A Conservative Autopsy

...His argument, however, rests on a false disjunction, plus a certain studied inattention to what the people he attacks actually say...

...This does not mean that a liberal must then go out and be crazy...

...So they never blame criminals or Communists for their behavior, and they invariably stress that social reform, the eradication of poverty and the equalizing of conditions are the best and only way to keep peace and defend freedom...

...His book brings to the surface fears and beliefs that are usually unspoken, and that lie beneath the everyday grumbles of conservatives...

...Apparently, "the real social revolution of our time," which Burnham described in 1941, hasn't happened yet...

...But they look better than their alternatives...

...or to the establishment of Communism in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, was not at all the resistance of which it was and is capable...

...Call this "liberalism" if you will...

...But it is brutality to say that there is natural evil in every child, and that it had better be beaten out of him before he will ever be any good...

...Obviously, we shall have to make provision for a variety of contingencies, good and bad...

...and we shall call all this "the defense of Western civilization...

...And along one perspective, the qualification Burnham drops into the middle of this sentence is, or at any rate can be interpreted as, the projection of his sense of guilt for having originally stated his thesis so dogmatically...

...Should we look at the members of oppressed and hated groups and decide that, whatever may have been the cause, they are now too handicapped to be treated as anything but inferior...

...Yet even though a man no longer believes in Christian doctrine, Burnham reminds us, "his guilt nevertheless exists...

...Because liberals believe this, they believe, he alleges, that all human wrongdoing is the product of ignorance or of faulty social institutions, and they think that every human difficulty is a problem susceptible to scientific solution...

...He detests ideology, and thinks that only cold, hard facts are relevant, but, so far as he lets on, these facts have no bearing on Western behavior in the last half-century...

...Immediately after interviewing the Vassar girl, Burnham writes: "Along one perspective, liberalism's reformist, egalitarian, antidiscrimination, peace-seeking principles are [his italics] or at any rate can be interpreted as, the verbally elaborated projections of the liberal sense of guilt...

...Suicide of the West is nevertheless an important book, important not so much for what it says as because it says it at all...

...The statement formulates a general guide to policy...

...Burnham is no longer the prophet, as he was in The Managerial Revolution, coolly forecasting a future unencumbered by sentimentalists and ideologues...

...It does not say that men are always or usually good, or that free government is bound to work...

...As I understand Burnham, we are never to negotiate with the Communists with any thought of mutual concession and accommodation...

...And equally obviously, we will behave differently in different individual cases...

...This is the pragmatic content of the statement that "man is good...

...The real and motivating problem, for the liberals, is not to cure the poverty or injustice or what-not in the objective world but to appease the guilt in their own breasts...

...It is the symptom of a mood, and of a set of emotions and ideas, that have long been present in the United States, but that now appear to be taking shape as a significant political movement...

...Burnham is in an astonishing position...

...And to present this interpretation so confidently, calling it "almost . . . self-evident," is to reveal the disturbing fact that one's only categories for discussing the fate of an immense and complex phenomenon like a "civilization" are the categories of political sovereignty and physical force...

...The liberals required an enemy on the Right...

...Still, this is only to choose between two kinds of inanity...

...But nowadays few liberals, whatever their officiai religious professions, are committed Christians...

...Clearly, no matter which way we choose, there are going to be risks...

...A few other circumstances seem relevant, too, in explaining the curious unwillingness of the West to do the things Bumham thinks it should have...

...To present the period since 1914 as a period of recession for Western civilization is to see things exactly upside down...

...Indeed, he professes to be quite mystified by that behavior...

...the amount of territory, and the number of persons relative to the world population, that the West rules have much and rapidly declined...

...As evidence for this proposition Burnham offers—literally nothing...

...For the past two generations Western civilization has been shrinking...

...For 25 years Burnham has prided himself on his political "realism," and has taught that the greatest error is to believe that moral ideals make a difference in human affairs...

...Burnham thinks that liberal beliefs about human nature, like liberal beliefs about most other things, are sheer "ideology," untouchable by argument and irrelevant to the facts...

...All that follows from liberalism's general orientation is that the necessary safeguards be erected (if they can be), and the necessary steps be taken (if they are known), so that the people living in such places keep their chances for freedom open, and are eventually placed in a position to be able to try democracy if they want...

