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iebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, and What It Indicates About What’s Shaping Modern Culture

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“I do not want the peace that passeth understanding.  I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”—Helen Keller

 

he entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr, says, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.  Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen.”  If you’re strong then naturally you’d courageously change reality, and if you’re weak then naturally you’d serenely accept reality.  “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” doesn’t necessarily mean, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” but is necessarily that unconditional, all-or-nothing, and

If the average person knew what the entire Serenity Prayer says, he probably, at the very least, would accept others not wanting to use the Serenity Prayer as a guide to life.  According to the Serenity Prayer school of psychology, the fact that the person who has the problem would simply be held response-able for dealing with it by courageously changing what he could and serenely accepting what he couldn’t, would be a fait accompli.  Unless what happened was so extreme that this would sound untenable, trying to correct the person who caused the problem, even assertively, could very easily seem or suggest: unrealistic, unreliable, stupid, conditional, optional, half-hearted, limited, judgmental, troublemaking, “on principle,” moralistic, unattractive, sophistry-rewarding, altruistic, controlling, whiny, mollycoddling, intellectualist, pathetic, resentful, maladjusted, negative, blaming, subjective, unproven, emotionalistic, manipulative, passive, etc., while trying to correct the person who has the problem in ways that would help him “take care of himself” better, could very easily seem or suggest: realistic, reliable, wise, necessary, vital, steadfast, limitless, forgiving, peace-making, pragmatic, trendy, marketable, success-rewarding, “getting on with life,” self-empowering, gutsy, achievement-oriented, down-to-earth, proud, competitive, well-adjusted, hopeful, solving, objective, self-justifying, practical, self-reliant, active, etc.  This is neo-Buddhism.  No problem could really be a problem if the victim prevented solved or dealt with it well enough, so victims who don’t take care of their own problems well enough seem omni-responsible.  The untermenschen are the only ones who could legitimately seem scary.  It seems that we must fear the untermenschen and their victim-power, and mustn’t fear the übermenschen and their freedoms.  Since AA founder Bill Wilson was a stockbroker, and the Big Book was written during the Great Depression, AA-style self-help is basically a stockbroker lecturing those living in the Great Depression that they should just take response-ability for their own welfare, and stop whining.  NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU.

Pat Buchanan, in a syndicated column in 1977, wrote, “...despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was an individual of great courage...  Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone.  His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”  The “defects of character” stressed by AA’s Big Book, resentment anger and fear in general, are the same as what Buchanan and Hitler meant by “character flaws,” i.e. not handling one’s own problems (whatever they may be) with enough stolid and self-reliant backbone.  “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” as well as, “Whatever your problem is, courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t,” also define “character flaws” as supposed weakness masquerading as morality.

 

Agent Orange has a webpage on how shocked Reinhold Niebuhr was about the fact that Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group (now called “Moral Re-Armament”; “Oxford” must have sounded too dreadfully intellectual), the conservative Christian group that AA grew out of, had similar attitudes toward Hitler.  Niebuhr was a hell-raiser, before Stalinism made him fatalistic about human nature.  Yet if any organization preaches the Serenity Prayer at people, the final result would be the same, that self-reliant STRENGTH seems good, and weakness that tries to get persuasive strength from emotion and/or abstractions seems intolerably bad.  As the history of The AA School of Self-Help Psychology shows, Nazism, minus anti-Semitism and committing outrageous aggression, equals taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it.

The Nature and Destiny of Man discusses the question of whether various expectations that we could ever have social justice, given a very Wagnerian conception of human nature.  Plenty of great writers, especially ever since the Renaissance, have written about how society should serve the needs of the common people, in whatever ways reflect the realities of human nature. In essence, Niebuhr evaluates them in terms of whether they take into consideration the Doctrine of Original Sin, in a way that’s Christian.  Since that seems to have been his favorite theological doctrine, The Serenity Prayer assumes that our choice isn’t between the peace that passeth understanding and the understanding that bringeth peace, but between the peace that passeth understanding and the dysfunctionality that would result from not adjusting to ineradicable imperfections.  That’s living in the real world.  You do what you can.  Beat the hardcore blues.  No self-care could seem onerous.  Whatever happens is, therefore, “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” etc.  Self-responsibility serves the greater good, is a moral obligation that we can’t afford to forgive.

 

(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)

For example, the chapter The Easy Conscience of Modern Man says, near the beginning, quotes T. E. Hulme as writing, “All thought since the Renaissance, in spite of its apparent variety, forms one coherent whole....  It all rests on the same conception of the nature of man and all exhibits the same inability to recognize the meaning of the dogma of original sin.  In this period not only have its philosophy, its literature and its ethics been based upon this new conception of man as fundamentally good, as sufficient, as the measure of things; but a good case can be made out for regarding many of its characteristic economic features as springing entirely from this central abstract conception.”  Anyone who believes that human sinfulness is that ineradicable, would naturally figure that the victims of this and other imperfections, simply must deal with their own problems by courageously changing what they can and serenely accepting whatever they can’t.

Yet when this book and the books it quotes discuss such topics as whether trusting nature or trusting people’s reason is the best way to have a just society, they completely ignore the passive aspects of human nature.  The Learning About Depression webpage on the Zoloft website, says, “If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated.  Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw.  It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression....  Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.”

 

Clearly, this isn’t simply among the diseases that are parts of the natural order.  A lot of this rampant depression are people’s natural reactions to helplessness.  The magnitude of this social problem, can’t just be brushed aside.  Yet discussions about how either nature or reason could lead us to either justice or injustice, doesn’t take into consideration that such rampant depression is a message from nature.  Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression.  Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.  As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive.  Of course, if our cultural norms have conditioned us to accept ads, books, etc., that would talk about such rampant depression as if it consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe character defects or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, then we couldn’t get this message from nature.  Sure, the old writers Niebuhr comments on, wrote before the Age of Depression.  Yet the threshold of human endurance has always existed, so they could have discussed that.

Manic-Depressive Illness, Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin and Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, says, in its chapter on personality differences, “Character has been defined as ‘personality evaluated’—that aspect of an individual which bears a moral stamp and reflects the person’s integrative and organizing functions.  The concept of character is employed less frequently in the United States than in Europe, although it is often used interchangeably with that of personality.”  Actually, the word character is used plenty in the United States, whether it be in comments on depression or from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Frank Buchman, to pass judgment on how integrated and organized are traumatized people.  After all, such judgments aren’t moralistic.  Someone absolutely has to provide our society’s homeostasis, since things simply have to remain integrated and organized.

