Scott Erwin, a former Team Mead associate, ditched his old friends at Team Mead and threw away a brilliant future as a lifetime Mead minion simply to chase after the illusory ‘prestige’ of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. After several years of intensive study of the intellectual and theological links between Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Scott has sent us a Christmas Eve blog post on the question of just how Niebuhrian President Obama actually is.
Meanwhile, in an equally extraordinary piece of disloyalty, official blog aide Sam has gone home to his family for the holidays. Bah, humbug! I say; it’s a poor way to pick a man’s pocket.
But every cloud has a silver lining; we can hope that in all the holiday excitement Sam won’t notice this post and get ideas above his station. Scott is one of three seemingly loyal team members over the years who defected to the UK for study at Oxford or Cambridge. The fierce and implacable bench of lawyers working night and day to sue and harass the team’s enemies have informed me that the US-UK extradition treaties have no provisions to cover the case of runaway interns.
So: in hopes that Sam won’t check this post and discover that there are paths to the future that don’t involve decades of loyally underpaid service to the mighty force that is Team Mead, here are Scott Erwin’s thoughts on the question of just how much of a Niebuhrian President Obama really is.
From Scott Erwin:
President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech has opened another chapter in the debate over his indebtedness to twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Since Obama identified Niebuhr during the campaign as “his favorite philosopher” every one of the president’s major public addresses has been scrutinized for Niebuhrian themes. What the majority of commentators and Obama, himself, seem to have overlooked is that Niebuhr was not only an intellectual but also a dynamic actor on the national stage in his own right. This broader understanding is key to understanding Niebuhr and what lessons Obama should be drawing from him as the mission progresses in Afghanistan.
Any examination of Niebuhr’s life must feature the global events he influenced (and was influenced by), beginning with World War I. As a young minister in the German Evangelical Synod Niebuhr became a forceful advocate for U.S. intervention and, in a show of patriotism, convinced the Synod to remove “German” from its name. Disillusioned by the post-war settlement Niebuhr became a pacifist and joined the Socialist Party, actually running for a seat in the New York State Senate on its ticket in 1932. His early recognition of the threat posed by Nazi Germany led Niebuhr to drop his pacifist beliefs and resign from the Socialist Party in 1935. It is no wonder that the first biography written about Niebuhr was entitled Courage to Change.
It was against the backdrop of German bombing raids that Niebuhr gave his Gifford Lectures (a prominent theology lecture series) at Edinburgh University in 1939, later published as The Nature and Destiny of Man. Although widely received as an academic treatise on sin, the work was also a political critique of Western civilization and its inability to stop Hitler’s rise. In the early stages of World War II Niebuhr urged Americans to come to the aid of the United Kingdom by writings hundreds of articles and joining numerous political committees. Frustrated by the isolationist sentiment of his country Niebuhr viewed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of divine judgment to “overcome our recalcitrant will.”
Upon America’s entry into the war Niebuhr supplemented his unflinching support of the Allied cause with strong warnings against the jingoistic attitude he had embraced in the previous world conflict. Additionally he condemned the widespread vilification of Germans in the American press by highlighting the domestic opposition to Hitler and the heroic efforts of martyrs such as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Indeed Niebuhr described his wartime approach as “being in the battle and above it,” explaining, “To be in the battle means to defend a cause against its peril, to protect a nation against its enemies…To be above the battle means that we understand how imperfect the cause is which we defend, that we contritely acknowledge the sins of our own nations.”
An attempt to strike this delicate balance defined Niebuhr’s journalistic writings and political advice to government officials such as George Kennan during the early stages of the Cold War. While these efforts led Time magazine to identify him as “America’s greatest theologian” in 1948, Niebuhr repeatedly felt that he failed to live up to his own standards. For instance, he repeatedly referred to the “evils of communism” and cast the emerging conflict between the two world powers in Manichean terms. Feeling the need to restore equilibrium in his own perspective Niebuhr wrote The Irony of American History, a cautionary tale against national self-righteousness that continues to have salience in foreign policy circles today.
A revealing part of Irony is found in its concluding pages in which Niebuhr identified Abraham Lincoln as the historical figure which best embodied the principle of being in the battle and above it or combining a “moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning.” Given the overall emphasis of Irony, Niebuhr stressed the latter half of the formulation by highlighting Lincoln’s “brooding sense of charity” and magnanimity toward to South as found in his Second Inaugural Address (“Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God”). Niebuhr’s many other references to Lincoln in separate works reveal, however, that he was equally as impressed by the combination of ruthlessness and resolve with which the sixteenth president successfully conducted the Civil War.
Given Obama’s interest in Niebuhr (and Lincoln) what implications should the president be drawing as he presides over the current conflict in Afghanistan? It seems apparent from Obama’s humble and restrained rhetoric on America’s role in Afghanistan, and the world generally, that he is capable of securing a view above the battle. What is less certain is whether he will show the mettle in battle that Niebuhr idolized in Lincoln and other political figures such as Winston Churchill. Niebuhr may have wanted a leader who appreciated the moral ambiguity of warfare, but he would not countenance signs of ambivalence in his commander in chief. Niebuhr, after all, accepted the fire bombing of German cities and the use of atomic weaponry to end World War II. If Afghanistan is a war of necessity as Obama has claimed, then Niebuhr would want him to conduct the affair as if that were the case. Commentators attempting to determine the degree to which Obama is relying on Niebuhr going forward would be wise to focus more on the president’s policies and less on his words.
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