And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.
—T. S. Eliot, East Coker
Gerhart Niemeyer’s long life was lived entirely within the boundaries of the twentieth, that “terrible” century, a century in which the extent of what had been lost in modernity became horrifyingly clear. Finding himself a contemporary of such unprecedented catastrophes, Niemeyer first sought a remedy through mastering international politics, but after realizing that this was inadequate for the depth of the crisis, he undertook the much more radical fight to recover the metaphysical foundations of right order.
He possessed the requisite mind and character for this task, for unlike many modern intellectuals, Niemeyer seems to have been spared the unfortunate ambition to be an “original thinker,” an architect of the new. His was more the mind of an archaeologist, someone who humbly seeks to exhume, preserve, interpret, and transmit the buried knowledge and wisdom of the past. He understood that there are no new truths to be wrested resolutely from, or imposed forcibly upon, reality, but only a constant “unforgetting” and gradually deepening comprehension of truth already given. Consequently, the central theme of his work was, in the sort of language he often used, a humble deference for truth, or being. This deference eventually took the form of “recovery,” “reconstruction,” “restoration,” “reconstituting,” “redeeming,” “reappraising”—all of which point to the yearning, and the struggle, to return “home,” to restore the true consciousness of reality and remove the pneumopathological distortions that afflict the modern mind.
When he was seventy-nine Niemeyer published an essay titled “Recovering History and Redeeming the Time” that dwelled on the need to overcome the demonically deformed modern consciousness by searching for the ground of being and order. Reflecting on over forty years of work, he characterized the writings of Eric Voegelin and others, as well as his own, as all a process of “retheoretization” that endeavored to restore the truth of consciousness and to diagnose, therapeutically, what has gone wrong. His description of the prophet, in the middle of the essay, epitomizes the spirit and witness-quality of his own work (whether or not he would have accepted the title of prophet for himself).
A prophet is a figure wholly absorbed with concern for the relation of God with man, not so much in particular instances but rather in the public teaching and dominant patterns of a society. By force of this situation, he is a solitary figure, standing his ground against attitudes and ways of acting that have become popular. He is also one who proclaims truth unselfconsciously, much as a man fighting in a great historical battle utterly forgets about his own life. We call prophetic men who have stood the ground of truth in historical watershed situations, from which streams run down in opposite directions: streams of living water to the one side, and streams of blood to the other . . . . [T]he awareness of reality is at stake, and with it, the order of human lives.1
Twelve years earlier he had used the same crisis or watershed image in a discussion of “two radically opposed premises.” The first inquires into the beginning, into God, the Word, or Plato’s Ideas, or Aristotle’s concept of nature—all of which point to something like a ground of everything that exists, so that life’s endeavor would be seeking to discover the norm of that ground, to re-establish the link to the origin, and to avoid or remove any habit or attitude alienating us from the ground of our being. The opposite view sees no ground or beginning. It assumes something like an original accident or accidents; it fastens its whole attention, rather, on the process of coming-to-be that goes on toward ever-increasing complexity and refinement, promising to culminate in some sort of perfection. The stream of becoming, and its eventual goal, orient man’s activities and aspirations toward the future, the point being to remove and destroy all traces of the past, to free life for the onrushing movement, to be a part of the “upward” thrust. These two orientations constitute the most significant watershed of our time, a line from which run down mighty currents in opposite directions.2
The watershed that divides mighty currents of living waters and blood represents what Niemeyer also understood as modernity’s disastrous cleavage of past from future and, more deeply, knowledge, necessarily grounded in the past, from an unconstrained, deracinated imagination that, rejecting all limitation by knowledge that is perceived as “confining, unbending, demanding,” seeks instead limitless horizons in dream worlds, or “possible realities,” projected into the future. As Niemeyer was well aware, in modernity “to be in continuity with the past is seen as something unspeakably vile. The modern man has cast his anchor into the future alone. There is his true home, there only are values to be found.”3
Far from experiencing knowledge and tradition as confining, Niemeyer found it possible to seek truth only in the unbending “boulders and solid blocks of reality” rather than in nebulous abstractions or “colorless universals.” 4 Because the massive promontory of reality that provides a sense of direction is found in the past, not in the future, Niemeyer saw himself in the position of “a boatman” who “moves intelligently forward as he looks backward.”5 This is the attitude of humility, or “deference” to truth, an attitude that mandates the most rigorous and trenchant reasoning and analysis. Those who prefer to avoid the rigors of unbending, demanding reality by facing forward behold, he said, “dreams rather than given reality,” for they forget that (to borrow from de Tocqueville) when the past ceases to throw its light upon the future “the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”
Unlike much of modern thought, Niemeyer’s thinking was conservative: it was always grounded in the literal data, the things given, the precise reality of concrete individuals and of their actual experiences at specific times and in specific places. What is “behind” us is all that has been given to us, preserved and handed on in the public memory called tradition. In one of his last essays Niemeyer gratefully penned an encomium to the past that had nourished his mind and spirit, unapologetically offering
unstinted praise of tradition, a reality of political existence and cultural creativity. Tradition implies awareness of being, along with awareness of history. Tradition is not merely a remembrance of ancestors, but an openness to God as well. Tradition results in appropriate humility of individual persons, while it denies not freedom of choice: indeed freedom of choice presupposes awareness of tradition . . . . Tradition attends all relations between particular persons . . . . Tradition is public memory—the stuff that Aristotle describes as “civic friendship.”6
In an earlier comment on tradition Niemeyer, after pointing out that the new is possible only in continuity with the past (“All newness is a re-newal”), wrote that “he who believes he can cut himself off from tradition is not a free man but rather a naked and isolated ‘self,’ drifting in icy solitude, debarred from any signposts of direction or hints of possibilities . . . . As [rebellious movements of our age] thought to destroy the past, they also destroyed the future, ending up in nihilism.”7 Respect for tradition and its fellowship of earlier with later generations is an umbilicus of meaning, of human identity, and of humility.
