Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Origins of Evil
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TERROR HAS NO VISAGE: WALTER LIPPMANN, REINHOLD NIEBUHR, AND THE ORIGINS OF EVIL A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Arts Jonathan B. White June 2002 TERROR HAS NO VISAGE: WALTER LIPPMANN, REINHOLD NIEBUHR, AND THE ORIGINS OF EVIL BY JONATHAN B. WHITE This thesis has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Kenneth Heineman Professor of History Leslie A. Flemming Dean, College of Arts and Sciences WHITE, JONATHAN B. M.A. June 2002. History Terror Has No Visage: Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Origins of Evil This thesis argues that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and journalist Walter Lippmann developed similar ideas about the origins of evil, and it is their realistic understanding of the causes of social injustice in American democratic society that might correct contemporary cultural and academic misperceptions about the nature of evil. In today’s technologically advanced society, pragmatic theories in education, sociology, and philosophy put forth an idea of progress that promises to eradicate evil. The media produces fast moving and horrific images that desensitize us to its presence. Today, the idea of evil has become less terrible and less real; we are no longer able to imagine its horror as we once did, nor do we see the problem of evil as each person’s moral responsibility. The conclusion is that contemporary modern society lacks an apparatus for detecting the evil around us. Both Lippmann and Niebuhr recognized this problem. They tried to find a perspective that balanced individual and social views on evil, one that saw evil originating within rather than outside the self. Thus, they made it a universal problem, one that we all must confront as a community in order to find salvation for humanity. Kenneth Heineman, Professor of History 4 Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of wonderful people who helped bring this project to a conclusion. My parents, Bruce and Alice White, provided unlimited encouragement and support which they have given tirelessly throughout my life. Without them, I would not have had the opportunity to study history. Professor Charles Alexander introduced me the field of intellectual history and to several similarities between Lippmann’s and Niebuhr’s writings. Professor Ken Heineman was extremely helpful in promptly returning drafts and providing insightful comments along the way. Professors Hamby and Mattson expanded my knowledge of American intellectual history and helped to give this project the depth it needed. A comment by Ray Haberski in seminar class inspired me to use the theme of evil as a focal point for Lippmann’s and Niebuhr’s writings on democracy. Finally, many thoughtful and encouraging discussions with Israel Lagos allowed me to think about the topic in ways I had not previously considered. To these people I am grateful. 5 Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………..4 Introduction……………………………………………………….6 Chapter 1………………………………………………………….16 Chapter 2…………………………………………………………..65 Conclusion………………………………………………………..121 6 Introduction A recent cover of Newsweek Magazine featured a blood-red visage of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh with the block letters "EVIL" superimposed over top. The story, which appeared twenty one days before McVeigh's execution on June 11, 2001, included the bi-line, "what are the roots of evil?", and outlined several sociological and psychological theories that tried to explain why seemingly normal human beings commit acts of indescribable terror. For six years the Oklahoma City bombing has loomed as an unfathomable horror in the public consciousness. Immediately following the blast, media sources hypothesized that Middle East terrorists were behind the attack. Even after McVeigh's execution last month, an event which many victims' families claimed would bring them closure, the public struggles to find an explanation for the Oklahoma City tragedy. Clearly, Americans have failed to grasp the nature of McVeigh's radical evil, not only because the bombing was an unprecedented act of domestic terrorism -- the worst in U.S. history -- or that it was an insidious violation of the country's moral sensibility. The true source of the conundrum is rooted in a moral deficiency in American culture: America presently cannot articulate the evil it encounters because it lacks the moral language to do so. As Newsweek writer Sharon Begley pointed out, most people prefer to characterize McVeigh "as evil incarnate, as Satan, as depravity in human form," a monster outside the scope of "normal." But in so doing, observed Begley, we deny the possibility that the same hatred that seized McVeigh might also afflict us. By attributing radical evil 7 exclusively to the actions of the psychopath, we place it in a "not us" category, thereby further limiting our conceptual mechanisms for understanding it.1 What is the source of this evil and how can we recognize it? During the 1990's, the federal government's attempts to legislate against acts of terror brought us no closer to an understanding. New York Times columnist Andrew Sullivan recently argued that the abstract language of America's hate crime laws has obscured the meaning of crimes associated with sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. Sullivan's central point was that the many forms of hate that exist today originate not within the psychopathic mind, but within human nature. Hate is often manifested as a prejudice in the form of vengeance -- a natural human emotion that infects the victim and the victim's family as much as it does the perpetrator. 