WHAT'S THIS WORLD COMING TO?
Barnes, Harry Elmer
First Of A Series Of Articles What's This World Coming To? By HARRY ELMER BARNES THE EDITORS of The Progressive have invited me to write a series of articles on the world after the war. This is,...
...We can keep up the feat for a time, but we cannot do it at the peace conference or in the postwar world...
...The Great Chasm This fourth world-revolution—growing out of the chasm between our lagging and outworn institutional equipment and the new and impressive material culture that has been produced by science and mechanical invention—had become inevitable even before the first World War...
...The facts and realities in the world situation stand out in staggering contrast to the illusions and fantasies of war propaganda, whether in the Axis or among the United Nations...
...Ley have both bitterly complained that the war has frustrated social progress and economic reform in Germany—in short, has prevented them from realizing a "century of the common man" under Nazi auspices...
...We are in the fourth world-revolution which has taken place during the historic experience of man, comparable to the Dawn of History, the break-up of pagan imperialism with the decline of the Roman Empire in the West, and the disintegration of the medieval order in western Europe between the days 'of Columbus and those of Napoleon...
...Nazi propaganda assures us that the Nazis have been fathering a noble crusade for a better social order...
...We must choose which ball we are ultimately to hang on to and cherish...
...Another way in which we are being led away from reality by war propaganda is to be discerned in the conflict between the harsh facts of the war period and the attractive ideology of the wartime slogans and pretensions...
...I make no pretense to divine guidance in composing these articles, nor do I claim any infallible prophetic powers...
...it is even more necessary and more urgent that America choose in relation to the alternatives ahead in the settlement of fundamental world-policies...
...The strongest military power among the United Nations, Russia, is the outstanding representative of the new order that may emerge, from the fourth world-revolution...
...Americans do not need to be told that any such claim is mainly fantastic nonsense...
...This was the essence of it, in contrast to Russian state-socialism...
...Josef Stalin, a calm and relentless realist, sees all this plainly enough...
...He can subscribe with his tongue in his cheek to the Moscow agreements and the like, for he knows well enough that the world-revolution now in progress, aided and abetted by the impact of the war itself, will destroy for all time all such relics of the old world-order...
...EDITOR'S NOTE: The second in this series of articles will appear in an early issue...
...The United States finds itself in the position of a juggler, trying to keep simultaneously in the air these two balls of Russian socialism and Tory financial imperialism...
...Once one turns upon this subject even a modicum of historical knowledge and 'sociological realism, the whole picture takes on much different outlines from what we have been, and are still being, deluged with in the war propaganda of all the belligerents...
...And the greater our efforts to obscure reality and evade the issues it imposes upon us, the more harshly it will deal with the human race and its temporizing leaders...
...The war is only hastening these trends and adorning them with unprecedented violence and bloodshed...
...World-change can be temporarily obscured but it cannot be successfully resisted...
...We were due for sweeping institutional changes of a revolutionary character, even if there had been no world wars in the 20th Century...
...But, along with many others, I have had ample evidence in the last few years that one's personal yearnings and preferences have little weight in the face of the tidal waves of institutional change and have slight bearing on the future destinies of mankind...
...The situation is even more striking than a union of Napoleon and Metternich in the days of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna—more comparable to an alliance of Danton or Robespierre with the Duke of Brunswick...
...What we shall be dealing with mainly in these articles are the larger trends in our institutional patterns of the future, so far as we can discern them in broad outline today...
...Vice-President Wallace once said that "America Must Choose" in relation to policies of world trade...
...But neither the war nor the actors therein can decisively affect or substantially resist the powerful underlying social trends of our age...
...Surely, the war, the statesmen, and generals who are running it, and the returning soldiers, will exert some influence upon the institutional outcome of the conflict...
...The Great Dilemma This basic situation creates the fundamental contradictions in the ideology of the United Nations...
...It should be obvious that nobody short of God Him-self could resolve this dilemma and both preserve the pre-war world-order and, simultaneously, give us a new and better era for mankind...
...The strategy of battles and the fate of campaigns are both less certain and far less important than the general course of civilization...
