Immoral Society Research Articles

Moral Education Between Hope and Hopelessness: The Legacy of Janusz Korczak

The responsibility for addressing morality and moral education in the current moral climate is a daunting task for conscientious educators. What educational response can extricate us from the debilitating feelings of hopelessness and helplessness as we are confronted by horrific terrorist actions, controversial use of military might, displays of corruption and greed and a growing general tension and anxiety? At this demoralizing juncture of uncertainty and doubt, the figure of Janusz Korczak (1878–1942), a Jewish-Polish educator, looms large. For more than 30 years, Korczak devoted his life to educating orphaned Jewish and non-Jewish children. He stayed with the Jewish children to the end as they all perished in a concentration camp. At a time when the surrounding society surrendered to fascism, anti-Semitism, and self-destruction, Korczak encouraged individual autonomy and caring relationships within the context of a community where a vision of justice and trust was an integral part of life. The orphanages he directed were democratic, self-ruled communities, where the children had their own parliament, court, and newspaper. This article describes the principles and the actualization of Korczak’s moral education and explores how Korczak reconciled the differences between the ethical world he created in his institutions and the surrounding immoral society. The example set by Korczak’s educational praxis serves as an inspiring model of school life across the boundaries of time and place and touches our need to believe in education’s responsibility to strive and struggle for a better world, even when it seems an unattainable goal.And the hour shall come when a man will know himself, respect, and love. And the hour shall come in history’s clock when man shall know the place of good, the place of evil, the place of pleasure, and the place of pain. (Korczak, 1978, p. 237)

Three Minds, Three Books, Three Years: Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, and Mordecai Kaplan on Religion

T hree truly exceptional books appeared in the early 1930sexceptional not only for their absolute brilliance but for emphasizing religion in history as well as modern times. In 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society, which shook liberal Christianity to its core with its powerful denunciation of naive faith in optimism and progress and its blunt assertion of the reality of evil still darkening human achievement. A year later, Perry Miller published Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, the first in a series of stunning histories by Miller that described the intellectual power residing inside sixteenthand seventeenth-century Calvinist theology. Miller resuscitated the reputation of New England's Puritans, and his work shaped the writing of American history for half a century. Then, in 1934, Mordecai M. Kaplan publishedJudaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life, which demanded wholesale rebuilding of Judaism as traditionally conceived and practiced, and which challenged traditional theistic and prophetic conceptions of religion broadly construed.'

Bad Communities

Bad Communities

Talking about Consumption

Members of the middle class in the Indian city of Baroda employ a common moral discourse on consumption, one that is shaped through the operationalization of historically rooted ideals of community, family solidarity and asceticism. These ideals are set against the experience of urban middle-class life. This discourse describes consumer culture as debased materialism, while at the same time presenting it as central to middle-class social life. This article explores the nature of the tension apparent in this contradiction, and finds that employers of this discourse accept the inescapable nature of status battles around consumption while denying it legitimacy and real significance for the constitution of their individual selves. Modern consumption is accepted, but this acceptance is morally ambivalent. People draw on collective ideological resources to describe and interpret their individual and social selves in order to individually dissociate from what they take to be an immoral society.

Society and Politics in the Early Niebuhr

This address was delivered at the inaugural meeting of the Reinhold Niebuhr Society. The theological and ethical contributions of the early Niebuhr from his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, are summarized and then contrasted with adjustments that Niebuhr would make in his thinking in light of the rise of National Socialism and the events of World War II. Then the author turns to contemporary times, reading Niebuhr as a guide to the present situation's moral complexities.

Reinhold Niebuhr and the US War on Terror: A Response to Dr Gilkey

Building upon Langdon Gilkey's reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, this article examines Niebuhr's enduring contribution in relation to two pressing international concerns: religious terrorism and the US War on Terror. As these two issues are characterized by their suppression of reason, I argue that Niebuhr's critical understanding of reason, a human rational capacity to consider interests other than one's own, offers an important resource in rectifying the disorder created by the two issues. Despite his stringent critique of a liberal idealistic view of reason, Niebuhr refused to completely deny the value of reason; although reason is always tainted by sin, it is not entirely ineffectual. This critical notion of reason is a necessary antidote to the unilateralism of the Bush administration and religious fundamentalism which altogether reject a dialogical, reflective value of reason. In an increasingly interdependent global society, a critical use of reason is indispensable for the achievement of global peace and justice.

