I’ve been working again on an article I’m writing on ninth century marriage disputes. One of these concerns the effect of new rules on indissoluble marriage on the case of Count Boso and his wife Ingiltrude. Ingiltrude ran off with one of her husband’s subordinates, fled to another kingdom and refused to return. By secular law, Boso had the right to kill her. By eighth century Frankish law he could have divorced her and remarried. Changes in law and the church’s influence, however, meant that in the ninth century, Boso could not remarry if he separated from Ingiltrude and that if he killed her, he would be severely penalised by the church. As a result, what he did was appeal to the Pope, to try and use his influence with other Frankish kings and clerics to get her returned to him.

A couple of historians with whom I’ve discussed this case have remarked on how humiliating the events must have been to Boso and how damaging to his masculine image. Yet the sources don’t imply this. The motif of cuckoldry (adultery by a man’s wife) is a common one in a lot of medieval and early modern texts. I know of at least two other cases where the adulterous wife is specifically spared by the husband (Vita Gangulfi (early C10) and Thomas Heywood's play A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). There are also other examples where cuckolds are presented positively: the most obvious is King Arthur (at least in Malory’s version). But there’s also a long comic tradition of showing cuckolds as ridiculous, as well as a tragic tradition of showing killing an adulterous wife as a necessity for a wronged husband. Under what circumstances can cuckoldry not damage a man’s image?

One basic distinction is that a wife’s adultery can be framed in two ways. On one view it is a betrayal of the husband, and betrayal specifically by one who is subordinate to him (since married to him). The wife who should be loyal to ‘her lord’ is not. The alternative is to put the emphasis on the woman’s trickery. In this view the main wrong is that the wife has deceived her husband. In the first mode of thought there is far less humiliation for the husband. Being betrayed is not in itself humiliating, but arouses feelings of sympathy (think of Jesus). Stories that use this kind of framing tend to stress also that the adulterous man is someone whom the husband was entitled to trust: he’s often a subordinate in some way. Thus Boso is betrayed by his vassal, Gangulf by a cleric, Arthur by Lancelot, Master Frankford (in A Woman Killed with Kindness) by Wendoll, who is his friend, but also being supported by him. Similarly, these texts all take place against a background (explicit or implicit) in which female virtue and chastity is possible and even likely. The wives who betray their husbands are all from a good social background, and it’s sometimes specifically stated that they are of good morals or good reputation. In other words, sympathetic husbands are those who have not been foolishly trusting, but have relied on their wives and other subordinates to behave with appropriate loyalty, which they have failed to do. The fault is not theirs, but that of the guilty pair.

The alternative view is the domain of cuckoldry (which is derived from the word ‘cuckoo’ and thus inevitably foregrounds deceit). If the husband is seen as deceived by his wife, this must be humiliating, because he should be superior to her (in the patriarchal order of things) and his superior brain should be able to detect trickery. The emphasis in stories of this kind is in the outwitting of the husband, or his being foolishly complacent. King Mark, for example, is deceived numerous times by Tristan and Isolde and this starts right from the beginning. On his wedding night, he sleeps not with Isolde, but her maid, in order to hide the fact that Isolde is no longer a virgin. Implicitly, a husband who can’t recognise his own wife (even in the dark) is a fool who doesn’t deserve her. In William Wycherley’s play The Country Wife (1675), the ‘hero’ Horner has a false report put about by his doctor that he’s impotent and thus has access to a number of unsuspecting husband’s wives.

In a number of these stories of the second type, there is a considerable streak of misogyny. It’s often stated that all women are naturally deceitful and lustful, and cuckoldry sometimes becomes seen as almost inevitable. (This form of misogyny has now completely reversed its message: now its claim is that it is men who ‘inevitably’ commit adultery and foolish women who hope to confine them in the unnatural state of monogamy.) Some of the husbands make desperate but unavailing attempts to prevent this: the ‘country wife’ has been chosen precisely as young and ignorant of the ways of the world, but she soon learns them.

