I took high school German language classes for two years. My parents required their children to take a high school foreign language because most universities required it for admission. I was fascinated by Germany since my parents were stationed there while my father served in the Air Force. They told us stories about life in Germany and our home contained a few German decorations.
My language teacher was a young German woman who immigrated to the United States after marrying a US serviceman. She was an excellent teacher who also taught French. Besides learning basic German language skills, we were taught German geography, history, and culture. I did not take my German studies seriously as it seemed irrelevant to me at the time. When would I ever use this knowledge? For 20 years after leaving high school, I did not speak German, so my initial assumptions were correct. Then, I was transferred to Europe and traveled many times to Germany for business and pleasure. I then realized that I squandered my opportunity to be fluent in German, something that I regret.
During my last ex-pat assignment, my managerial area included Germany, the most profitable region in my northern Europe portfolio. The office was in Hamburg with about 40 German marketing employees. I made many trips to Hamburg and grew to love the people and their culture. Germans are extremely well educated, diligent workers, and honest. What greatly puzzled me was their twentieth-century history. How did one of the most intellectual societies in the world commit such horrible, immoral acts against humanity?
A pastor friend of mine suggested that I read Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1932 publication, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Must Have Books, Victoria, BC, 2021), as it greatly impacted his theological thinking. Niebuhr (1892–1971) was an American theologian and Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. President Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and Time magazine named him the greatest Protestant theologian in American since Jonathan Edwards. His writings have influenced Presidents, theologians, civil rights leaders, pastors, and intellectuals.
Niebuhr was the son of German immigrants, born in Missouri and raised in Illinois. His brother, Dr. H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962), was a Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School — another highly regarded theologian. Both learned German as their first language and observed two World Wars as Americans with German ancestry. While Reinhold’s book does not give his reasons for choosing the topic, my previously posed question must have been in the forefront when he wrote his book. “The thesis to be elaborated in these pages is that a sharp distinction must be drawn between the moral and social behavior of individuals and of social groups, national, racial, and economic; and that this distinction justifies and necessitates political policies which a purely individualistic ethic must always find embarrassing. … Individual men may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of conduct, and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to their own. … In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.” (page 5)
On the first page of Niebuhr’s introduction, he quickly sets out his thesis: individual morals do not necessarily combine into group morals. When the topic of World War II was raised with German employees in casual conversations, they always stated that it was the ‘Nazis’ who did the immoral actions. They wanted to separate the German people from the Nazi political party. In a sense, this was partially correct as the Nazi political party was a minority party, roughly 20% of the population, but who eventually took over the German government through violent actions. But the Nazis were still composed of German people. “When collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it.” (page 6) It took six years of military action to defeat Germany at the cost of tens of millions of lives. “Complete rational objectivity in a social situation is impossible.” (page 7) It was futile to try to rationally convince Hitler to stop his aggression; only military force could stop German immorality.
The physical and social sciences have different methodologies to reveal truths and gain acceptance. Physical sciences gain traction by rationally proving that existing traditions are false. However, when the social sciences proved that the interests of the many were undermined by the interests of the dominant social class, changes in the social system did not always follow. Educators and religious leaders have used reason to articulate problems, but it has not eliminated many of the highlighted problems. Humans are resistant to giving up their self-interests for the collective good of all members of society. Understanding that racial discrimination is immoral did not result in giving legal equally to people of color. It took both economic and political power. It took actions like boycotts, strikes, and arrests for change to happen. “What is lacking among all these moralists, whether religious or rational, is an understanding of the brutal character of the behavior of all human collectives, and the power of self-interest and collective egoism in all intergroup relations.” (page 9)
Niebuhr is a practical theologian; he understands the theory but also desires a solution. “The relations between groups must therefore always be predominantly political rather than ethical, that is, they will be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses at least as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group.” Niebuhr’s “task is to find political methods which will offer the most promise of achieving an ethical social goal for society. Such methods must always be judged by two criteria: 1. Do they do justice to the moral resources and possibilities in human nature and provide for the exploitation of every latent moral capacity in man? 2. Do they take account of the limitations of human nature, particularly those which manifest themselves in man’s collective behavior?” (pages 11–12)
He offers a very astute observation to end his introduction: “In America our contemporary culture is still pretty firmly enmeshed in the illusions and sentimentalities of the Age of Reason.” In my next blog, I will discuss Niebuhr’s first two chapters on living together and the rational resources of the individual for social living.