Take Schopenhauer’s teachings, replace “violence” with “toughness,” and you’ve got a theme that goes through modern psychological thinking.  Schopenhauer’s focus on how we represent the world to ourselves, wasn’t about getting rid of pathological thoughts.  About a century ago, William James wrote that Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles.  The redbloods powerfully impress the human race in all circumstances.  We shouldn’t try to repress or control them.  The weak likely seem to be trying to get coddled, through ignominious cunning, what current self-help would call “manipulation.”  Correcting such untermensch weaknesses seems to be beneficial, self-improving, self-empowering.  Not only that, they seem to pose the sort of moral hazard that could be very powerful, very forceful and compelling, and one can’t defend himself against it without looking as if he’s re-victimizing victims.  To say that your feelings that something was bad or evil reflect a striving of your WILL, is to say that that they’re manipulative, reflecting a self-serving hidden agenda that even you probably aren’t aware of.  All you know is that you’re right.  Of course, the bad or evil person’s bad or evil choices, his belief that excusing or forgiving them is what’s right, etc., certainly reflect the striving of his WILL, but it would seem that we simply must accept that that’s the way that human nature is.

This wouldn’t see the above Al-Anon Conference-Approved Literature as extreme.  Sure, the law doesn’t simply accept addicts’ willfulness as if they’re not guilty by reason of insanity, but addicts’ family members are to have exactly that acceptance toward them.  Therefore, their family members, including their kids, should try to represent their own experiences to themselves as stoutheartedly as possible.  Their self-help mentors would simply check to see how well they’re doing in following these instructions.  (“Behavior Therapists and Cognitive Behavior Therapists... concentrate on a person’s views and perceptions about their life, rather than personality traits.”)  If they don’t, their refusal to fit in with this would be treated as if it’s their ignominiously weak, possibly cunning, certainly self-interested, WILLS.  They’d seem to want the world to be as they’d have it.  For an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, should seem like wryly Kafkaesque theater of the absurd, but instead it seems very  pragmatic and honorable.  No matter what any problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about.

And since this would apply equally to any situation, including alkies’ kids dealing with life with the alkies, this is the world as will and representation.

If one were to apply what On Speculation and Manipulation in Therapy says, “When it works, justice is always very particular.  It proceeds on a case-by-case basis with a careful weighing of the facts and an equally careful examination of the underlying logic of key arguments,” certainly the specifics of what addicts’ kids must deal with, would argue for someone else being to blame.  Yet the world as will and representation means that telling alkies’ normal kids to look at themselves rather than blame others, doesn’t seem any different than would be telling manipulative or hypochondriac blame-finders to do that.  No problem could seem to be a social problem if it seems to result from the ineradicably aggressive WILLS of those who cause it, and/or the (possibly masochistic) ignominiously cunning WILLS of those who have it.

Schopenhauer wrote of the sublime character, “Such a character will accordingly consider men in a purely objective way, and not according to the relations they might have to his will.  For example, he will observe their faults, and even their hatred and injustice to himself, without thereby being stirred to hatred on his own part....  For in the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself in this respect rather as a knower than as a sufferer.”  This is also the basic idea of cognitive therapy.  And, of course, there can be no “from the sublime to the ridiculous,” since everyone knows that however bad one’s problem is, that’s the reality that he must adjust to.  “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” to whatever degree your reality requires, would never be a reductio ad absurdum.  And, of course, the unjust are hardly sublime or serene, but we must accept that that’s just the way that they are.  We need coping skills that are

 

Here you two of the big failings of victim correction.  The first is that what this aims for isn’t a well-balanced personality, but one that would respond to “hatred and injustice... rather as a knower than as a sufferer.”  The second is that, while this is supposed to be good for “the lot of mankind as a whole,” this is actually moral bankruptcy.  One would be allowed to recognize what’s unethical about what’s done to others, and, especially, what’s unethical about anything that he might want to do.  But if he recognizes what’s unethical about what’s done to him, it would seem that his will wants this sinful world to be as he’d have it.  Even this limited acceptance of injustice and suffering, can’t be too good for the lot of mankind as a whole, as can be seen in the harm that the Wagnerian Germans have done to the world.

Ashley Montagu compiled a book, Man and Aggression, criticizing German biologist Konrad Lorenz’s book On Aggression along with two similar books by another author.  Montagu’s chapter is titled “The New Litany of ‘Innate Depravity’ or Original Sin Revisited,” and quotes Lorenz as writing, “Undeniably, there must be superlatively strong factors which are able to overcome the commands of individual reason so completely [so, according to the German logic, we need strong authority] and which are so obviously impervious to experience and learning.”  Naturally Schopenhauer, also, referred to the Doctrine of Original Sin as something he really related to.

And if sinfulness is so inherent, then peace has to come from somewhere.  It seems only natural to expect it to come from the victims, since they’re the most motivated to restore the peace, and because their unpeaceful feelings don’t seem ineradicable.  The World as Will and Representation also says, “When this striving after a painless existence, in so far as such an existence might be possible by applying and observing rational deliberation and acquired knowledge of the true nature of life, was carried out with strict consistency and to the utmost extreme, it produced Cynicism, from which Stoicism afterwards followed.”  This is basically Cognitive Therapy, the school of psychology that’s most associated with The Serenity Prayer.  Yet this would also be the inevitable results of Freudianism, Freud’s German-style scharf conceptions of ineradicable aggressiveness.  No matter what disruption occur or why, someone has to bring things back to normal.  The more self-responsibility, the better.

One problem-solver that most people would likely find obscure, but Götterdämmerung would require a good deal of, would be transcendence.  In the “Preface to the 1964 Edition,” Niebuhr wrote, “In regard to the Western emphasis on the individual, my thesis, which I still hold, was that individual selfhood is expressed in the self’s capacity for self-transcendence, and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.”  The unusual word that appears most frequently in The Nature and Destiny of Man, has got to be “transcend.”  And the parts of The World as Will and Representation that talk about zeitgeist rather than just philosophy, refer to transcendence enough, such as, “The apprehension of things by means of and in accordance with this arrangement is immanent; on the other hand, that which is conscious of the true state of things is transcendental,” and, “Further, it is sublime, in other words, it induces in us a sublime mood, because, without any reference to us, it moves along eternally foreign to earthly life and activity, and sees everything, but takes part in nothing.”  Self-help coping skills will use this whenever necessary, that just because something goes wrong in the material world, doesn’t mean that you have to let it bother you.

