
reasons why we must not expect to gain a quick or easy
victory over communism in the impoverished agrarian
world.

There are cultural, as well as socio-economic, causes for
the remarkable appeal of communism to the agrarian
world. The ancient cultures of Asia, whether humanistic,
as the Confucianism of China, or mystic as the religions
of India, have one common characteristic. They lack his-
torical dynamism. It would be impossible in brief terms

118

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

to do justice to the various roots of the western historical
dynamism as found in the Hebraic faith, in Greek hu-
manism and in the Christian religion. This historical
dynamism is partly an attitude toward the whole drama
of history, involving a sense of expectancy that some-
thing significantly new and meaningful will occur in the
future. It is partly derived from an attitude toward na-
ture. This involves a belief that man is to have dominion
over nature, which is assumed in Biblical faith and which
stands in contrast to a pious awe before nature in Oriental
pantheism. It also implies both the idea of the rationality
of nature, which the western tradition draws from Greek
thought, and the equally necessary idea of contingency
in nature, which is drawn from the Christian idea of
Creation. These two ideas together furnish the basis for
modern science and the scientific "exploitation" of nature.
"The method of Galilean science/' declares Mr. Michael
Foster, ". . . presupposes (a) that it is impossible that
nature should not embody a mathematically intelligible
scheme and exhibit laws mathematically definable; but
(b) that which of the possible alternative schemes it em-
bodies and which of the several laws equally definable
it exhibits can be decided only by observation and ex-
periment."*

The one idea lays the foundation for the deductive, and
the other for the inductive, methods of science. These two
together account for the remarkable achievements of
western science. They are distinguished from the indif-
ference toward problems of nature in Confucian human-

*Michael Foster in Mind, Vol. xlv, p. 24 (1936). See also John Baillie,
Natural Science and the Spiritual Life.

119

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ism and the mystic reverence of nature in Hindu pan-
theism in which reverence both the rationality and the
contingency of natural events are obscured.

In any event the cultures of the Orient are sleeping-
waking cultures in which the drama of human history is
not taken seriously and in which nature is either deified
or reduced to a realm of illusion. Communism is a his-
torically dynamic religion which comes to the hopeless
people of the Orient as the harbinger of a great hope.
They have been exposed to the culture of the West; but
have found the various western cultural and religious ex-
ports contradictory. There seemed to be a clear contradic-
tion between the Christian faith, as expounded by the
Christian missionary enterprise, and the cult of science
as acquired by Oriental students in the academic centers
of the West. There seemed also to be a contradiction
between the imperial impulses exhibited by western
power and the idealism propounded by western religion.
There was furthermore no clear political program in
western cultural exports. Christianity is reluctant to iden-
tify its piety with any particular political program for the
very reasons which make such an identification so dan-
gerous in communism. As politics deals with the proximate
ends of life, and religion with ultimate ones, it is always
a source of illusion if the one is simply invested with the
sanctity of the other.

Communism has a tremendous original advantage as
a destructive force in the dying sleeping cultures of
the Orient because it is not only historically dynamic
but it also seems to combine all the impulses of historical
dynamism, which so frequently stand in contradiction,

120

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

into one single unified impulse. This unification is spuri-
ous and dangerous; but this fact adds to, rather than
detracts from, its striking power. Religion and science are
combined in such a way that the modern cult of science
is brought completely into the service of an existential
faith. "Marxist-Leninist" science has proved to have a
great attractive power in the universities of China. And
even in India the intellectuals, without political pressure
upon them, take its pretensions seriously.

The Marxist "science" does have one advantage over
bourgeois social science. The latter usually gives itself to
the illusion that reasoning about historical events can be
presuppositionless and can achieve the disinterested char-
acter of the natural sciences. Yet all thought about human
life and destiny and about the problems of man's common
existence are "existential" in the sense that they begin
and end with presuppositions of faith which are not
determined by scientific inquiry. They begin with the
interests of the self and they end with some concept of
ultimate meaning, some hope or faith in what life is or
should be. The communist faith is not only explicitly
"existential" as bourgeois science is not. It also provides
for an identification of the beginning and the end of the
reasoning process which is particularly dear to the human
heart. It seeks to prove that the interests of a particular
historical force (in this case of the proletariat) are the
unqualified instruments of the ultimate. The poor, in
communist apocalypse, cannot emancipate themselves
from the injustices from which they suffer without eman-
cipating the whole of mankind from all evil. This formu-
lation has proved tremendously attractive to both intel-

121

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

lectuals and to industrial workers in some portions of
the western world; and it is bound to have an even
greater persuasive power in the non-technical societies.

To assign a Messianic function in history to the poor
not only seems to transmute their resentments into
vehicles of the ultimate good; but it also eases the un-
easy conscience of those who are affronted by social
injustice. As a religion this faith generates what in Chris-
tian terms is regarded as the very essence of sin. It iden-
tifies the interests of a particular self or of a particular
force in history with the final purposes of the God of
history. God, in this case, is of course the dialectic which
gives meaning to the whole. Such a faith also has an
advantage over a cynical creed, such as Nazism. It does
not demand that a particular force or interest in history-
defy every common standard of justice and right in the
name of its own ambitions. In theory it defies these
standards only provisionally. Ultimately, according to this
creed, the ruthless battle of the proletariat against all
other forces in history allegedly leads to the triumph of
universal justice.

For good measure communism couches this religion in
the language of "science" and thus comes to a world,
tired of defeatist religions, as an emancipating force.
Moreover, this science also promises the technical con-
quest of nature. This final pretension has no force in the
western world since technical achievements are obviously
prior to the proclamation of the communist apocalypse.
Russian propagandists do indeed seek to prove that their
technical inventions have in most cases anticipated ours.
But outside of Russia the facts are too obvious to give

122

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

these pretensions any force, even among prospective dev-
otees.

Tims, every aspect of the cultural crisis in the sleeping
cultures of the Orient combines with the socio-historic
tension between poor and rich nations to give this spuri-
ous religion a tremendous plausibility and attractive
power. This ironic situation is heightened by the fact that
the ethos in our technical and democratic world, more
particularly in the highly favored American nation, is so
different from that of the world in which these illusions
arise that it is difficult for us to appreciate their force
in the impoverished world. Our difficulties are heightened
by a widespread tendency in western social science to
seek the comprehension of the social and political phe-
nomena of our era in dimensions bordering upon the
purely biological. We confront manias and confusions in
the world, at enmity with us, which certainly lead to very
stubborn forms of "aggressiveness." But this aggressive-
ness is compounded of spiritual, historical, social and
cultural forces which cannot be measured by our com-
putations taken from biology. We are in danger, there-
fore, of facing the international "class struggle" with an
uncomprehending fury or complete dismay.

The attractive power of communism in the impoverished
world is heightened by the lack of receptivity in this
world for almost every facet of what we know as democ-
racy. Democracy in the West is both a political system
and a way of life. It requires a high degree of literacy

123

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

among its citizens, a sense of the dignity of the individual
but also a sense of his responsibility to a wider community
than his family. The bourgeois versions of the concept
of the dignity of the individual are frequently defective.
Sometimes they unduly subordinate the sense of com-
munity to the idea of the worth of the individual; some-
times they illicitly identify the dignity with the virtue
of the individual. Therefore our preaching of democracy
frequently seems highly irrelevant to broken or partially
reconstructed communities who are desperately seeking
for a viable structure for their common life.

But even without these particular defects, democracy
in its most ideal formulation is not as immediately rele-
vant to the ancient cultures of the East or to the primitive
cultures of Africa as is generally supposed. Some of both
the spiritual and the socio-economic presuppositions for
it are lacking. Spiritually the Orient is informed by reli-
gions which are either mystic and pantheistic such as
Buddhism and Hinduism; or humanistic and coUectivist
such as the Confucianism of China or the Shintoism of
Japan. Pantheistic religions can find no significance for
the individual in the integral unity of his spiritual and
physical life. The purpose of religious redemption is the
annulment of individual existence and its incorporation
into a divine unity. It is a far cry from this kind of mys-
ticism to the sober, earthbound humanism of Confu-
cianism. There are no greater differences between East
and West than between the humanism of China and the
mysticism of India. But Chinese humanism does not, for
this reason, offer the individual a more significant place
in the scheme of things. His life is oriented to the family.

124

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

All social relations and moral ideals (Confucius' "Five
Relations 37 ) are derived from the family. Japan was able
to achieve a more solid national cohesion because Shin-
toism establishes the whole nation as a kind of large
family, related to a divine ancestor. But in either case
the individual does not arrive at a position of inde-
pendence from the group. In Confucianism the group to
which the life of the individual is oriented remains the
family, through all the vicissitudes of a rich cultural
history. Therefore the national cohesion always remained
precarious and unstable.

