The insights into human nature which Marxism has fortunately added to modern culture belong to the forgotten insights of prophetic religion. They must be reappropriated with gratitude for their rediscovery. But since prophetic religion must deal with the total human situation it cannot accept them merely as weapons in one particular social conflict. To do so would mean to make them the basis of new spiritual pretensions. The pathos of Marxian spirituality is that it sees the qualified and determined character of all types of spirituality except its own. Thus the recognition of human finitenness becomes the basis of a new type of pretention that finitenness has been transcended.
From An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. Click here to see the quote in the book itself. I’m trying to get some working competence with the thought of Reinhold Neibuhr (not to be confused with his brother Richard Neibuhr) because I’m teaching this course again next year.
I have a long way to go. And, arguably, I’m not even in the right book! This is just some early Niebuhr that he later critiqued himself! (Speaking of Neibuhr, I also recently noticed that I’d been spelling it incorrectly–NeibHur instead of NeibuHr.)
But back to the quote–it probably won’t make it into my teaching notes, but it sure seems relevant to the political situation in north America. There are three things to observe in this quote.
The first thing to observe is the claim that Marxism is at least partially correct to criticize certain sins, and that insofar as it is it’s just borrowing (or plagiarizing) from Old Testament prophets.
I’m familiar with this idea from some Christian philosophy that borrows from modern (or postmodern) critics of religion. Merold Westphal has good books on that, especially Suspicion and Faith.
The second thing to observe is Neibuhr’s idea that a biblical religion is not supposed to join a movement like Marxism in some particular social conflict. That just replaces one sinful pretension with another.
Exactly what sort of spiritual pretension? I don’t understand Niebuhr well enough to answer very confidently, but I think what he means is, roughly, the sin of thinking we can build heaven on earth through our own efforts. (This would be the sort of sin committed by liberal heretics. Neibuhr also criticizes orthodox Christianity for hardly even trying to fix the world–leaving it all to G-d and deferring all expectations of a better world to heaven!)
The third thing to observe is what Neibuhr says about how a movement like this is blind to itself. Marxism cleverly calls out the conditions that influence the thinking of other people. But it tends to not notice that it is also influenced by conditions!
And here’s why I wanted to talk about this:
What if we tried thinking Neibuhr’s way about Critical Race Theory?
Yeah, I know–this is Ricochet, dang it! You don’t even like CRT! You don’t want to give it the time of day!
That’s fine. I don’t like it either. I’m totally fine with not giving CRT the time of day. Who even has the time to do that anyway?
But there are still two reason to ask a question like this. One is simple: For anyone who actually does have the time to look into CRT in the same way someone like Neibuhr or Westphal looks into Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, this seems like a promising way to do it! (Just don’t be expecting me to do all that work. Not that I can make any promises. Maybe I’ll give it a try someday.)
And the other reason to ask a question like this is: Neibuhr would no doubt have some good advice for people who love CRT. There’s our religious friends who feel a strong need to join CRT in its critique of America, and are in danger of abandoning biblical religion by doing so. And he’d make a heckuva critique of those who only care about CRT as a political cudgel for pushing things further and further left, for winning elections, etc.
But since those guys will probably never read Neibuhr, here’s a meme that asks the right sort of question:
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