Are We Becoming Too Powerful to Survive?:
MUNK, FRANK
ARE WE BECOMING Too Powerful to Survive? By Frank Munk "Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to his victims; the second it crushes, the first it...
...The historic American commonwealth was essentially a domestic state...
...Science itself being blind, directionless and directiveless, socialized science easily and inevitably becomes an arm of government...
...One of the great minds of our time, Simone Weil, denied it, saying that a moderate use of force, which alone would enable men to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness...
...faces the problem of combining a government of great external power with its traditional limitations at home...
...There is much to be said for both, but there are also seemingly impassable barriers to each...
...The truth is, nobody really possesses it...
...Among his books arc The Economies of Force (1940) and The Legacy of Nazism (1943...
...Too little power may invite aggression, too much power invite overarmament, militarization, the hybris of expansionism...
...Are there any built-in limitations on national power...
...He is now Professor of Political Science at Reed College, Dean of the Northwest Institute of International Relations, and President of the World Affairs Council of Oregon...
...This is his first NEW LEADER article...
...There is deep wisdom and centuries of experience behind the American's distrust of those who govern and his instinctive desire to limit their power over him and his fellow-citizens...
...the replacement of the inner-directed man, with a built-in gyroscope of values, by the other-directed man equipped with a radar-screen, sensitized to the feelings of his peer-group but devoid of any firm conviction or set of values (to use David Riesman's terminology...
...AMERICAN DIPLOMACY is retreating on a wide front extending all the way from Indo-China to Western Europe...
...May it have something to do with the gradual, almost invisible transition of our way of governing ourselves to what might well become known as the Second American Republic, radically different from anything that went before...
...Abolish one kind of power and another gets in through the back door...
...democracy is also something to fight with...
...it divided power through separation of its component parts along the tradition usually associated with Montesquieu...
...has had a government of limited powers kept weak by separating, checking and balancing...
...Democracy is something to fight for...
...It diffused power among the many, a procedure known as democracy...
...Here is an article which asks more questions than it answers, but the questions are those which underlie the entire American future...
...Many are the causes of the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian governments: Ortega y Gasset's revolt of the masses and the resultant massivization of all social activities: the spread of the Government-organized welfare state, or what de Jouvenel calls "the social protectorate...
...Is such moderation possible...
...At what point does it become self-destructive...
...In this process, the United States is being Europeanized as it becomes inextricably involved in the politics of power...
...It presupposes rational and able leaders, and these in turn are unthinkable except in a largely rational political community...
...States are governed by men, who will tend to use them as engines of their own urge for power...
...The fact, of course, is that we are in the presence of a competitive struggle—three governments have already exploded nuclear weapons and more are on the way—and that no secretiveness can prevent other nations from acquiring and developing the total weapons now coming off the assembly line...
...the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates...
...Laurence Scars, "American Foreign Policy and Its Consequences," The American Scholar, Autumn 1949...
...Total weapons create their own total states...
...It may be, as Bertrand Russell would have it, the fundamental concept of social life and social science...
...Frank Munk, formerly a scholar and author in Czechoslovakia, served with UNRRA after the war and taught at the University of California and the University of Washington...
...Government and science together are a formidable thing, formidable enough if one had to contend with one such government alone...
...Similarly, it must reassess the psychological and economic capacities of the American people and the potentialities of various densities and directions of power for attracting and holding reliable allies...
...To these may be added occasional confusion as a limiting factor: an energetic, expeditious government my not be quite the blessing expected by some...
...The real challenge to America is to establish firm foundations of national power in which the military, political, economic and ideological components are so balanced as to constitute a mixture blended for stability, maneuverability and overall effectiveness...
...Ideology, too, is part of a nation's strength...
...Yet, it is evident that the real impetus in this country is due to the shift from a primarily domestic to a predominantly external state, from a state dedicated to due process of law to a state dedicated to maximization of external power...
...Democracy is not a shield to crouch behind...
...It would be difficult enough to tame the tiger of power had we to cope with domestic and internal causes alone...
