The Challenge And Urgency of Standing Up to do What is Right

This challenge was illustrated in 1940 by the reluctance of people to face up to the horror of Hitler. Here is a petition signed by Potter Stewart, a future Supreme Court Justice, and Congressman Gerald Ford, a future President of the United States. “We demand the Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.” Or, at the same time, this from William Coffin, as the Treasurer of Harvard talking to its President Conant: “Hitler is going to win. Let’s be friends with him.” This reminded Arthur Schlesinger of the challenge faced by the old Whig Party, the party of business in antebellum America. It did not confront the challenge of slavery. Yet slavery was as urgent a question in the 1850s as Nazism was in the 1940s. Everyone had to come to a decision on this. Just as everyone today must come to a decision on who holds the responsibility for Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Niebuhr presents the challenge of doing "what is right" by illuminating the mixed nature of man: “The plight of the self is that it cannot do the good it intends because man’s pretensions to reason and virtue,” he argued, “are eradicably tainted by self-interest and love. Original sin lies in man’s illusion that he can overcome his inherent finiteness and weakness". Over-weening self-pride permeates all human endeavor and brings evil into history, Niehbuhr argues. A second theme of Niebuhr is the relationship between history and eternity. The modern fallacy, he thought, was the idea that redemption is possible within the history. Man must understand the incompleteness of all historic good as well as the corruption of all historic achievement. Wisdom, he wrote, “is dependent upon a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power.” “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” We are also saved, I have found, by the final form of love which is understanding and respecting another person’s reality as he or she sees it. I do not share Niebuhr’s thought that there is "corruption of all historic achievement.” I don’t buy this, not for a moment. There are historic achievements which do not become corrupt if carried out in the way that was embodied by that “historic achievement.” I think of a brilliant piece of art: a sculpture by Michelangelo or a timeless book by Tolstoy. I think of the development of the relationship of mutual understanding, true mutual understanding. That is not destined to become corrupt. There are things that are so right they stand the test of time. Above all, in my experience, works of art and personal relationships which are truly timeless.