There is thus no spiritual basis in the Orient for what
we know as the "dignity of the individual." This is one
reason why there is little prospect in China for heroic
resistance to totalitarianism, when once established.
Much was made, before communism triumphed in China,
of the alleged power of Confucianism to absorb every
cultural force which may gain a provisional triumph over
it. But since communism has triumphed in China we
hear less of this alleged stubborn vitality of Confucianism.
Its lack of historical dynamism makes it an easy prey to
communism, particularly among the youth ; and the lack
of individual independence and the strong emphasis upon
prudential rather than heroic virtue, predisposes even
opponents of communism to bow to its power. The mystic
religions of the Orient will hardly prove more capable
of offering spiritual resistance to the demonic dynamism
of the communist movement.

A democratic society requires some capacity of the
individual both to defy social authority on occasion when
its standards violate his conscience and to relate himself to

125

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

larger and larger communities than the primary family
group. The highly developed individual self-conscious-
ness in the western Christian tradition is supported by a
long spiritual history. Yet, even in the West, it did not
come to full flower until the developments of a commer-
cial and industrial civilization broke the organic forms
of western feudalism. The complex and multiple com-
munities of modern society involved the individual in
both complementary and contradictory loyalties and thus
created a new degree of individual independence. At the
same time technical developments increased the possi-
bility of communications so that the broader community
would be held together not merely by political authority
but by spiritual and cultural cohesions. The varied skills
of technical society and its more mobile and flexible forms
of property also emancipated the individual from the
restraints of hereditary property and vocation.

A democratic society, in short, requires not only a
spiritual and cultural basis which is lacking in the Orient
but a socio-economic foundation which primitive and
traditional civilizations cannot quickly acquire. Many of
the values of democratic society which are most highly
prized in the West are, therefore, neither understood nor
desired outside of the orbit of western society. Resent-
ment against feudal injustice easily prompts the youth
of decaying feudal societies to espouse the cause of a new
collectivist culture, which promises justice. They do not
understand the tyrannical consequences of this new form
of totalitarianism. But even if they did understand, they
cannot be expected to feel the loss of liberty with the
same sense of grievous deprivation as in the West.

126

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

If we consider both the cultural and the socio-economic
hazards to any immediate success of democracy in the
non-technical world and rightly gauge the causes for the
attractive power of communism in this world, we are
driven to the conclusion that we must face the menace
of the spread of tyranny in the non-industrial world for
many decades to come. We will not, of course, fail to take
the strategic and military measures which are possible
and necessary to arrest its growth. But we will avoid the
hysteria which arises from the mistaken belief that this
growth is due merely to some political or strategic mis-
calculation by this or that government agency or ad-
ministration. Fortunately the non-industrial world lacks
the technical resources to offer a mortal challenge to our
security. Fortunately, also, there are genuine spiritual
and moral affinities between ourselves and Japan and the
Philippines, which will make it possible to hold the
"island littoral" in the Pacific, though the danger of com-
munist infiltration into even these Asian cultures must
not be obscured.

But these tactical and strategic measures and possi-
bilities must not make us oblivious to the larger pattern
of history. In that larger pattern we face a revolt of im-
poverished peoples of the world against the centers of
technical power in which justified and unjustified resent-
ments are so curiously mingled, and legitimate desires
for greater well-being are so inextricably intertwined with
illusory hopes that decades upon decades will be required
to bring order out of this chaos. There is no wisdom in

127

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

the constant iterations of slogans in which liberty is con-
trasted with tyranny; and in which this tyranny is so
defined that the Utopian illusions, which nourish it, are
obscured. Communism is not merely another version of
Nazism. Nazism was a morally cynical creed which defied
every norm of justice. It represented a moral nihilism
which could have developed only in the decay of a highly
developed and sophisticated civilization. Communism is
a morally Utopian creed which has a much wider appeal
than Nazism because it speaks in the name of justice
rather than in defiance of justice; and it is ostensibly
devoted to the establishment of a universal society, rather
than to the supremacy of a race or nation. The fact that its
illusory hopes are capable of generating cruelties and
tyrannies, exceeding even those of a cynical creed, can
be understood only if it is realized how much more plau-
sible and dangerous the corruption of the good can be in
human history than explicit evil

The rise of communism in our world is comparable to
the rise of Islam and its challenge of Christian civilization
in the high Middle Ages. Some of the measures we take
against it are informed by the same lack of realism which
characterized the Crusades. The Islamic power finally
waned. It was destroyed not so much by its foes as by
its own inner corruptions. The Sultan of Turkey found
it ultimately impossible to support the double role of
political head of a nation and the spiritual head of the
Islamic world. Stalin has this same double role in the
world of communist religion. He or his successors will
finally be convicted of insinuating the power impulses of
a Russian state into the Messianic illusions of an osten~

128

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

sibly world-wide political religion. If we fully understand
the deep springs which feed the illusions of this religion,
the nature of the social resentments which nourish them
and the realities of life which must ultimately refute
them, we might acquire the necessary patience to wait
out the long run of history while we take such measures
as are necessary to combat the more immediate perils.

129

CHAPTER VII
The American Future

NATIONS, as individuals, may be assailed by contra-
dictory temptations. They may be tempted to flee
the responsibilities of their power or refuse to develop
their potentialities. But they may also refuse to recognize
the limits of their possibilities and seek greater power
than is given to mortals. Naturally there are no fixed
limits for the potentialities of men or nations. There is
therefore no nice line to be drawn between a normal ex-
pression of human creativity and either the sloth which
refuses to assume the responsibilities of human freedom
or the pride which overestimates man's individual or
collective power. But it is possible to discern extreme
forms of each evil very clearly; and also to recognize
various shades of evil between the extremes and the
norm.

The temptation to disavow the responsibilities of hu-
man freedom or to leave human potentialities undevel-
oped usually assails the weak, rather than the strong. In

130

THE AMERICAN FUTURE

the Biblical parable it was the "one talent" man who
"hid his treasure in the ground/' Our nation ought, there-
fore, not to take too much credit for having mastered a
temptation which assailed us for several decades. It was
a rather unique historical phenomenon that a nation with
our potentialities should have been tempted to isolation-
ism and withdrawal from world responsibilities. Various
factors contributed to the persuasiveness of the tempta-
tion. We were so strong and our continental security
seemed so impregnable (on cursory glance at least) that
we were encouraged in the illusion that we could live our
own life without too much regard for a harassed world.
Our sense of superior virtue over the alleged evils of Euro-
pean civilization and our fear of losing our innocency if
we braved the tumults of world politics, added spiritual
vanity to ignoble prudence as the second cause. pJLour
irresponsiBility. We thought we might keep ourselves free
of the evils of a warring world and thus preserve a healthy
civilization, amidst the expected doom of a decrepit one.
This hope of furnishing the seed-corn for a new beginning
persuaded moral idealists to combine with cynical realists
in propounding the policy of power without responsibility.
However, human life is healthy only in relationship;
and modern technical achievements have accentuated the
interdependence of men and of nations. It therefore became
apparent, that we could neither be really secure in an
insecure world nor find life worth living if we bought our
security at the price of civilization's doom. This knowl-
edge came to us during and after the Second World War
and marked a fateful turning point in our national life.
Some of our friends and allies still profess uncertainty

131

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

about the reality of our conversion from an irresponsible
to a responsible relation to the community of nations.
But ; whatever may be our future errors, it is fairly safe to
predict that we have finally triumphed over the tempta-
tion to "hide our talent in the ground."

We will not, however, take too much credit for this
achievement if we remember that the temptation, over
which we triumphed, is one which assails the weak rather
than the strong. Indeed, a part of the resource for our
triumph was our gradual realization that we were not
weak, but strong; that we had in fact become very strong.

Significantly the same world which only yesterday
feared our possible return to adolescent irresponsibility is
now exercised about the possibilities of the misuse of our
power. We would do well to understand the legitimacy
of such fears rather than resent their seeming injustice.
It is characteristic of human nature, whether in its indi-
vidual or collective expression, that it has no possibility
of exercising power, without running the danger of over-
estimating the purity of the wisdom which directs it.
The apprehensions of allies and friends is, therefore, but
a natural human reaction to what men intuitively know
to be the temptations of power. A European statesman
stated the issue very well recently in the words: "We are
grateful to America for saving us from communism. But
our gratitude does not prevent us from fearing that we
might become an American colony. That danger lies in
the situation of America's power and Europe's weakness/'
The statesman, when reminded of the strain of genuine
idealism in American life, replied: "The idealism does
indeed prevent America from a gross abuse of its power.

132

THE AMERICAN FUTURE

But it might well accentuate the danger Europeans con-
front. For American power in the service of American
idealism could create a situation in which we would be
too impotent to correct you when you are wrong and you
Would be too idealistic to correct yourself."

