By Reinhold Niebuhr
Ethical guy and Immoral Society is Reinhold Niebuhr's vital early examine in ethics and politics. Forthright and reasonable, it discusses the inevitability of social clash, the brutal habit of human collectives of each variety, the lack of rationalists and social scientists to even think the realities of collective strength, and, eventually, how person morality can triumph over social immorality.
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Additional resources for Moral Man and Immoral Society - A Study in Ethics and Politics (philosophy, theology)
Example text
Those who benefit from social injustice are naturally less capable of understanding its real character than those who suffer from it. They will attribute ethical qualities to social life, if only the slightest gesture of philanthropy hides social injustice. If the disinherited treat these gestures with cynicism and interpret unconscious sentimentality as conscious hypocrisy, the privileged will be properly outraged and offended by the moral perversity of the recipients of their beneficences. Since liberal Protestantism is, on the whole the religion of the privileged classes of Western civilisation, it is not surprising that its espousal of the ideal of love, in a civilisation reeking with social injustice, should be cynically judged and convicted of hypocrisy by those in whom bitter social experiences destroy the sentimentalities and illusions of the comfortable.
The moral resources of men would not be sufficient to guarantee it. A sentimental generation has |destroyed this apocalyptic note in the vision of the Christ. It thinks the kingdom of God is around the corner, while I he regarded it as impossible of realisation, except by God's grace. A day which confronts immediate problems of social reconstruction will have little understanding for this aspect of the religious life, this soaring of the soul beyond the possibilities of history. That appreciation can come only when the new and just society has been built, and it is discovered that it is not just.
At any rate the prevailing institutions were accepted, even though the church was quite conscious of the conflict between them and its own ideal. Its natural determinism, its faith that nothing in nature or history could exist without the explicit will of God, gave additional support to this tendency. The natural law might be of a lower order than the law of the gospel, but its institutions of state and property, of war and inequality were nevertheless ordained of God. It was left to the monastics, and in Protestant times, to the sects, to incarnate the higher law.