There are thus two different ways of describing husbands in this situation, one far more negative than the other. A separate issue is how a husband is expected to act when he does discover the adultery. One option is immediately ruled out. Even worse than being a cuckold is a ‘wittol’: a husband who acquiesces in his wife’s adultery. Some action must be taken. Does the husband have to kill his wife? Here there seems to be a link with the prevailing legal system. It may be illegal to kill an adulterous wife. Not taking violent revenge in this situation looks like cowardice rather than high principles. Similarly, if a man fails to take revenge in a situation where his wife’s family or the adulterer are more powerful than him, this also looks unmanly. The few cases where the husband explicitly spares his wife or the adulterer take place against a background in which he legally (or practically) has the right to kill them and is physically able to do so. He then shows exceptional Christian charity in forbearing to punish his wife (in all the cases there are explicitly Christian references here) and also exceptional magnanimity in not finishing off a defeated traitor/enemy (the adulterer). The extraordinary nature of this pardoning is stressed both by Thomas Heywood and in the Vita Gangulfi. Heywood has other men in the play saying they would not spare the lovers as Frankford has done and in the Vita Gangulfi, the guilty wife and cleric are so mistrustful that Gangulf can actually mean to spare them that they end up killing him for self-protection (he thus dies as a martyr).

Nevertheless, in both cases the wives don’t go unpunished. The alternative for Mistress Frankford and Gangulf’s wife is a variant of exile: they will still be maintained by their husbands, but have no access to them (and in Frankford’s case her children). The aim (explicitly in Frankford’s case, who plans to ‘kill with kindness’) is that they will thus be able to acknowledge and be tortured by their own guilt. The shame is hers, not her husband’s. (Mistress Frankford does indeed soon die, repentant). In Boso’s case it’s not entirely clear what the final outcome would have been, since he never managed to get Ingiltrude back. If he planned simply to have her back as his wife, this may have been potentially humiliating (although he could presumably have held the threat over her of death for any further transgression). However keeping her as wife but no wife could potentially have been entirely consistent with a masculine power so great that it could afford to be merciful. Cuckoldry and its relationship with masculinity is, thus in my view, not universal: how it is imagined is socially and historically specific.

The Enlightenment didn’t start out being against all religion (though it was always anti-Catholic). Some of its exponents were Anglicans, including William Paley, whose Natural Theology (1802) is still one of the basics of Intelligent Design (from finding a watch, we infer the existence of a watchmaker). Yet the views of most Enlightenment thinkers almost inevitably led them away from being orthodox Christians, normally towards being Unitarians, Deists or atheists. There seem to me to have been several reasons for this.

One was the demand for ‘rational religion’. Enlightenment thinking wanted nothing mystical or miraculous. Religion was reduced to moral teachings and Christianity was held to be simple and natural. John Tillotson, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1689, claimed: ‘The laws of God are reasonable, that is suitable to our nature and advantageous to our interest’. For many Enlightenment thinkers, Christian theology and Scripture also had to be gutted to make it acceptable. The doctrine of exclusive salvation had to go: it was unfair to the virtuous pagans who had died before Christ. Many of the Bible’s stories were held to be nonsensical or unedifying. (Roy Porter cites Thomas Woolston’s Six Discourses (1727-1730) which complained that by cursing someone else’s fig-tree Jesus had violated the sanctity of property!) All this tended to be accompanied by the usual condescension towards the masses: there was often a ‘Double Truth’ theory by which the Christian revelation was merely to ensure that God’s message reached the masses, while to the enlightened religious truths were obvious.

In particular, during the Enlightenment the divinity of Jesus increasingly came to be rejected (as by the Unitarians and Socinians). I suspect the main reason was that the entire doctrine of the Atonement no longer made sense in Enlightenment terms. If there was no sin, only ignorance, and humans were perfectible via education, then there was no role for Christ other than that of a Jewish equivalent to Socrates.