Such a measured judgment upon the virtues and perils
of America's position in the world community accurately
describes the hazards of our position in the world.
moral perils are not those of conscious malice or th,,

understood only ITwe realize the ironic tendency of vir-
tues to turn into vices when too complacently relied
upon; and of power to become vexatious ,if w the wisdom
which directs it is' trusted too confidently. The ironic ele-
ments in American history can be overcome, in short,
only if American idealism comes to terms with the limits
of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human
wisdom, the precariousness of all historic configurations
of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human
virtue. America's moral and spiritual success in relating
Itself creatively to a wodd community requires, not so
much a guard against the gross vices, about which the
idealists warn us, as a reorientation of the whole structure
of our idealism. That idealism is too oblivious of the
ironic perils to which human virtue, wisdom and power
are subject. It is too certain that there is a straight path
toward the goal of human happiness; too confident of the
wisdom and idealism which prompt men and nations
toward that goal; and too blind to the curious compounds
of good and evil in which the actions of the best men and
nations abound.

133

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The two aspects of our historic situation which tend par-
ticularly to aggravate the problems of American idealism
are: (a) That American power in the present world situa-
tion is inordinately great; (b) that the contemporary in-
ternational situation offers no clear road to the achieve-
ment of either peace or victory over tyranny. The first
aspect embodies perils to genuine community between
ourselves and our allies; for power generates both jus-
tified and unjustified fears and resentments among the
relatively powerless. The second aspect embodies the
temptation -to become impatient and defiant of the slow
and sometimes contradictory processes of history. We
may be too secure in both our sense of power and our
sense of virtue to be ready to engage in a patient chess
game with the recalcitrant forces of historic destiny. We
could bring calamity upon ourselves and the world by
forgetting that even the most powerful nations and even
the wisest planners of the future remain themselves crea-
tures as well as creators of the historical process. Man
cannot rise to a simple triumph over historical fate.

In considering the perils of our inordinate power it
would be well to concede that it embodies some real ad-
vantages for the world community. It is quite possible
that if power had been more evenly distributed in the
non-communist world the degree of cohesion actually at-
tained would have been difficult. Many national com-
munities gained their first triumph over chaos by the
organizing energy of one particular power, sufficiently
dominant to suppress the confusion of competing forces.

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THE AMERICAN FUTURE

Thus, dominant city-states in Egypt and in Mesopotamia
were responsible for the order and cohesion of these first
great empires of human history. The preponderant power
of America may have a similar role to play in the present
international scene. There is, furthermore, a youthful be-
lief in historic possibilities in our American culture, a
confidence that problems can be solved, which frequently
stands in creative contrast with the spiritual tiredness
of many European nations as also with the defeatism of
Oriental cultures. Our hegemonic position in the world
community rests upon a buoyant vigor as well as upon
our preponderant economic power.

Nevertheless, great disproportions of power are as cer-
tainly moral hazards to justice and community as they
are foundations of minimal order. They are hazards to
community both because they arouse resentments and
fears among those who have less power; and because they
tempt the strong to wield their power without too much
consideration of the interests and views of those upon
whom it impinges. Modern democratic nations have
sought to bring power into the service of justice in three
ways, (a) They have tried to distribute economic and
political power and prevent its undue concentration, (b)
They have tried to bring it under social and moral review,
(c) They have sought to establish inner religious and
moral checks upon it.

Of these three methods the first is not relevant to the
international community, as at present inchoately or-
ganized. The relative power of particular nations must
be accepted as fateful historic facts about which little
can be done. The idealists who imagine that these dis-

135

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

proportions of power would be dissolved in a global con-
stitutional system do not understand the realities of the
political order. No world government could possibly pos-
sess, for generations to come, the moral and political
authority to redistribute power between the nations in
the degree in which highly cohesive national communities
have accomplished this end in recent centuries. Further-
more, even the most healthy modern nations must be
content with only approximate equilibria of power lest
they destroy the vitalities of various social forces by a
too rigorous effort to bring the whole communal life under
an equalitarian discipline. The preponderance of Ameri-
can power is thus an inexorable fact for decades to come,
whether within or without a fuller world constitution
than now prevails. If it does disappear it will be elimi-
nated by the emergence of new forces or the new coalition
of older forces, rather than by constitutional contrivance.
The strategy of bringing power under social and po-
litical review is a possibility for the international com-
munity, even in its present nascent form. It is a whole-
some development for America and the world that the
United Nations is becoming firmly established, not so
much as an institution, capable of bridging the chasm
between the communist and the non-communist world
(in which task it can have only minimal success), but as
an organ in which even the most powerful of the demo-
cratic nations must bring their policies under the scrutiny
of world public opinion. Thus inevitable aberrations, aris-
ing from the pride of power, are corrected. It will be even
more hopeful for the peace and justice of the world com-
munity, if a fragmented Europe should gain the unity

136

THE AMERICAN FUTURE

to speak with more unanimity in the councils of the na-
tions than is now possible. It is impossible for any nation
or individual fully to understand the peculiar circum-
stances and the unique history of any other nation or
individual, which create their special view of reality. It
jis jmportant, iheref ore^ that the fragmentary wisdom of
any naHonTshould be prevented from achieving the'Bpful
omniscience, which occurs when the weak are too weak
to^dare challenge the opinion of the powerful. Such a
tyrannical situation not only within., but between, tlie
communist nations must finally destroy the community
ofthatwqrijdL

It is also to be hoped that the Asian world will gain
sufficient voice in the councils of the free nations to cor-
rect the inevitable bias of western nations in the same
manner.

It is now generally acknowledged (to give an example
of the salutary character of such discipline) that Ameri-
can policy in regard to the rearmament of Germany was
too precipitate and too indifferent toward certain moral
and political hazards of which Europe was conscious in
that undertaking. There were, on the other hand, fears
in Europe which might have prevented the inclusion of
Western Germany in the full community of the non-
communist world and the concomitant grant of the right,
and acknowledgment of the responsibility, of common
defense of that community. The tolerable solution of this
problem was achieved by compromises between the Amer-
ican and the European position. Thus a creative synthesis
was achieved despite the hazards of disproportionate
power.

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

If there should be, as many Europeans believe, too
great a preoccupation in America with the task of win-
ning a war which Europe wants to avoid; and if there
should be in Europe, as some Americans believe, so des-
perate a desire to avoid war that the danger is run of
bringing on the conflict by lack of resolution, it is to be
hoped that a similar creative synthesis of complementary
viewpoints will take place. The^real test of such a syn-
thesis will occur at the point in time when American
preparedness has reached its Highest possibility and "~ the
fear of the rapid outmoding of modern weapons and the
consequent economic burden of ever-new preparedness
efforts might tempt American strategists to welcome a
final joining of the issue. In that situation many Ameri-
cans would, of course, strongly resist the temptation to
embark upon a preventive war. But their resolution will
be strengthened and their cause have a better prospect
of success if the decision lies not with one powerful nation
but with a real community of nations.

The third strategy of disciplining the exercise of power,
that of an inner religious and moral check, is usually in-
terpreted to meah the cultivation of a sense of justice.
The inclination "to give each man his due" is indeed one
of the ends of such a discipline. But a sense of humility
which recognizes that nations are even more incapable
than individuals of fully understanding the rights and
claims of others may be an even more important element
in such a discipline. A too confident sense of justice al-
ways leads to injustice. In'sFfar as men and nations are

!5iii^^ the

Jiuman weakness of having a livelier sense of their own

138

THE AMERICAN FUTURE
interest than of the competing interest. That is why "just"

^ involved in ironic

refutations of their moral pretensions.

Genuine community, whether between men or nations,
is not established merely through the realization that we
need one another, though indeed we do. That realization
alone may still allow the strong to use the lives of the
weaker as instruments of their own self-realization. Gen-
uine community is established only when the knowledge
that we need one another is supplemented by the recog-
nition that "the other," that other form of life, or that
other unique community is the limit beyond which our
ambitions must not run and the boundary beyond which
our life must not expand.

It is significant that most genuine community is estab-
lished below and above the level of conscious moral ideal-
ism. Below that level we find the strong forces of nature
and nature-history, sex and kinship, common language
and geographically determined togetherness, operative.
Above the level of idealism the most effective force of
community is religious humility. This includes the charit-
able realization that the vanities of the other group or
person, from which we suffer, is not different in kind,
though possibly in degree, from similar vanities in our
own life. It also includes a religious sense of the mystery
and greatness of the other life, which we violate if we seek
to comprehend it too simply from our standpoint.

Such resources of community are of greater importance
in our nation today than abstract constitutional schemes,
of which our idealists are so fond. Most of these schemes
will be proved, upon close examination, to be indifferent

139

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

toward the urgencies and anxieties which nations, less
favored than we, experience; and to betray sentimentali-
ties about the perplexing problems of human togetherness
in which only the powerful and the secure can indulge.

