American Ironies

I don’t buy everything in Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History , especially his insistence that there is no power without guilt because no exercise of power is “transcendent over interest” (Can a gift be given? Same question). Still, the book is as relevant and important now, perhaps more so, than when it was written over a half-century ago.

Niebuhr, for instance, has a great deal of insight into the character of American religion. He traces the easy American conflation of virtue and prosperity to stranges within Puritanism that quickly lost “religious aw before and gratitude for ‘unmerited’ mercies” and quickly turned into congratulations to “God on the virtues and ideals of the American people, which have so well merited the blessings of prosperity we enjoy.” He quotes Tocqueville to good effect: “Not only do Americans follow religion from interest but they place in this world the interest which makes them follow it.” Remember, this is a man who never heard of Joel Osteen or Benny Hinn.

He also recognizes the corrosive effects that America’s technological prowess has had on culture. That we have more and more people in high school and college “has not had the effect of making us the most ‘intelligent’ nation, whether we measure intelligence in terms of social wisdom, aesthetic discrimination, spiritual serenity or any other basic human achievement. 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.”

Written near the beginning of the Cold War, Irony is resolutely anti-communist, but also warns that the “realist” argument that “a good cause will hallow any weapon” tempts us to “approach the communist ruthlessness.” He recognizes the global extent of American power, and that this is largely economic rather than directly political power: “the overt military power which we wield has been directly draw from the economic power, derived from the wealth of our natural resources and our technical efficiency.” And, we may add, military power is wielded to protect economic power.

Above all, he diagnoses the myth of American innocence. While recognizing that “No powerful nation in history has ever been more reluctant to acknowledge the position it has achieved in the world than we,” he also sees that America was “never as innocent as we pretended to be, even as a child is not as innocent as it implied in the use of the child as the symbol of innocency.” Our delusions of innocence make it difficult for us to engage the world constructively: “We expect Asians to be grateful 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.”