Theory in Action, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2012 (© 2012) DOI:10.3798/tia.1937-0237.12006

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Poets and Prophets in a Machine Age:

Reinhold Niebuhr on Technology

Jeremy Sabella1

Reinhold Niebuhr, the mid-twentieth century theologian, political philosopher, and social critic, wrote frequently about the deeper implications of technology. More specifically, he examined the moral and spiritual consequences of rapid technological change. In his view the industrial revolution mechanized social relations in a way that undermined the innate human awareness of the interconnection between the self, the universe, and other human beings on which morality and spirituality is built. He argued for the possibility of reestablishing awareness of these interconnections in industrialized societies by reclaiming the social roles of the poet and the prophet. This article outlines Niebuhr’s strategy for recasting these poetic and prophetic roles in the context of technologically advanced societies, analyzes Niebuhr’s own prophetic stance toward technology and society in his classic 1952 work The Irony of American History, and examines how Niebuhr’s vision for the poetic and the prophetic provides a framework for own attempts to work with technology in a morally responsible way. . [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS: Niebuhr, Technology, Religion and Science, Poet, Prophet. It may initially seem odd that the individual featured on the cover of Time Magazine’s 25th anniversary edition in 1948 was, of all things, a

1 Jeremy Sabella is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (B.A.) and Yale Divinity School (M.Div), and is currently a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Boston College. His dissertation examines how the concept of original sin shaped American political discourse during the Cold War. Address correspondence to: Jeremy Sabella, e-mail: sabellaj@bc.edu.

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theologian. But then again, Reinhold Niebuhr was no ordinary public figure. People as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., Alan Paton, Saul Alinsky, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama regard him as a major influence on their thought.2 Hans Morgenthau, the preeminent political theorist and proponent of twentieth century political realism, considered Niebuhr “the greatest living political philosopher of America.”3 Nor was Niebuhr’s influence restricted to the cultural elite: he is widely regarded as the author of the Serenity Prayer used by recovery programs worldwide.

How did this pastor-turned-ethics professor manage to have such broad cultural influence? For one Niebuhr had a remarkable synthetic mind, enabling him to bring theological concepts to bear on the pressing social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth century in cogent, profound, and surprising ways. But just as important, he was keenly attuned to the events, movements, and trends of his day. From his activism on behalf of Ford’s auto workers in Detroit in the 1920s, to his involvement in the Socialist Party and attentiveness to civil rights issues in the 1930s, to his vocal leadership throughout World War II and the height of the Cold War, Niebuhr persistently subjected the contemporary scene to incisive analysis.

This article focuses on a particular aspect of Niebuhr’s analysis: namely, his thoughts on the promise and peril of technology. Niebuhr’s career spanned a time of dizzying social transformation brought about through technological innovation. Niebuhr was born in 1892—a mere 15

2 Martin Luther King Jr. openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Niebuhr, and wrote extensively on Niebuhr while a graduate student. These writings can be found in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol 2, ed. Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Luker, Penny A. Russel, Peter Holloran (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Regarding Niebuhr Alan Paton writes, “I think him to be the wisest man I ever knew, with an understanding of human nature and of human society which no one has equaled in our century.” Quoted by Roger L. Shinn in Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited: Engagements with an American Original ed. Daniel F. Rice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s 2009) 9. In a 1972 letter to Reinhold’s wife Ursula shortly after Reinhold’s death, Saul Alinsky writes, “I can’t tell you what a tremendous influence he had in shaping a lot of my thinking” (Box 46, Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C). Jimmy Carter credited Niebuhr’s work with inspiring how he related the notions of love and justice in his acceptance speech at the democratic national convention (Box 46, Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C). In a conversation with David Brooks in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama called Niebuhr one of his “favorite philosophers” (“Obama Chapter and Verse,” New York Times, April 26th, 2007, section A p.25). 3 “Niebuhr’s political thought” in Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophetic Voice in Our Time, ed. Harold R. Landon (Greenwich, CT: Seabury Press, 1962) 109.