Response to Langdon Gilkey's Inaugural Address at the Niebuhr Society, 22 November 2003 in Atlanta

After applauding Professor Gilkey for focusing attention on Reinhold Niebuhr's book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, I framed my response by setting forth seven salient elements of Niebuhr's political theory. After affirming Gilkey's portrayal of the differences between our contemporary situation and that which Niebuhr addressed in the 1930s, I focused on a third characteristic of Niebuhr's thought that Gilkey neglected to mention, namely, the impact of his thought on African-American activists in their struggle for racial justice in the United States. That impact mainly pertained to his perceptive analysis of power conflicts among social groups and especially the societal power of racism. Niebuhr's sensitivity to that problem was heightened during his ministry in Detroit and thereafter. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr, his protégé, Jesse Jackson and many others came to view Niebuhr as a major source of inspiration for their struggle. But, in spite of Niebuhr's appreciation of Gandhi and his support of King's non-violent resistance approach, they disagreed about the moral value of pacifism. Most importantly, I join with another African-American scholar in pointing out Niebuhr's uncritical paternalistic assumptions about African Americans and their struggle.

TO SEE THE KINGDOM: A STUDY OF GRAHAM GREENE AND ALAN PATON

This article compares the religious thought of Graham Greene with Alan Paton through the use of two of their celebrated novels. The Power and the Glory and Cry, the Beloved Country. Both authors had read T S Eliot's The Waste Land and use striking wasteland imagery in their books. Both also refer to God and the reign of God in the world of their characters. By developing these two themes I was able to connect up many of the sub-themes of these books including those of decay, suffering, isolation, moral man and immoral society and the spiritual development of the leading characters in the novels.

A Hazard of New Fortunes and the Reproduction of Liberalism

In his seventy-eighth year, William Dean Howells wrote Henry James, I am comparatively dead cult with my statues cut down and grass growing over me in pale moonlight.(1) When he made that typically accurate, typically ironic self-appraisal, literary modernism was on rise. Howells' image was in process of being simplified and solidified as administrator of genteel tradition he had felt ambivalent toward his whole life. Today insights of modem era are more open to question and reputation of notoriously equable realist has never been better. One reason Howells' fortunes have improved is because contemporary literary intellectuals, in comparison to those of modernist era, have become less wary of everyday life. Mimicking Michel Foucault's eschewal of masters and geniuses in favor of solidly established non-geniuses (Ricardo rather than Smith, Bentham rather than Marx), some of today's most influential critics enjoy analyzing figures whose achievements typify rather than transcend conflicts of their particular historical moment. In last several years, Howells has thus attracted readers who have for most part purged themselves of crypto-romantic resentments that blinded modernists, and who have analyzed his status as normative literary figure of his time with relative disinterestedness. Alfred Kazin remarked that Howells it his function to mediate between moral man and immoral society.(2) It is precisely that -- Howells' significance as his culture's mediator -- that so fascinates critics today. Yet to great extent, Howells is still being brought to docket for crime he considered his primary virtue: liberalism. Many of Howells' current readers view him from perspectives that wistfully yearn toward stances of whole-souled radicalism. Such critics feel obliged to describe Howells' characteristic self-divisions and inconsistencies as if they were fatal flaws -- as if they were qualities that finally justify his twentieth-century rank as figure who can be pidgeonholed and dismissed by few misquotations (such as his notorious smiling aspects of life remark). Indeed, review of current arguments shows that most of Howells' best readers have often been content to dwell upon fact that liberal self-division is hallmark of Howells' writing. This self-division has been usually described in terms borrowed from historian Warren Susman, who has posited that after Civil War there was large shift in modal types(23) for individual development in United States. Economic prosperity and rise of mass culture, Susman argues, caused decline of productivist, largely protestant, and hard-working of and growth of consumerist, manifestly secular, and pleasure-oriented of personality.(4) If old culture of character valued consistency, moral centeredness, and expressing oneself through work, new culture of personality valued (and still values) unpredictability, charismatic waywardness, and expressing oneself through play. Susman's distinction has been directly echoed by such critics as Eric Sundquist and Richard Brodhead, among others. Sundquist has remarked that realists like Howells endlessly sought to capture in their fiction the transformation of `father' and `family' into `boss' and `corporation,'(5) and Brodhead, writing about A Modern Instance, remarks upon Howells' interest in a new kind of personality, character in which internalized cultural authority is strong enough still to impinge on self-esteem, but no longer strong enough to regulate behavior.(6) Repeatedly case has been made that Howells' engagement with centrifugal forces of new culture of consumption overwhelmed repeated and often dogmatic assertions of more centripetal ethical norms with which he often ended his books. Speaking of A Hazard of New Fortunes, Alfred Habbeger notes that closure of text -- in which Basil March insists that Margaret Vance's religious ecstasy must(7) contain answer to text's political riddles -- does not, in fact, lay to rest questions regarding social justice that are raised during course of novel. …

Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was one of America's foremost twentieth-century religious thinkers and social critics. As pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, he became deeply interested in social problems. He was Professor of Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary, remaining there until his retirement. Ultimately, he abandoned his liberal Protestant hopes for the church's moral rule of society and became a Socialist activist. Moral Man and Immoral Society is Niebuhr's eloquent argument for the church's involvement in social reforms as well as a platform for his beliefs that men are sinners, that society is ruled by self-interest, and that history is characterized by irony, not progress.

Religion and Society in Frontier California

The chaotic and reputedly immoral society of the California mining frontier during the gold rush period greatly worried Protestant evangelicals from the Northeast, and they soon sent missionaries westward to transplant their religious institutions, beliefs, and practices in the area. This book tells the story of that enterprise, showing how it developed, why it failed, and what patterns of religious adherence evolved in the West in place of evangelical Protestantism. Laurie Maffly-Kipp begins by analyzing the eastern-based religious ideology that underlay the movement westward, investigating the motives behind the founding of home mission boards dedicated to the spread of Christianity and civility among new settlers. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and journals of hundreds of California argonauts, Maffly-Kipp describes those missionaries and their wives sent to California after 1848 and the virtually all-male mining society that resisted the missionaries' notions of moral order and in turn created new religious beliefs and practices. Maffly-Kipp argues that despite its alleged immorality, the California gold rush was actually one of the most morally significant events of the nineteenth century, for it challenged and brought into conflict the cherished values of antebellum American culture: a commitment to spiritual and social progress; a concern with self-discipline, moral character, and proper gender roles; and a thirst for wealth fostered by the spirit of free enterprise.

The New Meaning of Modern War in the Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was the archetypical American intellectual. A leftist minister in the 1920s and an anti-utopian socialist in the 1930s (his finest book, Moral Man and Immoral Society [1932] attacked technocratic optimism from the left), Niebuhr forsook his modern political visions during World War II for an old-fashioned Protestant doctrine based upon sin. This new pessimism, which he would come to call Christian realism, outlasted the war, and he consequently supported the American decision to confront the Soviet Union in 1945 and 1946. Niebuhr's wholehearted, if guilt-ridden, endorsement of the Cold War decisively affected the course of American intellectual life, especially among Democratic party liberals, for whom Niebuhr's articles in The Nation and in his own Christianity and Crisis had been required reading. Many of these liberals, once eager to maintain amity with the Soviet Union after the war, followed Niebuhr's defection to the Cold War camp. Without this conversion of the American mainstream left, President Truman's decision to wage the Cold War would have riven the Democratic party and prompted a political crisis. Thus was born American War liberalism, a combination of welfare state domestic policy and realist foreign policy. Realists regarded Stalin as a specific global menace, and international politics generally as a nasty business in which America nevertheless had to participate. Realism provided the intellectual basis of the Cold War, and Niebuhr took his place along with George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Walter Lippmann as a leading philosopher of this new American realism and hence as a primary intellectual apologist for the Cold War. Niebuhr naturally incorporated the issue of the atomic bomb into his new philosophy, until the appearance, in the late 1950s, of both Soviet and American

Gandhi: Moral Man in Immoral Society

Gandhi: Moral Man in Immoral Society

A Woman Alone: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century America

THE life of Catharine Maria Sedgwick was betwixt and between. Unmarried, she joined other nineteenth-century sentimentalists whose novels focused upon woman and the home, lauding woman's distinctive and superior nature as ideally suited for the exacting yet gratifying roles of wife and mother. In large part, Sedgwick determined her own deviation from the role she prescribed by rejecting several proposals of marriage, thereby assuring for herself the status of a statistical oddity during a century in which nine out of ten women chose to marry. Sedgwick's fiction, however, reinforced the belief that woman could achieve her greatest fulfillment within the family as an example of selflessness for husband and child. Woman, she invariably added, could also benefit the community beyond her home, albeit indirectly, Functioning as a divinely appointed reformer within the confines of domesticity, she alone could inculcate the attitudes necessary for the regeneration of an increasingly crass, competitive, and materialistic society. In concert with other sentimentalists, Sedgwick glorified the home as a moral respository in an immoral society, as a bastion of stability in a changing, fragmentary world. Seen as a mini-Eden, the home served as both a haven from society and an incubator of women and men capa-