The fellowship between generations was something Niemeyer had personally experienced in his relationship with his father8 and later with his mentor and friend Hermann Heller, who died in 1933 and whose last, unfinished book, Staatslehre, Niemeyer edited for publication in 1934.9 Heller’s influence on Niemeyer was considerable, powerful, and obvious in Niemeyer’s early writings and still present as a strong ostinato in his later works. One of the fundamental beliefs that Heller seems to have passed on to Niemeyer was the belief that a political science based on Idealist abstractions was worthless and that it should be, in Heller’s term, “reality science” (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft), reality in this context meaning what concretely existing individual human beings actually choose to do in their living together in particular times and places.10 As Aristotle had also noted, there are no isolated individuals (Niemeyer would later maintain that there are no real self-sufficient Robinson Crusoes), but only individual human beings living and acting together in a specific society with its own particular institutions, structures, laws, and customs. Similarly, for Niemeyer all genuine political theory had to take as its starting point what tradition relates of the concrete reality of individuals bound together by, and finding much of their earthly happiness in, ties of friendship and loyalty, not only to their contemporaries but also to their ancestors.
Niemeyer was himself by nature a man who, like Aristotle, extolled friendship and loyalty as indispensable for the happy life. He valued friendship very highly partly for theoretical reasons but primarily because he was a man with a gift, and presumably a deep need, for friendship and like-mindedness grounded in a common love. In his writings, the theme of friendship and loyalty goes hand-in-hand with his close attention to reality.11 In the ideological attack on the individual and his natural loyalties, Niemeyer found a pernicious rejection of concrete human reality.
Friendship, with all of its need for commitment and its rewards, is a theme that runs thoughout Niemeyer’s writings, growing in richness and intensity as the years passed. Sometimes it is very explicit and sometimes only implicit, but it is always there, for example in his respect and admiration for thinkers such as Aristotle and Augustine with whom it would not be going too far to say that he entered into a kind of friendship. For Aristotle, the basis of true friendship was, of course, not merely mutual liking or usefulness, but a bond created by a shared love of the same good in itself, a good far greater than the mere gratification of passions and desires. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Niemeyer did not limit friendship to the ordinary personal-relationship sense of that term but saw it also as civic friendship, “the warmth of traditionally enjoyed community” that, essential to genuine political order, is found on the “living water” side of the watershed.12 But more than that, he eventually came to share Augustine’s view of friendship, and true peace, as grounded in a common love of God.
At the end of his chapter on “The Ethics of Existence” in Between Nothingness and Paradise Niemeyer discusses the richness of friendship in Aristotle, for whom philia had significant meanings that have been lost. For example, “a man’s relation with himself can also partake of the excellence of friendship, which prevails when people wish and do what is good for their friend’s sake.” (194) Because the spoudaios, the serious or virtuous man, loves and does the good for its own sake, he orders his soul according to what is best in him. That is, he brings about friendship and peace between the best part of his soul, his intellect or nous, which participates in the divine ground of being, and his emotions and desires, for all parts of his soul then love the same good. Through the nous, the entire soul is attuned to and participates in the divine ground. Niemeyer’s commentary encapsulates a metaphysics that, with the addition of the relation between the individual and God, came to be the understanding of the source of order that animated his philosophy.
This individual existence is, in a sense, an ineffability. To wish for the good is not serious if it relates not to the particular and ineffable existence in time and place, but rather to some abstract being, a phantasm of no potential existence . . . . The entire excellence of doing and wishing what is good is, then, embedded in the here and now, the thusness of substances for whose existence there is no accounting. Behind the truth of right decisions in contingent matters there is always a concrete existence at the point where given historical contingents cross and meet. (195)
Genuine goodness, for Niemeyer, is always grounded in a respect for what mysteriously is and is experienced in all its concreteness, factual uniqueness, and therefore theoretical unaccountability. Such goodness requires acceptance of the ineluctable imperfection of what actually exists in this world.
Friendship, both internal and external, is the bond of peace and the wellspring of “the vitality of the will to preserve a concrete existence ‘whatever it may be.'” In individuals, the peace of internal friendship between the soul’s faculties makes life attractive; in society, the peace of homonoia, like-mindedness, constitutes a friendship that “cements an entity of existence and engenders the wish to preserve it.” (197) This political friendship is an order based on participation in the divine ground, which is “a higher ineffability.”
One of Augustine’s concepts for the experience of participation in the Divine Good is “peace,” into which he condensed an entire metaphysic of order. As “the tranquillity of order,” peace means that the soul is subject to God as the body is to the soul and that in society human beings subordinate their self-interest and immediate gratification to a common participation in Divine Good. For Niemeyer, who perceived profound truth in Augustine’s whole psychology, peace meant, quite simply, the recognition of and dwelling in reality that are in their degree of realization the prerequisites of the corresponding degree of friendship. Following Aristotle, Augustine, and others in the classical tradition, Niemeyer regarded participation in the divine ground as the basis of an order of consciousness that gave rise to the will of friends to preserve, first, each other, “then the similarity of judgments and attitudes, and finally the enjoyment of common existence.” (199) Human beings by nature seek happiness in the community of friendship. Merely living side-by-side with other autonomous and isolated individuals, each withdrawn into a private world lacking internal friendship and lacking the external friendship that provides “delightful memories of past acts” and “good hopes for the future,” is the kind of death-in-life that we find, for example, in Hobbes’ philosophy.
