Sam Spade, Starbucks and Reinhold Niebuhr...

This morning's NT Times featured its regular David Brooks' column ~ a  weekly personal favorite - that is called, "Sam Spade at Starbucks."  It is worth a look (check it out @ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/opinion/brooks-sam-spade-at-starbucks.html)  At the heart of this article Brooks celebrates the creativity and commitment of the ever growing ranks of young activists who have been called into the "social entrepreneurship" movement of micro loans and discrete projects of compassion  "It is hard not to feel inspired by all these idealists," he writes. "Often they are bursting with enthusiasm for some social entrepreneurship project: making a cheap water-purification system, starting a company that will empower Rwandan women by selling their crafts in boutiques around the world. These people are refreshingly un-cyncial. Their hip service ethos is setting the moral tone for the age. Idealistic and uplifting..."

Simultaneously, he offers a corrective word of caution:  "Unfortunately, many of today's young activists are really good at thinking locally and globally, but not as good about thinking nationally and regionally. The prevailing "service religion" underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more care, compassion and resources... History is not kind to this assumption."
So, Brooks tenderly suggests spending some time with Sam Spade the the film noir heroes and heroines of that genre to discover a way to live into a world this always contains "venality, corruption and disorder."

(The) noir hero is a moral realist. He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues. The assumption in a Hammett book is that the good guy has a spotty past, does spotty things and that the private eye and the criminal are two sides to the same personality.

That's why I've added Reinhold Niebuhr to the mix:  if EVER there was a moral realist who understood the place of sin and grace in the human soul ~ as well as in politics - it was Niebuhr. He made it clear that human sin has to do with our ability to see and name the common good, but the inability to do it consistently.  He articulated an understanding of politics that grasped the difference between how grace works in the individual human heart and the body politic.  And he offered people of good will a way to advance the cause of compassion and justice that was always grounded in humility.

In fact, Niebuhr saw naivete and moral utopianism as an ally of hubris - sometime to be challenged as clearly as possible - knowing, of course, that "now we see as through a glass darkly... only later shall we see face to face." (Serendipitously, as I was catching up on the NY Times I missed while away earlier this week, I came across the obituary of poet, Reed Whittemore, whose words in "Lines Composed Upon Reading an Announcement by Civil Defence Authorities Recommending That I Build a Bomb Shelter in My Backyard," include:

But I'll not, no not do it, not go
     back
And lie there in that dark under
     the weight
Of all that earth on that old
     door for my state.
I know too much to think now
     that if I creep
From the grown-up's house to
     the child's house I'll keep.

Perfect, yes?)

Since the start of the current two wars of aggression in the Middle East - over 10 years - I've been wondering where the voice of Niebuhr might re-emerge in American discourse.  The neo-cons tried to reclaim him for a time, but they were so disingenuous that they quickly got lost by believing in their own press releases - hardly a Niebuhrian practice. And Obama has made reference to the master at times, notably in his speech at West Point, wisely calling us to explore the irony of American history.  But most politicians looked the other way.

In May, my little church will begin a two month study into a Niebuhrian understanding of justice, faith and American politics. We sense that the worn-out liberal commitment to the ethics of Rodney King - why can't we all just get along? - is just as empty as the cynical conservative agenda of exploiting wedge issues.  Personal and public morality must be congruous, to be sure, but understood as different, too.  Maybe part of our study will include watching "The Maltese Falcon" as well wrestling with the blessings and limitations of the social entrepreneurs.