Читать книгу Suicide of the West - James Burnham - Страница 13
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WHILE WORKING ON THIS BOOK one morning, I happened to come across, lingering on a remote shelf, an historical atlas left over from my school days long, long ago. I drew it out and began idly turning the pages, for no particular reason other than to seize an occasion, as a writer will, to escape for a moment from the lonely discipline of his craft. We Americans don’t go in much for geography, but I suppose nearly everyone has seen some sort of historical atlas somewhere along the educational line.
This was an old-timer, published in 1921 but carried through only to 1929. It begins in the usual way with maps of ancient Egypt under this, that and the other dynasty and empire. There is Syria in 720 B.C. under Sargon II, and in 640 B.C. under Assurbanipal. Persia “prior to 700 B.C.” appears as no more than a splotch in the Middle East along with the Lydian Empire, Median Empire, Chaldean Empire and the territory of Egypt. But by 500 B.C. Persia has spread like a stain to all the Near and Middle East and to Macedonia. Thereafter, it shrinks in rapid stages. Macedonia in turn pushes enormously out in no time; then as quickly splits into the fluctuating domains of Bactrians, Seleucids and Ptolemies.
Then Rome, of course, with dozens of maps, beginning with the tiny circle of “About 500 B.C.” around the seven hills themselves plus a few suburban colonies; flowing irresistibly outward over Italy, Sicily, Asia Minor, Macedonia and the Balkans, Greece, North Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Dalmatia, Gaul, Britain, Egypt . . . ; then ineluctably receding, splitting, disintegrating until by the end of the fifth century A.D. the Eastern Empire is left stewing in its own incense while the Western lands are fragmented into inchoate kingdoms of Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, Angles, Saxons and lesser bandits.
The successive maps of Islam are also there, rushing headlong out of the Arabian desert in all directions, to India, the Danube valley, around North Africa into Spain and the middle of France; then falling back, phase by declining phase. The ebb and flow of Mongol Hordes and Ottoman Turks are duly translated into their space-time coordinates. Because this atlas was made when the Westernized, straight-line “ancient-medieval-modern” historical perspective still prevailed over the historical pluralism made familiar by Spengler and Toynbee, it makes only minor display of the civilizations that flourished far from the Mediterranean Basin. But successive maps of the empires and civilizations of China, India and Central America would have shown the same general forms and space-time cycles.
Leafing through an historical atlas of this sort, we see history as if through a multiple polarizing glass that reduces the infinite human variety to a single rigorous dimension: effective political control over acreage. This dimension is unambiguously represented by a single clear color—red, green, yellow, blue . . . —imposed on a particular segment of the outline world. The red on Italy, Gaul, Spain, Egypt means Roman Rule; the blue means Parthian Rule; the uncolored fringes mean the amorphous anarchy of barbarism.
What of our own Western civilization, then, viewed through this unsentimental lens? More than half the pages of this old atlas of mine are used to chart its course. In the seventh and eighth centuries its birth pangs can be seen succeeding hard on Rome’s death agonies, until the West is shown plainly alive and breathing in the compact purple that marks “The Carolingian Empire About 814 A.D.” From then on it moves unceasingly outward over the globe from its west European heartland. In the fifteenth century it bursts from western Europe and the Mediterranean into Africa, Asia, the Americas, Oceania and all the seas. The last map in my atlas’ Western series—a double-size inserted page is needed for it—is entitled, “Colonies, Dependencies and Trade Routes, 1914”; and there before your eyes you can see at once that in A.D. 1914 the domain of Western civilization was, or very nearly was, the world.
True enough, in many regions the Western dominance was only external; the local societies had not been Westernized, or only superficially so; the peoples were subjects rather than citizens of the West. But, still, the West held the power. It held the power in western Europe itself, original home of the civilization, and in central Europe; in both Americas; over all Africa, Oceania and much of Asia. Japan was outside the Western domain, though there had been Western intrusions. China, too, was largely outside; though the system of concessions and enclaves had turned many of the most important areas of China into at least semidependencies of the West. The case of Russia is harder to classify. Peter the Great, the Napoleonic Wars, the Holy Alliance and the influence of Western ideas and technology had brought her in some measure within the Western concert of nations. But the combination of Byzantine, Asiatic and barbarian strains in her culture had prevented her from becoming organically a part of the West, while her strength and remoteness had fended off Western conquest. With these exceptions, or partial exceptions, plus a few oddities like Afghanistan and Ethiopia—all of which together would have seemed to a galactic observer almost too trivial to note—the planet, water and land, at the start of the First World War belonged to the West.
