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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Gandhi through Niebuhr9/17/2007 09:31:43This morning, as the sun cuts through the haze, I am reading Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch. I'm working through the chapter on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s encounter with Rienhold Niebuhr's writings while a student at Crozer. Apparently, King encountered Gandhi almost entirely through the realist lens of Niebuhr, who King found to provide a meaningful and challenging critique of Protestant liberal theology. Though I have not gotten to look into it directly, Niebuhr's Gandhi must have been one grounded not in the perfectibility of human nature but precisely in its imperfection, its original sin. This Niebuhr-Gandhi connection is of great interest to me lately, especially as I sort out the appeals of market economics (which creates new possibilities through trans-human scale) and nonviolent conflict resolution. Niebuhr, who came to reject total pacifism, insists that human nature's solution cannot quite be itself (for him on theological grounds, for me on biology). A Niebuhrian Gandhi opens the possibility of moving past Gandhi's personal blindnesses, which I argue confuse the local and civilizational scales: his body with the body of a nation, personal health with social health, purity with justice, chastity with unity, etc. His local obsessions as a politician are an unfounded spiritualism. Niebuhr's approach sidesteps the spiritual optimism that self-interest is a thing to be overcome, rather than realigned (through tran-human scales like morality and economics). All of this draws to mind a recent encounter of my own, with the neoconservative Catholic theologian Michael Novak. With a kind voice and a gentle smile, he painted a picture of the Niebuhrian worldview to a classroom full of knee-jerk liberal college students. I got out my own liberal anxiety by sparring with him about global warming, but ever since I have been plagued by the sense that his basic framework was deeply useful (read, pragmatically, "true"). What made it so striking, so difficult to dismiss, was the very kindness in his voice as he presented it. There was, it seemed, no option to accuse him of the pessimism that realism wanders so closely to. King's path to Gandhian nonviolence, perhaps, should be ours: through the lens of Niebhur. It may be safer for certain needs than meeting Gandhi more directly. The two complement each other in special ways: East and West, idealism and realism, purity and morality, self-sacrifice and self-interest. From here, in my studies of nonviolence, I will strive to think like a Niebhurian biologian, seeing what comes of it.
re: Gandhi through Niebuhr - 9/17/2007 10:48:35
"People ask me," said Niebuhr, "since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist? Well, I have a simple answer ... King's doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacifism. Pacifism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference." (896)
re: Gandhi through Niebuhr - 9/18/2007 08:53:09
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