Hobbes, despite his indebtedness to Epicurus, nonetheless abandoned the Epicurean emphasis on friendship and considered all human beings so completely egoistic and anti-social, so consumed by their own isolating instincts for self-preservation and desires for pleasure, that they were completely incapable of any true friendship. “Peace” in Hobbes’ Commonwealth is simply the absence of overt strife, which is suppressed by each solitary individual’s terror of punishment by the Sovereign. The power of the Sovereign is necessary to hold the society together precisely because there is not and cannot be any bond of friendship or loyalty among the citizens. Even such bonds as Hobbes tries to create with his “Laws of Nature” are based on the usefulness of others to each individual’s self-interest—but not on homonoia, a shared love of the good or a common experience of participating in the divine ground.
Niemeyer would have found it no accident that both genuine peace and friendship were absent from Hobbes’ Commonwealth, because in rejecting tradition, with all that “tradition” implies, Hobbes abandoned the understanding of the higher ineffable good that is the basis of the peace of friendship. In the Introduction to Leviathan Hobbes wrote that anyone who wished to understand and govern mankind should look within himself, leaving us to assume that the portrait of completely self-absorbed human beings motivated only by fear, vanity, and a desire for power is all he found in his own psyche. Niemeyer, who clearly found something rather different, grew toward a grounding of his philosophical concerns in his soul’s celebration of friendship based on a shared love of God. To a great extent, his political arguments rest on his appreciation of the need to protect the natural bonds between individuals because peace and friendship are the indispensable conditions of the good life. Genuine friendship, both personal and civic, presupposes the rational attitude of peace with reality. Conversely, alienation from reality precludes homonoia.
Such substantive rationality, the humble appreciation of the reality of the concrete that is the indispensable prerequisite for right order and the matrix of peace and friendship, is one of the unifying themes of Niemeyer’s work, developed with variations in the numerous topics to which he devoted his attention in more than half a century of published writings. One might say that it is the kernel of his thought. Again and again he pointed out the errors of those who did not have sufficient respect for, and therefore did not think carefully enough about, reality. The remainder of this essay will examine Niemeyer’s arguments against what he judged to be significant errors in several areas of political inquiry—international law, free speech, foreign policy and morality, communist ideology, and thinking clearly about the risk of war in an age of nuclear weapons—in order to convey some sense of how he sought to recover a substantively rational political theory as Wirklichkeitswissenschaft.13
International Law and Foreign Policy
Although Niemeyer’s academic training was in law, very few of his published writings deal specifically with legal issues and those that do are all among his early works.14 One of these was his longest book, Law Without Force: The Function of Politics in International Law, published after the beginning of the Second World War. In this lengthy and complex analysis of the collapse of international law, Niemeyer engaged in his first attempt to grapple with the crisis in the modern world.15 He stops short of any specific proposals for a new system of international law but provides a detailed analysis, substantively influenced by Hermann Heller, of the history, nature, and current condition of international law and of the social requirements of coordinated activity that adumbrate a functionalist “new direction” that would provide a basis of order immanent to human activities. His thinking in this early work is not yet based on recognition of a tradition as the public memory that is essential to political reality, but it does eschew unreal abstraction in order to focus on concrete, historical reality.
Part of Niemeyer’s purpose in this book is to seek protection for individualism, which he sees declining in importance in a modern world of collectivist societies and mass-men. At this time his concern is for the individualism of liberal democracy, which had insufficient mass support to be viable in most of Europe between the World Wars.16 Later, this would evolve into a much more profound concern for the unique spiritual identity of concrete individuals in their relation to Transcendence—that is, for “the relation of God with man.”
Niemeyer’s argument is that it was not international law as such that had broken down in the 1930s but only the particular system that had been in effect for three hundred years, because the traditional moral basis of international law had, through changed circumstances, come seriously into conflict with reality. As he put it, “Our thesis is . . . that political reality has become unlawful because the existing system of international law has become unreal.” (9)17 Because political conditions had changed since the creation of the modern system of international law, law and reality were often at odds; the demand of international law that nations act in accordance with its rules was frequently in conflict with the requirement that nations act in accordance with reality. Rationality requires acting in accordance with reality rather than adhering to an ideal but unreal statute which could command obedience only on the basis of moral appeal.
The basis of international order had been conceived centuries earlier as an order among Christian nations that followed the principles of Christian morality. The very existence of international law presupposed that, alongside the separate political identities of nations, there was an international non-political domain, occupied successively by the Church, the dynasties, and the bourgeoisie, that connected nations with each other. By the twentieth century, the world had changed. Because universal adherence to Christian morality among civilized nations could no longer be expected, the established system of international law had ceased to appeal to the moral sense of the modern world. “Ethics are no longer an efficient medium for a legal order of interstate relations.” (15–16) An international order that is maintained only if some states use various degrees of force to compel other states to adhere to the rules is based, ultimately, on war. Also, although business enterprise had once operated as a counterforce to the State because, as the agent of capitalism, business necessitated international economic relations and also safeguarded a very broad scope for individual enterprise, this ceased to be the case when the worldwide depression of the 1930s drove businessmen to seek government assistance. This meant that through its appeal to the State for support and protection during the economic crisis of 1929–1930, business had become too dependent on the power of government to check and balance it. The resulting increase in the power of the State in liberal democracies diminished the individual’s freedom as well as legal or parliamentary control over the State. What Niemeyer calls “a period characterized by the ascendancy of politics over private affairs” (98) needs an international law that facilitates, rather than inhibits, organizations and social coordination on the international level, while allowing the greatest protection of individuality and private life.
Niemeyer saw the ironic effects of the enormous upsurge in risky capitalist enterprise in the “gradual subjection of business life to government control” (185) and the rise of the mass mentality. Both implied the decline of individualism. The modern mass mentality “moves and is moved in terms of coordination, in terms of function, in terms of the interconnections making up the whole, rather than in those of the particular qualities of the parts. People are not only beginning to think, but also to evaluate by standards of connectedness, complexity, and cooperation.” (204) That in modern society the mass-man had replaced the individual who was free in his own choices and actions meant that taking part in governmentally and socially organized activities was not necessarily an improvement, for it was entirely congruent with totalitarianism. Because Niemeyer was never inclined to pursue an ideal society or form of government but sought only the best way of understanding and dealing with what actually existed, he concluded that a change in society and cultural orientation entailed a change in the basis of international law. As he put it, “the emphasis in our conception of reality is shifting from material individuation to functional connection,” (300) both within and between societies. At this point he is clearly searching only for a realistic and pragmatic basis for orderly international relations.