My atlas ended there; but as I closed it that morning and replaced it in its dark corner, my imagination was automatically carrying the series of maps forward over the intervening five decades: Territories and Possessions of the Major Powers in 1920, at the Founding of the League of Nations; Eastern Europe at the Conclusion of the Second World War; Asia and Oceania in 1949, after the Communist Conquest of Mainland China; Decolonization of Africa in the Period 1951-196x . . .
The trend, the curve, is unmistakable. Over the past two generations Western civilization has been in a period of very rapid decline, recession or ebb within the world power structure. I refer here to the geographic or what might be called “extensive” aspects only. I ignore the question whether this decline is a good thing or a bad thing either for the world as a whole or for Western civilization itself; whether the decline in extensive power may be accompanied by a moral improvement like the moral rejuvenation of a man on his deathbed. I leave aside also the question of increases in material power and wealth that may have come about within the areas still remaining under Western control. 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, having directed attention to this undeniable fact, to accept it hereafter as an axiom serving to define, in part, the frame of reference for the analysis and discussion that are to follow.
IT WAS WITH RUSSIA that the process of the political and geographic disintegration of the West began. However we may describe Russia’s relation to the West prior to 1917, the Bolsheviks at the end of that year broke totally away. What we mean by “Western civilization” may be defined in terms of the continuous development through space and time of an observable social formation that begins (or is revived—the distinction is irrelevant to the present purpose) about the year A.D. 700 in the center of western Europe; in terms of certain distinctive institutions; in terms of certain distinctive beliefs and values, including certain ideas concerning the nature of reality and of man. In the years 1917-21 most of the huge Russian Empire, under the command of the Bolsheviks, became not merely altogether separate from Western civilization but directly hostile to it in all these senses, in the moral, philosophical and religious as well as the material, political and social dimensions. The separateness and hostility were symbolized by the sealing of the borders that has continued ever since, often under such grotesque forms as the Berlin Wall, to be a conspicuous feature of Bolshevik dominion. The new rulers understood their initial territory to be the base for the development of a wholly new civilization, distinguished absolutely not only from the West but from all preceding civilizations, and destined ultimately to incorporate the entire earth and all mankind.
During the years between the first two world wars, through a process completed in 1949 except for a few small islands off her southeast coast, China shook off what hold the West had established on her territory. With the end of the Second World War, the rate of Western disintegration quickened. The communist enterprise conquered all eastern and east-central Europe, which had always been the march and rampart of the West against the destroying forces that periodically threatened from the steppes and deserts of Asia. Western power collapsed in the great archipelago of the South Seas, leaving only a few isolated enclaves that are now being picked off one by one. The Indian subcontinent fell away, and step by step the Arab crescent that runs from Morocco to Indonesia, along with the rest of the Near and Middle East.
In 1956 the Isthmus of Suez, the bridge between Asia and Africa, fell; and thus all Africa was left exposed and vulnerable. From 1957 on it has been the turn of sub-Saharan Africa. In 1959 communism’s anti-Western enterprise achieved its first beachhead within the Americas. It is like a film winding in reverse, with the West thrust backward reel by reel toward the original base from which it started its world expansion.
IT MAY BE RIGHTLY POINTED OUT that this shrinking of the West comprises two phenomena that are in at least one respect different in content: a) the ending of Western dominion over a non-Western society; b) the ending of Western domination within a society and region that have been integrally part of Western civilization. Undoubtedly the distinction can be drawn; and it may be important within some contexts. For example, there are many Westerners who find this distinction to be a proper criterion for moral judgment: the ending of Western rule over a non-Western society (“liberation” or “decolonization,” as it is usually called), they deem right and good; but they are less happy, even grieved, at the collapse of Western rule within a plainly Western area.