Enlightenment thought didn’t just want to strip religion doctrinally, however. It was also extremely hostile to religious ‘enthusiasm’. This was initially a reaction to the fanaticism of the religious wars (English Civil War, Thirty Years War etc), which had produced a fine crop of extremist sects and doctrines and atrocities. But the opponents of enthusiasm went much further. Johnson defined enthusiasm as ‘a vain belief of private revelation, a vain confidence of divine favour or communication.’ Any truly personal, emotional religion had to be rejected: not just Calvinism, but Quakers and particularly Methodism (seen as a ‘mania’ or ‘wild and pernicious’). There was an inherent tendency in Enlightenment thought to see religion as madness. Porter comments: ‘It fell to David Hume to complete the enlightened psychopathologization of religion.’ Meanwhile:

once madness was no longer attributed to supernatural powers, unbelievers like Dr Erasmus Darwin [Charles Darwin’s grandfather] could switch the blame for mass hysteria and religious mania to fanatics and Methodists and cast enthusiasm as itself a symptom of mental derangement. No longer did the Devil drive you insane: now believing in the Devil or in hellfire was, for physicians like him, a mark of madness.

Since Enlightenment thought was so hostile to religion, does that mean that Christianity must be inherently hostile to modernity? There are people now who seem to want to re-enact the battle, including some militant atheists and the Religious Right in the USA (who increasingly seem to want to reject all Enlightenment thought). I think there is a way, however, for Christians both to accept the benefits of the Enlightenment and yet to see its limitations. One is to accept the scientific method, while remaining sceptical about particular applications. There is nothing inherently wrong about the scientific method being applied to religion, as to any other aspect of society. But it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that the results are normally pretty unimpressive. Attempts at scientific history, for example, have been an overwhelming dead end. Meanwhile, a lot of evolutionary psychology has been incredibly sloppy (for example, by examining only one culture).

Secondly, Christians need to demonstrate the flaws in the ideas of inevitable progress or human perfectibility. I don’t think this means going back to Thomas Hobbes’ view of the natural brutishness of man or even High Tory views of unchanging humanity. It is an advance that more people now believe that slavery is wrong and that women should have equal rights. But education is not simply going to remove ‘error’ and ‘ignorance’ from the world. Not everyone will be ‘enlightened’: not everyone will choose to be ‘enlightened’.

This leads to what seems to me to the biggest error in some of those who see themselves as the ‘contemporary Enlightenment’ or ‘Freethinkers’. Christians are relatively able conceptually to cope with those who do not accept or reject Christianity. As well as those who have not yet heard the Word, there are those who hear it and reject it. (This is foreseen by Jesus, for example, in the Parable of the Sower). In some versions of Christianity those who reject Christ are automatically evil, but many Christians now would consider that those who do not accept the Gospel are not inherently more evil than Christians, but have some blind spot/hardness of heart. The virtuous non-believer/non-Christian is not an inherent contradiction.

In contrast, the Enlightenment model has no inherent way of coping with rejection. As Roy Porter puts it:

Modernizers were optimists; they thought in terms not of hopeless depravity but of problems to be settled. They prided themselves upon their benevolence and prized their power to bring improvement: those not enlightened were either innocents or victims. None was damned, none beyond rescue - education and philanthropy would allow them to enter the ranks of the civilized.

In this system, what happened to those who had received enlightening instruction and yet refused to become ‘civilised’ in the Enlightenment sense (e.g. by obdurately sticking to their non-rational religious beliefs)? They could only be stigmatised: if a reasonable human, once educated, inevitably became enlightened, lack of enlightenment once instructed could only mean an inherent lack of reason in the person. There is still a tendency in some atheist thought today (by no means all) to regard any religious belief as a sign of madness, personality defect or incomplete mental development. The virtuous believer is a contradiction in terms for them. (At the most, they want religion allowed only between consenting adults in privacy). Christopher Hitchins , for example, was recently complaining about the childishness of believers (see http://www.slate.com/id/2135499/). Whatever you might think about Christopher Hitchins, you would look at him for a long time before the term ‘adult’ springs to your mind. Christians ought to point out this condescending tendency when it occurs and enquire whether atheists really believe that the majority of the world’s population are deluded.

I’ve just finished reading Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world (Penguin, 2000), which is a remarkable blend of erudition and entertainment. As I read it, however, one thing kept striking me. Porter says at the start:

I find enlightened minds congenial: I savour their pithy prose, and feel more in tune with those warm, witty, clubbable men, than with, say, the aggrieved Puritans who enthral yet appal Christopher Hill or with Peter Gay’s earnestly erotic Victorians.