The second characteristic of the contemporary situa-
tion, which challenges American idealism, is that there
are no guarantees either for the victory of democracy
over tyranny or for a peaceful solution of the fateful con-
flict between two great centers of power. We have pre-
viously noted how the tragic dilemmas and the pathetic
uncertainties and frustrations of contemporary history-
offer ironic refutation of the dreams of happiness and
virtue of a liberal age and, especially, of the American
hopes. Escape from our ironic situation obviously de-
mands that we moderate our conceptions of the ability
of men and of nations to discern the future; and of the
power of even great nations to bring a tortuous historical
process to, what seems to them, a logical and proper con-
clusion.

The difficulty of our own powerful nation in coming
to terms with the frustrations of history, and our impa-
tience with a situation which requires great exertions
without the promise of certain success, is quite obviously
symbolic of the whole perplexity of modern culture. The
perplexity arises from the fact that men have been pre-
occupied with man's capacity to master historical forces
and have forgotten that the same man, including the
collective man embodied in powerful nations, is also a

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THE AMERICAN FUTURE

creature of these historical forces. Since man is a creator,
endowed with a unique freedom, he "looks before and
after and pines for what is not." He envisages goals and
ends of life which are not dictated by the immediate
necessities of life. He builds and surveys the great cul-
tural and social structures of his day, recognizes the plight
in which they become involved and devises various means
and ends to extricate his generation from such a plight.
He would not be fully human if he did not lift himself
above his immediate hour, if he felt neither responsibility
for the future weal of his civilization, nor gratitude
for the whole glorious and tragic drama of human history,
culminating in the present moment.

But it is easy to forget that even the most powerful
nation or alliance of nations is merely one of many forces
in the historical drama; and that the conflict of many
wills and purposes, which constitute that drama, give it
a bizarre pattern in which it is difficult to discern a real
meaning. It is even more difficult to subject it to a pre-
conceived order. We have previously considered the ironic
nature of the fact that the chief force of recalcitrance
against the hopes of a democratic world should be fur-
nished by a political religion, the animus of whose recal-
citrance should be derived from its fanatic belief that it
can reduce all historical forces to its conception of a
rational order. The fact that this religion should have
a special appeal to decaying feudal societies, which have
been left behind in the march of technical progress of
the western world is one of those imponderable factors
in history, which no one could have foreseen but which
can be countered only if we do not try too simply to

141

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

overcome the ambivalence and hesitancies of the non-
technical world by the display of our power, or the claim
of superiority for our "way of life."

We have enough discernment as creators of history to
know that there is a certain "logic" in its course. We
know that recently the development of an inchoate world
community requires that it acquire global political organs
for the better integration of its life. But if we imagine
that we can easily transmute this logic into historical
reality we will prove ourselves blind to the limitations
of man as creature of history. For the achievement of a
constitutional world order is frustrated not merely by the
opposition of a resolute foe who has his own conception
of such an order. It is impeded also by the general limita-
tions of man as creature. The most important of these
is the fact that human communities are never purely
artifacts of the human mind and will. Human communi-
ties are subject to "organic" growth. This means that they
cannot deny their relation to "nature"; for the force of
their cohesion is partly drawn from the necessities of
nature (kinship, geography, etc.) rather than from the
realm of freedom. Even when it is not pure nature but
historic tradition and common experience which provides
the cement of cohesion, the integrating force is still not
in the realm of pure freedom or the fruit of pure volition.
Thus, the "Atlantic community" is becoming a reality
partly because it does have common cultural inheritances
and partly because the exigencies of history are forcing
mutual tasks upon it. The assumption of these mutual
responsibilities requires a whole series of clear decisions.
Yet it is not possible even for such a limited international

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THE AMERICAN FUTURE

community to be constituted into an integral community
by one clear act of political will. Naturally a more un-
limited or global community, with fewer common cultural
traditions to bind it and less immediate urgencies to
force difficult decisions upon a reluctant human will, will
have even greater difficulty in achieving stable political
cohesion.

All these matters are understood intuitively by prac-
tical statesmen who know from experience that the mas-
tery of historical destiny is a tortuous process in which
powerful forces may be beguiled, deflected, and trans-
muted but never simply annulled or defied. The difficulty,
particularly in America, is that the wisdom of this prac-
tical statesmanship is so frequently despised as foolish-
ness by the supposedly more "idealistic" science of our
age. Thus the conscience of our nation is confused to the
point of schizophrenia; and the inevitable disappoint-
ments, frustrations and illogicalities of world politics are
wrongly interpreted as nothing but the fruit of "unscien-
tific" blundering. A nation with an inordinate degree of
political power is doubly tempted to exceed the bounds
of historical possibilities, if it is informed by an idealism
which does not understand the limits of man's wisdom
and volition in history.

The recognition of historical limits must not, however,
lead to a betrayal of cherished values and historical at-
tainments. Historical pragmatism exists on the edge of
opportunism, but cannot afford to fall into the abyss. The
difficulty of sustaining the values of a free world must not

143

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

prompt us, for instance, to come to terms with tyranny.
Nor must the perplexities confronting the task of achiev-
ing global community betray us into a complacent ac-
ceptance of national loyalty as the final moral possibility
of history. It is even more grievously wrong either to
bow to "waves of the future" or to yield to inertias of
the past than to seek illusory escape from historical dif-
ficulties by Utopian dreams.

Through the whole course of history mankind has, by
a true spiritual instinct, reserved its highest admiration
for those heroes who resisted evil at the risk or price of
fortune and life without too much hope of success. Some-
times their very indifference to the issue of success or
failure provided the stamina which made success possible.
Sometimes the heroes of faith perished outside the prom-
ised land. This paradoxical relation between the possible
and the impossible in history proves that the frame of
history is wider than the nature-time in which it is
grounded. The injunction of Christ: "Fear not them
which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul"
(Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of hu-
man existence which transcends the basis which human
life and history have in nature. Not merely in Christian
thought but in the noblest paganism, it has been under-
stood that a too desperate desire to preserve life or to
gain obvious success must rob life of its meaning. If this
be so, there cannot be a simple correlation betwen virtue
and happiness, or between immediate and ultimate suc-
cess. \-;-' .,"T'^

While collective man lacks the capacity of individual
man to sacrifice "the body" (i.e. historical security) for

144

THE AMERICAN FUTURE

an end which may not be historically validated, yet na-
tions have proved capable of great sacrifice in defending
their liberties against tyranny, for instance. The tendency
of a liberal culture to regard the highest human possibili-
ties as capable of simple historical attainment, and to
interpret all tragic and contradictory elements in the pat-
tern of history as merely provisional, has immersed the
spirit of our age in a sentimentality which so uncritically
identifies idealism with prudence that it can find no place
in its scheme of things for heroic action or heroic patience.
Yet the only possibility of success^tojourjiation and our
^

Hesln our capatyjo^make sacrifices and

complete certainty of success.

the burdens required to save the

world from tyranny if there were no prospects of success.
The necessity of this measure of historic hope marks the
spiritual stature of collective, as distinguished from indi-
vidual, man. Even among individuals only few individuals
are able to rise to the height of heroic nonchalance about
historic possibilities. But while the nation cannot fulfill its
mission in a given situation without some prospect of
success, it also cannot persist in any great endeavor if it
is so preoccupied with immediate historic possibilities
that it is constantly subjected to distracting alternations
of illusion and disillusion.

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed
to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure
of misgiving about our leadership in the world community
is due to their fear that our "technocratic" tendency to
equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history

145

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course
of history. We might be driven to hysteria by its inev-
itable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the
whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one
final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The
political term for such an effort is "preventive war." It
is not an immediate temptation; but it could become so
in the next decade or two.

A democracy can not of course, engage in an explicit
preventive war. But military leadership can heighten
crises to the point where war becomes unavoidable.

The power of such a temptation to a nation, long ac-
customed to expanding possibilities and only recently sub-
jected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberra-
tions which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The
certainty of the foe's continued intransigence seems to be
the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. Nations find
it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity
when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe.
Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vin-
dictiveness muddies every pool of sanity. In the present
situation , even the, sanest of our statesmen havfe"found r it
convenient to conform their policies to the public temper
of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politi-
cians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is
"tEus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and
inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is
hated with sufficient vigor. Unfortunately the only per-
suasive proof seems to be the disavowal of precisely those
discriminate judgments which are so necessary for an
effective conflict with the evil, which we are supposed to

146

THE AMERICAN FUTURE

abhor. There is no simple triumph over this spirit of fear
and hatred. It is certainly an achievement beyond the
resources of a simple idealism. For naive idealists are
always so preoccupied with their own virtues that they
have no residual awareness of the common characteristics
in all human foibles and frailties and could not bear to
be reminded that there is a hidden kinship between the
vices of even the most vicious and the virtues of even
the most upright.