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years after the invention of the telephone.4 By his death in 1971, Niebuhr had seen the emergence of the automobile and airline industries, the launching of the first satellite, the first human steps taken on the lunar surface—not to mention the carnage of two world wars, the invention of the atom bomb, the specter of nuclear proliferation, and with it, the capacity to destroy the planet many times over. Niebuhr was well acquainted with the promise and peril that accompany technological change, and the theme of technology and its implications surfaces repeatedly throughout his writings.5 More specifically, I examine what Niebuhr understood to be the spiritual repercussions of technological change, as well as his suggestions for how modern society can relate to technology in a way that fosters the conditions necessary to spiritual health in a technologically advanced age. It is my contention that Niebuhr offers us insight into how to promote and maintain spiritual health amid the technological transformations of our day. RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY IN NIEBUHR’S THOUGHT

Niebuhr’s frequent references to technology are typically embedded in his analyses of political, ethical, social, or economic issues. As a consequence, Niebuhr’s analysis of technology shifts to accommodate major changes in society. Niebuhr’s early writings were informed by his experience of advocating for Henry Ford’s assembly line workers during his pastorate in Detroit from 1916-1928. Repeated failures to obtain concessions from Ford on their behalf prompted Niebuhr’s grim appraisal of the industrial revolution’s effect on the urban poor and on American society in general. Though he sharply disagreed with Marx’s appraisal of religion, Niebuhr saw Marx as industrial society’s most insightful and perceptive critic. He drew heavily on Marx in the often scathing critiques of industrialism in his first major writings following his acceptance of a faculty position in ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1929.6 From the mid-1930s onward,

4 Both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey submitted patents for the first telephone in 1876. 5 The persistence with which Niebuhr raises issues related to technology prompted Charles McDaniel, in God and Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), to note that Niebuhr “exhibited a near obsession not with technology itself but with its social and moral outcomes” (207). 6 I particularly have in mind Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and Reflections on the End of an Era (1934).

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Niebuhr’s attention shifted from American society to the mounting political tensions in Europe which would eventually give way to World War II. Renouncing both fascism and communism, he nonetheless remained critical of the dangerously naïve individualism he perceived at the core of American democratic and economic theory and retained socialist political leanings throughout his life. Underlying the various ways that Niebuhr developed and altered his thought to take into account the massive political and social changes that transpired over the course of his life was a remarkably consistent understanding of technology’s larger implications.7

Niebuhr’s treatment of technology derives from a larger, more explicitly articulated topic of concern for Niebuhr: namely, the relationship between religion and science. In virtually all his major works, Niebuhr contends that one of the main pitfalls of his age was the presumption that the human person could be analyzed, explained and understood purely within the empirically verifiable terms of the scientific method. But this, in Niebuhr’s view, was a tragic mistake. For Niebuhr the human person is simultaneously part of and transcends the natural world. While science was indispensable to understanding humanity insofar as it is part of nature, there is a transcendent and unquantifiable dimension to the human person— particularly the dimension of the relationship to God and neighbor—that defies scientific analysis. The malaises peculiar to a technological age are rooted in the tendency to ignore these unquantifiable aspects of the human person in the pursuit of technological solutions to human problems. The way to correct these malaises is to learn how to address the needs of the transcendent as well as the natural aspects of the human person, which inevitably requires drawing on the insights of religion as well as those of science. Interrelating religious and scientific knowledge is thus crucial to understanding technology and managing it in a responsible way.

