sentment," its deflation of the "moral conceit" of entrenched interests, its recognition of the adversary's humanity, and its appeal to "profound and ultimate unities." Note that Niebuhr advocated nonviolent "resistance" or "coercion," not "nonresistance." There was no virtue in passive submission to injustice, in his view; even violence was better than submission. The choice between violence and nonviolence, indeed, presented itself to him as a tactical choice, not one of principle. Gandhi himself, he observed, introduced tactical considerations into the case for nonviolence, arguing that it served the interests of a group that "has more power arrayed against it than it is able to command," as Niebuhr put it. Gandhi thus implied that violence itself "could be used as an instrument of moral goodwill, if there was any possibility of a triumph quick enough to obviate the dangers of incessant wars." What mattered was "moral goodwill," not the choice of nonviolent over violent methods.

What mattered, in other words, was the "spiritual discipline against resentment," which discriminated "between the evils of a social system ... and the individuals who are involved in it." William Lloyd Garrison, Niebuhr argued, solidified the South against abolition when he condemned slaveholders as sinners. Self-righteousness and resentment, as Niebuhr understood the latter term, went hand in hand. Victims of injustice, whose suffering entitled them to resent it, had all the more reason to renounce resentment, lest it confer the sense of moral superiority that allegedly excused them in retaliating against injustice with injustice of their own. In order to undermine their oppressors' claims to moral superiority, they had to avoid such claims on their own behalf. They had to renounce the privileged status of victims. They needed "repentance" no less than their oppressors. They needed to recognize, in other words, that "the evil in the foe is also in the self." "The discovery of elements of common human frailty in the foe," Niebuhr argued, "... creates attitudes which transcend social conflict and thus mitigate its cruelties." The "profound and ultimate unities" Niebuhr hoped to awaken rested on a sense of sin, not on the assumption that all people ultimately had the same interests and that intelligent awareness of this harmony of interests would prevent social conflict. He did not regard the prevention of conflict as possible or even desirable. The most that could be hoped for in politics was to "mitigate its cruelties."

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