...One is in the form of a qualification, made, as it were, in passing...

...And what liberalism has contributed has been a shout of victory each time we have willingly put the knife to our veins and let out some more of our life's blood...

...Since it wasn't willing to pay that price, Burnham, as corner, pronounces a verdict of "suicide...

...It is sentimentality, for example, to say that there is a natural goodness in every child, and that it is bound to show itself if only society doesn't block the child's natural line of development...

...It's getting so that you can't trust anybody...

...The kind of attitude that Burnham entertains is indicated by another important argument in his book—the one in which he attempts to demonstrate that the liberal's desire to improve the world is merely a mask for his feeling of guilt that he is more fortunate than others...

...To make an empty ideological statement is not the only alternative to making a factual statement...

...Yet Burnham still thinks we have gone too far...

...In brief...

...Of course, in a sense he is right...

...Liberalism preaches Progress, Self-Determination and Equality...

...A liberal does not have to argue, for example, that parliamentary government is just the thing we must expect to work in Zanzibar or Laos the moment such places gain what is euphemistically called "independence...

...He agrees that there are "bright" liberal thinkers—the courteous adjective is Burnham's—who appear to recognize the nasty and unpleasant facts about human nature...

...But Burnham's "undeniable fact" is not undeniable at all...

...But it seems plain as day to Burnham that anyone who says that "man is good" can be paying no attention to the facts of history and everyday experience...

...General guidelines to policy are not Kantian absolutes...

...As to who invented Barry Goldwater, Burnham does not say...

...Burnham, I fear, maintains the silence of the tomb on this question...

...Burnham is an articulate and well-read man...

...Liberal faith in human potentialities requires only that the task be undertaken, rather than abandoned with a sneer before it is begun...

...I would not recommend faith in the untapped potentialities of Goebbels, or a program of loving understanding for Stalin...

...Conservatives have usually underestimated the capacities of people not like themselves, and have overestimated the inherent durability and decency of the prevailing order of things...

...However, he does add two embellishments to this "argument...

...Burnham, it is true, discusses—no, to put it more accurately, he mentions—the ideas of more modulated spokesmen for liberalism...

...In 1947, The Struggle for the World first identified the Cold War...

...But neither are liberal recommendations for policy drawn out of the blue...

...According to Burnham, Christianity "faces the reality of guilt, provides an adequate explanation for it, and offers a resolution of the anxiety to which it inevitably gives rise...

...What we have been witnessing has been a continuing act of suicide by the West...

...So Burnham has given up being either a prophet or a strategist...

...A few pages later, Burnham says that Christian doctrine does all this "if it is true...

...Everyone has met "liberals" whose social outlook is a smudge of selfrighteousness, patronizing sympathy for the poor and unfortunate, and jejune solutions for complex problems...

...and when measuring the social significance of Burnham's conservatism, it is fair to look at the simplifications of Senator Goldwater and at the demonologists of the radical Right...

...the advent of nuclear weapons, and their relation to a growing tendency, which Burnham finds deplorable, to emphasize negotiation in the settlement of international disputes...

...All this serves, I think, to highlight the issues between the kind of stance toward the world for which Burnham speaks and the posture which he describes, and abominates, as "liberalism...

...Quite right...

...What is the connection between the ugly world in which liberals live and the ideas they employ to make sense of that world...

...But how are we to carry through this attractive program...

...Liberalism's principles can be interpreted as projections of guilt: Burnham has done just that...

...Pardon my ideology, but I am getting off the boat, and it looks as though not only liberals but rather a large number of conservatives are joining me...

...Suicide of the West is the pure Platonic Form of which Barry Goldwater is only the pale, stammering shadow...

...I make the point only to set the decline of the Western political Imperium in its context, something that Burnham does not do...

...we shall very probably not merely risk, but engage in, nuclear war...

...And, of course, it is not a doctrine that has been professed by liberals alone...

...But all these involve human psychological and emotional reactions that Burnham...

...All real ones of importance were beaten down or in quiescence, so in their desperation they invented McCarthy and McCarthyisnr...

...According to Burnham...

