Writing on theology and ethics
and their application to politics and economics in An Interpretation of Christian
Ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr runs the risk of fusing the respective domains,
which I maintain are qualitatively different, and thereby minimizing or losing outright
what is unique to each domain. Besides occasioning category mistakes, such as
in labeling divine love as ethical rather than as distinctly theological, overreaches
from one domain onto another even at the expense of the other’s own criteria
can occur from the underlying error. Besides being extant in Niebuhr’s text, the
conflation of distinct domains and the related overreaches of their respective
criteria has exacerbated the long-standing conflict between the Jews and Arabs
in what was Palestine when Niebuhr was writing his book on Christian ethics in
which he discusses the sheer intractability of the conflict.
In Niebuhr’s view, “the full
evil of human finitude and sin is most vividly revealed in conflicts between
national communities.”[1]
Such conflicts “present a tragic revelation of the impossibility of the law of
love because no party to the conflict has a perspective high enough to judge
the merits of the opponent’s position.”[2]
That is to say, every perspective is partial, and thus partisan, rather
than wholistic containing tensions and even outright contradictions. “Every
appeal to moral standards thus degenerates into a moral justification of the
self against the enemy.”[3]
To Niebuhr, “self-love is never justified.”[4]
This is so both ethically and in religious terms. On the ethical level, Niebuhr
insists that, “In spite of the relativity of morals every conceivable moral
code and every philosophy of morals enjoins concern for the life and welfare of
the other and seeks to restrain the unqualified assertion of the interests of
the self against the other.”[5]
Any moral justification on behalf of one’s own side against one’s enemy cannot
be construed as moral, but, rather, immoral qua egoist. In terms of religion,
Niebuhr wrote that “human egoism . . . is sin only from the perspective of the
law of love.”[6]
Here, Niebuhr’s statement would be more congruent on the religious level if
self-love, which is a sin, were substituted for egoism, which is an ethical term.
Self-love is a sin because it goes against charity, meaning love in a distinctive
religious sense (i.e., caritas). The seventeenth-century Jansenist
priest in Europe, Pierre Nicole, penned an essay railing against self-love
precisely because it is antithetical to charity understood as love (rather than
as philanthropy); even enlightened self-interest is still of sordid self-love
and thus not at all consisting of love.
In Niebuhr’s discussion of international
conflicts between nations in which distinctly religious love, such as manifests
in compassion rather than hatred to enemies, is wholly absent, and taking into
account the squalid theological idolatry of self-love that places love of self above
love directed to an externally-based divine (e.g., God), Niebuhr’s theological
claim, “Parties to a dispute inevitably make themselves judges over it and thus
fall into the sin of pretending to be God,” is hardly surprising.[7]
The gravitas of self-love that renders any combative perspective partisanship (i.e.,
partial) is ultimately sourced in self-idolatry, hence presumptuous
infallibility and the presumed universalizability of one’s perspective as absolute
can be expected. In the mid-2020s, in the midst of Israel’s militaristic
decimation of Gaza, which went far beyond the damage that had been committed by
Hamas in an attack in Israel in 2023, Niebuhr’s distinctly theological claim
readily applies, and may even explain the longstanding intransigence of the
aggressor in the multi-year operation that went far beyond justice to vengeance,
which, incidentally, is supposed to belong to Yahweh alone.[8]
Writing in the mid-1930s,
hence prior to the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Niebuhr perceived
the “rivalry between Jews and Arabs in Palestine” as “a conflict between two
races and religions, involving not only the natural will-to-live of two
collective racial organisms, but [also] the economic differences between the
feudalism of the Arabs and the technical civilization which the Jews [were]
able to introduce into Palestine.”[9]
From a standpoint in time after many decades from the establishment of Israel,
it is easy in hindsight to grasp the superiority of the technical civilization not
only economically, but also militarily. Even in the 1930s, the conflict must
have been generally perceived as frozen in terse intractability. The rule of
love based on forgiveness, as in being compassionate to enemies, was so far
from the contending mentalities and emotions in Palestine that Niebuhr’s more
general claim that such love is impossible in the world of politics appears to
be tenable (even though I disagree with his claim).
So, in utter futility, Niebuhr
asks his readers rhetorically, “How can a high enough rational and moral
perspective be found to arbitrate the issue between” the Jews and Arabs in
Palestine? “How is the ancient and hereditary title of the Jew to Palestine to
be measured against the right of the Arab’s present possession? Or how is one
to judge the relative merits of modern Jewish against ancient Moslem culture
without introducing criteria which are involved in and do not transcend the
struggle?”[10] Both
peoples had some historical presence in the region, and the involvement of religion
and questions of ethics in this mess renders the conflict that Niebuhr perceived
in the 1930s as even more intractable. Conflating all of these domains doesn’t
help.