Therefore, since the cultural orientation had changed from independent individual activity to connectedness, cooperation, and coordination, with many believing that human activity could be effective only when organized by a State, Niemeyer sought a way “to safeguard individuality against the growing threat of collectivization.” (xxv) He found such a safeguard in the functionalist theory of law, which assumes that “law (and social order in general) is concerned only with relationships, and not with separate individuals or groups of individuals,” (xxv) since (contra Hobbes) individuals, and even groups, do not really exist in isolation. This demarcates a realm of private life, allowing each individual the responsibility for the integration and perfection of his solitary, unrelated “existence,” which is necessary lest “in a thoroughly planned society human individuality should become a product of social organization.” (xxv) Instead, individuals would be free in their private “existences,” but would be able to step out of their private lives to apply their individual efforts to social cooperation and enter into coordinated activities to achieve desirable social goals. Similarly, within the framework of a functionalist international law, individual nations would be constrained to act in certain lawful ways not by moral obligation or threats of force, but simply by the natural requirements of activities aimed at attaining common goals.
Niemeyer finds the new conceptual basis in an understanding of interrelated and coordinated activities, or organization, which has an order of functions, not of individual parts. This sense that human social consciousness was, in the early twentieth century, concentrating on connectedness, illustrates the notion of reality with which Niemeyer was working in his early thirties. His interest was on the level of the practical relationships, not the spiritual lives, of individuals and societies:
An organization is a unity of acts not of men. Not the members, nor the organs constitute an organization, but that which connects them; the structure of their relevant behavior. The scheme of order is only a plan; unless individuals actually behave in a coordinated way, as foreseen by this plan, there is no organization. Thus organization is a specific structure of connectedness among individuals, materializing in their behavior. (109)
According to the functionalist theory, every cooperative, goal-directed activity contains within its own reality certain laws that determine how the action must be carried out. One of Niemeyer’s examples is a fire brigade. The accepted standards of putting out fires and rescuing victims have nothing to do with moral obligations or moral laws that compel individuals to direct the water a certain way or set up ladders in one place rather than another, but are based on the very nature of fire and the specific reality of a situation. All individuals who wish to fight fires must act in certain ways regardless of their personal moral or religious beliefs. Therefore, Niemeyer argued, there is a basis of order that coordinates the activities of individuals while leaving those individuals a private realm beyond the power and regulation of the State.18 Even though individuals could be coerced into acting in accordance with a scheme of order, Niemeyer’s assumption is that the basis of such unity would be unreliable and unrealistic. Genuine cooperation requires that individuals have an interest in attaining the same goals. The reality of human social existence is found in specific circumstances in specific times and places. By the twentieth century, human consciousness had apparently changed from a focus on the benefits to be derived from the enterprise of autonomous individuals to the advantages of mass, coordinated activity. Niemeyer’s functionalist theory is intended to transform a necessity into the virtue of protecting a domain of individuality. Even though within a society persons occupy impersonal “anyone” positions in coordinated public activity, in their private lives they are free to live as the unique individuals they are.
From the functionalist standpoint the same holds true for nations which, to attain certain goals of common interest, are required to act in coordination, but which maintain their unique individual identities derived from their particular traditions and specific circumstances. Since in the modern world nations are interdependent, they are compelled to act cooperatively to achieve certain ends, and the nature of the action, not moral laws or force, determines nations to act in one way rather than another.
Because the proper realm of morality is between individuals and between individual and society, but not between societies, the transcendent evaluation of international relations by morality simply is not appropriate, even though international law had a moral basis for three centuries. Niemeyer argues that
Moral rules are not suitable standards of behavior for all aspects of social life. They seem to envisage only those relationships between individuals which are brought about by the essentially “unreasonable” impulses of human beings; passion, greed, appetites, lust, and selfishness. From the social point of view, those springs of individual action are irrational and incalculable . . . . Thus morality opposes its postulates of a general and elementary “reason” of social behavior to such types of conduct which are not inspired by “reason” from the social point of view, but by impulses of an unreasonable character. That means that morality cannot apply to activities which are inspired by some kind of social reason anyway. (246–47. Italics added.)
Niemeyer’s understanding of “reason” in 1940 may not have been derived from Aristotle, but it seems to have essentially the same meaning as Aristotle’s “practical reason” (phronesis), the deliberative choice of actions on the basis of an accurate assessment of their effectiveness in attaining a goal that is rightly perceived as good. Morality is one form of reasonableness in which the duty to promote the social good restricts the control that desires have on actions. But Niemeyer finds other kinds of reasonableness in coordinated actions: Reason of State, Reason of Religion, Reason of Economy, Reason of Law, etc., that manifest “values which are distinct from those of conventional morality and which are immanent in social reality.” (247) The commonly recognized goal of extinguishing destructive fires does not require constraining firemen by moral obligation because their natural desire to engage in the activity of putting out fires and saving victims will guide them to act, and to want to act, in the most efficacious way.
Therefore, in his first major publication Niemeyer argued that the State qua State does not dedicate itself to an “international” goal, that a system of international law based on the conviction that most States will follow Christian moral law and will coerce any that do not, had, through the decline of Christendom, become unrealistic and lost whatever efficacy it ever had.19 The very nature of moral obligation, which lies in the priority of duty over disorderly desires, makes it unsuitable as a basis for international relations. For statesmen can find themselves caught, not between selfishness and duty, but between the duty to act for the benefit of their own societies and the “duty” to follow morality-based international laws. International law, and international relations, must be grounded in the concrete national interest of the State, not in transcendent and abstract moral principles.
