At this point, Niebuhr echoes the concerns offered a century earlier by Anonymous, while adding the more psychological perspective to be found in mid-20th Century America:
“The inferiority of the morality of groups to that of individuals is due in part to the difficulty of establishing a rational social force which is powerful enough to cope with the natural impulses by which society achieves its cohesion; but in part it is merely the revelation of a collective egoism, compounded of the ego istic impulses of individuals, which achieve a more vivid expression and a more cumulative effect when they are united in a common impulse than when they express themselves separately and discreetly.”
Elsewhere, Niebuhr puts it this way: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. . . . The perils of uncontrolled power are perennial reminders of the virtues of a democratic society; particularly if a society should become inclined to impatience with the dangers of freedom and should be tempted to choose the advantages of coerced unity at the price of freedom.” (Niebuhr, 1986, pp. 160-161) It is the individual moral person (with the inner voice) who can conceive of justice (and mutuality of interests) and holds a vision of true freedom, but it is the assembled morality of the society via democracy that must ensure (protect) this justice and “the dangers of freedom”.
I offer another quote from Reinhold Niebuhr (1932, p. 33) that brings the connection between protection (harmony of interest) and true freedom. He is once again echoing Anonymous’ cautionary notes regarding rampant laissez-faire commerce that had been extolled by Adam Smith:
“When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace.”
The challenge thus becomes how this privately held morality is brought together in a collective (mutual) demand that the society (via Democracy) embrace and engage this moral stance. We find such a process operating in the work done by people of morality such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Nelson Mandala. Even closer to home for me (as a resident of Maine) is Margaret Chase Smith, who was not only the first women in the US Senate but was also the first member of the senate to speak out against her fellow senator, Joseph McCarthy, who was a hate and fear monger of the 1950s. For Smith and the other “heroes” I have identified, the acts of morality-based courage (to coin the term used by John Kennedy) not only modeled what other citizens could emulate, but also brought about a collective (mutual) perspective on the moral stance to be taken and resultant actions to be engaged.