And if a culture is that cynical about the will, and assumes that aggression is ineradicable or “the way that the world is,” it’s likely to figure that the victims can and must get their own unpeaceful feelings under control.  If they don’t, then their objections are shameful willfulness.  As The Serenity Prayer puts it, they’re expecting the world to be as they’d have it.  Or, as T he World as Will and Representation puts it, “Nature has produced [the intellect] for the service of an individual will; therefore it is destined to know things only in so far as they serve as the motives of such a will, not to fathom them or comprehend their true inner essence,” and, “The hitherto infallible certainty and regularity with which the will worked in inorganic and merely vegetative nature, rested on the fact that it alone in its original inner being was active as blind urge, as will, without assistance, but also without interruption, from a second and entirely different world, namely the world as representation.  Indeed, such a world is only the copy of the will’s own inner being, but yet it is of quite a different nature, and now intervenes in the sequence of phenomena of the will.”  Thought seems synonymous with will, so if you object to sinful behavior, those objections are just your will.  Of course, anti-intellectualism is a lot more susceptible to emotional reasoning, including willfulness, since anti-intellectualism doesn’t have to be reality-tested, but it’s more likely to reflect the accepted willfulness of the strong.  As Eric Hoffer wrote in The Passionate State of Mind, “The beginning of thought is in disagreement—not only with others but also with ourselves,” but the only disagreement that anti-intellectualism would have with one’s own aggrieved will, would be desires to be too pragmatic red-blooded and/or forgiving to get upset.

And if a society feels at home with the conceptions of personal responsibility that would make one most likely to succeed in Götterdämmerung, that society would have to be pretty chaotic.  The book Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, says, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year.  Of these, over 20,000 commit suicide every year.”  To say that as doctors treat the million of Americans who suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, they should know this rate since it would help the doctors treat each individual as if their depressions simply are their problems, completely ignores the fact that this involves an unnaturally high rate of helplessness, happening to millions of people, year in and year out.

The April, 2001 issue of Psychology Today magazine, says in an article about how people could better manage the psychiatric disorders of family members, “More than 100 million Americans have a close family member who suffers from a major mental illness.  Of the 10 leading causes of disability, half are psychiatric. By the year 2020, the major cause of disability in the world may be major depression.”  The book When Madness Comes Home by Victoria Secunda, says that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV says that affective disorders affect 20% of the American population, anxiety disorders affect 25%, substance abuse disorders affect 27%, schizophrenia affects 0.7%, and sociopathy affects 3.5%.  And intercultural studies have consistently found that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser.  The webpage Surprising Risk Factor of Suicide, by Dr. Dean Edell, says about suicide, “It’s the eighth leading cause of death in this country, and in 1997 claimed about 30,000 lives - by comparison, only 19,000 people died as a result of homicide,” and suicide is certainly less red-blooded than murder.  In such a society, a lot of the people are likely to go through a lot of ordeals which are simply dismissed as nebulous, banal, seemingly inevitable, personal problems that the victims’ own personal weaknesses may have allowed to happen or to bother them, though science could prove that the real effect of these certainly isn’t something that we could afford to brush off.

Yet Schopenhauer would probably say that no matter how unnaturally high are a society’s rates of depression, anxiety disorders, etc., those are merely human will at work.  If nature has produced the biological phenomena that go on behind depression, for the service of an individual will, it would then be destined to know things only in so far as they serve as the motives of such a will, not to fathom them or comprehend their true inner essence.  This would seem to be just our animal natures, that keeps getting in the way of others’ freedom.  And if objections to sinfulness are willful expectations that the world would be as the objectors would have it, then that would have to include all of those whose depressions, anxiety disorders, etc., resulted from others’ sinfulness.

This isn’t to say that everything that Niebuhr implied, is therefore intentionally implied whenever someone coldly, pragmatically, instrumentally, tells an infuriated person to choose to calm down.  Yet you might be amazed how much of Niebuhr’s absolutist double standard, where victims are the ones to be corrected and those who cause the problems are the ones to be accepted, would be there.

Volume I: Human Nature
 
 

Chapter I is titled, “Man as a Problem to Himself,” which might suggest that Niebuhr could see that what he regards as human nature, would make for a real, practical problem.  Instead, how he begins this chapter is to say, “Man has always been his own most vexing problem.  How shall he think of himself?”  Here we have the supposed importance of representation.

Niebuhr then goes on to talk about whether humankind is good or evil, and the distortions that would naturally result from people sizing themselves up.  Here we have two very crucial suppositions that could lead to the real practical problems, both of which are very linked.  The first is that destructive behavior is a matter of what humanity inherently “is,” which means that all that someone has to do is choose to do something destructive, and, therefore, we’ll simply have to accept that at least some of humanity “is” that way.  In the notes I took in 1991 about comments that I heard about an outrageous situation I was in, mainly in 1990, “Whatever they do, you’ve just got to accept that some people are that way, or you can’t accept humanity,” which could be applied to any destructive behavior.

The second crucial supposition is that what humanity inherently “is,” is a question of whether they’re good or evil, not whether they’re destructible or indestructible.  This can be seen clearly in the Serenity Prayer.  It seems that whatever happens, we’re supposed to surrender to it as God’s will, since as long as something happened, it must be God’s will.  The acceptance of murders, etc., as God’s will is the main reason why Vincent Bugliosi converted to Agnosticism.  Of course, it seems perfectly acceptable to pass judgment on people’s weaknesses in dealing with their own problem.  One doesn’t pray, “Taking as Jesus did this resentful world as it is not as I would have it,” since the German worldview doesn’t consider distressed feelings to be ineradicable.

The ultimate question for us, would have to be, what would Niebuhr’s worldview say about what causes our glaringly unnaturally high rates of depression and anxiety disorders?  This point of view would simply accept what causes a lot of this, as ineradicable human nature, though the high rates of depression and anxiety certainly indicate an unnaturally high rate of trauma and insecurity.  Yet the depression and anxiety themselves, seem very eradicable, whether this be by medication or thought-stopping.

The subchapter The Classical View of Man says, “The classical view of man, comprised primarily of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of human nature, contains, of course, varying emphases but it may be regarded as one in its common convictions that man is to be understood primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his rational faculties.”

The subchapter The Christian View of Man says, “The consequence of this conception of the world upon the view of human nature in Christian thought is to allow an appreciation of the unity of body and soul in human personality which idealists and naturalists have sought in vain.”  This is where Niebuhr wrote, “It is this capacity of freedom which finally prompts great cultures and philosophies to transcend rationalism and to seek for the meaning of life in an unconditioned ground of existence....  But since mysticism leads to an undifferentiated ultimate reality, it is bound to regard particularity, including individuality, as essentially evil.”