I am not sure that the line is quite so plain in practice as these persons feel it to be. Civilization is not a static condition but a dynamic development. The first stage of Western civilization in any area of the globe’s surface is, by the nature of the case, Western dominion over a non-Western society; and there must be an analogous first stage in the case of any other civilization also. The society is not created Western, Indic, Sinic, Babylonian, Incaic or Moslem ex nihilo, but becomes so. Moreover, the society over which the dominion of a given civilization is extended is not necessarily that of another civilization that is conquered and then in time replaced; often it is, as in New Guinea, eastern South America or sub-Saharan Africa, a primitive, pre-civilized social order, in which case the moral differentiation becomes rather blurred.
Still, this distinction between the two kinds of recession, whatever its relevance for some purposes, has none for my own. A greater refinement in definition will not alter the main point that I am making. I am referring to what can be seen in the changing colors of maps. These show that over the past two generations Western civilization has undergone a rapid and major contraction—it still continues—in the quantitative terms of the relative amount of area and population it dominates. This is the fact on which I want to fix attention; and it is a fact that, taken at its barest, the past history of mankind seems to endow with considerable significance. We may once more review, to that point, the successive maps of Rome, which also had its colonies, dependencies and subject nations.
Moreover, recession of both types has been taking place: from areas where Western civilization was not only dominant but integral as well as from others where it was merely dominant. Russia has already been mentioned as a special case, since it was never fully part of the West; though in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it acquired enough Westernism to make it a net quantitative loss for the West when the Bolshevik triumph took Russia altogether out of Western civilization. But most of those regions of eastern and east-central Europe acquired by the communist enterprise at the end of the Second World War—the Baltic nations, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bohemia—had undoubtedly been an integral, and very important, part of the West. So too were at least much of the coastal plain of Algeria, and of Tunisia and Morocco also for that matter; and, indeed, the Western communities in a number of other colonial or subject regions, where these communities were much more than a band of proconsuls and carpetbaggers. Let us not omit Cuba.
The mode of the Western withdrawal is not everywhere identical, nor is the resultant condition of the abandoned territory. Where the communist enterprise takes fully over, it inflicts an outright defeat on the West and destroys or drives out the representatives of Western power. It then consolidates the territories, resources and peoples inside the counter-system of its own embryonic civilization.
But in many of the regions breaking away from the West, communism has not had the sole or major direct role, at least in the early stages. In some of these, too, the West has been defeated in outright military struggle. In most—perhaps indeed in all—military battles have been a secondary factor. In some of these regions, the withdrawal of the West is still not total: in parts of the vanished British Empire, for example, and even more notably in what was France’s sub-Saharan empire. It is still conceivable that such regions are not altogether lost to the West. Though the political interrelationship has now sharply changed, their internal development may, conceivably, be such as to make them part of the West in a deeper sense than in their colonial past. However, that would alter only details and fragments of the moving picture.
As in every great historical turn, the symbols are there to be seen by all who are willing to look: the Europeans fleeing by the hundreds of thousands from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria; the British Viceroy’s palace in Delhi taken over by a Brahman mass leader posing as a parliamentarian; the crescent replacing the cross over the cathedrals of Algiers and Constantine; the mass rape of European women in central Africa, the elaborate killing of European men, the mass feasts on dismembered bodies of European seminarists and airmen; the ostentatious reversion of non-Western leaders, in public, to non-Western clothes; the Western warships abandoning Dakar, Bombay, Suez, Trincomalee; the many conferences and palavers from which the representatives of the West but not the communists are excluded; the deliberate public insolence to soldiers, diplomats and wandering citizens of the West.