This interrelation, however, is not without friction. In “Religion and Poetry” (1930),8 Niebuhr questions the popular notion that there is no conflict between religion and science. He argues that they are always in tension, as they embody fundamentally different modes of construing

7 For a sense of the frequency with which the topic of technology surfaces in Niebuhr’s work, see Charles McDaniel, God and Money: the Moral Challenge of Capitalism (USA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) 207-212 8 Originally published in the Theological Magazine of the Evangelical Synod of North America (July, 1930), this article was reprinted in Young Reinhold Niebuhr: His Early Writings, 1911-1931 ed. William G. Chrystal (St. Louis, MO: Eden Publishing House, 1977) 220-226

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reality. However this is a productive tension which generates a fuller engagement with the world than either religion or science can achieve on its own. In fact, to follow one at the exclusion of the other warps one’s perception in potentially dangerous ways. A balanced society in a post-enlightenment age finds ways to cope with rather than eliminate the friction that comes from embracing both religious and scientific insights.

At the core of the tension between religion and science are different dispositions toward the world which generate divergent and at times conflicting insights into reality. Niebuhr defines science as “the application of human intelligence to the problem of discovering, analyzing, and collating the observable facts in the cosmic process and in human history.” As such, “Science is analytical. It makes careful analysis of detailed facts and attempts to explain their relation to each other.” Religion, on the other hand, is the “poetic apperception and appreciation of the total meaning of reality.” On account of its focus on larger meaning, religion does not dwell on “the details of life and the minutiae of reality” as science does (221). Niebuhr captures the contrast between them by describing science as microscopic in orientation and religion as telescopic. This difference in orientation results in a series of contrasting characteristics: science is detail-oriented and precise; religion is intuitive. Science relies on intelligence; religion relies on imagination. Science renders insight into specifics; religion discerns the harmony that unites the specifics (221-23).

These divergent characteristics equip religion and science to grasp distinct aspects of reality. The microscopic emphasis of science renders in-depth empirical insight into the world as it is. The telescopic emphasis of religion enables us to discern what the world might potentially become: “The difference between religious truth and scientific truth,” Niebuhr writes, “might be defined as the difference between a description of what is and what ought to be and therefore may be” (223). While religious talk of what ought to be may strike the scientific mind as amorphous and inexact, ideals need to be imagined and described before they can become reality. Conversely, the scientific emphasis on empirical data may strike the religious mind as unimaginative and dull. But it is the scientific commitment to concrete facts that enables modern civilization in all of its complexity to exist at all. A society which aspires to have both a clear grasp of the present and a robust vision for the future must foster both temperaments: “For a wholesome culture there must be tension between the scientific temper which takes into account only the present realities, no matter how discouraging, and the religious temper

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which dreams of the Kingdom of God and speaks of man as a child of God” (223).

The analytical mode of scientific perception and poetic mode of religious perception are bound to clash with one another. The scientific disposition will object to the tendency of the poetic disposition to draw broad, sweeping generalizations that do not take adequate account of the facts, and the poetic disposition will be frustrated by the reticence of the scientific disposition to search for the deeper meanings behind the facts. But this conflict is beneficial insofar as it prevents either disposition from dominating the other in a way that leads to dangerous imbalances in society. Without the counterweight of science, the poetic impulse in religion will create “a sentimental religiosity which is out of touch with the facts;” without the counterweight of religion, science will foster “a cynical realism which enervates moral vigor” (223). But a society which permits both religious and scientific truth to thrive strikes the balance between sentimentality and cynicism that keeps societies vital and healthy. Thus Niebuhr concludes, “There will always be a certain conflict between poets and scientists, between those who describe detailed facts and those who seek to apprehend total meanings. Yet the interests of truth demand that both continue in their pursuit of it” (222).

However, Niebuhr did not believe that the technologically advanced society of his day had preserved this balance. He argued that the problems of the twentieth century could be traced to the post-enlightenment dismissal of religious thought in favor of scientific thought. In a 1954 article entitled “Tyranny of Science,”9 he argues that the enormous technological advances made possible through the scientific method have invested science with an aura of authority that religion had held in previous ages. The prestige of science is so great that our culture fosters the belief that science will ultimately solve all major problems. But, Niebuhr observes, for all of science’s advances, it has “been singularly deficient in generating wisdom in human affairs” (465). This is because the realm of human freedom—of moral responsibility before God and fellow human beings—is not reducible to the scientific realm of cause, effect, and predictability. A religious perspective, with its view toward a total frame of meaning, is necessary for taking human freedom and moral responsibility into account. The carnage of the first half of the 20th century was due in part to an enthralled fascination with science which blinded the West to the need to subject scientific advances to the scrutiny of this religious perspective.

