Niebuhr (1932, p. xi) suggests that:
“Individual men may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of conduct, and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages. of others to their own. They are endowed by nature with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind, the breadth of which may be extended by an astute social pedagogy.”
It is at this point that Niebuhr’s optimism regarding the capacity for rational, sympathetic judgment by individual actors runs up against the improbability that this same level of rationality and sympathy will be found in the collective. As psychoanalysts would propose, there is a “regression” in human thought and feelings when people gather together. Niebuhr (1932, pp. xi-xii) puts it this way:
“. . . All these achievements are more difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups. In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.”
As a social scientist, as well as theologian, Niebuhr (1932, p. xii) offers his own diagnosis:
“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 egotism, compounded of the egotistic 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.”
It is this inferiority of group morality that aligns with the collective construction of money as something of value. It is also, according to Niebuhr, in the capacity of individual human beings to engage in rational thought that we find some buffers against the use of money in the maintenance of patterns that justify societal inequity, injustice, and cruelty.
Immorality of the Collective
I reintroduce Richard Rohr to the conversation. As Rohr notes, the immorality of people in a collective setting was also clearly evident in the world of Ancient Judah and Israel, where Hebrew prophets dwelled. In presenting the wisdom offered by the prophets of ancient Israel, Richard Rohr points directly to the attention given by most of these prophets not to the evil inherent in the hearts and minds of individual people, but rather to the evil found in the collective. Rohr (2025, p. 21) focuses in particular on the perspective of Amos, one of the first Hebrew prophets:
The prophet’s judgments are clearly directed at the group, the culture, the collective, the society. Amos knew that most collectives are content to locate evil among individuals. But there is little value in placing our attention merely on a handful of bad actors. Culture and systems are what create the large-scale evils that threaten us—such as poverty, war, and ecological devastation.”