The American situation is such a vivid symbol of the
spiritual perplexities of modern man, because the degree
of American power tends to generate illusions to which
a technocratic culture is already too prone. This tech-
nocratic approach to problems of history, which errone-
ously equates the mastery of nature with the mastery of
historical destiny, in turn accentuates a very old failing
in human nature: the inclination of the wise, or the
powerful, or the virtuous, to obscure and deny the human
limitations in all human achievements and pretensions.

The most rigorous and searching criticism of the weak-
nesses in our foreign policy, which may be ascribed to the
special character of our American idealism, has recently
been made by one of our most eminent specialists in
foreign policy, Mr. George Kennan.*

He ascribes the weaknesses of our policy to a too simple
"legalistic-moralistic" approach and defines this ap-
proach as informed by an uncritical reliance upon moral
and constitutional schemes, and by too little concern for

*George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950.

147

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

the effect of our policy upon other nations, and too little
anticipation of the possible disruption of policies by in-
calculable future occurrences. In short, he accuses the
nation of pretending too much prescience of an unknown
future and of an inclination to regard other peoples "in
our own image. "/These are, of course, precisely the perils
to which all hip^an idealism is subject and which our
great power and bur technocratic culture have aggravated.

Mr. Kennan's solution for our problem is to return to
the policy of making the "national interest" the touch-
stone of our diplomacy. He does not intend to be morally
cynical in the advocacy of this course. He believes that
a modest awareness that our own interests represent the
limit of our competence should prompt such a policy.
His theory is that we may know what is ^goodjpr us Jbut
sould7^ know what is good for

others. This 1 adltiomtlon to modesty is valid as far as it
goes. Yet his solution is wrong. For egotism is not the
proper cure for an abstract and pretentious idealism.

Since the lives and interests of other men and com-
munities always impinge upon our own, a preoccupation
with our own interests must lead to an illegitimate in-
difference toward the interests of others, even when
modesty prompts the preoccupation. The cure for a pre-
tentious idealism, which claims to know more about the
future and about other men than is given mortal man to
know, is not egotism. It is a concern for both the self and
the other in which the self, whether individual or col-
lective, preserves a "decent respect for the opinions of
mankind," derived from a modest awareness of the limits
of its own knowledge and power.

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THE AMERICAN FUTURE

It is not an accident of history that a culture which
made so much of humanity and humaneness should have
generated such frightful inhumanities; and that these
inhumanities are not limited to the explicitly fanatic
politico-religious movements. Mr. Kennan rightly points
to the evils which arise from the pursuit of unlimited
rather than limited ends, even by highly civilized nations
in the modern era. The inhumanities of our day, which
modern tryannies exhibit in the nth degree, are due to
an idealism in which reason is turned into unreason be-
cause it is not conscious of the contingent character of
the presuppositions with which the reasoning process be-
gins, and in which idealism is transmuted into inhumanity
because the idealist seeks to comprehend the whole realm
of ends from his standpoint.

A nice symbol of this difficulty in the policy of even
"just" nations is the ironic embarrassment in which the
victorious democracies became involved in their program
of "demilitarizing" the vanquished "militaristic" nations.
In Japan they encouraged a ridiculous article in the new
constitution which committed the nation to a perpetual
pacifist defenselessness. In less than half a decade they
were forced to ask their "demilitarized" former foes to
rearm, and become allies in a common defense against
a new foe, who had recently been their victorious ally.

We cannot expect even the wisest of nations to escape
every peril of moral and spiritual complacency; for na-
tions have always been constitutionally self-righteous.
But it will make a difference whether the culture in which
the policies of nations are formed is only as deep and as
high as the nation's highest ideals; or whether there is a di-

149

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

mension in the culture from the standpoint of which the
element of vanity in all human ambitions and achieve-
ments is discerned. But this is a height which can be
grasped only by faith; for everything that is related in
terms of simple rational coherence with the ideals of a cul-
ture or a nation will prove in the end to be a simple justi-
fication of its most cherished values. The God before whom
"the nations are as a drop in the bucket and are counted
as small dust in the balances" is known by faith and not by
reason. The realm of mystery and meaning which encloses
and finally makes sense out of the baffling configurations of
history is not identical with any scheme of rational in-
telligibility. The faith which appropriates the meaning in
the mystery inevitably involves an experience of repent-
ance for the false meanings which the pride of nations
and cultures introduces into the pattern. Such repentance
is the true source of charity; and we are more desperately
in need of genuine charity than of more technocratic
skills.

150

CHAPTE R VIII
The Significance of Irony

ANY interpretation of historical patterns and configura-
tions raises the question whether the patterns, which
the observer discerns, are "objectively" true or are im-
posed upon the vast stuff of history by his imagination.
History might be likened to the confusion of spots on the
cards used by psychiatrists in a Rorschach test. The par
tient is asked to report what he sees in these spots; and
he may claim to find the outlines of an elephant, butterfly
or frog. The psychiatrist draws conclusions from these
judgments about the state of the patient's imagination
rather than about the actual configuration of spots on the
card. Are historical patterns equally subjective?

Is the discernment of an ironic element in the history of
the American nation or of modern culture merely the fruit
of a capricious imagination? Is the pattern of irony super-
imposed upon the historical data which are so various that
they would be tolerant of almost any pattern, which the
observer might care to impose? In answering such ques-
tions one must admit the subjective element in historical
judgments, but also insist upon the distinction between

151

THE IRONY OP AMERICAN HISTORY

purely arbitrary judgments and those which throw real
light upon the variegated events of history. Patterns of
meaning are arbitrary if they do violence to the facts, or
single out correlations or sequences of events, which are
so fortuitous that only some special interest or passion
could persuade the observer of the significance of the
correlation. An example of such caprice was recently
given by a politician who compared the number of people
under communist rule in 1932 with the number in 1950.
He drew the conclusion that the vast increase in the num-
ber of communist-dominated peoples (an increase which
was made particularly impressive by the addition of mil-
lions of Chinese to the total) was evidence of the com-
plicity of the "New Deal" in the spread of communism.
Such conclusions can be advanced only from the stand-
point of an obvious bias, and are credible only to an
equally biased mind.

It is possible, however, to interpret the endless and
variegated events and sequences of history from many
legitimate standpoints which are not corrupted by special
interest. But the question is whether the interpretations
have any legitimacy or credibility to the observer apart
from his acceptance of the governing principle of inter-
pretation which prompted the generalizations. To be spe-
cific, is an ironic interpretation of current history gen-
erally plausible; or does its credibility depend upon a
Christian view of history in which the ironic view seems
to be particularly grounded?

One must answer that question by insisting that there
are elements in current history so obviously ironic that
they must be patent to any observer who fulfills the con-

152

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

ditions required for the detection of irony. Nevertheless,
the consistency with which the category of the ironic is
applied to historical events does finally depend upon a
governing faith or world view.

There are sojmnjM}!^

history, particularly in our own national history because
a nation which has risen sj> quic3y^"Ifom weakness to
power and from innocency to responsibility and which
in_Fs -j oe k k^s transmuted our harmless illusions

into noxious ones is bound to h& JOTBlved Jinm
incongruities.

These ironic contrasts and incongruities, though ob-
vious, are not always observed because irony cannot be
directly experienced. The knowledge of it depends upon
an observer who is not so hostile to the victim of irony
as to deny the element of virtue which must constitute
a part of the ironic situation; nor yet so sympathetic as
to discount the weakness, the vanity and pretension which
constitute another element. Since the participant in an
ironic situation cannot, unless he be very self -critical, ful-
fill this latter condition, the knowledge of irony is usually
reserved for observers rather than participants. If par-
ticipants in an ironic situation become conscious of the
vanities and illusions which make an ironic situation more
than merely comic, they would tend to abate the preten-
sions and dissolve the irony. Purely hostile observers, on
the other hand, may laugh bitterly at the comedy in
an ironic situation, but they could not admit the virtue
in the intentions which miscarry so comically.

Individuals do, of course, have a degree of transcend-
ence over the vicissitudes of their nations and communi-

153

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ties, no matter how intimately they are involved in them.
They may, therefore, be individual observers of an ironic
situation in which they are collectively involved.

Ironic contrasts and incongruities have an element of
the comic in them in so far as they exhibit absurd juxta-
positions of strength and weakness; of wisdom through
foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt
arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency
hiding behind ostensible guilt. Yet contrasts are ironic
only if they are not merely absurd, but have a hidden
meaning. They must elicit not merely laughter but a
knowing smile. The hidden meaning is supplied by the
fact that the juxtapositions and contrasts are not merely
fortuitous. They are related to each other by some foible
of the person who is involved in both. The powerful per-
son who is proved to be really weak is involved in an
ironic contrast only if his weakness is due to some pre-
tension of strength. If "pride cometh before the fall," the
fall is ironic only if pride contributed to it. A wise person
may be ignorant in some areas of life, without his ig-
norance being ironic. It is so only if the ignorance is
derived from the pretension of wisdom.

