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PARTISAN REVIEW
Christian realism seems to be a definition of man based on the
Scriptures and on Christian theology. Man is radically free to choose
either good or evil and he often, in fact, chooses evil. Evil is thus a
positive goal, not merely, as in Platonism, the absence of good; nor is
it the case that man always wills the good and is prevented from at–
taining it either by ignorance or by insufficient control of the passions.
Niebuhr accuses secular social thinkers of these erroneous beliefs about
people, beliefs also found in classical rationalism, in Thomas Aquinas,
in Rousseau. Contemporary attempts to deal with evil by education or
scientific method are regarded as sentimental; if man wants evil, edu–
cation, science, even self-discipline, can make it more effective.
The tragic flaw in man which brings him to desire evil seems, for
Niebuhr, to be self-interest. Its opposite is love, which brings true altru–
ism. Man is free to choose evil because he is not totally bound by time
and culture ; he is in nature and beyond it, is creature and creator, is
destructive and creative. Social science treats man only as a natural
creature, time- and culture-bound; so it cannot do justice to his tran–
scendent nature and his creativity; nor can it account for the willful
evils of communism and fascism.
Niebuhr seems to equate love with creativity and altruism, and
he argues that if man chooses love, he needs, if he is to go far with
it, God's grace. Christian love
(agape,
as distinct from
philia
and
eros)
reaches its height in sacrificial love, love of the Cross, which is the
ultimate altruism. Secular appeals to enlightened self-interest as a basis
for community presuppose a rationality that men do not have and use
a form of the very principle of destructiveness to yield good. This is
not only illogical but unrealistic in that it does not face up to human
experience, which is Niebuhr's criterion of the worth of social beliefs.
Contemporary experience includes war, totalitarianism, concentration
camps, and gas chambers; and Niebuhr thinks that only religious vision
is adequate to face and understand these horrors.
Niebuhr's reliance on experience is all to the good, but experience
is, of course, the touchstone of empirical science. Insofar as science does
not understand what it should, it is not scientific enough. To make a
generalization which does not, of course, apply to all current work,
there are two essential respects in which contemporary social science
fails in its dealing with our experience: it often substitutes the laboratory
for the social situation; and it neglects history. Laboratory work is in–
dispensable but its conclusions cannot be applied without qualification
to society. The neglect of history destroys the context of social issues
and vitiates their meaning. Criticism of social science in terms like these