For example, the claim that
the Jews had a hereditary title is dubious if it comes out of a
religious story, or myth, and has been superimposed on the political domain,
for the religious and political domains are arguably distinct—each having its
own unique basis—so criteria from one of the domains supervening on those of
the other can be flagged as an overreaching encroachment and thus as out of bounds,
to evoke sports. Put another way, the jurisdiction of material in the mythic
genre does not extend into the political world, whose genre is that of
political power rather than faith narratives. So, it would be more accurate to
say politically and culturally that both the Jew and the Arab had (conflicting)
historical interests in occupying the land.
Replacing the theological dimension
with that of ethics and basing that on history, even fusing these two domains, is
also problematic. Niebuhr disparages that the “(p)articipants cannot find a
common ground of rational morality from which to arbitrate the issues because
the moral judgments which each bring to them are formed by the very historical
forces which are in conflict. Such conflicts are therefore sub- and
supra-moral.”[11]
In other words, ethical analysis would get only so far, rather than resulting
in a definitive should that both parties would accept as legitimate as
taking into account their respective interests and histories.
At this point, Niebuhr shifts
back from the ethical to the religious level of analysis, but even in spiritual
terms, he was not optimistic. “The effort to bring such a conflict under the
dominion of a spiritual unity may be partly successful,” he admits, but then he
observes that such efforts had “always [produced] a tragic by-product of the
spiritual accentuation of natural conflict.”[12]
Even though religion “may be regarded as the last and final effort of the human
spirit to escape relativity and gain a vantage-point in the eternal,” the “introduction
of religious motives into these conflicts [has usually been] no more than the
final and most demonic pretension.”[13]
In other words, the presence of religious motives on both sides contributed to
the sheer intransigence of the antipodal political positions.
Again, warding off distinctly religious
content from the turf of actual geopolitics between nations in the context of
international relations is advisable, but distinguishing related domains is
easier said than done, given the proclivity of the human mind to agglomerate different
strands as if they were essentially the same stuff. This tendency is especially
egregious when at least one of the domains, along with its criteria, is unique
and thus not just different from the others. Given the tendency to project or
apply religious meaning onto geopolitics, it is worth taking into
account Niebuhr’s suggestion that “a contrite recognition of the finiteness and
relativity which characterizes human spirituality, even in its moments of
yearning for the transcendent,” is necessary in applying religion to
political/cultural conflicts between nations lest the “religious aspiration” be
“transmuted into sinful dishonesty” and thus make the political matters even worse.[14]
In other words, without spiritual humility in line with the true situs of finite
creatures, which of course are not deities and thus are not omniscient or
omnipotent, religious beliefs can easily become weapons even in the midst of stultifying
cognitive dissidence.
Hence Niebuhr laments, “Historical
religions, which crown the structure of historic cultures, thus become the most
brutal weapons in the conflict between cultures.”[15]
This happens too much, and at least part of the problem, I submit, is that
religious meaning is so often conflated with differing genres or domains,
including those of history, politics, and even ethics. A religious
entitlement to land, a title whose jurisdiction is limited to the religious
domain, is not itself a political statement. Put another way, the criteria in
the domain of religion that undergird the religious claim of being chosen by a
deity, or even a shared deity, for the land, or even a chosen people, do not override
the criteria of political power that are sovereign in and innate to the political
domain; in fact, the criteria innate to religion do not even have validity
there.
I contend that religious
meaning, as in what religious scholars classify as myth (i.e., a religious
story with a message), is qualitatively different, as well as unique, from the contents
that are “home grown” in other, even related, domains. International disputes
stand a better chance of being mitigated and even solved if all the combatants would
“get on the same page” in the sense of focusing on the distinctly political
criteria of international relations, whether the criteria are based on international
law or the nature of power itself in the state of nature as described by Thomas
Hobbes in his classic text, Leviathan. Diverging interpretations of a
passage in a distinctly religious text need not complicate matters that could
perhaps be solved politically, especially if those interpretations are subject to
the gravitas of self-love and thus partial. At the very least, the contention
that a convenient interpretation of one’s own text has universal validity incurs
a conflict of interest even just in religious terms. For example, the statement,
my sacred book says I get to win, inherently lacks credibility, and incurs
the “extra-jurisdictional” overreaching of religious content onto the political
domain of winning territory.
Category mistakes,
consolidation, and especially presumptuous overreaches of one domain’s criteria
into another domain even at the expense of that other domain’s own, sovereign
criteria have been committed so much that they may be taken for granted, as
valid, even as we look back at the Catholic Church’s overreaching onto
Galileo’s valid scientific criteria and scoff at the theological
overreach. The world is at the center of Genesis in that religious text,
but this does not mandate or justify presuming that the religious meaning
is astronomical in nature and applying theological criteria onto those belonging
to astronomy. From the other direction, foisting criteria of the domain of
history onto a faith narrative also counts as an overreach—in this case, at the
expense of the sui generis (literally “of its own genus”) religious
domain and its own criteria. From such errors, even peaceful international
relations can be thwarted.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 64.
5. Ibid., p. 116.
6. Ibid., p. 124.
7. Ibid., p. 136.
10. Ibid., p. 137.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 137-38.