Niemeyer found realistic, effective law not in abstract principles that had to be imposed on society—such as what he thought of as a rigid and absolute natural law—but in the “inherent element of orderliness in social reality” which is concretely “conditioned by the pattern of a specific culture.” (354) Similarly, “legal rules are found within the reality of life, not in abstract formulations opposed to it.” (367) The central theme of Law Without Force is the primary significance of concrete experience over abstract theories, a theme that he would later elaborate into the importance of peace and friendship for the enjoyment of political and social order. Niemeyer’s understanding of individuality would also mature beyond the bourgeois domain of private life to include the ineffable uniqueness of each person. Similarly, although for the next half century he no longer wrote on international law, he did pursue the issue of the relation between morality and foreign policy, consistently excluding morality from its proper formulation, with the significant exception of relations with countries ruled by communists.
Critique of the Doctrine of Free Speech
Niemeyer did not provide any specific proposals for international law and never returned to a discussion of the functionalist theory of law, most likely because within a few years he realized its inadequacy for dealing with the critical problems of modernity. By 1950 when he published his essay “A Reappraisal of the Doctrine of Free Speech,”20 he was clearly beginning to reevaluate his view of liberal individualism and to analyze more deeply the tension, or conflict, between political liberalism and the requirements of true social and political order. Although an almost unrestricted freedom of speech, or “freedom of expression,” has come to be considered a right essential to a free society, Niemeyer found that the doctrine of the beneficial effects of unlimited free speech, when rigorously analyzed with a consideration of likely real consequences, was actually self-contradictory, self-defeating, and harmful to society, “like much of political liberalism.” Even in this early work, published about twenty years before he began to write explicitly on Aristotle and Augustine and Christianity, Niemeyer’s thinking shows signs of being nurtured by the classical tradition.
John Stuart Mill had, of course, argued in On Liberty that society ought to allow the maximum liberty of speech consistent with public order—incitement to riot being an obvious exception—because the accepted opinion might be false and the controversial one true, or vice versa, in which case the holders of the accepted opinion would benefit from the necessity of thinking through and defending their position, or, finally, because the conventional and controversial opinions might both have but part of the truth. For all these scenarios Mill gratuitously assumed, as a matter of theory, that extensive public discussion would reveal the truth, at least to all rational and unbiased persons, so that allowing unhindered expression of even the most unlikely opinions would always, in the long run, promote a greater knowledge and understanding of the truth.
However, as Niemeyer is at pains to point out, like many claims that seem at first blush to make sense, this argument falls prey to the law of unintended consequences. The difficulty lies in an aspect of the doctrine of free speech not sufficiently attended to—namely, “the refusal to allow value distinctions between various types of ideas to have influence on the public treatment of utterances.” (277–78) Just as up until the moment when the numbers are drawn all lottery ticket holders have an equal chance of winning no matter how many previous lotteries each has failed to win, so the doctrine of free speech carries the implicit assumption that the search for truth is always at the beginning, that all competing opinions have an equal chance of being right, so that no belief can ever be regarded as an established truth, confirmed by experience, but must always be considered only a conventional belief that is possibly false. Since the sort of truth with which public discussion is most concerned is moral truth, the consistent application of the free speech doctrine leads to the skeptical undermining of the society’s sense of the reality of any moral truth, which would, in turn, render the development of any respected moral tradition virtually impossible.
Although Mill assumed that virtually unrestricted speech would lead to an increasingly solid grasp of the truth, he neglected to consider all the implications of the never-ending scrutiny of every belief. As Niemeyer argues, when all accepted ideas are seen as having as much chance of being false as of being true and the accepted belief is not given any preference over new ideas (and in fact, although Niemeyer does not mention this, the new ideas may be given the preference simply because they are “new”), the result is a subtle but deeply corrosive skepticism and relativism. This is the sort of attitude that Socrates warns his friends against in the Phaedo, the “misologic” or cynical idea that no belief can be unassailably supported by argument and therefore there is nothing that we can definitely know to be true or that is really worth believing in. The implication is that there is no requirement of an existential attitude of deference to truth because even what is most universally and deeply held to be true today could easily be unveiled as false tomorrow, as has occasionally happened, for example, in the realm of scientific beliefs. Thus, even the most basic beliefs on which political order is grounded can turn out to require no more respect or loyalty than the once commonly accepted belief in a geocentric cosmos and a stationary earth.
The result of such skepticism and relativism is, of course, the loss of a sense of knowledge concerning moral truth and the evaluation of moral and political ideas on the diminished grounds of their mere effectiveness or expediency. Or, to put it another way, the result is a “faltering sense” of reality.21 Truth is whatever “works,” whatever produces the desired result, so that individuals can claim that the moral good is “whatever feels right for me,” the feeling of rightness being merely a function of personal wishes or preferences. The very same action in identical circumstances could feel, and therefore be, wrong for someone else who merely had different preferences.
The degree of the loss of moral truth can be seen in the incomprehensibility of this loss to the minds of those in whom this attitude has been inculcated. Such a view of “truth” involves no substance that commands loyalty or deference or a commitment to protection. As Plato made clear in his analysis of the battleground of desires in the democratic psyche, when the love of the Good loses its authority in the soul the result is an anarchy of competing passions, all of which present their demands for gratification as possessing equal value. Because the soul lacks all authoritative vision of order and goodness, the good collapses to nothing more than the most seductive pleasure or demanding desire of the moment. Or, as Niemeyer puts it, “The masses from whose mental world the awareness of common standards of truth and goodness has receded are prone to accept not that which is true but that which is emotionally best fitted to their prevalent mood.” (283) His example is Hitler’s racial doctrine, but one can find a less severe example in the apparent assumption, behind many recent public comments on controversial subjects, that the good must be whatever is most widely approved and therefore moral issues should be resolved on the basis of polling numbers. This overlooks the strong likelihood that the majority of those polled are not well informed on the issue and respond according to the formulation of the question or on the basis of emotion or a belief that they should agree with what they perceive as the socially approved position. It is erroneous to assume that all public discussion takes place in an atmosphere of a disinterested, rational, and informed search for truth.