2 If scientific approaches have failed to bring us closer to an understanding of the nature of evil, education has done no better. "It is one of the most foolish clichés of our time," wrote Sullivan, "that prejudice is always rooted in ignorance, and can usually be overcome by familiarity with the objects of our loathing." Sullivan pointed to the irreducible racial tensions that existed under segregation in the United States and in Rwanda. The dynamics of community conflict, he concluded, can just as easily lead to expressions of resentment and hatred as much as they produce efforts toward progressive action and social improvement. 3 Sullivan's article touched on two key criticisms of our contemporary understanding of evil. The first illuminated a trend of modern twentieth century 1Sharon Begley, "The Roots of Evil," Newsweek, vol. CXXXVII, no. 21, (May 21, 2001), p. 31. 2Andrew Sullivan, "What's So Bad About Hate," vol. New York Times Magazine (September 26, 1999), p. 50. 3Ibid, 55. 8 American culture, observing that Americans have traditionally distanced themselves from terror and social injustice by making the perpetration of evil a relative problem, something that exists in the other rather than the self. The second criticism challenged several key concepts of pragmatism, an early twentieth century philosophy born from the writings of American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. While Peirce, James, and Dewey each developed their own versions of pragmatism, all three conceived a method of scientific inquiry that tested ideas to produce verifiable, value-free, socially useful knowledge. Some of today's philosophers who claim to follow in this tradition emphasize the pragmatic concepts of a community of inquiry and social action as the best means for addressing contemporary social problems. Certainly, this conception of pragmatism was instrumental in overcoming the formalistic laws that existed at the turn of the twentieth century, and today it continues to offer a source of hope for social renewal. However, as Sullivan suggested, pragmatism has proven too optimistic in its assessment of the viability of community action and the potential of human intelligence. Too often it conceives of evil as an eradicable entity rather than an irreducible social force based in the stubbornness of power. Part of the difficulty in articulating the parameters of evil in contemporary culture may be that our disconnection from the potency of evil is so deeply rooted in American history. Author Andrew Delbanco demonstrated how Americans from the Puritan era to the modern era gradually lost their conception of evil as a cornerstone of a moral order. As America shifted from a God-fearing nation to the modern, secular state, luck or chance became the new divinity. Evil no longer 9 remained God's revelation and part of the human imagination, but was projected onto the luckless have-nots. Modernism produced what Delbanco identified as the hubristic cultural tendency to scapegoat those who fell outside the circle of normal. Individuals and groups in history who demonized the subversive, such as the Red Scare raids against radical aliens in 1919 and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy's so-called anticommunist "witch hunts" from 1951 to 1954, demonstrated the human capacity for evil; they played God by placing their own purposes above others. Delbanco feared that by turning away from the spiritual revelation of sin and toward the scientific extermination of social injustice, America has extinguished its imaginative capacity to sense the evil of our unrecognized limitations. Delbanco sympathized with the Puritan spirit and those intellectuals in history who adopted a transcendental moral system -- one that could gauge our limited capacity to both conquer social injustice and perceive the fragility of our own egocentric and finite existence. He admitted that the Puritan conception of evil was likely lost for good. In its place, he hoped for a new construction created from universalist insight, one that recognized the symbolic importance of Satan. It was the presence of Satan, argued Delbanco, which instilled a sense of individual moral responsibility in each citizen and reminded us of our limitations as human beings. 4 This thesis argues that the effort to give the universalist view of evil a modern twentieth century context can be traced to two American liberal intellectuals who rose to prominence at the outset of the Cold War.