[In the following review, Niebuhr offers a negative assessment of Between Tears and Laughter.]

We have learned to respect and appreciate Lin Yutang as a kind of Wise Man from the East. Beginning with My Country and My People, in which he interpreted Chinese culture for the West, he expounded a philosophy which in our Western tradition would be called Epicurean but which he defined as a combination of Confucian and Taoist viewpoints. He gloried in the earth-bound and sober common sense of Confucianism and poured his scorn upon the heaven-storming fanaticisms of the West.

Perhaps he intended the same spirit to permeate his new book [Between Tears and Laughter], for we are told that the Chinese title, literally translated, means “weeping, laughter, both wrong.” But the tragedies of the war have long since drawn him out of his partly Epicurean and partly Stoic equanimity. There is little in this volume of the “law of measure” which the title betokens. The fact is that Mr. Lin is very, very angry. Anger may, on occasion, distil more wisdom than serenity does; the author's anger is therefore no explanation of the fact that this book will add nothing to his reputation or stature. It is strident in tone, sometimes cheap in expression, full of contradictory opinions, and lacking in both nobility of spirit and significant illumination of the problems under discussion.

The cause of the author's wrath is fairly clear, though not at all clearly defined. The cause is the white man's pride. It is not clearly defined because Mr. Lin alternately accuses the Western world of arrogance, of power politics, of “materialism,” and of undue reliance upon science. Since the arrogance of Western man is undoubtedly one of the chief hazards to the creation of a world community in which the Asiatic peoples can find their rightful and due place, one may well regret that the author's anger has not found a more effective vehicle, and that he allows absurdities and contradictions to destroy the force of his accusation.

When indicting the West Mr. Lin is never quite certain whether he wants to include the whole West or whether he is aiming primarily at Britain, while claiming America as an ally. Mr. Churchill is his chief whipping boy. The Prime Minister's intransigence on the issue of the freedom of India makes him a natural and proper object of attack. Sir Norman Angell falls under his condemnation less plausibly; and he never adequately or justly defines Sir Norman's approach to world problems. Though he seems at times to regard America as essentially free of the prejudices which arouse his scorn, he speaks at other times as if the late Professor Spykman's “American Strategy in World Politics” were the definitive approach of our country to world problems.

Spykman offers a good foil for the author's charge that the West plays power politics. “I remember,” he declares, “during World War I the term ‘power politics’ used to be written Machtpolitik and had a German flavor; now it is not necessary, Germany has conquered from within.” Against the Western realization that all politics is power politics, in the sense that political life is never a purely rational accommodation of interest to interest but a dynamic harmony of vital forces, Mr. Lin presents Confucian moralism as the answer to the problem of a global community. I seem to remember that in his My Country and My People he admitted that all the Confucian words of advice to the powerful did not insure justice. The simple moralism in this book throws no light on how the world is really to be organized justly.

Furthermore, when it suits his purposes, he easily discards the picture of the pure morality of the East in contrast to the cynical devotion to power politics of the West, and threatens us with force in the following terms:

The only logical way to keep Asia down permanently would be to keep the knowledge of the use of rifles and guns from the Asiatics, as we are trying to keep the American bombsight from the enemy. Stretch it across the decades and you know it cannot be done. For a century the discrepancy in arms alone maintained the white empires in Asia. What the Second World War suddenly revealed is that now the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Russians have guns. This fact is going to change world history.

I think that the observation is true and the implied threat justified. But it stands in strange contradiction to the monotonous indictment of “power politics” in the rest of the volume. The real fact is that the author has never meditates very profoundly on the relation between power and justice and how to make the former a servant of the latter.

One of his charges against the West is that it trusts science too much. It is not quite clear whether his case against science is that it makes value judgments on the basis of inadequate criteria, or that it fails to make such judgments, or that it is incapable of measuring the “imponderables” of human life. A very plausible indictment against Western confidence in science can be written; but it would have to be made with more discrimination than the author reveals.

Among many other vagaries in this disjointed diatribe against the West is the idea that experts are interested only in facts, while the common people have a sure hold on “principles.” This charge becomes particularly implausible when applied to foreign policy. Most of the national policies against which he inveighs were forced upon statesmen by the reluctance of ordinary citizens to assume responsibilities for political order and justice beyond their own nation and by the inability of the common man to foresee coming events.

We shall just have to write off this book and hope that the author will regain his poise in the future. If he is going to write about politics, he might well study a little political science, however hateful scientific discipline may seem to him.