9 Theology Today 10, 4 (1954) 464-473

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Niebuhr’s analysis of technology and its effects informs his attempt to create and maintain a productive tension between religion and science in an industrial age. One of Niebuhr’s most sustained reflections on technology is an article entitled “The Spiritual Life of Modern Man” (1930).10 He contends that what unites people across time and place is a “desire to be whole, to fulfill every capacity and develop every potentiality of the human spirit, and to bring abundance and wholeness of life to our fellows” (67). Integral to fulfilling this desire for wholeness is a sense of interconnectedness with society and with the universe. Traditionally, the sense of interconnectedness grew organically out of close-knit communities which formed the basis of all preindustrial societies. These highly integrated communities provided the structure, discipline, and sense of belonging necessary for engendering the strong sense of mutual obligation at the core of all morality and spirituality (67).

The technological achievements of the industrial age vastly increased the scope and breadth of society, though they also depleted those aspects of community formation which met the human need for wholeness. In a pre-industrial age human beings needed to be physically proximate to one another to form community. The industrial revolution introduced technologies of transportation and communication which virtually eliminated the constraints of physical proximity, creating previously unimaginable links between people the world over and reconfiguring how people related to one another. Niebuhr identifies two major consequences of this technological reconfiguration of society: first, it upset previous modes of human association. Through business or commercial links, one routinely develops intimate connections with distant people, while scarcely having any interactions with the person next door. In Niebuhr’s words: “Our neighbors have become strangers and strangers have become our neighbors” (70). Second, the mechanical forms of interconnection replaced the organic communal bonds of the past. Consequently, “our sense of organic relationship to society and to the universe has been destroyed” (68). This in turn has depleted the sense of moral obligation toward one another arising from organic interconnectedness: “Human sympathy which flows at the touch of human hands ceased to flow where men feel only the bonds of steel which hold them together in artificial societies” (70). Without the moral structure which organic social ties provide, people neglect the moral discipline that keeps their baser impulses in check. These unchecked impulses have a potentially devastating consequence on society at large:

10 Reprinted in Faith and Politics, ed. Ronald Stone (NY: Braziller, 1968) 67-76.

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“our common life is ordered by the impulses of nature, greed, and lust for power, which have achieved a new and awful potency by the advance of science; and our individual lives… are not ordered at all” (70-71).

Lest his occasionally bleak tone suggest otherwise, Niebuhr was no Luddite. He was as keenly aware of the benefits of technology as he was of its risks. He appreciated the vast improvements in quality of life which technology made possible, and saw promise in the fact that mechanical interdependencies of modern society made human community on a worldwide scale possible for the first time in history. However, such community could not take place in the absence of organic forms of interconnectedness. One of the great challenges confronting industrial society is to figure out how to create these organic interconnections in a society which no longer generated them naturally.

Part of what makes this task so daunting is that it lacks precedent. Preindustrial societies could count on organic ties forming naturally, and thus did not have to address the problem of how to create organic ties from scratch. Furthermore, not only is industrial society working without a template; it also has to fight its own innate tendencies. The impressive technological achievements of the industrial age have convinced the inhabitants of industrial societies that there are technological solutions to all problems. This renders them prone to being dumbfounded by technology’s impotence before their burning (and ultimately spiritual) desire for wholeness: “These [technological] instruments of precision have gained such a prestige by their immediate triumphs and achievements that your modern man is unable to see what he cannot see through these instruments and is afraid to confess that he feels unities and relationships which cannot be expressed in their terms!” (73). But before it can go about building the organic interconnections which can meet our spiritual needs, society must abandon the futile search for technological solutions for a decidedly non-technological need for wholeness.