Niebuhr promulgated individualistic transcendence, transcending all of one’s own problems in order to become self-assured, and in order not to be so intrusive as to need the world be as he’d have it.  Kitab Adab al-Muridin, in A Sufi Rule for Novices, described the mystical experience of “ecstatic yearning,” as, “absence of selfhood, loss of personal will and consciousness, and screaming.”  He also wrote, “When Sahl b. ‘Abdallah [al-Tustari] was asked about good ethical behavior, he said that its minimal requirements were to suffer evil with forbearance, to abstain from retribution, and to have compassion for him who wrongs you.”  So the big difference between mysticism’s regarding individuality as essentially evil and absence of selfhood, and the regarding individuality as essentially evil and absence of selfhood, of “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is that one practices the radical humility of the latter in order to benefit himself by making himself feel more serene.  Plenty of Catholic asceticism, but no Puritanism (modern history’s first individualistic self-improvement), has led to mystical experiences, etc.

This, also is very relevant to the question of what Niebuhr’s worldview means for a society with rampant depression and anxiety.  Such a society might prize independent problem-solving, including each individual coping with his own problem by transcending it through Stoic self-discipline.  Yet this would mean that no matter how much the problem in question is a part of a social problem, the only thing that each individual is supposed to care about, is what he can courageously change and what he must serenely accept.

One fact that could really make one wonder whether Niebuhr had read into the writings of the Romantic era is though mystical experiences are a pretty esoteric topic, they were a favorite theme of the romantic era.  Not only that, Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, spoke highly of them as a good way to transcend this sinful world.  When he wrote such things as, “For just what the Christian mystics call the effect of grace and the new birth, is for us the only direct expression of the freedom of the will,” he saw this as serving the purpose of letting the individual cope with reality, as much as accepting hardship and sinfulness as pathways to peace would.  “Serenely accept whatever you can’t change, including hardship and/or sinfulness ad infinitum, or you’d be guilty of a resentful pity-party,” could hardly be called self-determination or free thought, but it allows people to have the freedom of will in which they don’t let anything bother them, and it also makes them more resilient and therefore more likely to succeed.  Schopenhauer’s Stoic mysticism would do the same.  And most modern writers on mystical experiences, didn’t explore them as a form of transcending worldly misery, choosing not to let it bother you.  That was basically Schopenhauer.

And while there was a good reason why he discussed mysticism, Niebuhr’s mentioning it could make one wonder if he literally based his ideas on Schopenhauer’s, or, at least, from ideas of this era.  The World as Will and Representation was published in 1819, during the Age of Romanticism, which followed the Age of Enlightenment, of intellectual free thought, with an era of emotional free thought.  In Central Europe, mysticism was a big part of this, as in Flaubert’s statement, “I am a mystic and believe in nothing [religious],” and Nietzsche’s, “when skepticism mates with longing, mysticism is born.”  As Paul Mendes-Flohr wrote in his introduction to his edition of Martin Buber’s Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, an anthology of diverse mystics’ reflections on mysticism, “Decrying the ‘barren intellectualism’ (as Diederichs once put it) of the bourgeoisie—and the attendant neglect of the unique, the beautiful, and the spiritual—this generation of pre-World War I central Europe cultivated an epistemological skepticism, finding redeeming value in aesthetic sensibility, profound ‘inner experience’ (Erlebnis) and spiritual quest.”

The Wikipedia webpage on Nazism says about this era, “Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the irrationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early 19th century.”  Actually, what has more of a connection to Nazism’s values is regarding, as Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Days of the Phoenix, “Wagner as a symbol of his epoch,” a love of strength and fear of manipulative weakness, rather than irrationality (though that love of strength and fear of weakness could easily become irrational, look like The Big Lie, etc.).

In Schopenhauer’s era one would naturally be thinking about mysticism, but why would Niebuhr have even brought it up?  Especially, why would he have brought up mysticism, purely as a way to transcend one’s problems?  He must have been familiar with, at least, Central European writings from Schopenhauer’s era that considered mysticism to be a technique to keep your problems from bothering you.  If, instead, Niebuhr had gotten his conceptions of mysticism from his local Pentecostal church, Hassidic synagogue, Sufi mosque, mystical atheists, etc., he wouldn’t have gotten the message that mysticism gives the opportunity for  freedom of the will when something bad happens to you, in that it doesn’t have to bother you if you don’t let it.  That would be barren anti-intellectualism.  Even someone like Jimmy Swaggert would probably regard that to be extremely banal.

Not only that, Niebuhr’s claim that mysticism “is bound to regard particularity, including individuality, as essentially evil,” involves a form of presumption that one is far more likely to see in the psychology surrounding The Serenity Prayer.  That is, that just because a zeitgeist aims for a certain ideal, doesn’t mean that it would slap negative labels on those who don’t meet it.  Mysticism probably doesn’t regard  an undifferentiated ultimate reality as an ultimate ideal, so probably won’t care that much if someone disagrees with it.  Also, mystics probably realizes how unnatural a mystical experience is, so don’t think that something is wrong with those who don’t want to have one.  Yet the psychology based on The Serenity Prayer, is bound to regard free thought as essentially evil, since if one draws his own conclusions that others’ destructive behavior was unacceptable, he’d likely get labels such as “resentful,” “self-righteous,” “manipulative,” and “guilt-tripping.”  This will end up looking like Nietzsche’s definition of evil as “whatever springs from weakness.”  And this doesn’t come from an understanding that a serene acceptance of hardship, others’ sinfulness, etc., is unnatural.  Rather, this takes to its limits, the usual psychologists’ presumptions that if you don’t adjust to, adapt to, function in, fit in with, and feel contented with, whatever your reality is, that would make you a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent.  If you’re an addict’s spouse so your realities literally do involve hardship and sinfulness, you’d be told that since a human ability to transcend his material realities, gives even you a  freedom of the will, your resentment will be corrected as if it’s only realistic to try to make you well-adjusted.

The subchapter of The Nature and Destiny of Man, The Modern View of Man says that the modern view is a combination of classical and Christian conceptions along with a few of its own.  Here Niebuhr writes, “In Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, the characteristics of human life which make for conflict between life and life are raised to the eminence of the ideal.”  Nietzsche once defined evil as “whatever springs from weakness.”  Christian forgiveness treats the injured who have feelings which spring from weakness, such as judgmentalism or inadequate forgiveness, as if those who have them don’t deserve God’s forgiveness so they’ll burn in hell unforgiven.  Yet evil people who are forgiving, may go to heaven.  The Sermon On the Mount says repeatedly that we must purge ourselves of judgmentalism so it’s intolerable, and we should emulate God’s tolerance in that he “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good,” so judgmentalism out-evils evil.  To say that objections to sinfulness in general are desires that the world be as the objector would have it, says that we dare not have enough chutzpah to object to the characteristics of human life which make for conflict between life and life.  The stronger that you are, the more likely you are to seem adequately serene courageous and wise, since it wouldn’t take much to deal with your problems.

