The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

At some point in a few years, when the accounting for our present times is done, we will be faced as a nation to choose what stories we will tell to explain what happened to us. We're not particularly good at owning up to failures, especially egregious ones like those we're likely to be looking at (See Vietnam, Jim Crow, native fratricide, slavery, etc.) When we can, we like to just ignore consequences that wise and rational people would deal with fervently and immediately, preferring instead to protest our innocence and well-meant ignorance. "We're good people, we couldn't have known, someone should have told us, yada."

We can already see the consequences in some detail. Not just Iraq, Iran, blowback, feedback, get back. Our insistence on ignoring water, weather, and whatever we're burning for fuel in a few years will require significant story-telling at least to our posterity. If we hold true to form, we'll blame someone else, and it may just be luck how much of our response is philosophical rather than physical, no sure thing with the angers and anxieties churning and whirling.

But there is another tradition, usually a failed one, but one with a respected pedigree nonetheless. A tradition of realism, about the world, about the future, about ourselves. It doesn't lift us up as humanity's or God's highest achievement, thereby making undeniable descents less terrifying and undemocratic. It recognizes our failures as well as our achievements and acknowledges that, sometimes, hey, we just screw up. Get over it, fix it, move on. No unnecessary recriminations.

Its chief spokesperson throughout the middle of last century was Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian, political analyst, author of the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can;and wisdom to know the difference.

Author also of tons of articles and books warning humans against their constant hubris, self-pride, and silliness, aka sinfulness. In a world of human frailty and mistakes, we should be very careful about exalting ourselves and diminishing others. Evil, like sin, is a human condition that should be countered with strength and forthrightness, but Niebuhr stressed, as did my other namesake, Isaiah Berlin, Kant's "from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing has ever been made." Niebuhr hammered consistently on the fact that not only are "the children of darkness" capable of evil and sin. So are "the children of light," who, convinced of their moral superiority, lose site of what those morals are and the necessary and perpetual humility that must accompany their exercise. According to Niebuhr, Americans in particular, long taught their special place in history, are highly susceptible to the self-righteousness that leads children of light astray. His The Irony of American History and, coincidentally, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness should be required reading of all sides in our current political and cultural polarization. At the risk of sounding like I'm ignoring his warnings, Bush the Younger and his entire administration should be the first readers. (You're welcome for all the one-liners I just set you up for.)

One of Niebuhr's heroes was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's continual spiritual growth, which puts the lie to any idiotic thing written about any fixed statement he may once have made in politics, brought him to realize that the Civil War could best be explained as a punishment brought down on both sides, despite each side's claim of God's special allegiance, like receivers pointing upward after a touchdown over that God-forsaken cornerback. Even when triumphant at last, Lincoln called the nation to recognize its "dark" side and to base future reconciliation on that common human core. Of course, look at what happened to him.

Still, it's worth think about now, before the recriminations for who's to blame for everything on the crap horizon right now start. Again, that's not to say that true evil, true darkness, should go uncontested, any more than Lincoln let Confederates off or Niebuhr embraced Nazis, Stalinists, or their successors. But it can and should be done with a sense of the error common to all humans and a "there but for the grace of God" concept. We will have so much to repair and restore; we won't have time for debates over light and darkness. Some people, like the aforementioned administration and surrounding posse, the leaders at Haliburtonexxon and their ilk, all the sacrilegious religious, will have to answer, but always in proportion to their evil and sin, never more, and with an eye to "am I pure light myself?"

So, we do have an alternative to our usual blindness and anger and avoidance when these enormous chickens out there coming pounding on the gates of our current privilege. What we don't have is Niebuhr, or his admirer, M.L. King, and we've blown off another admirer, Jimmy Carter, when he expressed his confidence in our seriousness of purpose as Americans. Maybe we've become too cynical or, the opposite, too Oprah about evil and sin ("God don't make no junk!"--then who the hell made Jeffrey Dahmer?). But it was there once, a willingness to listen to those who held the mirrors up to us when problems needed addressing. It can be there again.

So here's the deal. Get one or both of the books mentioned above. Read them and think them through. Then pass them on to someone else who will do the same. Start the chain. And look in the mirror. It's still there. Our great ones understood. And they, in their hard-won humility, knew one more thing. They weren't any better than you.