The Encyclical and Niebuhr's ‘Impossible Possibility’

The debate over Humanae Vitae reminds one strongly of the controversy—now much less pronounced than it was—over the nature of the ethic of Jesus. I want to suggest how an answer which emerged in that controversy may have a bearing on the present discussion among Catholics.The Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted in three main ways—as an utterly transcendental ethic, as an interim-ethic, and as an ethic realizable in terms of this present world. Broadly speaking, the first and third of these alternatives received most support and they have their counterparts in the present debate. The transcendental view commanded great respect; the ethic of Jesus was absolute, it promulgated a new sort of law demanding a superhuman obedience. The opposite view argued that the ethic could not be attained, and we had much better wrest significance from such principles of justice, fair play, equality, etc., as we had and attempt a progressive improvement of humanity with these. In practice, this often corresponded with the third view about the nature of Christ’s teaching: Christian morality was about a human ideal, a vision of a better world after which we must all strive.The most lucid critic of these positions was Reinhold Niebuhr, in a long line of books, notably Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics in 1936. Niebuhr holds that the great mistake of most of the usual interpretations of the ethic of Jesus is their failure to realize the ‘true dialectic of the spiritual life’.

Reinhold Niebuhr: New Orthodoxy for Old Liberalism

Reinhold Niebuhr has profoundly affected American thought in theology, on society, and about politics. He has puzzled more than one of his many critics and commentators, especially by the veritable panorama of doctrines which, at one time or another, he has appeared to advocate: several varieties of socialism, liberalism, and what seems to be a sort of mellow conservatism. The confusion engendered by this ideological medley has not been alleviated either by the voluminous extent of his writings, or by his teutonic, yet highly personal style. But Niebuhr's policy suggestions have been shaped in response to changing conditions in the political world. Deeper analysis reveals a remarkably consistent teaching, present in all essential respects at least as early as hisMoral Man and Immoral Society, which if not a philosophy, is at least a theology of politics. The scope of this paper prevents any examination of the entire intellectual pilgrimage of Reinhold Niebuhr; I shall confine my attention to the main lines of his political teaching.

Qumran and Jerusalem: Two Jewish Roads to Utopia

forms of Utopianism, social and revolutionary. The social Utopian would restore society to its ancient ideal, proposing to reconstruct the city out of its own stone and mortar. The revolutionary Utopian would build a new society on the ruins of the old, destroying in order to create. These two Utopian forms recall the efforts of moral men in an earlier immoral society, that of Jewish Palestine during the Second Commonwealth. In the centuries before the start

Two Currents in Contemporary English Political Theory

There is widespread discontent today with the state of English political theory. This does not seem to have been so a generation ago. In 1915, Ernest Barker certainly revealed uneasiness about some intellectual tendencies of the time, but his overriding belief was that the new psychology and the new awareness of the personality of groups within society would enrich thinking in the long run. Ten years later, Lewis Rockow was distinctly optimistic at the end of his Contemporary English Political Thought. Having surveyed the first quarter of this century, he was impressed by “the richness of the contemporary mind” and the boldness of its political speculation. How different is the self-judgment of our own day. “In the present generation,” declared Professor Catlin in 1952, “England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries.” There were only a few men—Laski, Barker, Oakeshott, E. H. Carr—whom he would put in a high category, while apart from them he went on to say, “a drear darkness has fallen on British political theory which was so bright.” A little later, and speaking of the world in general rather than of England alone, Professor Cobban lamented “a general tendency to cease thinking about society in terms of political theory.” He could find no original thought since the eighteenth century and concluded that the idea of democracy had become a mere shibboleth—and not even a serviceable one, since all camps used it. He felt that the study of politics had taken a wrong turn, being corrupted by a neglect of the moral element, by an indifference to the practical problems besetting men, and by a deep pessimism about the possibility of resolving the dilemma between “moral man and immoral society.” Eric Voegelin seems at first to strike a more cheerful note when he speaks of “the revival, not to say the outburst, of political philosophy at Oxford in recent years,” but his article is critical of some of its tendencies and even goes so far at one point as to refer to its “distressing state.”

Is the Antithesis of "Moral Man" and "Immoral Society" True?

Is the Antithesis of "Moral Man" and "Immoral Society" True?

Moral Man and Immoral Society; A Study in Ethics and Politics. Reinhold Niebuhr

<i>Moral Man and Immoral Society; A Study in Ethics and Politics</i>. Reinhold Niebuhr