The Bible Handbook, written and now published by Atheists, says, “Christ’s absurd reversals of true morality would place the good at the mercy of the bad, and would make an end of civilized society.”  Sure, the New Testament also includes plenty of worldly moral responsibility, but “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” wouldn’t allow you to include any of it.  For example, Matthew 5:43-48 says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.  For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?  Do not even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others?  Do not even the Gentiles do the same?  You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  Of course, the unjust are hardly sublime or serene, but we must accept that that’s just the way that they are.  This is certainly a transvaluation, which says that in the material world, even evil is to be accepted, but those who must deal with it are to hold themselves to a perfectionist standard.  Yet that doesn’t actually treat the evil as an ideal, which makes that only mandatorily amoral.

In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote, “No one is such a liar as the indignant man.”  In Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche wrote, “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”  In Ecce Homo, “Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness.”  One could come up with the same transvaluation of values, from the psychology based on The Serenity Prayer.  While it doesn’t promulgate an attitude of might-makes-right, it does insist on an attitude of might-makes-unquestionable, since as long as you’re too powerless to change something, you must serenely accept it.  If you don’t, your willfulness would have all the negative labels that would be put on a willful whiner.  An indignant man seems to be a liar not because he dares to disagree with someone stronger than him, but because we are all victims of victims, and their protests are just manifestations of their own wills.  We must get rid of resentment and pathetic, not because they’re disgracefully weak, but because they’re disgracefully unpragmatic.  In many of these cases, the indignancy resentment and/or pathetic attitudes concern behavior that could be called “sinful,” but the transvaluation of The Serenity Prayer says explicitly that if you object to sinfulness, the problem is your willfulness.

Niebuhr also called Nietzsche one of the Germans who condemn rationality with a romanticist’s logic.  Yet the bottom line of the Serenity Prayer, and the bottom line of Nietzsche’s law of the jungle, are virtually the same, so you end up with the same law, only different legal theory.

Chapter II of The Nature and Destiny of Man, The Problem of Vitality and Form in Human Nature, says near the beginning, “Since man is deeply involved in the forms of nature on one hand and is free of them on the other; since he must regard determinations of sex race and (to a lesser degree) geography as forces of ineluctable fate, but can nevertheless arrange and rearrange the vitalities and unities of nature within certain limits, the problem of human creativity is obviously filled with complexities.  Four terms must be considered in this situation: (1) The vitality of nature (its impulses and drives); (2) the forms and unties of nature, that is, the determinations of instinct, and the forms of natural cohesion and natural differentiation; (3) the freedom of spirit to transcend natural forms within limits and to direct and redirect the vitalities; (4) and finally the forming capacity of spirit, its ability to create a new realm of coherence and order.”

His use of the word “vitalities” here, sounds like Schopenhauer’s use of the word “will.”  “Impulses and drives,” are what he had in mind by “the will.”  As he wrote in The World as Will and Representation, “Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and the same flame that makes them all visible, so in all the many different phenomena which together fill the world or supplant one another as successive events, it is only the one will that appears, and everything is its visibility, its objectivity; it remains unmoved in the midst of this change.”

Exactly how race is supposed to create a force of ineluctable fate regarding our impulses and drives, or whether this just means that Niebuhr regarded bigotry to be biologically predestined, I don’t know.  Another presupposition that could have just as strong effects, is that here he talks in passing about transcending potentially destructive vitalities “within limits,” but the only transcendence that he has our society praying for is transcending hurt feelings without limits.  If you’re up against forces of ineluctable fate, you can’t afford limits on how you can deal with them.

The subchapter of The Nature and Destiny of Man, The Rationalistic View of Human Nature gives classical ideas of divine reason versus untrustworthy gut-level.

The subchapter The Romantic Protest Against Rationalism tells of both an acceptance of whatever the gut-level tells people to do, and a fear that rational mastery could be based on mistaken or manipulative ideas.  Here, Niebuhr quotes Nietzsche as saying, “Consciousness of values as norms of conduct is a sickness and evidence that real morality, that is instinctive certainty of action, has gone to the devil.  Strong nations and periods do not reflect about their rights, about principles or actions or about instinct and reason,” and, “Do not deceive yourself: what constitutes the chief characteristic of modern souls and modern books is not the lying, but the innocence which is part and parcel of their intellectual dishonesty....  Our cultured men of today, our ‘good’ men do not lie, that is true; but it does not redound to their honour.  The real lie, the genuine, determined honest lie (on whose value you can listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an article for them by a long way; it would be asking them to do what people have been forbidden to ask them to do, to open their eyes to their own selves, and to learn to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ in their own selves,” as examples of how Nietzsche’s philosophy endorsed the same might-makes-right that Nazism believed in.  Soon before that latter quote, Niebuhr wrote, “romanticism is primarily concerned to assert the vitality of nature and to preserve it against the peril of enervation.”

Yet, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference....  Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” has to go in this same direction.  While this doesn’t assert the vitality of nature to preserve it against the peril of enervation, it does hold that you should accept sinful behavior, and that if you don’t you’re too controlling. 

(This is the heading of the section of Al-Anon’s workbook Blueprint for Progress, Al-Anon’s Fourth Step Inventory, for those who seem to be codependent to take a fearless moral inventory of behaviors, including helpful ones, that are labeled as “controlling.”  Frankly, just about any helpful behavior in a relationship that’s considered codependent, would be considered “controlling,” as in, “Sure, you think that what you’re doing is trying to help, but supposedly trying to help someone is a great way to control him.”  This morality-based “control” is in the same sense of what the Mississippi preacher mentioned by Bobby Kennedy’s administrative aide James Symington, meant by tyranny, “One preacher let me into his church, and told me, ‘You represent a tyranny.’   I said, ‘How do you think black people feel living in Mississippi with no rights?’   He said, ‘Well, it’s better to have a lot of little tyrannies than one big one.’”  Control based on one person having power over another, is only a little tyranny.  Of course, if those driven into depression, anxiety disorders, etc., by such behavior, instead fixed themselves by taking antidepressants, choosing to think positively, eating more omega-3 fatty acids, etc., that wouldn’t seem controlling, anti-freedom, manipulative, resentful, etc.  If you object to sinfulness, that’s really your will-to-power.)

 

Those beset by hardship, others’ sinfulness, or anything else, and who resolutely believe in the principles and intellectual-looking ideas that would say that this is wrong, would be condemned as resentful, bookish, too concerned with principles and other abstractions, dishonest in that naturally they want to believe that they’re entitled to something better than what they won, etc.  On the other hand, the “sinful,” while not quite being honored, would be respected in the sense that it would seem that we mustn’t risk violating their freedoms, imposing on them manipulatively, passing judgment on them, etc.  Just look at all the AA slogans that deride those who don’t face up to their own problems, no matter who or what caused them, as Nietzschian ideals would tell them to, not because they’d therefore be bad in the profound sense, but because they’d therefore be unpragmatic, passive, feeling that they’re entitled to better, self-righteous, whiny and resentful, judgmental, etc.  Those quotes from Nietzsche, “No one is such a liar as the indignant man,” “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment,”  and, “Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness,” were very much along the lines of this pragmatism and self-reliant self-respect and realism about sinfulness.  This would constitute our everyday coping skills.

