Challenge for .America

...Secretary of State Dulles was right in this policy...

...Mowrer develops the theory of growth and decay of civilization, seeking an explanation for the ultimate collapse of man's every civilizing venture...

...It is a fighting book and hence is bound to distress and anger those whose interests are vested in the status quo...

...It is possible to discern some alarming symptoms of decadence: Our society tends toward materialism and soft living...

...The society has become too civilized to survive...

...Mowrer asks...

...Since then Mowrer has remained one of our most prolific and notable writers on international politics...

...But after the barbarians or less-civilized peoples have conquered a more highly developed society, stability and peace follow, and prosperity and ease arrive...

...He picks out several areas where American foreign policy has failed and several areas where the fabric of American society is weak, and he prescribes policies and principles for us to follow in correcting these failings...

...Mowrer argues that we cannot rely on the United Nations to protect our legitimate international interests, for, while we conform to the UN Charter, other governments "systematically gnaw away at American vital interests by devices short of territorial aggression [so that] the United States runs the danger of being 'nibbled to death,' and with it the rest of the free world...

...It is true that, in the recent past, we have met two serious challenges, but this does not assure adequate responses in the future...

...and the educational system tends to reward conformist mediocrity over rare achievement...

...Our problem is to save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous ones...

...While deploring violence, they are serenely ready to meet force with superior force...

...Sometimes Mowrer's voice grows a little strident...

...They know that fighting is a lesser evil than submission or martyrdom...

...His writings have been distinguished by courage, perspicacity and wit...

...He asserts that "each civilization is accompanied by a psychological change which symbolizes, if it does not account for, the rhythmic process...

...How can we escape the conclusion that the West at some point will succumb to the fate that has attended all previous societies, once the civilizing process has sufficiently softened them up...

...there has been an alarming rise in juvenile crime...

...His book is singularly devoid of ambiguities...

...What we need for the future are men who are "courageous yet compassionate, resolute yet gentle, highly individualized yet public-spirited, at war with evil yet inwardly at peace with man...

...Yet, in contrast to belles-lettres, there are not enough angry-men-with-a-vision in the field of international affairs...

...Barbarian societies are dominated by tough, warlike individuals, whose characteristics are personal courage and native aggressiveness, and who accept "physical combat, physical injury and death as things in the established order of nature...

...Mowrer has succeeded admirably in filling this gap...

...Western Europe and America represent this second type, the civilized man, so that, despite a warlike past, the Atlantic peoples are now basically peaceful and "the West has gradually lost its interest in mastery...

...So long as one side in a death struggle is determined to expand by all means short of major war, including the risk of war, the other side must disdain every threat, call every bluff, and occasionally take risks of its own...

...A Good Time to be Alive is a book about Americans and the dangerous and exciting problems with which the world confronts them...

...On the other hand, East Europeans, particularly the Russians, have preserved the martial virtues, the essence of which is the acceptance of possible war without undue apprehension...

...Fourth, there is a pressing need for an immediate change from "progressive" to "traditional" educational methods, from "adjusting to society" to learning, in order to meet the political-military threat inherent in Soviet educational systems and simply to foster the growth of a literate, rather than a "socially adjusted," generation...

...He warns that other civilizations, at the height of their power and glory, entered a period of decadence and succumbed to external enemies and internal weaknesses...

...It is a time when anyone can, if he so chooses, find a kind of satisfaction rarely attainable—participation in a struggle for essential values...

...Americans prefer to put their personal comforts and gadgets ahead of defense expenditures...

...But it is a good time to be alive, primarily because of these challenges and the wide range of opportunities which the present age presents in both the international and domestic fields...

...stake their very lives in the cause of freedom...

...Third, the American people still have the stamina to rise to the challenges of the present, and, if need be...

...Each Western compromise, each withdrawal from an overseas base, each refusal to defend an ally (Iraq) or go to the aid of a revolting country (East Germany, Hungary) leaves the non-Communist world in a more precarious position...

...Each Communist aggression compels the West to meet Soviet "brinkmanship" by "counter-brinkmanship...

...his sure diagnosis of Germany's ills was a prophetic vision of things to come...

...Its central ideas are the following: First, there is an overriding need for the political, as well as the economic and cultural, unity of the Western peoples...

...The response must be imaginative, made by dedicated, moral, law-abiding men who are not afraid to fight for their ideas...

...If we do not respond to the challenge of Communism (he quotes Toynbee approvingly on "challenge and response") and set about to correct our unimaginative foreign policies and internal shortcomings, we could fall, and freedom could disappear along with us...

...Until we have enforceable world law and order, only the major powers, acting separately or in groups, cap protect their own rights and the rights of weaker countries...

...We cannot diminish the risk of war by running away from our enemy...

...Edgar Ansel Mowrer is a forthright man...

...Yet complacent satisfaction with our own achievements might dull our responses to hostile challenges...

...we must accept the job with no assurance that it is possible...

...Second, the Western peoples must, if necessary, meet the threat of Communist imperialism with military force, for slavery is more fearful than war and peace is worth less than freedom...

...3.50 By Robert Strausz-Hupe Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO Edgar Ansel Mowrer first achieved fame: His Germany Puts the Clock Back still stands out as one of the great political books of the era...

...The present volume, A Good Time to be Alive, is worthy of its predecessor, which established Mowrer's reputation as an expert on European politics...

...The will to war declines, and gradually there emerges from these former barbarians a citizenry which, for a variety of reasons, will no longer fight...

...Mowrer does not paint a rosy picture and does not see an easy road to national survival and the protection of Western values...