Summary Of Niebuhr's Moral Man And Immoral Society

I have really enjoyed both the reading and class discussion surrounding Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral society. The overarching thesis of Neibur’s work is that there is an inherent disconnect between the moral and social behaviors of individuals and that of groups. This is essentially the same idea of the “mob or mass mentality” that the founders feared and is still noticeably present at sports games today. However, Neibur extends this concept of “the group” to include Nations as a whole as well as more traditionally notions of economic classes. Essentially Neibur is arguing against those who overestimate that ability of rationality and religion to act as a check on the self-interest of a group. The reasoning behind this is that there are …show more content…
This notion, relaters to our class discussion around the nose bleed seats, and the greyhound bus, because as a society as a whole we aren’t very good at interacting with people that have radically different beliefs and backgrounds then us. The result of this is that we put ourselves into confined echo chambers in which we don’t want to be uncomfortable. These polarized silos, limit public discourse, and are very confining and stagnating in nature. The natural byproduct of this according to Neibur, is that in order to ensure unity in a group the most dominate subset or subgroup imposes there will, (in the reading this usually referred to economic will) on everyone. Therefore, this social power leads to inequality, creating animosity. This concept of inequality caused by social power is even evident in procedural structures of our voting system. I was also very interested by the larger discussion around religion. Essentially Neibur explains that while rationalist are right about religions role to create harmony in a group they are wrong about its power to heal divides between