...Simone Weil, The Iliad...
...Most nations looked up to the United States because they respected in some degree our freedom...
...and it legalized power through a rigid and vigilant constitutionalism entrenched by judicial review...
...Are there perhaps some hidden flaws in the very marrow of America's might and influence...
...Our democratic ideology was in the past a vital ingredient of our strength abroad...
...Erich Fromm's escape from freedom, from the frustrations, insecurities and anxieties of an atomized, urbanized and industrialized society...
...You can become so powerful that everybody fears you--especially if you succumb to the temptation of throwing your weight around...
...Power attracts, but it also repels...
...There is no absolute level of military power at which a country would be "secure...
...It must balance the need for a government capable of decisive action in any emergency with continuation of constitutional safeguards against undue and unwise limitations of individual freedom...
...The U.S...
...Furthermore, does not impairment of the democratic process also reduce our military power...
...it is a sword, stronger and sharper than any forged in the arsenals of the dictators...
...Our chief worry in the months to come will be not our potential enemies but our present friends...
...Of modern societies, America was perhaps the most pluralistic in ideology and, in fact, the one most remote from etatisme...
...Unfortunately, science --the power over matter-has been brought in to increase man's power over man...
...The New Republic is an external state, devoted principally to maximizing its military strength...
...Our concern is the power of the state, the only contemporary social agency enjoying a monopoly of legal violence...
...In the present world situation, a high degree of military power would be required even had there been no changes in the technology of war...
...There is an irrational element in the political behavior of all human mass groups in the Western democracies as well as in the Communist states...
...Are there any unseen weaknesses that grow in proportion to our power...
...Its collapse is too alarming and too consistent to be attributable to a single party or group of men...
...their external government, like that of the dictators, is based on coercion and the ability to kill...
...It was largely Lockean in its philosophy, Smithian in its economics and Victorian in its folklore far into this century...
...Except for times of brief and episodic wars, the U.S...
...As we reduce these freedoms, as we accept at least some of the totalitarian precepts in our defense against totalitarian power, we lose the potentialities of leadership, alienate our natural friends and thus detract from our power...
...Yet, each government is really two things at once: an internal government and an external one...
...Power--the ability to coerce--may start out as a tool only to end as the real master...
...it fused power at several levels of federalism...
...Are we too strong, or do we possess the wrong kind of strength...
...The ultimate question, therefore, is whether attempted maximization of power truly leads to its optimum, whether the pursuit of more power may not in reality tend to reduce it...
...Abolish private capital and, contrary to the tenets of socialism, all you do is to open the gates to other types of power and their corruption and abuse...
...Socialization requires strong governments...
...It therefore conflicts with the American tradition of limited government...
...In fact, America became great by applying every device for the achievement of that end...
...All of which amounts to saying that contemporary man is becoming more and more socialized, for reasons that are at the same time internal and external...
...Will not the very same forces that point toward totalitarian-type governments, the same insecurities and frustrations that thwart and agitate the masses, militate against a rational electorate...
...This idea of a limited government roughly corresponded to the realities of America--a continental nation bent on extracting a good living from a harsh but bounteous nature in unchallenged peace and security...
...The question is to what extent...
...The 1952 election demonstrated that the majority of the American people desired a weak government at home and an overpoweringly strong government abroad...
...In the long run, the most advantageous is that level at which aggression is more risky than non-aggression...
...Democracies base internal government largely on consent...
...In a world of power politics, America must supplant arguments with armaments...
...It can never again be the same United States it was...
...Can there be a democracy permanently armed to the teeth...
...How much power, then, must the U.S...
...But let us remember also that power tends to create counter-power...
...The destiny of America hinges upon our seeking and finding a just equilibrium between power limited too much and power limited too little, between freedom based on insufficient force and force based on inadequate freedom, between a nation that would retreat to isolation and one which would become so intoxicated with power as to become its slave and ultimately its victim...
...The important thing is not only the level of power, but the relative rate of increase...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