Ironic transfigurations of weakness, foolishness and sin
have the same logic as ironic refutations of power, wis-
dom and virtue. There is no irony in a purely fortuitous
escape of a guilty man from punishment. But it is ironic
if those who are despised by their fellowmen achieve
recognition and justification in some higher court through
the very qualities which brought about their original con-
demnation; or when the naivete of babes or simpletons
becomes the source of wisdom withheld from the wise.

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

Comic incongruity is transmuted into irony, when one
element in the contrast is found to be the source of the
other.

Since ironic interpretations are difficult for reasons al-
ready mentioned they are naturally rare in history. The
combination of critical, but not hostile, detachment,
which is required for their detection, is only infrequently
attained.

Yet the Christian faith tends to make the ironic view
of human evil in history the normative one. Its concep-
tion of redemption from evil carries it beyond the limits
of irony, but its interpretation of the nature of evil in
human history is consistently ironic. This consistency is
achieved on the basis of the belief that the whole drama
of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge
who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile
to human aspirations. The laughter at the pretensions is
the divine judgment. The judgment is transmuted into
mercy if it results in abating the pretensions and in
prompting men to a contrite recognition of the vanity of
their imagination.

The Biblical interpretation of the human situation is
ironic, rather than tragic or pathetic, because of its unique
formulation of the problem of human freedom. According
to this faith man's freedom does not require his heroic
and tragic defiance of the forces of nature. He is not
necessarily involved in tragedy in his effort to be truly hu-
man. But neither is he necessarily involved in evil because
of his relation to the necessities and contingencies of the
world of nature. His situation is, therefore, not compre-
hended as a pathetic imprisonment in the confusion of

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

nature. The evil in human history is regarded as the con-
sequence of man's wrong use of his unique capacities.
The wrong use is always due to some failure to recognize
the limits of his capacities of power, wisdom and virtue.
Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is
not simply a creator but also a creature.

The Biblical conception of man's unique freedom,
which distinguishes him from the other creatures, as-
sumes his right to have dominion over nature and to make
natural forces serve human ends. Man is, therefore, not
involved in guilt merely by asserting his creative capaci-
ties. This emphasis must be distinguished from the motif
in the Promethean theme of Greek tragedy. In JEschylus'
Prometheus Bound Zeus is jealous of Prometheus because
the latter seeks to help men to achieve their true hu-
manity by elaborating the arts of civilization. Prometheus
declares: "the secret treasure of the earth, all benefits to
men, copper, iron, silver, gold . . . who but I could boast
of their discovery? No one, I ween, except in idle boasting.
Nay, hear the matter in one word: All human arts are
from Prometheus."*

According to such a conception every achievement
of human culture inevitably implies the HYBRIS which
brings the wrath of Zeus upon the human agent. This
interpretation makes life fundamentally tragic. The tragic
hero elicits the pity and admiration of both JEschylus
and the reader because he consciously defies the divine
wrath for the sake of achieving a full human creativity.
But it is apparent that the power of Zeus is essentially
that of the order of nature. Man becomes involved in evil

*jEschylus, Prometheus Bound, 490-500.

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

by breaking the harmonies of nature and exceeding its
ends.

Since modern technical achievements include the de-
velopment of atomic energy and this development has
put an almost unmanageable destructiveness into the
hands of men, this purely tragic view of human freedom
seems to have acquired a new plausibility.

Nevertheless, a purely tragic view of life is not finally
viable. It is, at any rate, not the Christian view. Accord-
ing to that view destructiveness is not an inevitable con-
sequence of human creativity. It is not invariably neces^-
sary ,to do evil in order that we may do good. There are,

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of course, tragic moments and tragic choices in life. There
are situations in which a choice must be made between
equally valid loyalties and one value must be sacrificed
to another. The contest between Antigone and Creon, for
instance, was tragic because each from his own perspec-
tive, Creon from the standpoint of the state and Antigone
from that of the family, was right. All rational resolu-
tions of such tragic dilemmas which pretend that a higher
loyalty is necessarily inclusive of a lower one, or that a
prudent compromise between competing values can al-
ways be found, are false. We have already observed the
tragic character of the dilemma which modern democratic
nations face, when forced to risk atomic warfare in order
to avoid the outbreak of war. The alternatives to this
dilemma, proposed by moralists and idealists of various
types, will prove upon close scrutiny to involve a dubious
sacrifice of some cherished value; in this instance the
security of our civilization.

While good and evil are thus so curiously intertwined in

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

history that tragic choices and dilemmas are frequent,
the Christian faith is surely right in not regarding the
tragic as the final element in human existence. The tragic
motif is, at any rate, subordinated to the ironic one be-
cause evil and destructiveness are not regarded as the
inevitable consequence of the exercise of human crea-
tivity. There is always the ideal possibility that man
will breaJTa&tt "transcend the simple harmonies and neces-
sities of nature, and yet not be destructive. For the de-
structiveness in human life is primarily the consequence
of exceeding, not the bounds of nature, but much more
ultimate limits. The God of the Bible is, like Zeus, "jeal-
ous." But His jealousy is aroused not by the achieve-
ments of culture and civilization. Man's dominion over
nature is declared to be a rightful one. Divine jealousy is
aroused by man's refusal to observe the limits of his free-
dom. There are such limits, because man is a creature
as well as creator. The limits cannot be sharply defined.
Therefore, distinctions between good and evil cannot be
made with absolute precision. But it is clear that the great
evils of history are caused by human pretensions which
are not inherent in the gift of freedom. They are a cor-
ruption of that gift. These pretensions are the source of
the ironic contrasts of strength leading to weakness, of
wisdom issuing in foolishness.

The Biblical view of human nature and destiny moves
within the framework of irony with remarkable consist-
ency. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of
Eden because the first pair allowed "the serpent" to in-
sinuate that, if only they would defy the limits which
God had set even for his most unique creature, man, they

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

would be like God. All subsequent human actions are in-
fected with a pretentious denial of human limits. But the
actions of those who are particularly wise or mighty or
righteous fall under special condemnation. The builders
of the Tower of Babel are scattered by a confusion of
tongues because they sought to build a tower which would
reach into the heavens. The possible destruction of a
technical civilization, of which the "skyscraper" is a neat
symbol, may become a modern analogue to the Tower of
Babel.

The prophets never weary of warning both the power-
ful nations, and Israel, the righteous nation, of the judg-
ment which waits on human pretension. The great nation,
Babylon, is warned that its confidence in the security of
its power will be refuted by history. "Thou saidst, I shall
be a lady for ever . . . therefore . . . these two things
shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of
children, and widowhood" (Isaiah 47:7, 9). They regard
nothing as absolutely secure in human life and history;
and believe that every desperate effort to establish se-
curity will lead to heightened insecurity. The great nation
is likened unto a cedar whose boughs are higher than all
other trees. This eminence tempts it to forget "that the
waters made it great and the deep set it on high," which
is to say that every human achievement avails itself of,
but also obscures, forces of destiny beyond human con-
trivance. In consequence of this miscalculation Babylon
will fall prey to "the terrible of the nations/' to remind
all the trees in the garden that they are "marked unto
death." No human eminence can escape the limits of
man's mortality (Ezekiel 31).

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The ironic aspect of power and security being involved
in weakness and insecurity by reason of stretching beyond
their limits is matched by the irony of virtue turning into
vice. The Pharisee is condemned and the publican pre-
ferred because the former "thanks God" that he is "not
like other men." He seeks desperately but futilely to
cover common human frailties by a meticulous legalism.
Israel is undoubtedly a "good" nation as compared with
the great nations surrounding it. But the pretensions of
virtue are as offensive to God as the pretensions of power.
One has the uneasy feeling that America as both a power-
ful nation and as a "virtuous" one is involved in ironic
perils which compound the experiences of Babylon and
Israel.

There is irony in the Biblical history as well as in Bib-
lical admonitions. Christ is crucified by the priests of the
purest religion of his day and by the minions of the
justest, the Roman Law. The fanaticism of the priests is
the fanaticism of all good men, who do not know that
they are not as good as they esteem themselves. The
complacence of Pilate represents the moral mediocrity of
all communities, however just. They cannot distinguish
between a criminal and the Saviour because each violates
the laws and customs which represent some minimal
order, too low for the Saviour and too high for the
criminal.

The crown of irony lies in the fact that the most ob-
vious forms of success are involved in failure on the ul-
timate level. "Not many wise men after the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble are called" (I Corinthians 1:26).
The Saviour came "not to call the righteous but sinners

160

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

to repentance." He is a physician who came to minister
not to them "that are whole" but to them "that are sick"
(Matthew 9:12). The words are deeply ironic because
"they that are whole" are obviously not healthy in his
estimation precisely because they think they are. Those
"who are sick" are those who know themselves to be so.

