THE MORALITY,POLITICS, AND IRONY OF WAR: Recovering Reinhold Niebuhr's Ethical Realism

The American experience of war is ironic. That is, there is often an intimate and unexamined relationship between seemingly contrary elements in war such as morality and politics. This article argues that without understanding such irony, we are unlikely to reflect in morally comprehensive ways on past, present, or future wars. Traditional schools of thought, however, such as moralism and political realism, reinforce these apparent contradictions. I propose, then, an alternative—“ethical realism” as informed by Reinhold Niebuhr—that better explains the irony of war. Through an ethical realist examination of the U.S. Civil War, World War II, and the Iraq War, I consider how American political interests have been inextricably linked with deep moral concerns. Ethical realism charts a middle path that ennobles traditional realpolitik while eschewing certain perfectionist tendencies of moralism. Ethical realism provides a conceptual framework for evaluating these other frameworks—a distinct form of moral‐political deliberation about war.     

Remembering the Summer of 2020

How will historians and theologians remember the summer of 2020? This article leverages a socio-ethical analysis and response to twenty years of sacralized and sacrificial U.S. war-culture, and the meaning of this history, given the shifting cultural tectonic plates in the summer of 2020, and intersecting social ills of climate crisis, racism, inequality, and pandemic.     

Renaissance Catholicism and Contemporary Liberalism

Contemporary (post‐1945) liberalism functions analogously to Roman Catholicism in the decades after 1443. Both ideologies, in their respective periods, represent the hegemonic ideology of Western civilization, despite the fact that both comprise a miscellany of competing belief systems. Both ideologies are dominated by a single hegemonic power—the United States and the Renaissance papacy, respectively—which strives for doctrinal stability. All who reject official “doctrine,” however, are rendered liable to violent suppression. In this, papal Catholicism and American liberalism display an ultra‐conservative outlook; but they also evince a powerfully millenarian streak, as evidenced by their dual proclamations of the “end of history” and their zealous missionary responses to macro‐historical events in the final decades of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. For ideologues of both regimes, those events speak to an ultimate harmony of truth and value that only serves to entrench their own dogmatism. This, however, has dire consequences when it comes to war, as can be seen in the “crusading” character of contemporary liberal warfare. Ultimately, the Renaissance papacy proves unable to maintain its monopoly on Christian doctrine; and one has to wonder if a similar fate may befall America's perceived role as the champion of liberalism.     

Verbal-manual time sharing in children as a function of task priority

Eighty-three normal, right-handed children performed (a) unimanual finger tapping, (b) recitation of a tongue twister, and (c) both tasks concurrently. Tradeoffs in dual-task performance were measured as the priority assigned to each task was manipulated. Irrespective of task priority, speaking interfered to a greater degree with right-hand tapping than with left-hand tapping, but the effect of tapping upon verbal production and speech errors was not lateralized. The asymmetric effect of speech upon tapping, which was seen in 85.5% of the children, cannot be attributed to the disparity between hands in baseline tapping rate. The findings suggest that time-sharing asymmetry reflects cerebral lateralization of speech, but only some of the results would be predicted on the basis of a functional distance principle of cerebral organization.     

Music draws attention to the left and speech draws attention to the right

Providing free-field music input prompts right-handers to attend to their left side in a loudness-matching task that requires no musical analysis. Conversely, speech prompts rightward attention. The processes inferred are akin to the attentional asymmetry demonstrated in the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.