Assertive self-interest and social decay

Friday, 1 July 2016  | Peter Corney

Why an unrealistic view of human nature undermines democracy and human flourishing

‘Never underestimate the power of self-interest.’ - Paul Keating[i]

In 1944, not long before the Allies’ final victory over German fascism and the demonic forces unleashed by the Nazis in WW2, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr[ii] wrote his memorable book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. It was a spirited defence of democracy and a reminder of its dependence on an honest and realistic view of human nature.

This view, Niebuhr maintained, was underpinned by the Christian understanding of reality and of human nature. In his introduction, he wrote that the political philosophy on which his defence of democracy rests was

informed by the belief that a Christian view of human nature is more adequate for the development of a democratic society than either the optimism with which democracy has become historically associated or the moral cynicism which leads to the abuse of power and which inclines human communities to tyrannical strategies for solutions to situations of social decay.[iii]

The tyrannical strategies he had in mind, of course, were those of Nazi fascism and Soviet communism.

Writing as he was at the time of the unfolding knowledge of the scale of the Jewish holocaust and the human catastrophe that had taken place in Europe, his warnings cannot be taken seriously enough by us today. His warning was never to underestimate ‘the power of human self-interest, both individual and collective in modern society’.[iv] He wrote that ‘evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole’; by ‘the whole’, he meant the common good, including the wider international community of humanity as well as the individual nation state.[v]

Niebuhr was concerned that Western liberal democrats and secular idealists have a too superficial, sentimental and optimistic view of human nature, and do not account for the potency of individual freedom for both creative initiative and destructive self-interest. That is why freedom needs a framework of order and objective values that transcend the individual. It is why moral relativism is in the end corrosive to society and democracy. It is why the Postmodern emphasis on the rejection of absolutes and their substitute with the autonomous authority of the individual’s perspective, unmodified by any transcendent set of values and meaning, will lead to a particularly destructive form of self-interest.

It is sadly ironic that what at first may be seen as a way to self-fulfilment turns out in the end to be self-destructive. For, as Niebuhr points out, in order to experience true and full human flourishing, the individual needs not only personal freedom but also community, communal responsibility and obligation, because people are by nature social. A person cannot fulfil their life within themselves, but only in responsible and mutual relations with others: ‘The individual cannot be a true self in isolation’.[vi]

Niebuhr’s views are very relevant to our current situation in Western culture, where the quest for individual freedom has reached an extreme and destructive hyper-individualism. Anne Manne, in her recent book ‘The Life of I’, has described this as a form of social narcissism.[vii] Personal freedom has been redefined, having broken loose from its Judeo/Christian influences where it was understood as a freedom from our tendency to a dominating self-interest so that we might be free for the service of God and others: ‘love God and love your neighbour’.[viii] It is now about the unrestricted freedom of my will to choose whatever I decide. It has become what Friedrich Nietzsche, that influential prophet of unrestrained freedom of the will, predicted and championed: ‘the triumph of the will’.[ix]

A major problem with the current view of personal freedom is that it leaves people trapped in their own limited interior world of subjective feelings, impressions and limited perspectives, a world that is frequently disturbed and dysfunctional. For adolescents and young adults in particular, they are left without any larger and more objective framework of meaning with which to make sense of their questions and to navigate a very confusing world. Coupled with prosperity and consumerism and the growth of a culture of entitlement and exaggerated individualism, they are set upon a journey that will lead them into a lifestyle of destructive self-interest. Remember Niebuhr’s penetrating insight that ‘evil is always some assertion of self-interest without regard to the whole’.

Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, has a very arresting image in which he describes what will happen when Western culture leaves the stability of its Christian heritage and moral framework. (It is of course a result of which he approved, as his whole intellectual energy was devoted to overcoming that heritage and what he believed was its repressive hold on the Western intellect and spirit!) He says it will be like leaving the stability of the land and launching out onto the restless uncertain sea:

We have left the land and embarked…. we have burned our bridges behind us - indeed we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us…. Woe then when you feel homesick for the land…. there is no longer any land’.[x]

His prediction is a devastatingly accurate description of 21^st Century Western culture. Through Existentialism and Post Modernism, Nietzsche’s ideas have filtered down to influence a new generation of Western intellectuals who, having driven out transcendent values and Christian faith, have succeeded in contributing to the creation of a spiritual, moral and cultural desert in Western culture. With its old moral energy fading, this culture is now focussed almost solely on the creation of material wealth, but in increasingly unequal distribution. The West’s moral confusion, its growing social and relational instability and restless uncertainty about its ultimate purpose are fast approaching Nietzsche’s graphic image, and with this comes a crisis, a storm that will ultimately sink individual flourishing and endanger even democracy itself.

Peter Corney is the Vicar Emeritus of St. Hilary's Kew. He was the founding director of the Australian Arrow Leadership Program and maintains an involvement in the mentoring of young Christian leaders. He writes on issues of faith and culture and blogs at www.petercorney.com.

• Your Name
• Email
• Your Comment

Type the code from the image