...Accordingly, when the Communists promise a new era of "peaceful co-existence," liberals interpret this announcement in a spirit of wistful optimism, and enter negotiations with the Communists that can only lead to the further weakening of the Western position...

...Yet it is apparently the continued assertion by the West that it means what it says by its doctrine of universal rights that Burnham calls "suicide...

...Let us admit what is obvious—that there is good and evil in most of us...

...For Burham believes that "liberalism"—the classic outlook of the non-Communist Left and Center-Left— dominates most of the important centers of opinion and communication in the United States and Europe, and that it is the ideology that reconciles us to the continuing decline of Western civilization...

...I do not think that is true...

...Should we bet that intellectual freedom, for example, would help them or hurt them...

...Accordingly, if liberalism is to be judged at this level, the alternatives to it should be judged at the same level...

...Charles Frankel, a previous contributor, is a member of the Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, and the author of The Case for Modern Man...

...And then again, the cause of Western decline "may have something to do with the decay of religion and an excess of material luxury...

...Such a man becomes a liberal...

...Now, confronted by the need to explain why everything is going to the dogs, he falls back on those two old standbys— the decline of religion and morality...

...If his new book is to be trusted, there are still a considerable number of these types around, gumming up the works...

...We are simply to take it for granted that the unwillingness of a great many people in the West to do these things to themselves is a sign of cowardice and moral decay, and reflects a kind of death-wish...

...So much for Burnham's "structural premise...

...And we are to recognize that our cities are turning into jungles, drop our do-good efforts to "understand" the beasts from the lower depths who are making life dangerous, and simply meet violence with violence...

...Now, in a book that takes its place beside these others for its profound analysis of what is going on in the world . . ." Nothing that Burnham says in this book suggests that he disagrees with his publisher's affectionate view of his work...

...Inviting the reader to look at a map of the world as it was in 1914, and to compare that map with one today, he points out that 50 years ago the Western Imperium was worldwide, and that now it is much smaller...

...Well, in realistic terms, perhaps nomadic conquerors have built empires on this basis, but there is no record that any great civilizations have...

...So he concludes that they have simply emptied the belief of all factual content, and are using it, not to provide information about the world, but to preserve their own peace of mind while the world slides into ruin in front of them...

...Burnham's answer comes quick as a flash...

...Above all, we are to keep ourselves in a state of readiness to die for the Western civilization that is behaving in this manner...

...the horrors of World War II, and eagerness of men who had spent half a decade under military discipline to return to lives they liked...

...Consequently, when new countries, many not a generation away from savagery, attain independence, liberalism automatically counts this as a triumph for the rights of man...

...At the end of this discussion, Burnham reads a lecture to liberals on the foolishness of their acting only from feelings of guilt...

...To be sure, it is relevant to a judgment of liberalism, considered as a cultural tendency, to take account of its cruder manifestations...

...And from this point of view, the reasons for preferring the liberal approach are impressive...

...But it is disingenuous to defend an existing system of privilege on the ground that the world will never be perfect...

...What of Burnham's view that the logic of liberalism at its best commits all liberals to entangling and damaging illusions about the world...

...In this way, Burnham's account of the evil in man runs its course: It ends with an attack on the guiltfeelings of other people...

...Although Burnham's generous feeling toward his fellows remains unchanged, his mood these days, as I say, is different...

...Nevertheless, it has to be recognized that factual considerations alone are not enough to decide whether a man should choose a liberal or illiberal approach...

...Liberalism has not been the cause of this retreat, but it has been the ideology that has sanctioned it, supplying the comforting slogans that have allowed men to interpret every failure as a success, and every surrender as a victory...

...But it would be as fair to deal with Reinhold Niebuhr's ideas by discussing the Holy Rollers, or with Burnham's ideas by interviewing Governor Wallace of Alabama, as it is to deal with liberal culture in terms of the attitudes and ideas of people of this sort...

...The question, indeed, never even comes up...

...and the Scopes Trial...

...And this, in part, is because they were connected processes...

...We haven't been acting as Burnham said we would, and then, when he shifted gears, and merely gave us advice, we didn't take that either...

...Among them are World War I, and the exhaustion that followed it...

...they want to believe that all their enemies are to the Right...

...Americans were, and are, too immature for the undertaking...