 

A subchapter The Errors of Romanticism, is on the kudos given to anarchy.  Yet though the Serenity Prayer doesn’t cheer one person overpowering another, it does say to accept this.  If gender is a force of ineluctable fate regarding vitalities and unities of nature, does this mean that Niebuhr and his followers would end up correcting men more because they tend to have the more aggressive natures, or women more because they have to deal with more problems and therefore would have a greater need for self-efficacious survival skills?

Likewise, Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, wrote, “Women can have remarkable talent, but not genius, for they always remain subjective.”  Yet women are far more likely to be in situations where they’re the ones who must represent the world to themselves Stoically, so they end up facing their problems serenely.  Men are far more likely to be those who are acting and feeling aggressive, and therefore, their wills seem ineradicable.  Men’s subjectivity is considered ineradicable so it’s taken as a given so we don’t notice it.  The subjectivity that women tend to have because of the situations that they’re more likely to be in, doesn’t seem ineradicable, so their WILLS are what get all the corrective attention.  If one’s zeitgeist is along the lines of “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” the sinners are going to be a lot more willful and subjective than are the victims, but they, and not the sinners, are going to look as if they expect the world to be as they’d have it.

Then are the subchapters of The Nature and Destiny of Man, Romantic Elements in Marxism about whether material needs versus ideas are supposed to shape the desired society, and The Social Basis of Conflicting Theories, “They do not see the problem of human nature in sufficient depth and therefore remain in the confusion, and sometimes accentuate the errors, in which modern culture has been involved from the beginning.”  One would have to ask, would expecting people to serenely accept hardship and others’ sinfulness, see the problems caused by the aggressive aspects of human nature in sufficient depth?  Would that accentuate the errors of moderns who think that destructive behavior doesn’t really matter in a long-term hurtful sense, since those whose welfare is at stake can always solve their own problems, and, as John Gotti said “It’s all mind over matter.  If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”?

This includes,

In Civilization and its Discontents Freud arrives at conclusions almost as nihilistic in their implications as Nietzsche’s.  He believes that the discipline of the super-ego (significantly regarded not as transcendent spirit but as a social construct) leads inevitably to complexes and aberrations.  Provisionally inclined to draw anarchistic conclusions from these premises, Freud is ultimately unable either to deny the necessity of social discipline or to find a real cure for the psychopathic aberrations which are, in his opinion, inevitable concomitants of such discipline.  This insoluble problem leads him into the cul-de-sac of pessimism.

From a sociological perspective, people have always lived in societies, so human nature has to be able to live with the expectations of society.  If we try to reduce these to the point where a society would be considerably anarchistic, we’d have to live with a far more arduous self-discipline, that of, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  After all, the homeostasis, self-stabilizing, of any society has to come from somewhere.  If it doesn’t come from moral responsibility, then it would have to come from the victims and potential victims of the resulting problems doing whatever it took to prevent stop or fix the problems, or at least not letting them bother them.

Chapter III, Individuality in Modern Culture, starts out talking about the usual partial not total individuality in nature and human life, and, of course, about self-transcendence.  The first subchapter, The Christian Sense of Individuality, says more of the same partial individuality of Christianity, and even says, “In that sense the profoundest expression of Christian individuality is itself partially responsible for the anarchy of modern life.  The individual who is admonished, ‘All things are yours but ye are Christ’s,’ [1 Corinthians 3:21, 23] may, in a period of religious decay, easily lose the sense of ultimate religious responsibility expressed in the words, ‘But ye are Christ’s,” and remember only the law-defying part of the dictum, ‘All things are yours.’”  Niebuhr, with his “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” must have realized that a lot of the New Testament’s commands to forgive don’t include any conditions about trying to obey the law.  If a holy book told me, “All things are yours,” I certainly wouldn’t interpret this as law-defying, unless it was in the context of other teachings that were.

The Bible Handbook defines the Christian worldview of Antinomianism as, “the doctrine that under the gospel dispensation of grace the moral law is of no use or obligation because faith alone is necessary to salvation,” “murder no crime, vice no sin, natural morality a snare,” and, “a logical result of Christianity, and in all times [even when the New Testament was written, Jude 4 tells of, “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”], especially during seasons of active belief, it has had to be fought and crushed by the more practical members of society or the Church.”  Or, in the words of the Serenity Prayer, no matter what hardship or sinfulness impacts your life, if you don’t surrender your instincts that tell you that what happened matters, then it seems that you want the world to be as you’d have it.  The Bible Handbook gives New Testament verses that are more explicitly law-defying, such as 1 Corinthians 6:12, “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.”  This is the ideal Bible verse for self-help thinking, which stresses that anything could seem at least morally excusable but only some things can seem optimally expedient and pragmatic, and as long as you’re pragmatic and self-empowered enough, you hopefully won’t be brought under the power of any.

Back to The Nature and Destiny of Man, the subchapter Individuality and the Renaissance tells of how the move to autonomy was even more individualistic than Christianity is.  The subchapter Bourgeois Civilization and Individuality tells of how the upper middle class tended toward individuality while the working class tended toward Nazism.  The status quo is supposed to be self-perpetuating, but greedy businessmen can’t help but disrupt the process.

Here is where, ironically, he says the following:

Inevitably the early vision of capitalistic philosophers (Adam Smith) of a process of production and exchange which would make for automatic harmony of interests is not realized.  Man controls this process just enough to disturb its harmony.  The men who control and own the machines become the wielders of social power on a vaster scale and of more dynamic quality than previous history has known.  They cannot resist the temptations of power any more dun the older oligarchies of history.  But they differ from previous oligarchies in that their injustices are more immediately destructive of the very basis of their society than the injustices of a less dynamic age.  Modern society is consequently involved in processes of friction and decay which threaten the whole world with disaster and which seem to develop by a kind of inexorable logic of their own, defying all human efforts to arrest the decay.

