As Niebuhr saw it, both religious and secular variants of liberalism presume that the trajectory of human civilization is one of continual progress: from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to enlightenment, from brutishness to civilization. The engine driving the forward march of progress is the power of reason. Human beings, the thinking goes, are rational animals. The more they cultivate and apply the tools of reason, the better their societies will become. For Niebuhr this view was not only dangerously naïve; it was also based on a fatally flawed understanding of how reason operates
...more