Central to Niebuhr’s strategy for helping society reclaim organic interconnections in a technological age is to reestablish the roles of the poet and the prophet in a modern context. The role of the poet for Niebuhr is to identify and deepen the awareness of our desire for wholeness and of our interconnectedness with the universe and with our fellows (69). The role of the prophet is to help us recognize and internalize the moral obligations toward one another which arise from this interconnectedness (71). Through fulfilling these roles, poets and prophets play a crucial role in helping mechanically interdependent

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society envision and build organically interdependent communities which foster and sustain our spiritual wellbeing.

Niebuhr elaborates on the roles of poet and prophet in considerable detail. Niebuhr’s model for the recovery of the prophetic is that of the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. The way they “warred against a civilization much simpler than ours in the name of their ideal of brotherhood” provides a template for the reasserting this ideal in our own time (71). To provide the guidance and leadership necessary to pursuing this ideal, prophetic figures must “know how to insist how man cannot be whole until he lives again in organic unity with his fellow men” and possess the ability to shape the social realities in a way that enables this unity (71). In the context of a machine age, such a figure must be a technician of two types: a pedagogical technician who “knows how to create the kind of social and spiritual imagination which will overcome the mechanical and indirect relationships which modern life has produced and help man to feel with his or her brother in this sort of society,” and a social technician who “knows how to create social organisms which can come into control of the mechanical world which moves now without social intelligence” (71-72). Meanwhile, the poet supplies the linguistic and symbolic tools which enable people to imagine and convey their interconnectedness to the universe and to their fellows. But poets have never had to ply their craft in an age with such a depleted sense of organic interdependence. Poetry which neglected to take the realities of this new age into account would become socially irrelevant. To play an active role in creating and developing the capacity for organic interconnection in an industrial society, the poet must be willing to undergo the scrutiny of philosophy’s unimaginative realism: “Without the philosopher the poet will let his imagination degenerate into free fancy… so we need the discipline of philosophy with the imagination of poetry for the solution of our cultural problem” (73). Niebuhr concludes that to fulfill their role as spiritual leaders in a technological age, prophets must become technicians and poets must become philosophers: “Religion which grew naturally out of the heart of the peasant can live in a more complex era only by collaboration of prophets who are also technicians with poets who are also philosophers” (74).

Taking on their respective roles of technicians and philosophers enables modern-day prophets and poets to fulfill their social function. In order to function as the conscience and moral compass of a society, the prophet must possess the ability to stand outside of, and frequently against, civilization. The prophet, then, must always be at a certain

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degree of remove from society. Alternately, the poet helps to create the culture of a society. From this place within culture the poet cultivates the intuitive, imaginative, symbolic resources which enable people to conceive of themselves as part of a larger whole. Fulfilling this function requires the poet to be deeply engaged in society. From their respective locations outside of and within society, modern-day prophets and poets must continue to collaborate. The prophet can interminably exhort his society to greater spiritual and moral vitality; but without poetic tools to help society imagine this new life, society cannot make sense of the prophetic message. Similarly, the poet can create a wealth of images, symbols, and insights which help a society envision a deeper unity; but without prophetic exhortation, this vision breeds self-satisfied complacency rather than vital moral and spiritual life. In our technological age, as in any other age, “the poet leans on the prophet and the prophet on the poet in guiding the spirit of man” (69). THE PROPHET LEANING ON THE POET: NIEBUHR’S IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

By style and temperament, Niebuhr was decidedly more prophetic than poetic. While his relentless and incisive cultural criticism has earned him acclaim as one of the great prophetic figures of the twentieth century,11 he lacked the patience to undergo the cultural immersion necessary to the poetic craft. As Richard Crouter flatly states, “Niebuhr was no poet.”12 Yet Niebuhr has also been called a “dramatist of theological ideas”—a description which points to his ability to marshal poetic images and devices to make his point.13 Though himself no poet, Niebuhr leaned heavily on the poet in his attempt to fulfill a prophetic role in American society. And as we have seen, this role included addressing the deeper moral implications of technology.