No, actually, there is one human effort to arrest that decay, the destruction of the very basis of their society, that’s extremely effective, and makes the kinds of problems that result from this vaster scale of elites wielding social power, seem far more innocuous than the kinds of problems that resulted from previous elites’ wielding social power.  That is, for the public in general to internalize the worldview of, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  If everyone in the society that the above describes, dealt with all of their own problems whatever they may be, like that, then this society would have homeostasis.  Preferably they wouldn’t be told that this entails, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” but if hardship, sinfulness, or anything else, ad infinitum, is the reality that they must deal with, then that’s the reality that they must deal with.  No matter how high would be that society’s rates of depression, anxiety disorders, etc., each affected individual couldn’t change whatever made him helpless, but could change: his own brain chemistry through drugs, his own outlook on life, his own survival skills, etc.  If each and every problem in such a society is addressed in such a self-reliant, self-motivated, self-empowering, and self-helping fashion, then this society would have homeostasis unconditionally, and the homeostasis of a society always serves the common good.  The victims would be told that they should be grateful that each of them is free to solve his problems that result from this sort of wielding of social power, whereas since the problems that resulted from the former sort of wielding social power, involved the coercion of the law, each of those victims couldn’t have overcome each of them by courageously changing what each of them could.

This would mean that in that society, it would seem only natural that the problem of the millions of the members of that society having depression, would be solved through each separately being treated as if his problem is that he’s suffering from a deficiency of Vitamin P, so this problem is to be resolved through mega-medication.  Sure, on a profound and philosophical level, that sort of personal response-ability would seem very wrong, but on a pragmatic and human level, it would arrest the decay, so would seem very right, even necessary.

The subchapter The Destruction of Individuality in Naturalism, says, “Beginning with Thomas Hobbes [lived 1588-1679] a fairly consistent denial of the significance of selfhood, certainly of transcendent individuality, runs through the empirical and naturalistic tradition.”  An empirical proof of the threshold of human endurance would meet the definition of “realism” as reflecting reality, and certainly would work to protect devastated individuals, but wouldn’t be transcendent, and wouldn’t meet the Schopenhauerian definition of “realism,” that of boosting one’s own endurability.

The subchapter The Loss of the Self in Idealism says, “The significant fact from the standpoint of our study is that, while naturalistic philosophies tend to reduce the human ego to a stream of consciousness in which personal identity is minimal, idealistic philosophies tend in varying degrees to identify consciousness mind and equate the highest reaches of conscious mind with divine or absolute mind, or at least with some socially or politically conceived universal mind.”  That would mean that empirical studies on the what causes our high rates of depression and anxiety, including what hardship and sinfulness people are now simply expected to courageously change if they can or serenely accept if they’re helpless, wouldn’t be idealistic.

“Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is, quite explicitly, a very extreme version of the loss of self in idealism.  If only everyone faced with hardship and/or sinfulness that they can’t change, did that, then we could live in an Objectivist utopia, where everyone would simply deal with their own problems, and people would be motivated to get what they want by winning it rather than by proving that their victimhood entitles them to it.  Just read any self-help book on codependency, and you could see that the question of who has the practical responsibility for the consequences of even sinfulness, could usually be called subjective.  If a woman diagnosed as codependent holds her partner responsible for the consequences of his unambiguously sinful behavior, this would then be labeled as her controlling, melodramatic, manipulative, self-righteous, (intentionally) passive, victim-posturing, blame-finding, etc., opinion.

According to all addictive personalities, and, probably, most Libertarians, a society where everyone held to that conception of personal responsibility whenever necessary, would be the ideal.  As Libertarians would put it, that response-ability for one’s own welfare would be self-motivated, objective, self-reliant, and forgiving, while ethical responsibility could easily be labeled as: counting on altruism, subjective, manipulative, and judgmental.  One must lose himself in this, to the point of accepting hardship and sinfulness as Jesus would have, but that doesn’t seem so bad, since if you lower your own standards you’d be happier, you’d benefit, from both the happiness and the fact that with this confidence you’ll be able to function with more resolve.  As long as you couldn’t change the hardship, sinfulness, etc., the more that you lowered your standards to fit your realities, the more that you’d benefit.

The subchapter The Loss of Self in Romanticism says, “The political form and tool of romanticism is fascism.”  Also,

While Nietzsche maintains a more resolute individualism and bravely asserts the autonomous individual against every type of universality, including the relative universality of the nation, it is significant that in these latter days even his version of romanticism has been subtly compounded with nationalistic furies.  There is a peculiar irony in the fact that his doctrine, which was meant as an exposure of the vindictive transvaluation of values engaged in by the inferior classes, should have itself become a vehicle of the pitiful resentments of the lower middle classes of Europe in their fury against more powerful aristocratic and proletarian classes.

Yet this “exposure of the vindictive transvaluation of values,” is, in itself, quite a transvaluation of values, along the lines of, “In Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, the characteristics of human life which make for conflict between life and life are raised to the eminence of the ideal.”   If a worldview assesses “defects of character” in terms of whether each person is judgmental, resentful, acting like a victim, etc., then the victims who don’t just “get over it” would seem to be the dominators, and the victimizers who are held accountable would seem to be the dominated.  Exposing this supposed domination, seems to expose a transvaluation of values, in that this domination could be labeled as the victims’ SELF-WILLS expressing themselves.  Yet to characterize the untermenschen as manipulatively trying to control the sinful übermenschen, really does twist morality.

If a Nietzschian transvaluation of values was done on this transvaluation of values, that would say that if a society has rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., then these are our vitalities expressing themselves, and if we deride them insisting that the sufferers shut up their whining, this would be a herd-like slave morality.  If depression, anxiety disorders, etc., are rampant in a society, then these are the sufferers’ natural vitalities asserting themselves, rather than aberrations.  Those who act like victims of supposed manipulators, obviously want to believe that they themselves deserve to get away with whatever they’re trying to get away with.

That really is the same loss of self that you’d find in, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  The strong are to be at least accepted, while the weak must anathematize their own SELF-WILLS.  The lower middle classes no doubt figured that they must earn or otherwise win their power, while the aristocratic classes didn’t earn theirs, and the proletarian classes had just gotten their added power by playing the victim role.  Resentments about power that seems to have been gotten through ignominious cunning or other ways that aren’t as objective as winning it, don’t seem pitiful: “They hate us because they’re jealous of our goodness!”, “They’re diabolically manipulative!”, “Their strength comes from abstractions!”, “They’re anti-freedom!”, etc.  Gun nuts’ resentment about laws restricting guns, doesn’t seem whiny, or from those who are inferior.  If you expected them to can their resentments, that would seem anti-individualistic.  In modern-day America, combining nationalistic furies with this adamant insistence on preserving the vitality of übermensch nature against the peril of enervation, sells, as does combining it with old-fashioned moralistic preaching.  Realists realize that you’ll see plenty of what sells.  The image of the Antichrist as a beguiling supposed man of peace with an evil hidden agenda (which began with the “Dispensationalists” in the 1830s), is plenty religious, but also follows the archetype of the untermensch, who ignominiously and cunningly uses weakness and whining, to make evil and WILLFULNESS seem to be goodness and humanitarianism.  This sort of Christianity is a lot more exciting than piety is.