The second problem Niemeyer saw in the doctrine of free speech is the belief in the free determination of the will of the people. The effects of the doctrine of free speech run counter to what Aristotle called “political friendship,” the common loves, shared goals, and fundamental beliefs of the citizens, or, in Niemeyer’s words, “a fundamental will to stay together and to keep faith with one another.” (284) When this fundamental will or “mutual loyalty” is present, differences of opinion can be quite constructive, for each person can make his contribution to the common stock of wisdom, much as, according to Aristotle, an eranos, a feast to which manycontribute, is usually better than a feast arranged by only one person. But, Niemeyer says, “When differences develop to the point where they disrupt the bond of mutual loyalty, they constitute either treason or rebellion and involve the forfeiture of the right to be heard peacefully.” (284) The bond of mutual loyalty is, of course, civic friendship.
“The people” does not refer merely to a multitude living within certain boundaries, but to a community bound together by mutual obligations and living an ordered existence grounded in fundamental convictions about reality and truth, convictions that “maintain and nourish the community,” (285) convictions that Niemeyer would later (following Augustine) consider the basis of the “common love” that creates a people. That is, if the statement that “some men are not created equal” must be given the same respectful hearing and consideration as its contradictory, then “the people of the United States” loses its meaning. A society in which the statement “some men are not created equal” could be true is obviously not going to involve the same loyalties and sense of mutual obligations or the same beliefs about the basis of political order as a society in which it could not be true. A society in which both contradictories are suspended in a state of possible truth and possible falsity is one that is fundamentally irrational and lacking in organic, unifying order. If someone whose life has been defined by a belief in God begins to entertain seriously the possibility that there is no God, he will find his life and his sense of identity both becoming severely disrupted. Niemeyer’s point is that the same happens to the idea of “the people” in a political society in which traditional beliefs are allowed to be seriously challenged, for a people cannot afford to be agnostic about the basic truths that alone provide it with order and identity. Prejudices, in the Burkean sense, are essential. In our age “the concept of ‘the people’ as the supreme political authority has tended to evaporate . . . and the non-preferential doctrine of free speech has been one of the main contributing factors in this development.” (287) The diminution of the concept of “the people” also spells the decline of political friendship. Without “the people” as a criterion of moral authority, the doctrine of free speech loses its justification. It seems that the freer the speech, the less there are defining, loyalty-inspiring beliefs, and therefore the less there is a “people;” the less reality “the people” has, the less there can be such a thing as “the free determination of the will of the people.”
The third problem that Niemeyer considers is the belief that the rational method of discussion is “the common good of the social order.” The problem is that “free speech” requires that there be no evaluation of speech to distinguish the rational from the irrational. If speech is to be completely free, such that all opinions have an equal claim to be heard, then the exponents of the most irrational ideologies can use free speech to subvert all public order and end all freedom. The naïve assumption that public discussion will necessarily be a rational and disinterested quest for truth is hardly borne out by human history. The irrational can also achieve and wield power by means of speech when the only concerns are that all legitimate political action must be in the form of speech (and not acts of violence) and when speech is understood as a flow of words that must be unrestricted. Furthermore, “once the idea of the ‘common good’ has been formalized and emptied of its content, freedom of speech actually amounts to an official encouragement for every person or group that knows how to use the methods of democracy for the end of destroying its substance.” (289) Unless speech is evaluated according to a common experience of participation in a higher truth, there is only the chaos of competing opinions, which allows for neither peace nor friendship.
Niemeyer then considers the practical consequences of the erosion of the foundations of society by the consistent application of the doctrine of free speech. One is the question of criminal subversiveness. If we do not have clear criteria for the health of “the people” then how is it possible to recognize an intention to do harm to the people? If we do not have a definite idea of what constitutes organic health, then how would we recognize disease? How will the propaganda of destructive ideologies be distinguished from reasonable speech expressing loyal and constructive criticism? The absence of a clear moral criterion by which a relativistic society can defend itself against the subversion of its own internal enemies results in “the curious paradox . . . that a ‘free’ society classifies inquiry into its government as a crime [as in laws restricting criticism of the government during wartime] while looking with indifference on activities which undermine the spirit of community that is the only basis of freedom and mutual acceptance.” (291) The spirit of community, again, is friendship based on the common love of the good and of moral truth.
Another practical consequence concerns the problem of the defense of a free society against its ideological enemies, the main ones, of course, being communists, who use the free speech right of liberal society with the intention of destroying it. One might expect that Niemeyer would advocate eliminating or decreasing the right to free expression of subversive ideas such as those of communism, but he refrains from this because of the difficulty, in a contemporary free society which has long disregarded the moral laws of community life, of making a meaningful decision “about what must be rejected and what can be tolerated by the community.” (295) Without a clear understanding of the moral basis of the community, curbs on freedom of speech appear to be merely the actions of certain powerful interests for their own self-protection. “As long as that is the case, we cannot excuse the communists from political life without doing ourselves harm. Even a superficial observation of the public temper must confirm this view, for the hysterical shouting by which some people cover their own uncertainty weakens the social fiber no less than the gnawing doubts of the ‘progressives.'” (295) When the sense of the common good has seriously declined to the point where the object of common love seems to be nothing more than the individualistic freedom to advocate any opinion whatsoever, then it is precisely a restriction on free speech that will appear to be arbitrary and an attack on society. Thus, a society that is blind to the basic moral requirements of the political community and has lost the understanding of civic friendship seems unable to defend itself against subversion.