I have almost the opposite impression. There were many admirable ideas that came from Enlightenment thinkers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from political liberty and religious tolerance, to the rise of the novel and better treatment of animals and the mentally ill. But I really do not like the period or its representatives and I cannot warm to them. There are three main reasons I have for my distaste. One is the Enlightenment contempt for Christianity (which I want to discuss separately).

The second is the smugness of so many of the writers. Porter comments; ‘On this [charity to the poor], as in so many other matters, the enlightened were nothing if not self-congratulatory.’ Some of this complacency arises from the fact that from the start of the Hanoverian period in Britain progressive thinkers were politically in the ascendancy and so prone to vindicate the status quo rather than challenge it. Hence all the emphasis, for example, on the sanctity of property. But I think the smugness has deeper roots. Christian writers have often been smug, but Jesus’ own statements have always been available to prick complacency and expose hypocrisy. In contrast:

Whereas Christian humanism gloried in arduous choice - witness Samson Agonistes or Rasselas - the enlightened always wanted, nay expected to have their cake and eat it.

One of the key Enlightenment ideas was the perfectibility of man (and possibly woman as well, but that’s a separate issue). There was no sin, just ignorance, which could be removed by education/enlightenment. If enlightenment could bring humans towards perfection, it was an inevitable temptation for progressive thinkers to imagine (even if they never explicitly stated it) that they were themselves were therefore pretty near perfect. There was also a deep-seated tendency to despise ‘the vulgar’, even among those who theoretically cared deeply for the people.

The third problem in Enlightenment thought was its paradoxical potential for both cruelty and authoritarianism, paradoxical because of its humanitarian and libertarian ideals. Niebuhr’s comments about the problems of idealism are very relevant here, and how men who ‘know’ how the world can be made perfect can be ruthless in enforcing their will. Locke argued for religious tolerance, but not for Catholics, because their beliefs were a danger to the state. The arguments of Adam Smith and others about the virtues of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market lead to all the potential cruelties of the free market. Enlightenment ideals could believe that the enjoyment of wealth for the prosperous was virtuous, but that the wages of the poor had to be kept low to make them industrious. As Porter puts it:

The Enlightenment piloted a transition from homo civilis to homo economicus, which involved the rationalization of selfishness and self-interest as enlightened ideology, the privatization of virtue and the de-moralization of luxury, pride, selfishness and avarice.

One strand of Enlightenment thought also had an authoritarian streak: Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism, in particular, shows this. He was one of the greatest enthusiasts for the workhouse: ‘a mill to grind rogues honest and idle men industrious’. Bentham was in theory an individualist, thinking that individuals should be able to find happiness in their own way, but his urge for mastery had a totalitarian side:

If it were possible to find a method of becoming master of everything which might happen to a certain number of men, to dispose of everything around them so as to produce on them the desired impression, to make certain of their actions, of their connections, and of all the circumstances of their lives, so that nothing could escape, nor could oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects of the utmost importance.

Enlightened absolutism (which Porter doesn’t discuss, since it wasn’t a British phenomenon) thus wasn’t as much of as a contradiction as it might have seemed. If there was no higher authority than the state (once religion had been cut down sufficiently) and if what the populace really needed was education and reformation into virtue, then why shouldn’t it be done by one enlightened ruler. After all, s/he would not necessarily be corrupted by absolute power, because there was no such thing as sinfulness.

Roy Porter's book is a good counter to the view of Michel Foucault etc. that the Enlightenment was solely repressive, but it does also show some of the darker tendencies of the movement, as well as its considerable triumphs.

I got irritated by an article in the Spectator by Jackie Mason ‘Why you never hear ‘Muslim jokes’’ (http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=7317&issue=2006-02-11). Of course, it’s intended as Jewish humour, the idea that Jews are naturally peace-loving/reasonable/cowardly etc. But it’s of the same type as a lot of more serious articles that claim that somehow some ethnic groups/religions/non-religious beliefs are intrinsically peace-loving, in a way that other religions (normally Islam) are not.