Niebuhr’s Irony of American History bears closer examination as an example of Niebuhr utilizing poetry to enact a prophetic role for the following reasons: first, it is arguably Niebuhr’s most popular work. This

11 Acclaimed Jewish theologian and philosopher Abraham Heschel compared Niebuhr to the “prophets of old” in his eulogy at Niebuhr’s funeral. See “Reinhold Niebuhr: A Last Farewell,” Conservative Judaism 25 (summer 1971) 62-63. 12 Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010) 15. In a chapter entitled “Connecting with Wit and Words” Crouter examines how Niebuhr the non-poet was nonetheless highly skilled at using poetic devices to communicate his message (59-76). 13 Larry Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (1991) 82

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is due in part to how Niebuhr draws on a variety of disciplines—history, political science, theology, literature—to craft his argument in a way that appeals to a wide and diverse audience. This book, then, is a good measure of the potential scope of the prophetic role as Niebuhr understands it. Second, as the title suggests, Niebuhr explicitly uses a literary device—the motif of irony—to structure his argument, making the reliance on poetry which runs throughout his works especially clear. Finally, Niebuhr published this book in 1952, in a drastically altered political, social, and technological context than existed when he was theorizing about the role of the poet-prophet in a technical civilization in the late 1920s. If he successfully uses these earlier notions to address the technological challenges the 1950s, this would suggest that his poet-prophet concept is highly adaptable and could perhaps inform our attempts to work through the moral implications of technology in our own day.

Niebuhr opens The Irony of American History by contrasting the motif of irony to the motifs of pathos and tragedy. Pathos is elicited by situations in which people suffer evil through no fault of their own, as is the case in natural disasters. Tragedy arises when people consciously commit evil for the sake of a greater good, such as the decision to leverage the threat of the atomic bomb as a means of preserving peace. Irony arises when the elements of a particular situation in which we are involved are juxtaposed in such a way that they reveal ulterior motives had previously been hidden from us. Irony is thus distinct from either pathos or tragedy:

The ironic situation is to be distinguished from a pathetic one in that the person involved bears some responsibility for it. It is differentiated from tragedy in that the responsibility is related to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolution (viii).14

Furthermore, unlike pathos or tragedy, irony dissolves upon being identified. When confronted with the hidden vanity or pretension that the ironic situation makes clear, nations as well as individuals either cease their pretension in an act of contrition, or persist in their pretension, and thus consciously commit evil. In either case, recognition of the ironic situation results in the dissolution of its ironic element (viii). While Niebuhr acknowledges that there are tragic and pathetic elements to the

14 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (NY: Scribner’s, 1952).

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American experience, the motif of irony in his view generates more valuable insight into the American historical situation (vii).

The ironic juxtapositions resulting from technology and its uses feature prominently in Niebuhr’s analysis of American history. Technological prowess enabled the U.S. to develop the atomic bomb, which gave it the devastating military advantage it needed to bring a swift end to WWII.15 Transportation and communications technology enabled the U.S. to extend its military influence to the most far-flung corners of the globe and to bring stability to an otherwise chaotic postwar world. And the pioneering role that the U.S. played in developing print, radio, and television media gave American culture an unprecedented ability to inform and shape other cultures. While America was hardly the first society to recognize and exploit technology’s potential, Niebuhr maintained that no other society had become quite as enamored with technological advancements and the scientific principles which make these advancements possible. European critics pick up on the American obsession with technology when they refer to the U.S. as a “technocracy” (58)—a fitting description in light of how the natural sciences dominate American intellectual life to the point of undermining and subsuming other academic disciplines: “No national culture has been as assiduous as our own in trying to press the wisdom of the social and the political sciences, indeed of all the humanities, into the limits of the natural sciences” (60).