Niemeyer opposed policies repressing free speech “under certain circumstances,” such as war, because the determination of the circumstances is arbitrary and not grounded in a fundamentaltruth.On the other hand, he had already shown the serious flaws in the notion that unlimited freedom of speech is a good in itself. What is needed is a reawakening of a sense of the moral basis of society, the mutual obligations and public faith demanded by community life. On this basis the members of the society would share “a broad and firm ground of common convictions, principles, and standards which would serve as a generally understood criterion for drawing meaningful boundaries of public expression.” (299) This is homonoia, like-mindedness, political friendship. With such an awareness there would be no need for arbitrary limitations of public speech. This requires what Niemeyer calls “a firm, official stand for what is known as right, true, and good,” which can be arrived at only through “a spirit of deep humility” that springs from “a confession of imperfection” (300), the realization that we are falling short of what we ought to be.
Niemeyer wrote this essay more than half a century ago, long before public awareness of the importance of a moral sense for public order had declined to the point where both public officials and private citizens could seriously maintain that character is irrelevant to fitness for holding an office of public trust. This almost complete loss of a sense of the moral requirements of the political order has gone hand-in-hand with the limitations on free speech found in universities’ speech codes and various restrictions placed on “hate speech.” Although the ostensible intention of minimizing the social roots of bigotry, discrimination, and oppression may be worthy in itself, in practice such restrictions generally amount to nothing more than the stifling of opinions that certain groups find it unpleasant to hear. Niemeyer does not tell us exactly how the harmful effects of free speech found in relativism, skepticism, and the loss of any sense of the significance of morality for public order can be reversed. Where will we find the humble, prophetic public figures who can lead a society back to its necessary roots? This was, presumably, a question that Niemeyer did not think a political theorist could answer.22
“A Reappraisal of the Doctrine of Free Speech” was published before all of Niemeyer’s writings on communism and the nature of ideologies and his social criticism, with only some short works and Law Without Force, preceding it. Yet in this critical essay we can find, already carefully thought through, the fundamental beliefs in which his later thinking is rooted. First is that the very fact that human beings engage, or seek to engage in rational discussion bears witness to the existence of an absolute, objective truth, without which there is no real discussion but only emotive or preferential expressions and no awareness of “the royal majesty of truth.”23 (279)
Second, the deepening understanding of the truth that is the basis of order requires strenuous efforts at rigorous rational thinking, with a careful and thorough analysis of all assumptions and their implications. Social order does not just happen but must be gained and regained by thought. Insufficient or careless thinking can easily result in the deterioration of public order.
Third, political order requires that the citizens acknowledge a mutual obligation and loyalty not only to each other but also to the already hard-won insights into moral truth found in the tradition that provide a basis for a lasting order. The essay on free speech argues that the public authorities should adopt “a cautious official attitude of parti pris,” that is, a preference for moral truths embodied in the society’s traditions. To be truly beneficial, freedom of speech must be subordinated to a commitment and loyalty to moral truth already gained. Otherwise the political order disintegrates into anarchy. Niemeyer has here come to recognize the necessity of a common love of moral truth to ground political order within a society.
Fourth, mere discussion is not a good in itself, but is good only when it is based on the humble acknowledgment of a truth imperfectly, but at least partially, grasped. The life of the mind must be guided by the love of truth, both as it is experienced in the present and as it was experienced and articulated by predecessors, for reality is given only in the consciousness of the present and the memory of the past. Grounded in the illusion that somehow, through a constant public airing of any and all opinions the chaff of falsity will be winnowed from the grain of truth without any requirement for personal commitment, the doctrine of free speech accords no particular respect to past or present. It has no deference for tradition. Instead, it assumes that the attainment of truth lies at some undetermined point in a nebulous future. There is also the illusion that human beings engaged in public speech are always engaged in a rational act. As a German who witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, Niemeyer had first-hand experience of the enormously destructive effects of the demagogic use of free speech. By 1950 he had observed how Communists used free speech purely to gain power.24 Where loyalty to truth is lacking, free speech can become a weapon used for destructive and evil purposes. Even in the absence of virulent ideologies, a free speech based on indifferentism leads to the relativism that has put down deep roots in contemporary American society. There is no real order without a common recognition and love of moral truth.
Foreign Policy and Morality
In his 1980 essay “Foreign Policy and Morality: A Contemporary Perspective,” Niemeyer’s position on the role of morality in the international arena is a more detailed and probing version of the argument he had made forty years earlier, but now the focus is not on the “individual” but on the person, whose soul possesses the faculty necessary for discerning moral truth. Morality and government are intimately connected because of the habits and prejudices of the citizens and the role of government in fostering the humanly and ethically good life. Government deals with human persons, realities that exist by nature, but foreign policy is concerned with “relations between wholes who are not ‘natural’ substances in the way each individual person is, and who have no center of normative experiences resembling the human soul. What is more, the immediate concern of foreign policy is not the citizens’ good life, but rather the continued existence of an artifacted whole neither the size, nor the configuration, nor the duration of which are ‘given,’ as it were, ‘by nature.'”25
In reality, a “common good” can exist only within a society and under a particular government. There is no common good for nations, there is no such thing as a “community of nations.” There is only reciprocity in pragmatic affairs and relations, because there is “no institutional, legal, or existential unity”26 among nations, nor can there be, since human loyalties are naturally too limited to extend to all mankind. An international organization, because it deals with governments rather than with individuals, is too remote from individuals to engage their loyalties. That there will always be “a multitude of particular common goods”27 among nations means that instituted security of sovereign nations is impossible. This is one of the roots of Niemeyer’s critique of the United Nations, an institution which arose from the progressive illusions that war and international conflicts could eventually be eliminated and that individuals really owe allegiance to humanity prior to any allegiance to a nation. What Niemeyer calls “the basic fallacy” lies in the assumption that nations can be “citizens” of the U.N. in essentially the same way in which individuals are citizens or members of a nation. The problem is a misapprehension of reality.
