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The Best of the 1940s Articles December 1945 Will Civilization Survive Technics? First in the series ‘The Crisis of the Individual.’ Reinhold Niebuhr March 1946 The Crisis in Human History The danger of the retreat to individualism. John Dewey March 1946 The Jewish Delicatessen The evolution of an institution. Ruth Glazer April 1946 The Solitary We must be one family. Pearl Buck April 1946 My Beginnings A chapter from an autobiography. Mark Chagall May 1946 The Jewish State: Fifty Years After Where have Herzl’s politics led? Hannah Arendt June 1946 The Dilemma of Our Times Noble ends and ignoble means. Arthur Koestler September 1947 America the Beautiful The humanist in the bathtub. Mary McCarthy January & February 1948 Nietzsche in the Light of Modern Experience In two parts. Thomas Mann February 1948 The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948 The vicious cycle of frustration and prejudice. James Baldwin May 1948 The Two Great Traditions The Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. Abraham Joshua Heschel October 1948 Britain’s Struggle for Survival The Labor government after three years. George Orwell February 1949 Can Western Civilization Save Itself? Our present anxiety in the light of history. Arnold J. Toynbee July 1949 The Intellectuals and the Jewish Community The hope for our heritage in America. Elliot E. Cohen December 1945 July 1949 The Vindictive and the Merciful Will Civilization Survive Technics? First in the series ‘The Crisis of the Individual.’ God of wrath and God of love. Milton Himmelfarb Reinhold Neibuhr March 1946 The Crisis in Human History The danger of the retreat to individualism. John Dewey March 1946 The Jewish Delicatessen The evolution of an institution. Ruth Glazer April 1946 The Solitary We must be one family. Pearl Buck April 1946 My Beginnings A chapter from an autobiography. Mark Chagall May 1946 The Jewish State: Fifty Years After Where have Herzl’s politics led?. Hannah Arendt December 1945 Will Civilization Survive Technics? First in the series ‘The Crisis of the Individual.’ Reinhold Niebuhr HE DIAGNOSTICIANS of a historical crisis usually see one or the other di- mension of the crisis. They see either the political-social maladjustments in the body of civilization, or the philosophical-religious weaknesses in the spirit of a culture; and attribute our difficulties solely to the one or to the other. This is analogous to a neurologist and a psychiatrist cooperat- ing in the diagnosis of a patient and creating confusion because the one attributes his illness to purely physical, and the other to purely psychic causes. TThere have, for instance, been many diagnoses of the collapse of France in which the defeat of France has been attributed to a variety of causes, spiritual and physical, running all the way from the effect of 18th-century philosophy upon French morale, through the disintegration of the French family, and ending with technical aspects of French military inadequacy. All of these diagnoses may have been true on their own level. But no one has sought to present a theory of breakdown which would bring all the diagnoses into a consistent whole. Reinhold Niebuhr was an influential figure in American intellectual life who com- bined a disciplined theology with with a radical political philosophy. He was professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. This essay is first in the series “The Crisis of the Individual.” Reinhold Neibuhr The present crisis in our culture and our civilization is certainly wide and deep enough to involve, and probably to have been caused by maladjustments on all levels of our existence. On the political and economic level the situation is fairly clear. Our crisis is due to the fact that we have not been able to develop political and social instruments which are adequate for the kind of a society which a technical civilization makes possible and necessary. The atomic bomb is in a sense only the most recent and the most dramatic symbol of this deep inner con- tradiction which cleaves our whole society. The ever increasing introduction of technics into the fields of production and communications constantly enlarges the intensity and extent of social cohesion in modern man’s common life; and also tends constantly to centralize effective economic power. The effect of technics upon communications is to create a potential world community, which we have not been able to actualize morally and politically. The effect of technics upon production is to create greater and greater disproportions of economic power and thus to make the achievement of justice difficult. The one represents the international as- pect of our crisis and the other the domestic aspect. We might well consider each in turn. N THE level of international life Nazism was a form of tyranny which grew in the soil of international anarchy and sought to overcome that anarchy by the O coerced unification of the world. Had not the several nations felt themselves irresponsible toward the duty of maintaining the liberties of each against the threat of aggression, Nazism could not have come within an ace of achieving success. Nations have not, of course, ever accepted a very high degree of responsibility for each other’s welfare. But modern technics had created a world-community in embryo. It was by the use of modern technics that one nation could gain the military power to make world- domination a plausible military goal. It therefore became necessary to develop political instruments through which the nations of the world would express and implement a worldwide sense of common responsibility. Since it was not possible to take such a step quickly the tyrannical threat almost succeeded. Indeed it is still far from certain even now that we will have adequate instruments, or a sufficiently universal moral sense, to solve the problems of community on a world- wide scale. The political instruments that have been constructed at the San Francisco Conference are obviously of only minimal efficacy for the purposes for which they are intended. They could not be made much better because of a lack in the moral imagina- tion of the nations. Each of the great powers is still more interested in strategic security for the event of another conflict than it is in security against conflict. The systems of unilateral security which have been more or less artfully combined with a general system of mutual security may very easily vitiate the power of the mutual system. We have, for this reason, no right to hope that we are at the end of the crisis of our age on the level of the international problem. It is possible indeed that we may live in this crisis for centuries. The task of building Will Civilization Survive Technics? a genuine world-community is greater than any generation can solve; and it may be too great for the resources of a century. The enormity of the task is usually underestimated. Our cultural presuppositions are such that we have not understood the tragic character of history or the difficulty of historic achievements. The present-day world community is held together by economic interdependence created by modern technics; and is threatened by the technical elaboration of instru- ments of warfare. The forces which make for political and moral cohesion are minimal. They consist of a general though rather vague sense of universal moral obligation; and of the fear of the consequences of overt world-anarchy. This fear of war is however not as potent a cement of cohesion as the fear of a con- crete foe, which has frequently welded smaller communities together. Furthermore the international community lacks all the intermediate forms of cohesion that hold national and imperial communities together. It lacks a single center of power and authority, a common language or a common cultural, moral, or religious tradition. No geographical frontiers help it to arrive at a common consciousness and it has no sense of a common history, as nations have, except the minimal common experience of a war partnership through which a terrible foe was defeated. But the very defeat of the foe removes one factor of cohesion. For this reason our civilization will probably require ages before it will master the problem of our common life on the world level. The inevitability of a considerable degree of frustration in achieving what we must achieve is one aspect of our existence for which our culture has not prepared us. F TECHNICS in modern communications I have created a potential world-commu- nity, which finds difficulty in becoming actual, technics in production have shattered Iold forms of justice and made the achievement of new ones difficult. The modern machine becomes larger and larger as it becomes more and more efficient. It long since has divorced the skill of the worker from his tool. It has to a certain degree divorced the worker from his skill, which is now increasingly in the machine. It has thus made the worker powerless, except insofar as common organized action has given him a degree of social and political power. It has on the other hand constantly increased the power of fewer and fewer centers of economic authority. It may be regarded as an axiom of politi- cal justice that disproportions of powers increase the hazard to justice; for to be armed with power means that the temptation to do what one wants increases. And what one wants immediately is usually not the common welfare. The cultural inadequacies of our age have contributed to the difficulties we face in achieving economic justice. For our age began with the presupposition, derived from a naturalistic philosophy, that economic justice would be achieved by a natural equilib- rium of social and economic forces.

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