The Christian interpretation of ironic failure has its
counterpart in the conception of ironic success. If the
pretension of wisdom may issue in foolishness, the final
wisdom, which is "withheld from the wise," may be "re-
vealed unto babes." There may be a wholeness of view
among the simple which grasps ultimate truths, not seen
by the sophisticated. The "rich fool" is excoriated because
he tries to gain complete security for the future ; and the
poor are blessed. The kingdom of heaven is likened unto
a feast, invitations to which are spurned by the respect-
able and extended to the "maimed, the halt, and the
blind" (Luke 14:15-24).

Superficially the Biblical preference for "sinners," for
the poor, the foolish, the maimed, the sick, and the weak
seems to be just as perverse a "transvaluation of values"
as Nietzsche charged. Its justification lies in the fact that
as certainly as failure may ironically issue from pride
and pretension, so also may success of a high order be
derived from seeming failure. The Christian faith is cen-
tered in a person who was as "the stone which the build-
ers rejected" and who became the "head of the corner."
The sick are preferred to the healthy, as the sinners are
preferred to the righteous, because their lack of health
prompts them to an humility which is the prerequisite
of every spiritual achievement. The poor are blessed and

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

a "woe" is pronounced upon the rich for the same reason.
For as wealth and power lead to pride, so weakness and
poverty tend to remind men of the limits of human
achievement. The ironic success which issues from the
various types of failure in Biblical thought is of course
not a success which is recorded in history. It belongs to
a transcendent divine judgment of Him "who resisteth
the proud and giveth grace to the humble." It is the sym-
bol of the potential contradiction between all historic
achievement and the final meaning of life.

The relevance between the Christian interpretation of
ironic failures, issuing from obvious success, and our con-
temporary experience is obvious enough. But the Chris-
tian interpretation does not seem to fit those facets of
our experience in which we are under indictment of guilt
by friend and foe without just cause. That we should be
less innocent as a nation than our fathers hoped; that
we should be covered with guilt by assumption of the
very responsibilities which express virtue; that we should
become less powerful in relation to the total historical
pattern as we become more powerful in given historical
issues; that the happiness which our fathers regarded as
the true end of life should have eluded us, all this fits
very well into the pattern of ironic failure. In all of them
human limitations catch up with human pretensions.

But in those ironic experiences, in which our very vir-
tues become the occasion for mistrust against us, our his-
tory does not seem to fit into the general Christian pat-
tern of irony. According to that pattern the poor and

162

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY
outcast, demised of their fellows, are fcaUj^ exalted

D^er hand, are condemned by an impoverished
jworld because" w^~ aWf oHuhi^ andjrich. While

we are certainly not as virtuous as we pretend to be, our
good fortune is not so~ simply a proof of our injustice
as our Marxist detractors assert. What shall we make of
this kind of ironic experience, in which riches rather than
poverty, and power rather than weakness, have become
the occasion of false judgments?

The force of these judgments against us is partly de-
rived from a perversion of the Biblical interpretation of
irony. Marxism is a secularized version of Christian apoc-
alypse in which the beatitude, "Blessed are the poor,"
becomes the basis of unqualified political and moral judg-
ments. The rich, the wise and the powerful are undoubt-
edly less humble than the poor, the weak and the naive.
They are, therefore, at a spiritual disadvantage in the
final court of divine judgment. But this does not prove
that they are morally inferior to the poor in every court
of judgment. Even in the final judgment there is no
guarantee that poverty will be accompanied by the virtue
of humility. Significantly the two reports of this beatitude
in Luke and Matthew translate the phrase which Jesus
undoubtedly used, and which means "the poor of the
land," differently. In the Lukan version the beatitude is
rendered, "Blessed are the poor/ 3 and in the Matthean
version it is "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Both ver-
sions are necessary to catch the full flavor of the beati-
tude. For the Lukan version alone would make poverty
a guarantee of virtue, particularly of the virtue of hu-
mility, which it is not. The Matthean version alone, how-

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ever, misses the "existential element." It might encourage
the idea that humility of spirit is unrelated to the for-
tunes of life. It is related. Those who succeed in life,
whether by the acquisition of power, wealth, or wisdom,
do incline to value their achievements too highly and to
forget the fragmentary character of all human achieve-
ments. The Matthean version alone would make the other
word of Christ, "How hardly will those that are rich enter
the kingdom of heaven," meaningless. It is a necessary
word which emphasizes the moral hazards of success.

The Marxist religious apocalypse, on the other hand,
destroys every reservation about the relation of success
to virtue. It transmutes a judgment which is intended to
stand as a religious warning against the pretensions of
the historically successful into a simple category of his-
torical judgment.

The poor are not actually as disinterested and pure as
the Marxist apocalypse assumes. They do have fewer
interests to defend than the rich. But though their jus-
tified resentments against injustice may be a creative
force in history, their bitterness and their compensatory
Utopian visions may as frequently be sources of confusion
as the social pride of the successful. Utopia is, in fact,
"the ideology of the poor."* Invariably those who suffer
from the arrogance or the power of others wrongfully as-
sume that the evils from which they suffer are solely the
consequence of the peculiar malice of their oppressors; and
fail to recognize the root of the same evils in themselves.
Thus, the intellectuals of the Orient actually engage in
serious arguments on the question whether it would be

*CJ. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia.

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

possible for an Oriental nation to be "imperialistic/' In
the same way members of minority ethnic groups in-
variably assume that racial arrogance is a peculiar vice
of the group which causes their suffering.

In the Marxist apocalypse one error is piled upon an-
other with regard to the virtue of the poor. They are not
only assumed to be completely disinterested or to have
interests absolutely identical with the interests of the
whole of mankind. But also no thought is given to the
fact that if they become historically successful they will
cease to be poor. Furthermore, the oligarchy, which pre-
sumes to speak for the poor claims to participate in their
supposed sanctity. To cap the mountain of errors, the poor,
to whom all virtue is ascribed, are identified with the
industrial proletariat. This latter error becomes a more
and more vicious source of confusion as communism seeks
to conquer great peasant civilizations. One reason for the
fanatic collectivization program is to be found in the com-
munist effort to transmute peasants into industrial work-
ers by changing farms into "grain factories."

All these errors enter into the monstrous evils of com-
munism. It has transmuted religious truths, intended to
warn against the element of pretension in all human
achievements into political slogans, effective in organiz-
ing a political movement in which these very pretensions
achieve a noxious virulence of unparalleled proportions.
This is one reason, and perhaps the chief reason, why the
communist alternative to the injustices of our civilization
has universally created greater injustices and hatched
more terrible tyrannies than previously known in history.
Perhaps it is the crowning irony of our day that the vir-

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

tues of the poor should thus have become a screen of
sanctity for their not so virtuous resentments; that an
oligarchy should have found a way to harness these re-
sentments into engines of political power; and that this
power should have been used for a program which not
only despoils the rich but also defrauds the poor.

Irony must be distinguished as sharply from pathos as
from tragedy. A pathetic situation is usually not as fully
in the consciousness of those who are involved in it as
a tragic one. A tragic choice is purest when it is deliberate.
But pathos is constituted of essentially meaningless cross-
purposes in life, of capricious confusions of fortune and
painful frustrations. Pathos, as such, yields no fruit of
nobility, though it is possible to transmute pathos into
beauty by the patience with which pain is borne or by
a vicarious effort to share the burdens of another. Thus,
the situation in a displaced persons camp may be essen-
tially pathetic; but it may be shot through with both
tragedy and grace, through the nobility of victims of a
common inhumanity in bearing each other's sorrows. One
who is involved in a pathetic situation may be conscious
of the pathos without thereby dissolving it. We can, after
all, pity ourselves. But consciousness of the pathos does
not dissolve it since the participant does not bear re-
sponsibility for it. He is the victim of untoward circum-
stances; or he has been caught in the web of mysterious
and fateful forces in which no meaning can be discerned
and from which no escape is possible.
An ironic situation is distinguished from a pathetic

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

one by the fact that a person involved in it bears some
responsibility for it. It is distinguished from a tragic one
by the fact that the responsibility is not due to a con-
scious choice but to an unconscious weakness. Don
Quixote's ironic espousal and refutation of the ideals of
knight errantry may be detected by the reader whose
imagination is guided by the artist-observer, Cervantes.
But Don Quixote is as unconscious of the absurdity of
his imitation of the ideals of chivalry as the knights are
unconscious of the fraudulence of their ideals.

Elements of irony, tragedy or pathos may, of course be
detected in life and history without any guiding principle
of interpretation. All three types of experience are occa-
sionally so vividly presented that they compel the ob-
server either to the combination of pity and admiration
which implies tragedy; or to the pure pity which pathos
elicits; or to the laughter and understanding which are the
response to irony.