The extent of this enthrallment with technology and science is evident in the value American culture places on an ever-increasing standard of living as “the final norm of the good life” (57). The reason this is evidence of a technologically obsessed society is twofold. First, science and technology are the driving force behind standard-of-living increases. The natural sciences generate the technologies that expand and perfect techniques for acquiring wealth. Second, “standard of living” is a purely material measure of wellbeing. When a material measure becomes the highest cultural good, non-material aspects of humanity suffer neglect. For this reason the American pursuit of an ever-higher standard of living

15 Niebuhr himself drew a distinction between developing and using the atomic bomb. While he did think it important for the U.S. to develop the bomb before the Germans, he wondered whether the mere possession of the bomb might have been enough to induce a Japanese surrender without actually using it. See Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press, 1992) 123.

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often comes at the expense of our psychological and spiritual health.16 But at the very pinnacle of astonishing material success, an analysis of the historical situation reveals the anxieties as well as the benefits that the narrow-minded pursuit of an ever-higher standard of living has generated:

The prosperity of America is legendary. Our standards of living are beyond the dreams of avarice of most of the world. We are a kind of paradise of security and wealth. But we face the ironic situation that the same technical efficiency which provided our comforts has also placed us at the center of the tragic developments in world events (45).

Niebuhr analyses the specifically technological dimension to these “tragic developments” through his analysis of two symbols: one which points to the unintended perils of technology per se, and the other which points to the costs of cultural obsession with technology. The prime symbol of the potential peril of technology per se is the atomic bomb. Developed with the twin aims of bringing a swift end to World War II and establishing American security through military might, nuclear technology also unleashed the power to destroy human civilization. The technological “solution” to our security problems ironically became the source of a hitherto unknown degree of insecurity. The symbol of the cost of cultural obsession with technology is the television, which “may represent a threat to our culture analogous to the threat of atomic weapons to our civilization” (59). Niebuhr elaborates on this rather jarring claim by pointing out that, while technological innovation is “basic to the advancement of culture” (he cites the invention of printing as an example), communications technology can also disseminate information that undermines culture (59). In the interest of maximizing profits, mass media tends to approach culture as a commodity to be exploited. The damage this approach inflicts on a culture’s integrity is analogous to what a nuclear bomb does to the infrastructure of a city.17

16 The technological preoccupation at the root of our neglect of the non-empirically quantifiable aspects of human life has led us to seek “vapid solutions for profound problems” (60). 17 For a more thorough treatment of television and radio’s effects on culture, see Niebuhr’s introduction to Wilber Schramm, Responsibility in Mass Communication (New York: Harper, 1957) xi-xxiii. For a useful overview of Niebuhr on the topic of mass media see Brown, 193-95.

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In Niebuhr’s analysis, the two technologies which represent the pinnacle of American technological achievement are also grave threats to American civilization and culture. They are thus emblematic of the spiritual pitfalls to which the powerful, and in the U.S. case the technologically sophisticated, are prone:

[The] technocratic approach to problems of history, which erroneously equates mastery of nature with the mastery of historical destiny, in turn accentuates a very old failing of human nature: the inclination of the wise, or the powerful, or the virtuous, to obscure and deny the human limitations in all human achievements and pretensions (147).

But rather than allow the insecurities of our age to force us into a tragic assessment of the contemporary situation, Niebuhr suggests that we view adopt the standpoint of irony. Niebuhr reminds us that from an ultimate perspective, the plight of our civilization is the result of the same illusions and mistakes to which all great civilizations fall prey. Every great civilization indulges the pretense that it can obtain a secure a greater measure of security and freedom than is humanly possible. And in every age, the prophet points out that “every desperate effort to establish security will lead to heightened insecurity” (159). An ironic view of one’s plight helps one see the discrepancy between pretense and reality. And in the case of the US, the discrepancies are manifold:

That we should be less innocent as a nation than our fathers hoped; that we should be covered with guilt by assumption of the very responsibilities that express virtue; that we should become less powerful in relation to the total historical pattern as we become more powerful in given historical issues; that the happiness which our fathers regarded as the true end of life should have eluded us, all this fits very well into the pattern of ironic failure. In all of them human limitations catch up with human pretensions (162).