...This proclaims that we are, at one and the same time, going to preserve the pre-war political and social system and yet create a new and more promising world order—in short, that we are going to perpetuate nationalism, imperialism, secret diplomacy, great armaments, military governments, capitalism, and the profit system, and yet bring into being a new order devoted to international candor, disarmament, freedom, democracy, peace, good-will, abundance, and all the other good things envisaged in the "Century of the Common Man...
...The first great illusion in our war propaganda is that the war itself is the all-important occurrence in our historic experience and is the main force and factor which will change the patterns of contemporary civilization...
...When, in these articles, I discuss the impending changes in our institutions and civilization, I do not have in mind primarily what may happen a few months, or even a few years, from now...
...The outstanding difference between these periods of institutional crisis is that in our day the transformation of institutional patterns is more striking and far-reaching, and is being accomplished far more rapidly than was the case when the medieval order was slowly supplanted by modern institutions over a period of several' centuries...
...As an extreme libertarian, such a prospect is utterly repugnant to me...
...To try to do this would be like trying to combine the French Declaration of the Rights of Man with the Manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick or the Declaration of Pillnitz...
...Unless we, in America, wake up in time, the world will head inevitably towards an irrevocable totalitarian epoch...
...These conflicts and contradictions are implicit in the character of the Allies...
...Not even the talents of a super-Talleyrand could be expected to produce such a feat of political magic at the peace conference...
...But it is also a shocking and disconcerting task...
...It is literally comparable to attempting to work out a synthesis of the tenets of the Bank of England and the Communist Manifesto...
...I can only put down what seem to me to be the more reasonable probabilities...
...The most powerful state in the propaganda and ideological leadership of the United Nations, namely, Britain, is the most frank and prominent exponent of legitimacy and the status quo in world affairs...
...All this comes down to the fact that we are in the midst of the greatest period of world-change that man has ever experienced...
...Fascism has provided the classic attempt both to preserve the old and to bring in the new...
...Today, our leading contemporary institutions-capitalism, nationalism, democracy, metaphysical and rhetorical jurisprudence, liberal education, supernatural religion, and "otherworldly" ethics are passing through a crisis comparable to that which the manor, the guilds, feudalism, medieval imperialism, chivalry, Scholasticism, and the Roman Catholic Church were experiencing in the 15th and 16th Centuries...
...Even while signing the pact, he announced its fundamental irrelevance and acted accordingly...
...Hitler and Dr...
...The world wars of our era are institutionally comparable to the wars that built up the city-states, kingdoms, and empires that emerged out of primitive society in the ancient New East, to the wars led by the "barbarian" chieftains who broke up the Roman Empire and created medieval feudalism, and to the wars of the early monarches who brought into being the national-state system on the ruins of this very medieval feudalism a thousand years after Clovis and his like...
...This is, indeed, an alluring opportunity and a great responsibility...
...But we are much less aware of the conflicts, contrasts, and contradictions in the ideology and propaganda of the United Nations...
...America Must Wake Up' Let me say, at the outset and once and for all, that many of the changes which may lie ahead of us have less than any appeal to me personally...
...Its ignominious failure should be a sufficient warning against trying to reproduce the experiment on a world scale...
...They are, it is claimed, carrying on a revolution to lead the people to a better day...
...But it was "in the cards," in any event...
...A Dynamic Era The more resolute and extreme the attempt to underwrite and consecrate the old order in the peace settlement and postwar policies, the quicker will both evaporate and the deeper and more rapid will be the floods of innovation and resentment which will engulf the apostles of the antique and all their works...
...Had this conflict of 1914-1918 been avoided, the fourth world-revolution might have taken place more gradually and less violently...
...As a matter of fact, not only the second World War, but also the first, are only subordinate items in the great world-revolution through which we are now passing...
...What these world-shaking wars have contributed to the pattern of change has been to hasten the period of acute crisis in the fourth world-revolution, to step up the tempo of social change, and to increase the violence associated therewith...
...Whatever the ideology of the United States, and whatever the superficial settlement at the peace conference—and here we return to our main theme in this article—the real war that is in progress, not the war of propaganda, will not permit any return to legitimacy and the status quo...
...No reactionary policies among the belligerents on either side, and no amount of befuddling propaganda, can vitally affect this great dynamic reality of our era...
...The Moscow agreements and the Teheran conference were tributes to astute temporizing and political jugglery but they were not masterpieces of international statecraft...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 19