This resentment is very much along the lines of Nietzsche’s, “Do not deceive yourself: what constitutes the chief characteristic of modern souls and modern books is not the lying, but the innocence which is part and parcel of their intellectual dishonesty....  Our cultured men of today, our ‘good’ men do not lie, that is true; but it does not redound to their honour.  The real lie, the genuine, determined honest lie (on whose value you can listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an article for them by a long way; it would be asking them to do what people have been forbidden to ask them to do, to open their eyes to their own selves, and to learn to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ in their own selves.”

Though François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion says that both Nazism and Stalinism disprove the Marxist belief that historical events are inevitable products of the economies of the societies in which they happen, what Niebuhr described here really was an inevitable product of German society.  This is what Populism looks like wherever lower-middle-class people are up against certain competition, and animosity toward the weak seems far more honorable than does animosity toward the strong.  Though Populism of this variety always includes a love of patriarchal morality, and a belief in this could easily reflect what the believers’ SELF-WILLS want to believe, the patriarchal quality could still look übermensch enough.

If it seems that the untermenschen and the intellectual elite parasitically get what they want through ignominious cunning, then naturally one would be resentful toward them.  These are the same people who’d be corrected by expectations that those in trouble deal with their own problems by courageously changing what they can and serenely accepting what they can’t.  Though people aren’t supposed to get resentful at those who fail to live up to these expectations, by “acting passive” or intellectually analyzing the dangers of this victim-blaming, those who don’t live up to their culture’s definition of “personal responsibility” would probably get the sort of resentment that manipulative machinations get.  Everyone knows that a Wagnerian realism about human nature means accepting that the übermenschen are like that and fearing that the untermenschen are like that: either take this sinful world as it is, or you’d seem to be wanting the world to be as you’d have it.

At the end of Destruction of Self in Naturalism, Niebuhr wrote that the schools of modern psychology, are similar to the worldviews of each of the naturalist philosophers he listed, and that “Behaviourist psychology is an elaboration of Hobbe’s position,” even though Niebuhr described it as “His individuals are animal natures whose egohood consists of the impulse of survival,” and that for people to get along they must be arbitrated by a political power.  The only similarity that I could see between that and Behaviorism, is that both are just as mechanical, so both don’t give the person a profound selfhood.  Yet Behaviorism, from the industrial era, is as other-directed as you can get, and the psychology that Hobbes described before the industrial era, is as inner-directed as you can get.  What’s most pressing here is the fact that cognitive therapy is the modern version of Behaviorism, and cognitive therapy very much follows the lines of both the Serenity Prayer and the absolutist forgiveness commanded by the New Testament.

The web page EMOTIONAL THOUGHT STOPPING (A Mood Enhancing Exercise), which tells depressed people how to put a stop to depressive thinking, “‘I deserve to die!’ ‘STOP!’  ‘I’ll never get a job!’ ‘STOP!’  ‘If only I—’ ‘STOP!’  ‘That bastard always—’  ‘STOP!’  ‘My depression is caused by—’  ‘STOP!’.”  That webpage begins, “Each year over 17 million people in the United States are depressed.  Of those fewer than 30% get help!  Each year over 30,000 people in the United States commit suicide,” so the plan is hopefully for all of these 17,000,000 Americans in any given year to do this and to stop themselves from asking what causes millions to have to do this.  That sure is banal.  That webpage also says, “You may have been exposed to the procedure if you are familiar with the bible, and some modern therapists use its concepts.”

This is also very much along the lines of the Prayer of Saint Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of your Peace.  Where there is hatred, Let me sow Love.  Where there is injury, Pardon.  Where there is doubt, Faith.  Where there is despair, Hope.  Where there is darkness, Light.  Where there is sadness, Joy.  O divine master, grant that I may not so much seek, to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.  For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born to eternal life—Amen.”  So peacemaking means acting like a mechanistic instrument which supplants hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair, and sadness, with love, pardon, faith, hope and joy, and this is supposed to constitute consoling, understanding (though it certainly doesn’t understand the victims’ feelings), and love.

Despite all the religious trappings, the modern version of this is as banal as Hobbes’ ideas as portrayed by Niebuhr.  If a suffering person could pray, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  Or, he could pray, “God, supplant my hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair, and sadness, with love, pardon, faith, hope and joy.”  Or, he could pray, “Forgive us out debts, as we forgive our debtors, For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses,” etc.  All of these would be a sophisticated version of Behaviorism, treating people as blank slates, by representing the world as innocuous, rather than through reward and punishment.  This certainly doesn’t let him decide what his spiritual pursuits would be.  If he’s faced with a big problem, then suddenly his spiritual calling will be to transcend it, even if what caused it was evil so should be strongly rebuked, and even though the aim would be nothing more than banal coping skills.

Chapter IV, The Easy Conscience of Modern Man, begins, “Our introductory analysis of modern views of human nature has established the complacent conscience of modern man as the one unifying force amidst a wide variety of anthropological conceptions.  In the words of T. E. Hulme: ‘All thought since the Renaissance, in spite of its apparent variety, forms one coherent whole....  It all rests on the same conception of the nature of man and all exhibits the same inability to recognize the meaning of the dogma of original sin.  In this period not only have its philosophy, its literature and its ethics been based upon this new conception of man as fundamentally good, as sufficient, as the measure of things; but a good case can be made out for regarding many of its characteristic economic features as springing entirely from this central abstract conception.’”  It was originally Protagoras, the first Greek Sophist, who, in the fifth century, BC, wrote “Man is the measure of all things.”

Despite Niebuhr’s quotation of the word “dogma” meaning the Doctrine of Original Sin, he very much agrees with it.  Yet if you’ve ever looked closely at both the easy conscience of modern man, and what the Doctrine of Original Sin says shapes each individual’s destructive behavior, you could see that the Doctrine of Original Sin can only add to the easy conscience of modern man.  It certainly wouldn’t make sense to say that since those who cause problems do so because they’re inherently that way, our conscience should be less easy.  Trying to stop that would grossly lack the serenity to accept something that we can’t change.  Also, to treat any objection to any sinfulness, as the objector wanting the world to be as he’d have it, is certainly treating man as the measure of all things.  It’s as if the only thing that measures that behavior to be bad, is the human objector, so if only he’d stop making trouble, we’d have peace.  All that permissiveness requires is permission, and if people object to some behavior but tacitly approve of it, they’ve permitted it.  In fact, this sort of permissiveness could be more dangerous than the kind that actually approves of the destructive behavior, since it seems acceptable to what one will approve of, but not to what one will serenely accept.