The ironies revealed in these discrepancies may be resolved in two fundamental ways: either disregard the discrepancies and thereby persist in one’s pretensions, or acknowledge agency in creating these discrepancies and repent of one’s pretensions. The former stance dismisses irony in favor of a tragic or a purely evil approach to the discrepancy. The latter approach, which attempts to confront rather than dismiss the ironic discrepancy, acknowledges the admixture of motives

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always present in the behavior of nations as well as individuals. Pretension distorts the good in human creativity. It is this distorted, sinful element which ironic discrepancies reveal and from which individuals and nations must repent. But very distinction made between good and distorted elements in human action presupposes a belief that history plays out in a moral universe; and the notion that one can repent and change implies accountability to a “divine judge who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations” (155). The ironic understanding of history can therefore only make sense within a religious frame of meaning. For Niebuhr, it is only within this frame that we can detect the unforeseen moral shortcomings which our technological achievements lay bare—and it is only through repeatedly repenting of these shortcomings that one can ultimately direct these technologies to morally responsible uses.

Irony of American History, then, illustrates the poet-prophet motif in action. The poetic device of irony becomes the basis for bringing the reader to the point of acknowledging and recognizing the moral universe in which a given deed has taken place. With regard to technology, Niebuhr demonstrates how the very technological prowess which gave the U.S. its status in the world has also implicated it in the ambiguities, complexities, and pitfalls of a technological age and points us to the conceptual framework which can help us navigate these pitfalls effectively. Niebuhr thus adopts the role of the pedagogical technician who uses poetic imagery to point a technical civilization to a moral end. CONCLUSION

Our own historical context is drastically different from Niebuhr’s. The bilateral political arena of the Cold War has given way to the chaos of international terrorism. American economic dominance and military prestige, though still significant, have undergone noticeable decline. Oil spills and nuclear reactor meltdowns have made us more aware of the cost as well as the benefits of technological development. And the global ramifications of economic missteps and environmental issues demonstrate just how intertwined the fates of nations have become. In short, our world is complex and ambiguous in ways that Niebuhr could never have anticipated.

But there is a crucial point of continuity between Niebuhr’s context and our own: in our internet age we are more “technocratic” than ever, and in dire need of ways to conceive of technology’s effect on society in more comprehensive and substantive terms than purely material

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measures can provide. Through his analysis of the relationship between religion and science and of the complementary roles of the poet and prophet, Niebuhr integrates spiritual and material views of the world and helps us perceive the moral as well as the empirically measurable aspects to the challenges we face. This integrated approach is essential as we face global challenges with clear moral dimensions, such as how to provide for the basic needs of an enormous world population, or how to allocate increasingly scarce energy resources.18

Niebuhr’s understanding of irony in particular continues to be a useful lens through which to detect and respond to the moral and spiritual dimensions underlying the use and implementation of technology. Niebuhrian irony presumes that human beings are limited and flawed historical actors, preventing us from investing any one approach to a challenge with too much prestige or authority. It also presumes that good is intermingled with human limitations and flaws, encouraging us to keep trying to come up with innovative approaches to the challenges we confront. Finally, Niebuhr’s insistence on repentance for the shortcomings that irony discloses compels us to acknowledge that our actions play out in a moral universe in which we are held accountable. Meeting the technological challenges of our increasingly complex and unpredictable world will require us to be assertive as well as humble, cognizant of our limits as well as our strengths, as ready to acknowledge the good in others as we are to admit the faults in ourselves. Niebuhr points us to how to foster these qualities as we attempt to wield technology in a morally responsible way.

18 For analysis of Niebuhr’s economic theory and intriguing suggestions for its modern application, see “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Economic Realism” in Charles McDaniel, God and Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) 183-228.

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