But a basic faith or ultimate presupposition of mean-
ing will determine which of these three categories is re-
garded as the most significant frame of meaning for the
interpretation of life as a whole. If man is regarded as a
noble creature who must prove his humanity primarily
by "defying the trampling march of unconscious power"
(Bertrand Russell), the interpretation of life becomes
basically tragic. If man is regarded primarily as a prisoner
of dark and capricious forces with no possibility of tri-
umphing over the vast confusion of life the interpreta-
tion of life becomes basically pathetic.

The Christian preference for an ironic interpretation
is derived not merely from its conception of the nature

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

of human freedom, according to which man's transcend-
ence over nature endows him with great creative pos-
sibilities which are, however, not safe against abuse and
corruption. It is also derived from its faith that life has
a center and source of meaning beyond the natural and
social sequences which may be rationally discerned. This
divine source and center must be discerned by faith be-
cause it is enveloped in mystery, though being the basis
of meaning. So discerned, it yields a frame of meaning in
which human freedom is real and valid and not merely
tragic or illusory. But it is also recognized that man is
constantly tempted to overestimate the degree of his
freedom and forget that he is also a creature. Thus he
becomes involved in pretensions which result in ironic
refutations of his pride.

Naturally an interpretation of life which emphasizes
the dire consequences of vain pretensions and sees them
ironically refuted by actual experience must induce those
who accept the interpretation to moderate the pretensions
which create the irony. Consciousness of an ironic situa-
tion tends to dissolve it. It may be dissolved into pure
despair or hatred. If, for instance, a nation should regard
the accusations of injustice, which are made against it,
as prompted purely by the malice of neighbor or foe;
if it should fail to understand how our very confidence
in our own justice may lead to unjust demands upon our
friends, its mood may turn either into despair about the
seeming confusion of counsel in human affairs or into
hatred of the malicious accuser. An ironic smile must
turn into bitter laughter or into bitterness without
laughter if no covert relation is acknowledged between

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

an unjust indictment and the facts of the case. If, on
the other hand, a religious sense of an ultimate judgment
upon our individual and collective actions should create
an awareness of our own pretensions of wisdom, virtue
or power which have helped to fashion the ironic incon-
gruity, the irony would tend to dissolve into the experi-
ence of contrition and to an abatement of the pretensions
which caused the irony. This alternative between con-
trition on the one hand and fury and hatred on the other
hand faces nations as well as individuals. It is, in fact,
the primary spiritual alternative of human existence. The
question for a nation, particularly for a very powerful
nation, is whether the necessary exercise of its virtue in
meeting ruthlessness and the impressive nature of its
power will blind it to the ambiguity of all human virtues
and competencies; or whether even a nation might have
some residual awareness of the larger meanings of the
drama of human existence beyond and above the imme-
diate urgencies.

The difficulties in facing this issue are threefold. In
the first place nations (and, for that matter, all com-
munities as distinguished from individuals) do not easily
achieve any degree of self -transcendence, for they have
only inchoate organs of self-criticism. That is why col-
lective man always tends to be morally complacent, self-
righteous and lacking in a sense of humor. This tendency
is accentuated in our own day by the humorless idealism
of our culture with its simple moral distinctions between
good and bad nations, the good nations being those which
are devoted to "liberty."

The second reason for our difficulty in sensing the

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ironies in which we are involved is our encounter with
a foe the fires of whose hostility are fed by an even more
humorless pretension. No laughter from heaven could
possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-ap-
preciation in which the religion of communism abounds.
Goaded by this hostility and wounded by unjust charges
it is difficult to admit any ironic ambiguity in our virtues
or achievements. Thus we are tempted to meet the foe's
self-righteousness with a corresponding fury of our own.
The sense of a more ultimate judgment upon us is ob-
scured by the injustice of immediate hostile judgments.
This is why a frantic anti-communism can become so
similar in its temper of hatefulness to communism itself,
the difference in the respective creeds being unable to
prevent the similarity of spirit. Therefore we must not
speak too glibly about the spirit of "humanity" and "hu-
maneness" in our civilized world. For the spirit of hu-
manity is not preserved primarily by a correct definition
of the nature of "humanitas" but rather by an existential
awareness of the limits, as well as the possibilities of
human power and goodness.

There is the final difficulty that involvement in the
actual urgencies of history, even when men and nations
are confronted with less vindictiveness than communism
generates, makes the detachment, necessary for the de-
tection of irony, difficult. Could Tolstoi have written his
ironic interpretation of Napoleon's invasion of Russia at
the time of that struggle? Would it have been imagina-
tively possible for him or tolerable for his readers? Tol-
stoi delighted in proving that the conscious intent of the
participants in the struggle had little to do with its deeper

170

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

meaning. It was, in fact, his thesis that the momentous
consequences of the conflict were achieved by inadvert-
ence rather than conscious intent. He was perhaps too
scornful of the conscious purposes of the participants.
"The best generals I have known," he wrote, "were stupid
and absent-minded men Napoleon Bonaparte himself.
I remember his limited self-satisfied face at Austerlitz.
Not only does a good army commander not need any
special qualities of love, poetry, tenderness and philo-
sophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly con-
vinced that what he is doing is very important . . . and
only then will he be a brave leader."

Yet the situation of the participant in historic strug-
gles is not quite as desperate, spiritually, as Tolstoi as-
sumes. We might well consider the spiritual attainments
of our greatest President during our Civil War as a refu-
tation of such pessimism. Lincoln's responsibilities pre-
cluded the luxury of the simple detachment of an irre-
sponsible observer. Yet his brooding sense of charity was
derived from a religious awareness of another dimension
of meaning than that of the immediate political conflict.
"Both sides/' he declared, "read the same Bible and pray
to the same God. The prayers of both could not be
answered that of neither has been answered fully."

Lincoln's awareness of the element of pretense in the
idealism of both sides was rooted in his confidence in an
over-arching providence whose purposes partly contra-
dicted and were yet not irrelevant to the moral issues of
the conflict. "The Almighty has His own purposes," he
declared; but he also saw that such purposes could not
annul the moral purposes of men who were "firm in the

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THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

right as God gives us to see the right." Slavery was to
be condemned even if it claimed divine sanction, for:
"It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask
a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the
sweat of other men's faces." Yet even this moral condem-
nation of slavery is followed by the scriptural reservation:
"But let us judge not, that we be not judged/'

This combination of moral resoluteness about the im-
mediate issues with a religious awareness of another di-
mension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as
almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible
task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral
treasures of a free civilization on the one hand while yet
having some religious vantage point over the struggle.
Surely it was this double attitude which made the spirit
of Lincoln's, "with malice toward none; with charity for
all" possible. There can be no other basis for true charity;
for charity cannot be induced by lessons from copybook
texts. It can proceed only from a "broken spirit and a
contrite heart."

Applied to the present situation Lincoln's model would
rule out the cheap efforts which are frequently made to
find some simple moral resolution of our conflict with
communism. Modern communist tyranny is certainly as
wrong as the slavery which Lincoln opposed. We do not
solve any problem by interpreting it as a slightly more
equalitarian version of a common democracy which we
express in slightly more libertarian terms. The hope that
the conflict is no more than this and could be composed
if only we could hold a seminar on the relative merits of
equalitarian and libertarian democracy, is, in fact, an

172

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRONY

expression of sentimental softness in a liberal culture and
reveals its inability to comprehend the depth of evil to
which individuals and communities may sink, particu-
larly when they try to play the role of God to history.

Lincoln's model also rules out our effort to establish
the righteousness of our cause by a monotonous reitera-
tion of the virtues of freedom compared with the evils of
tyranny. This comparison may be true enough on one
level; but it offers us no insight into the corruptions of
freedom on our side and it gives us no understanding of
the strange attractive power of communism in a chaotic
and impoverished world.

We do, to be sure, face a problem which Lincoln did
not face. We cannot say, "Both sides read the same Bible
and pray to the same God." We are dealing with a con-
flict between contending forces which have no common
presuppositions. But even in this situation it is very
dangerous to define the struggle as one between a God-
fearing and a godless civilization. The communists are
dangerous not because they are godless but because they
have a god (the historical dialectic) who, or which, sanc-
tifies their aspiration and their power as identical with
the ultimate purposes of life. We, on the other, as all
"God-fearing" men of all ages, are never safe against the
temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier
of whatever we most fervently desire. Even the most
"Christian" civilization and even the most pious church
must be reminded that the true God can be known only
where there is some awareness of a contradiction between
divine and human purposes, even on the highest level of
human aspirations.

173

THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with
whom we have little in common the possibility and neces-
sity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the
urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of
awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which
we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the
virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolu-
tion of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the
common human frailties and foibles which lie at the
foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vani-
ties; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies
which are promised to those who humble themselves.

Strangely enough, none of the insights derived from
this faith are finally contradictory to our purpose and
duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact,
prerequisites for saving it. For if we should perish, the
ruthlessness of the foe would be only the 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 of the struggle; and the blindness
would be induced not by some accident of nature or his-
tory but by hatred and vainglory.

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