This prompted me to produce a brief list of modern (WW2 and later) examples of brutality in a variety of religious and atheist societies:

Christianity: terrorism (IRA, Basque ETA), massacres (Lebanese Phalangist militia, 1982), ethnic cleansing (former Yugoslavia)

Hinduism: terrorism (Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers)

Judaism: terrorism (Stern gang, Irgun), religiously motivated murder (Yigal Amir - killer of Yitzhal Rabin, Baruch Goldstein - shooting in Hebron)

Atheism: genocide (Nazis, Khmer Rouge), mass murder (Stalin, Mao)

This is just a brief list, and more knowledgeable people could probably add to it, particularly for Asia. I’m also not trying to argue that all these examples are equally bad, and some might even be claimed as justified (e.g. pre-State of Israel Jewish terrorism). My point is only that no tradition is exclusively, invariably peaceful and that all religions (and atheism) can turn to violence in particular circumstances.

One of the surprising things looking now at Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘The Irony of American History’ is how few mentions there are of Islam. To him the ‘Oriental religions’ are Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Shintoism. Nevertheless, there are some interesting analogies which his discussions of the struggle against Communism brings. The book was written at the height of the Cold War (1952), with Stalin still in power, the Korean War being fought and the threat of Communism being adopted by many Third World countries and even triumphing in parts of Europe. Niebuhr hated Communism as evil, but he was careful to distinguish it from Nazism:

There is no wisdom in the constant iterations of slogans in which liberty is contrasted with tyranny; and in which this tyranny is so defined that the utopian illusions, which nourish it, are obscured. Communism is not merely another version of Nazism. Nazism was a morally cynical creed which defied every norm of justice. It represented a moral nihilism which could have developed only in the decay of a highly developed and sophisticated civilization. Communism is a morally utopian creed which has a much wider appeal than Nazism because it speaks in the name of justice rather than in defiance of justice; and it is ostensibly devoted to the establishment of a universal society, rather than to the supremacy of a race or nation. The fact that its illusory hopes are capable of generating cruelties and tyrannies, exceeding even those of a cynical creed, can be understood only if it is realized how much more plausible and dangerous the corruption of the good can be in human history than explicit evil.

All the modern comment about Islamo-fascism tends to obscure the fact that in this way Islamism [in the sense of the desire to establish a widespread Islamic state/caliphate] is closer to Communism than Nazism. In fact, I’m not sure what Islamo-fascism really means except ‘it’s bad’ - there is clearly anti-semitism in Islamism, but there was in Communism as well, and I’m not sure it’s intrinsic to Islamism., as it was to Nazism. The other parallel with Communism is that it is in theory possible to have Islamism without violence: ‘tamed’ Communist parties have existed (for example in Italy and India), which participate in democracies and abide by unfavourable election results. (In contrast, Nazism can’t be fitted into a democratic system: its core beliefs of the right of might are alien to democracy). If there are groups who want to establish a Muslim state in Britain, I’m prepared to accept their existence, provided that they will work only via attempts at individual conversion/persuasion and eschew violence.

Niebuhr was also far-sighted in starting to discuss the implications of the USA being the dominant power in the world. He was already accepting, for example, European concerns about America as legitimate:

Significantly the same world which only yesterday feared our possible return to adolescent irresponsibility is now exercised about the possibilities of the misuse of our power. We would do well to understand the legitimacy of such fears rather than resent their seeming injustice. It is characteristic of human nature, whether in its individual or collective expression, that it has no possibility of exercising power, without running the danger of overestimating the purity of the wisdom which directs it. The apprehensions of allies and friends is, therefore, but a natural human reaction to what men intuitively know to be the temptations of power. A European statesman stated the issue very well recently in the words: "We are grateful to America for saving us from communism. But our gratitude does not prevent us from fearing that we might become an American colony. That danger lies in the situation of America’s power and Europe’s weakness." The statesman, when reminded of the strain of genuine idealism in American life, replied: "The idealism does indeed prevent America from a gross abuse of its power. But it might well accentuate the danger Europeans confront. For American power in the service of American idealism could create a situation in which we would be too impotent to correct you when you are wrong and you would be too idealistic to correct yourself."