MODERN RESEARCH INTO PAST civilizations and its systematization into theory or poetry, as by Spengler and Toynbee, have made us familiar with this flow and ebb, the growth, climax, decline and death of civilizations and empires, whose morphological pattern, unclouded by the abstractions and metaphors of the theories, can be so plainly seen by turning the colored pages of the atlas. From precedents and analogues we learn that the process of shrinking, when once it unmistakably sets in, is seldom if ever reversed. Though the rate of erosion may be slow, centuries-long, the dissolution of empires and civilizations continues, usually or always, until they cease altogether to exist, or are reduced to remnants or fossils, isolated from history’s mainstream. We are therefore compelled to think it probable that the West, in shrinking, is also dying. Probable, but not certain: because in these matters our notions are inexact, and any supposed laws are rough and vague. Even from the standpoint of perfect knowledge the outcome might be less than certain; for it may be dependent, or partly dependent, on what we do about it, or fail to do.
I have, perhaps, been putting too heavy a burden of adornment on the modest premise which it is the business of this chapter to lay down. The premise is itself so very simple and makes such a minimum assertion that I would not want it called into question because of possible implications of the elaborating gloss. For the past two generations Western civilization has been shrinking; the amount of territory, and the number of persons relative to the world population, that the West rules have much and rapidly declined. That is all the premise says.
I would like to state this proposition in language as spare and neutral as possible, so that it cannot smuggle any unexamined cargo. To speak of the “decline” of the West is dangerous. It calls to mind Spengler, via the English translation of his title; and almost unavoidably suggests a psychological or moral judgment that may be correct but is irrelevant to my purposes. It is not self-evident that in shrinking quantitatively the West is morally deteriorating. Logically, the contrary might equally well be the case. There are similar confusions with words like “ebb,” “breakup,” “waning,” “withering,” “decay,” “crumbling,” “collapse” and so on. It may be of some significance that nearly all words referring to quantitative decrease have a negative feel when applied to human beings or society. But let us try to be neutral.
Let us say only: “Western civilization has been contracting”; and speak of “the contraction of the West.”
Reduced to so small a minimum, my premise would seem to be so easily verified, so much a part of common knowledge, as to be unquestionable. Yet I know, from the experience of many discussions and debates on these matters, that it is questioned; or, more exactly, is avoided. As soon as it is formulated, someone (I mean some Westerner; non-Westerners have no difficulty with this premise) will say: “Isn’t it a good thing that the West should put an end to the injustice, tyranny and exploitation of colonialism?” And another: “It is deceptive to put things as you do because actually the West has become stronger by liquidating its overseas empires.” Still another will add: “Surely the West is much better off dealing with non-Western peoples on the basis of freedom, equality and friendship.” And again: “Colonial oppression and exploitation were in reality not an expression of Western civilization, but a betrayal of Western ideals, so that the West has not truly lost anything but in fact gained by getting out of Asia, Africa, etc. And as for Eastern Europe, communism is just a temporary excess that will soften in good time, to permit Poland, Hungary and the others, and Russia itself, to take their place within a broadened Western framework.” Or in still another variant: “That purely quantitative way of putting things misses the important factors. By basing its relations with the rest of the world on concepts of equality, mutual respect, the rule of law, the search for peace, etc., and by dropping the old ideas of Western superiority and rightful domination, Western civilization has in reality improved its standing and increased its global influence in spite of superficial appearances.”
Maybe so. Later on there will be occasion to examine more closely comments of this sort, the ideas and attitudes that give rise to them, and the functions they fulfill. Whatever their merits, they do not negate the assertion that, in the simple, straightforward atlas sense, the West has, for two generations, been contracting.
So much, then, for my structural premise.
II
WHY HAS THE WEST BEEN contracting? This is a question that I shall not try to answer, now or later. I raise it here only to reject two answers that are surely false.
The contraction of the West cannot be explained by any lack of economic resources or of military and political power. On the brink of its contraction—that is, in the years immediately preceding the First World War—the West controlled an overwhelming percentage of the world’s available economic resources, of raw materials, of physical structures, and of the physical means of production—tools, machines, factories. In advanced means of production it had close to a monopoly. And the West’s superiority in politico-military power was just as great, perhaps even more absolute. In terms of physical resources and power there just wasn’t any challenger in the house.
Even today, when the Western dominion has been cut to less than half of what it was in 1914, Western economic resources—real and available resources—and Western military power are still far superior to those of the non-Western regions. The disparity has lessened—though not nearly so much as masochistic columnists would lead us to think—but it is large enough to define a different order of dimension. In sheer power, the ratio in favor of the West was probably at its height long after the contraction started: in the seven or eight years following the Second World War, when the West had a monopoly of nuclear weapons.
