So we’ve been talking for a few weeks now about Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, which, for the record, is a bitch to read. Just about the longest hundred and fifty pages I’ve ever forced myself through. Niebuhr’s key idea is that society is awful. While individual people can have a moral compass, he suggests, social groups cannot. There’s no point trying to uplift people by spreading knowledge and dignity, because while you might educate individuals, they won’t be able to overcome the inertia of their class interests. Niebuhr describes this sort of naïve attitude as that of the moralist, who “believes, therefore, that nothing but an extension of social intelligence and an increase in moral goodwill can offer society a permanent solution for its social problems.” Niebuhr sees that attitude as blind and silly. The problem won’t be fixed by moral education, or by appealing to our shared rational, logical spirit. Knowing the solution won’t stop us – hasn’t stopped us – burning the planet.

So, Niebuhr says, what do you do? What’s the best system to try and limit some of these more destructive impulses? Niebuhr thinks that it has to be coercive. If “greed, the will-to-power, and other forms of self-assertion can never be completely controlled or sublimated by reason,” then you have to use power against itself. If you can’t get away from coercion, you have to employ it. Obviously in itself that’s a threatening and potentially quite dangerous idea. What possible boundaries could you put in place to make coercion safe and productive? Is there any such thing? Are we not really just creating another set of problems? “If coercion, self-assertion and conflict are regarded as permissible and necessary instruments of social redemption,” Niebuhr asks, “how are perpetual conflict and perennial tyranny to be avoided?” His best-fit solution has two parts. First, if we can’t get rid of coercion, we can set about “reducing it to a minimum, by counselling the use of such types of coercion as are most compatible with the moral and rational factors in human society.” Second, we must be “discriminating between the purposes and ends for which coercion is used.”

As an example of that first part, we might consider the cultural changes around appropriate language that have rolled through since the 90s. The concept of what’s acceptable in polite company is a type of coercion – it’s social pressure that rewards and punishes certain behaviours. If someone uses a slur in polite company, it’s embarrassing. There is a social mechanism that kicks into gear: we raise our kids not to be like Uncle Tony, who gets drunk and says things about immigrants. That’s in our culture. I can invoke the ‘racist uncle’ caricature, and even if you don’t have a racist uncle, you know what I mean. You understand the idea. Obviously we can sit around and critique the concept of polite company – very white, very middle-class, a social site of bourgeois power and control – but it also does some useful heavy lifting. Much of the overt racism of the past has been tamped down by political correctness. Niebuhr’s attitude towards polite company, as a concept, would be that we should reform its narrowness, broaden its blind spots, sure, but also harness its power as a form of social control.

So – the idea that ‘coercion is good, actually’ is maybe a little bit of an unusual conclusion. But Niebuhr seems confident. “A rational society will probably place a greater emphasis upon the ends and purposes for which coercion is used than upon the elimination of coercion and conflict. It will justify coercion if it is obviously in the service of a rationally acceptable social end.” What counts as a rationally acceptable social end? Well, Niebuhr says, any effort to overthrow inequality. “The oppressed, whether they be the Indians in the British Empire, or the Negroes in our own country, or the industrial workers in every nation, have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force.” Niebuhr would probably be in favour of, for instance, sending the National Guard to protect the Little Rock Nine, the first group of black students enrolled in a previously segregated school in Arkansas. Strictly speaking, that’s an example of coercion. The state is using its power to enforce the law. But it’s a form of coercion that’s on the right side of history.

Really this is the thrust of Niebuhr’s argument: we don’t live in a world where coercion can be extinguished. There’s no point trying to get rid of it in its entirety. Coercion is never going away. We have to figure out how to live with it – and maybe even use it to some productive ends. Obviously the process will never be perfect, and it’s always going to be risky. “Conflict and coercion are manifestly such dangerous instruments.” But for Niebuhr, abandoning coercion for being ‘too dangerous’ is almost a failure of nerve. “Moral reason must learn how to make coercion its ally without running the risk of a Pyrrhic victory in which the ally exploits and negates the triumph.” It’s not an easy process, and it’s not necessarily safe. But that’s the task Niebuhr sees in front of us. We’ll never get rid of coercive measures, he says. So we may as well use them for something useful.