A serious man

Readers of this blog will know that I profoundly disagree with Barack Obama in a couple of areas. But one of the things I appreciate about him is that he's a serious person. What do I mean? It's evident that he's read widely and thought deeply about big issues. He has a sense of history. He's serious without taking himself too seriously. I'm sure being the father of two young children helps in that regard. This is a refreshing change. Contra the rhetoric from the right, Obama is no raving revolutionary, but a cautious realist whose first instinct is to build bridges not lob Molotov cocktails. The first year of his presidency has lacked (thankfully) the messianic overtones that characterized his campaign.

David Brooks had an interesting column yesterday on how Obama's engagement with the 20th-century Christian thinker Reinhold Niebuhr has informed his approach to foreign policy. Incidentally, another of Niebuhr's students was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though Bonhoeffer criticized Niebuhr for lacking the Christocentric focus which he found in his other mentor Karl Barth. I wonder if Obama has read Barth or Bonhoeffer? But back to Brooks. He traces the influence of Niebuhr on Cold War liberals like George Kennan. Unlike later generations of Democrats these men had a healthy appreciation for the limits of human virtue and the persistent effects of the evil within -- what a theologian would call original sin. What Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the line running through every human heart.

Brooks writes:

As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”

So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting. . . . But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You can read the whole column here. It's interesting that Obama has a better grasp of the doctrine of original sin than some of the politically conservative Christians that despise him.