Niebuhr sees some advantages to the world in American predominance, because it can help provide international order and coherence.

Nevertheless, great disproportions of power are as certainly moral hazards to justice and community as they are foundations of minimal order. They are hazards to community both because they arouse resentments and fears among those who have less power; and because they tempt the strong to wield their power without too much consideration of the interests and views of those upon whom it impinges.

Niebuhr sees two possible ways of ensuring that international power serves justice. One is via international organisations such, as the UN, seen (possibly rather idealistically) as ‘an organ in which even the most powerful of the democratic nations must bring their policies under the scrutiny of world opinion. Thus inevitable aberrations, arising from the pride of power, are corrected.’

The second control on power is via religious and moral checks on it. Here Niebuhr has a very interesting take on the key virtue; not justice, but humility:

The inclination "to give each man his due" is indeed one of the ends of such a discipline [of power]. But a sense of humility which recognizes that nations are even more incapable than individuals of fully understanding the rights and claims of others may be an even more important element in such a discipline. A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice. In so far as men and nations are "judges in their own case" they are bound to betray the human weakness of having a livelier sense of their own interest than of the competing interest. That is why "just" men and nations may easily become involved in ironic refutations of their moral pretensions.

It is only via humility that genuine community between nations and individuals is possible:

This includes the charitable realization that the vanities of the other group or person, from which we suffer, is not different in kind, though possibly in degree, from similar vanities in our own life. It also includes a religious sense of the mystery and greatness of the other life, which we violate if we seek to comprehend it too simply from our standpoint.

Niebuhr, fifty years early, has put his finger on one of the most dangerous distortions of Bush’s America: that there is only possible view of the world, which is the American view and only one possible model for the good state: the American one. The delusions springing from these beliefs range from the ludicrous (that an acceptable constitution must provide for the separation of state and religion, which is news to most European countries) to the pernicious. For example, the repeated attempts to characterise the Arab TV station al-Jazeera as a terrorist organisation or part of ‘the enemy’ (see e.g. http://www.policyreview.org/000/corn.html) aren’t actually borne out by the facts. Al-Jazeera may be prone to sensationalism (how unlike our own beloved media), but it is a place of genuine debate and multiple viewpoints.

Niebuhr also has some prescient things to say about the dangerous effects of long ideological conflicts:

Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe. Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddles every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor. Unfortunately the only persuasive proof seems to be the disavowal of precisely those discriminate judgments which are so necessary for an effective conflict with the evil, which we are supposed to abhor.

This problem is common to any society, but Niebuhr also sees a particular danger to which the US might be prone, of impatience:

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our "technocratic" tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history. We might be driven to hysteria by its inevitable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is "preventive war." It is not an immediate temptation; but it could become so in the next decade or two.

Niebuhr’s ‘preventive war’, of course, was not Iraq, but a nuclear attack on the USSR, and thus far more cataclysmic, but for once he was sadly over-optimistic: ‘A democracy, of course, cannot engage in an explicit preventive war.' Bush’s America is precisely what Niebuhr feared: a ‘pretentious idealism’, combined with great power and a vast lack of patience and charity.

PS: I've now found the full text of 'The Irony of American History', plus other works of Niebuhr's online at: http://www.religion-online.org/listbycategory.asp?Cat=37.

One of the more peculiar claims about the changes that took place after the World Trade Center attack is that it marked the end of American innocence. Reinhold Niebuhr was already casting a sceptical eye on American claims of innocence back in the 1950s:

Our pretensions of innocency therefore heightened the whole concept of a virtuous humanity which characterizes the culture of our era; and involve us in the ironic incongruity between our illusions and the realities which we experience. We find it almost as difficult as the Communists to believe that anyone could think ill of us, since we are as persuaded as they that our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions.