...The decision also depends on a man's moral preferences, on the kind of attitude he wishes to entertain toward his fellows...

...Liberal faith in human potentialities has proved much more often to be closer to the mark...

...And the other half of the story is that, during this period, when stronger methods of control would have been necessary, the West became increasingly indisposed to use even such methods as it had used in the past...

...What he offers instead is a lengthy anecdote about a rich Vassar girl he knew 30 years ago who used to invite Left-wing friends to her home...

...I presume, would describe as "immature...

...Burnham begins his book with an "axiom," an "undeniable fact," which he says is its "structural premise...

...Or should we suspect that they will take care of themselves at least as well as we are taking care of them given the chance...

...Unlike classic logic, Burnham's has the peculiarly useful trait that it does not cut both ways...

...Nazism, and the blow it struck at Western self-esteem...

...Well, it is very plain what he does not like—Communism, liberalism, the Welfare State, the United Nations, the Alliance for Progress, permissiveness in education, pampering criminals, the promise that we will do our best to mitigate hunger and wretchedness in the world . . . it's a long list...

...It could have fought back if it was willing to pay the moral price...

...Nearly 25 years ago, in 1941, The Managerial Revolution gave the first account of the real social revolution of our time...

...THINKING ALOUD A Conservative Autopsy By Charles Frankel According to the chaste words on the dust jacket James Burnham's new book, Suicide of the West (John Day, 311 pp., $5.95), this is the third of Burnham's "germinal books" on the nature of the modern era...

...In view of that fact, how shall we behave in our economic and political lives, in our courts of law, in bringing up and educating our children, in dealing with the demands for an equal chance of those who have been at the bottom of the pile...

...I know of no liberal thinker who advocates the abolition of policemen, for example, or the elimination of safeguards against governmental tyranny...

...For the factual consequences of adopting one general approach as against another can be compared...

...The West's assertion of this doctrine, as everyone knows, has been fairly hesitant, and sometimes positively cloudy...

...And the way to do this, as he sees it, is for the West to drop its belief that at least a few of its moral principles may have universal relevance...

...It still "could...

...He is now the chief coroner, diagnosing the death of Western civilization...

...My own guess, however, is that we shall have to be in permanent military formation...

...Apart from Christianity, however, which rests on a special revelation, the doctrine of universal rights has represented the West's one claim to universal moral influence...

...In purely physical terms, its resistance to decolonialization...

...The answer to these questions depends on the validity of Burnham's general diagnosis of our situation...

...one of the key ideas in the liberal intellectual armory is the belief in "the goodness of man...

...But he notices that they continue to assert their belief in "the goodness of man...

...No social outlook can be inoculated against the possibility of being adopted by fools or knaves, and liberal foolishness and knavery are far from edifying...

...However, this qualification, which consists of only four words, apparently slips Burnham's mind as his argument proceeds...

...But in organizing or maintaining the institutions of a society, or in forming one's own code of behavior, one must decide on certain general guidelines to policy...

...As a "realist," concerned with power, he wishes to reassert the universal hegemony of the West...

...He has caught the contempt and indignation felt by the ordinary gut conservative adrift on the seas of liberal culture, and has given these feelings an organized and intellectual statement...

...And liberalism places its faith in Peace, Reason and the Goodness of Man...

...The argument, as can be seen, is pellucidly clear...

...I shall not take the space to indicate here the variety of meanings that the phrase "man is good" can carry, but shall limit myself to one of its most important meanings...

...Is Burnham right...

...However, readers who may rush to Burnham's book expecting to find hitherto unrevealed information about the details of this liberal achievement should be warned that they will be disappointed...

...Nor is Burnham any longer the master strategist of The Struggle for the World, laying down a program for a Pax Americana...

...I do not make this point, however, in order to show that, despite the contracting political boundaries of the West, the fundamental values of Western civilization are today more secure than they were in 1914...

...In the last 50 years, the days of its greatest military and material power, the West "could" have fought back harder...

...Burnham's argument is a purely logical one, and is not contaminated by any reference to that world of visible and physical things which Plato dismissed as a world of illusion...

...But my favorite argument in the book is that in which Burnham explains certain events following the Nazi defeat...

...For what is striking is that the advance of the West culturally and its retreat politically were simultaneous processes...

