Saturday, December 12, 2009

Andrew Sullivan on Obama's Nobel Acceptance Speech

The Tragedy of Hope



Snippet:

When I have been asked why I, as a conservative, support this man the way I do, I can only answer: listen to him. What is the philosophy that most affirms "the imperfections of man and the limits of reason"? What philosophy sadly demurs when told that peace is possible on earth, that history is leading to utopia, that war is over, that "freedom is on the march"? And this is the critical distinction between Bush and Obama: Obama is far more conservative than his predecessor. He sees that the profound flaws in human nature affect us as well as them; that we "face the world as it is," not as we would like it to be; that the decision to go to war is a moral and a pragmatic one; that ends have to be balanced by a shrewd and sometimes cold-eyed assessment of means.

For peace to exist, there must sometimes be war. A statesman will sometimes have to bargain with evil men. A statesman will also sometimes have to let evil flourish because he simply does not have the proportionate means to counter it. Human nature is alloyed between good and evil, and evil often wins.

Hope is not optimism. We have little reason for optimism given the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hope is a choice. As much a choice as faith and love.

1 comment:

Fr. Bryan Owen said...

Thanks for sharing this piece by Sullivan, Chris. I'll have to read the whole thing.

It sounds like Obama has internalized Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism, whereas Bush's rhetoric about changing the world for democracy sounds more like one of the social gospel liberals castigated by Niebuhr. How ironic to have a political conservative embrace the naive optimism of theological liberalism's approach to engaging the wider world, and a political liberal embrace the tough-mindedness of Christian realism.