Niebuhr sees two great historical traditions behind these American claims to special innocence and virtue: the New England Calvinist tradition of America as a nation set apart by God and Thomas Jefferson’s belief of a new beginning for humanity in an escape from corrupt Europe. Such claims, however, have never really coincided with reality:

The surge of our infant strength over a continent, which claimed Oregon, California, Florida and Texas against any sovereignty which may have stood in our way, was not innocent.

The climax, for Niebuhr, came at the end of the Second World War, with the development of nuclear weapons:

an “innocent” nation...finds itself the custodian of the ultimate weapon which perfectly embodies and symbolizes the moral ambiguity of physical warfare. We could not disavow the possible use of the weapon, partly because no imperilled nation is morally able to dispense with weapons which might insure its survival...But we also could not renounce the weapon because the freedom or survival of our allies depends upon the threat of its use...Yet if we should use it, we should cover ourselves with a terrible guilt.

What Niebuhr wanted was a delicate balance of idealism and realism, an acceptance by the US of the moral responsibilities that went with its power, but without too great a confidence in its own virtue. National interests had to be accepted, but policy could not be reduced to that:

We were drawn into the [First World] war by considerations of national interest, which we hardly dared to confess to ourselves. Our European critics may, however, overshoot the mark if they insist that the slogan of making ‘the world safe for democracy’ was merely an expression of that moral cant which we seem to have inherited from the British, only to express it with less subtlety than they. For the fact is that every nation is caught in the moral paradox of refusing to go to war unless it can be proved that the national interest is imperilled, and of continuing in the war only by proving that something much more than national interest is at stake...Loyalty to the community is...morally tolerable only if it includes values wider than those of the community.

Niebuhr wasn’t a realist in the degraded Henry Kissinger sense of believing that moral values were irrelevant in foreign policy. He was a realist in seeing the need on occasions to choose the lesser of two evils and in rejecting a retreat from the world to keep oneself morally pure. Reinhold’s America isn’t innocent, because it can’t be: it has to be streetwise and tough enough to exercise power wisely. Its claims of innocence are largely self-deluding: it has to ‘slough off many illusions’.

Fifty years on, has anything changed? After all, one of Bush’s bigger lies was ‘They hate us because we are good.’ After Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua etc, it’s harder for Americans to claim that their foreign policy is invariably positive. I think more Americans are aware of these problems and yet too many still seem able to believe that the US is a purely benevolent force in the world. In one way things have got worse. Niebuhr contrasted the American idealists and realists in their attitudes towards the foreign policy problems of 1950s. The idealists then were arguing for world government or unilateral disarmament, while:

The realists on the other hand are inclined to argue that a good cause will hallow any weapon. They are convinced that the evils of Communism are so great that we are justified in using any weapon against them. Thereby they closely approach the Communist ruthlessness.

In Bush’s America we have similar ruthless realists who yet claim to be idealists and appropriate and taint liberal values. Bush wants to make an end to tyranny in the world, via bombing and torture. Niebuhr has the neo-cons nailed though, long before ‘the end of history’ was proclaimed and the ‘reality-based community’ was declared irrelevant:

Communism believes that it possible for a man, at a particular moment in history, to take “the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.” The cruelty of Communism is partly derived from the absurd pretension that the Communist movement stands on the other side of this leap and has the whole of history in its grasp. Its cruelty is partly due to the frustration of the Communist overlords of history when they discover that the “logic” of history does not conform to their delineation of it. One has an uneasy feeling that some of our dreams of managing history might have resulted in similar cruelties if they had flowered into actions. But there was fortunately no programme to endow our elite of prospective philosopher-scientist-kings with actual political power.

Reinhold, thou shouldst be living at this hour. America (and the world) has need of thee.

Sue Axon, the mother arguing that she has a right to know if an underage daughter has an abortion, has lost her case (http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1693518,00.html). There’s a good piece on this by Anne Karpf in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1696263,00.html). She is pro-choice, but admits how difficult the dilemma is. Parents are being expected to take responsibility for their children, and yet they can be excluded from such a key decision. Sue Axon’s attempt to create legal rights for parents doesn’t seem the right way to deal with the situation, but the current position does leave a lot of responsibility on the health professionals to deal with difficult family situations.