Immoral Society
It is at this point that I invite two theologians to join my accounting of Weber’s troubling analysis. The first theologian is Reinhold Niebuhr (1932), who would point to the inherent propensity of the collective (society) to be immoral. For Niebuhr, it would be a foregone conclusion that the early Protestant leaders found it convenient to apply John Calvin’s notion of predestination to the matter of money. They could make the unsupported pronouncement that God offers a sign of predestination to living people by supporting their current financial condition.
While the Christian (and Jewish) scriptures are filled with pronouncements regarding social justice and the condemnation of accumulated wealth, there was a collective agreement among all members of the European society (or at least all-powerful members of society) that this profound distortion of biblical “truths” was somehow valid and acceptable. Niebuhr’s immorality of the collective was in clear evidence during the early years of European Protestantism.
Niebuhr wrote cogently about the challenge of taking moral action within a world that is all-too-often immoral. To begin with, Niebuhr (1932, p.1) would see the roots of present-day misinformation, conspiracy, polarization and violence deeply embedded in human history:
“Though human society has roots which lie deeper in history than the beginning of human life, men have made comparatively but little progress in solving the problem of their aggregate existence. Each century originates a new complexity and each new generation faces a new vexation in it. For all the centuries of experience, men have not yet learned how to live together without compounding their vices and covering each other ‘with mud and with blood’.”
And this was written when the Holocaust and World War II were yet to consume the world!
Niebuhr (1932, p. 1) proceeds by identifying the “culprit” as (in part) the imaginative power of humankind. Apparently, we are capable of imagining a set of personal wants that are not yet (and probably never can be) fulfilled.
“The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks. However much human ingenuity may increase the treasures which nature provides for the satisfaction of human needs, they can never be sufficient to satisfy all human wants; for man, unlike. other creatures, is gifted and cursed with an imagination which extends his appetites beyond the requirements of subsistence. Human society will never escape the problem of the equitable distribution of the physical and cultural goods which provide for the preservation and fulfillment of human life.”
It is in from this profoundly pessimistic frame of reference that Reinhold Niebuhr would suggest that there is very little that can be done collectively to engage moral judgments in addressing mid-21st Century challenges.
We find a more optimistic Niebuhr in his assessment of an individual human being’s capacity to engage rational capacities – what Daniel Kahneman (2011) would identify as “slow thinking”: “Their rational faculty prompts [human beings] to a sense of justice which educational discipline may refine and purge of egoistic elements until they are able to view a social situation, in which their own interests are involved, with a fair measure of objectivity.” (Niebuhr,1932,p.xi)
