Reinhold Niebuhr
in tms if IN wMrast between the hopes of ow forefathers
aul tie reality of oir present sttuMm
973 N66i 63-08035
llebuhr
The irony of American history.
114800672 9115
THE IRONY OF
AMERICAN HISTORY
BY
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
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.*
8
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-
10
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.
2
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
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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.
16
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
17
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.
18
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
19
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.
20
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-
21
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
22
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.
23
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
25
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.
26
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.
27
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.
28
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,
29
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.
30
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.
31
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
32
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
33
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-
34
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-
35
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
36
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
37
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"
38
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
39
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
40
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-
41
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.
42
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
43
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.
44
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.
45
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
46
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
47
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
48
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."
49
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
50
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.
52
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.
53
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
54
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
55
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.
56
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
57
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
58
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-
59
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?
60
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-
61
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-
62
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
63
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.
64
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.
65
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
66
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
67
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.
68
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
69
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 a
