One of the most bracing books I read for doctoral work was Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1932 classic, Moral Man and Immoral Society. I pulled it off the shelf this week while thinking about Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Michael Brown, Staten Island, Eric Garner, the Cleveland police and so on, and so on.
Written to pierce any surviving liberal optimism as the Roaring ’20s gave way to the disastrous ’30s, Niebuhr’s primary thesis concerns the effects of sin on human society and, in particular, on human collectivities or groups. Niebuhr says that all human life is marked by sin, especially in the forms of ignorance and selfishness, but at least the individual sometimes demonstrates the potential to rise above ignorance and selfishness to reach rational analysis and unselfish concern for others. Human groups, on the other hand, are both more stupid and more selfish than individuals. They seem especially impervious either to rational or moral appeal, easily prone to self-deception and demagoguery, and apparently needful of the imposition of a power greater than their own power if they are to accede to any changes that cut against their own self-interest.
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