...But it is equally relevant to a judgment of Christian culture to recall the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War...

...For Burnham nowhere gives the slightest reason for thinking that these are not the implications of what he recommends...

...He has confused political and military boundaries with the boundaries of a civilization...

...And this is a very tall order...

...He has, in fact, simply bowdlerized some old positivistic distinctions between "sense" and "nonsense," "factual" and "non-factual" statements...

...For only then does it have a chance to survive...

...It is ingenuous to imagine that a society can ever be created in which every man will get an even break...

...the World Depression, and the alienation of large sections of Western populations from their governments...

...we shall have to maintain a system of vast centralized power, and of masters and serfs...

...Thus, the liberal belief in "the goodness of man" is not a straightforward factual belief...

...We are to tell all the untutored people in the world who are howling for freedom that they aren't ready for it, and keep them in their places...

...As Burnham sees it, the retreat of the West has taken place during precisely the period when the West was at the height of its material and military power relative to the rest of the world...

...Would it be better, as Burnham recommends, to drop the word-play, to stop the pretense, and to admit that we in the West are fighting for our lives against people many of whom hate us, and most of whom are incapable of understanding the principles of civilized life...

...Looking back on those ambitious days that followed World War II, he now writes: "Abstractly considered, the full creative response to the challenge then presented would have been to establish a Pax Americana on a world scale...

...Let us admit that, in his portrait of liberalism, Burnham is not completely off the mark...

...Only liberals can't...

...Its mood is different...

...Q.E.D...

...But in every one of these choices liberalism would prefer to take the risks that go with an effort to enhance the individual's freedom, intelligence and powers...

...There are a number of other alternatives, which Burnham ignores...

...Western tools and clothes, medicines and games, music and movies, moral codes and political creeds, have reached much larger numbers of people than were reached in the high days of colonialism...

...When he refers to pieces he has written in the past, he does not say, "As I argued," but "As I demonstrated," and he writes in the tone of a man who has superior knowledge and sees through the popular illusions of an era...

...But Suicide of the West does not quite take its place beside Burnham's other books...

...During the last two generations Western civilization has expanded...

...we shall have to commit, every day, acts of unspeakable atrocity against people in other countries, and against people in our own cities...

...I want to narrow my focus down to a fact so obvious and undeniable that it can almost be thought of as self-evident...

...And should we build a policy based frankly on the proposition that if we do not hold these people down, they will destroy us...

...It became increasingly difficult to maintain the kind of control over the non-Western parts of the world that Burnham would like, once these parts of the world became sufficiently Westernized for a large number of people in these areas to demand Western rights...

...Then it has to be asked whether, in preparing for all sorts of circumstances we cannot foresee, we would generally prefer to take a chance on trusting or distrusting people...

...Should we give individuals more opportunities to break loose from the accidents of birth and to make their own way, or should we fear that they will not know what to do with the opportunity and conclude that they had better be kept in line...

...But when we look for more positive advice, we get only very general directives...

...However, this solution was too abstract...

...At any rate, nowhere in his no-holds-barred examination of an entire epoch in human history does he mention them or any of the events in the above list...

...There were a number of reasons for this, but one of the simplest was that it was hard to use repressive measures against people talking one's own moral language, and claiming for themselves rights that the West had always declared to be universal...

...Do we have any clues as to what Burnham would recommend by way of reviving the West...

...Burnham can want to improve the world without having a sense of guilt...

...Perhaps we are just growing old, he speculates...

...and what that requires is some program, some solution, some activity, whether or not it is the correct program, solution and activity...

...I or another," he reminds them, "might choose to try to better the lot of the wretched because I thought it God's command that I should do so or out of a feeling of noblesse oblige, from charity or civic duty or because I preferred a happier world for its own sake: none of which motives need presuppose any sense of guilt on my part...

...This being the case, what is such a man to do...

...Liberals, he argues, never like to believe that they have any enemies to the Left...

...Then, arguing in a straight line from these premises, he writes: "So necessary for liberalism is the enemy on the Right that when he does not exist, liberialism must invent him...

...But his portrait of liberalism is in the main a portrait of liberal sloganeering and extremism, and owes little to the writers to whom he refers...

...The second embellishment is even more arresting...