Nations are real in a sense in which international organizations never can be real. The reason is that nations have their roots directly in the convictions, experiences, and loyalties of individual persons. Only individuals are ultimately real. Individuals, however, are capable of a “we” consciousness, of allegiance to public authority, and of obligation to society as a whole. In this sense, nations are real, a part of everyday human life, entities supported by living loyalties, capable of action, measured and judged in terms of truth.28
But nations have a secondary, derivative reality. As he put it in “Risk or Betrayal? The Crossroads of Western Policy,” “Individual people are ultimate realities, compared with which such concepts as ‘Germany,’ ‘Western civilization,’ and ‘mankind’ are progressively meaningless abstractions.”29
Because no civil or political friendship is possible between governments, no international organization like the U.N. can ever be a community, but can have only occasional unity of international agreement. There is no such thing as the U.N. in the singular because, as he wrote in his 1964 essay, “The Collapsing U.N.,” “the U.N. is not an entity, the U.N. is United Nations.”30 In the same piece, Niemeyer echoes what he had written almost a quarter-century earlier: “Governments . . . are responsible to their own citizens and countries. It is not selfishness that causes nations primarily to look inward and to be mindful of their own interests, but rather the opposite, a sense of duty toward the maintenance, defense, and well-being of that world of order, that structural bit of life which is circumscribed by their national boundaries.”31 The U.N., as a non-community, can never be a proper object of loyalty and cannot (as more than fifty years of experience has amply demonstrated) bring about world peace. Governments neither can nor should give priority to loyalty to international order over fidelity to their own citizens, institutions, structures, and traditions. Obviously, individuals could not extend loyalty to something as abstract as world government.32
Niemeyer opposed as pretentious the American tradition of basing foreign policy on the national sense of being “a city on a hill,” the model of ideal political and social order which all nations were destined to imitate. This American attitude disdains the particular traditions and political preferences of other peoples.33 The universal moralism of American foreign policy requires the United States to set itself up as a kind of “governess,” constantly meddling in the internal affairs of other societies. Such moralism leads the United States to arrogate to itself the role of universal standard of political goodness, which vitiates the real traditions, customs, and preferences of other peoples who may genuinely prefer not to model their societies on America. Furthermore, it is realistically impossible for any one country, regardless of how well governed and well intentioned it is, to eradicate evil from the world.
The exception to a generally amoral foreign policy standard was, for Niemeyer, the foreign policy toward communist states, because communism was a radical evil rooted in the total critique of society and reality. Communist ideology rejected the goodness of the present world and proclaimed a future perfection that required the fundamental transformation of human nature and existence. The “total critique” is a concept that Niemeyer explored in his book Between Nothingness and Paradise, where he analyzes both the axiological total critique and the teleological total critique. The former invokes an ideal perfection that is the antithesis of all historical human and social imperfection. In the axiological total critique there is no future goal of perfection, as in the teleological total critique, which imagines an ideal society in the future. As a teleological total critique, communism is constantly at war with the reality of the present, and therefore at war with all real traditions, all real social bonds, and all real human loyalties. Communist power was accomplished through what Karl Wittfogel called “the pulverization of all non-governmental human relations,”34 a phrase echoed by Niemeyer (who admired Wittfogel) in Deceitful Peace: A New Look at the Soviet Threat: “The salient fact in a totalitarian regime is the total pulverization of what used to be a social fabric. A person no longer finds anything in his relations to others that he can call his own.”35
This is one of the themes of Niemeyer’s analysis of communism in Deceitful Peace. He characterizes the Communist Party as not really a “party” but “a collectivity . . . which must deny and annihilate all loyalties other than to itself and imply the total submission of the entire human personality.” (48) Similarly, in countries not ruled by communists, “Communist agitation aims at weakening or loosening established loyalties. To this end, Communists seek to make every particular grievance appear as merely an aspect of a general discontent with the whole of society, so that whatever may be wrong at some point is interpreted as proof of an all-pervading wrong that supposedly can be abolished only with the whole of society.” (116)
At the beginning of his analysis of communism and the Soviet Union in Deceitful Peace Niemeyer described his method of understanding communism: “There is only one way of establishing the general possibility of an ideological orientation: one must oneself delve into ideology and follow its contortions, probing whether one could oneself become a captive of its logic, given favorable circumstances. In other words, if there is such a thing as an ideological sickness of the mind, one must allow oneself to be affected by it for the purpose of finding out what is its efficacy.” (21) Niemeyer did notsuccumb to the sickness of the mind because his loyalty to the tradition and grasp of reality had, in effect, lashed him to the mast before he sailed into ideological waters.
As an ideology demonically at war with reality, communism was profoundly disloyal to the truth, and to the fact that human beings can find meaning only through a commitment to live in reality. Communist ideology was a prime example of the “second reality,” the imaginative projection of a humanly-preferred “truth” onto the actual truth, with “dialectical thinking” providing examples of the incredible mental contortions to which communists resorted to avoid the truth. With its notion of collective society, the transformation of human nature, and the toleration of no loyalties except to itself, communism waged psychological warfare against the ineffable and ineluctable uniqueness of individuals. Toleration of individuality admits into the world a factor of unpredictability and uncontrollability, but those who seek to stretch reality on a Procrustean bed must be in complete control. This means a constant assault on all that individuals might call their own, beyond the control of the Party. 36
Suppression of individuality is not, of course, the finis ultimus: “What Communists seek is leverage to subvert the entire social, political, and moral order, through control of people’s minds.” (111) What communism seeks is not power in the political sense, but the penetration “of the core of the social order and