So it cannot be the case that the West is contracting because of any lack of physical resources and power; there neither was nor has been nor is any such lack. (This is a point, by the way, that might well be pondered, though it will not be, by those of our leaders who believe the answer to defeats in the Cold War to be one after another colossal weapons system heaped on the armament pile, or a compound growth rate for our economic plant.)
Bolshevism was launched as a practical enterprise in 1903, when Lenin pieced together the Bolshevik faction during the course of the convention of the Russian Social Democratic Party that met first at Brussels, and then, on the suggestion of the Belgian police, adjourned to London. Its armament consisted of a dozen or so revolvers, possessed mostly by men who didn’t know much about using them. Its treasury was a few hundred pounds borrowed from the first bourgeois fellow traveler. Lenin—in spite of a professed belief in a materialist theory of history—didn’t allow himself to be fooled into thinking that physical resources and power were going to decide the twentieth-century destinies of empires and civilizations.
Nor did the West suffer from any other of the sort of material deficiency that has in the past sometimes choked off the initially dynamic growth of a civilization or empire. Besides the resources and arms, the West had, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a big enough population, a large enough extent of land, an abundance of strategic positions—in fact, every key strategic post on earth outside the inner Asiatic heartland. There was no possibility that a purely external challenger could pose a serious direct threat. There was no external challenger to be taken seriously, if his assault against Western civilization were mounted solely from the outside.
We must therefore conclude that the primary causes of the contraction of the West—not the sole causes, but the sufficient and determining causes—have been internal and non-quantitative: involving either structural changes or intellectual, moral and spiritual factors. In one way or another the process involves what we rather loosely call, by a kind of metaphor, “the will to survive.” The community of Western nations has possessed the material means to maintain and even to extend still further its overwhelming predominance, and to beat off any challenger. It has not made use of those means, while its position, instead of being maintained or extended, has drastically shrunk. The will to make use of the means at hand has evidently been lacking.
Under these circumstances we shall not be straining our metaphor too much by speaking of the West’s contraction as “suicide”—or rather, since the process is not yet completed and the West still some distance short of nothingness, as “potential suicide” or “suicidal tendency.” If the process continues over the next several decades more or less as it has gone on during the several decades just past, then—this is a merely mathematical extrapolation—the West will be finished; Western civilization, Western societies and nations in any significant and recognizable sense, will just not be there any more. In that event, it will make a reasonable amount of sense to say: “The West committed suicide.” In an analogous way, one might say that the Aztec and Incaic civilizations were murdered: destroyed, that is, not by inner developments primarily, but by an external assault from an outside source possessing power that was overwhelming compared to their own. It may be added that suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.
I know, again from direct experience of discussion, argument and conversation, that my use of the word “suicide” to describe what is happening to the West is even more disturbing to many persons than the use of such words as “contraction.” “Suicide,” it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and “bad.” Oddly enough, this objection is often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.
All words carry an emotive and normative load of one sort or another, though we are less likely to notice this when we are in accord with the feelings and evaluation than when these go against our grain. But it is always possible to disregard the non-cognitive meanings, and to confine our attention to the cognitive assertion and its logical properties. My intention in using the word “suicide” is purely cognitive. It seems to me an appropriate and convenient shorthand symbol for dealing with the set of facts I have just reviewed, the facts showing that: a) Western civilization is contracting rapidly; b) this contraction cannot be accounted for by the material power of any agency external to Western civilization; c) it cannot be accounted for by any Western deficiency in material power or resources; d) it must therefore derive from structural or non-material internal factors.
It remains possible to believe that Western civilization, assuming that it disappears, will be conquered, succeeded or replaced by another civilization or civilizations that might be judged superior to it. If so, the suicide of the West might be considered good riddance; or might be looked on as the immolation of the phoenix, or the free sacrifice of the god who dies that man may live. These are indeed ways in which many persons—many Westerners among them—do in fact feel about the present troubles of the West. From such a point of view, a decidedly positive, not negative, emotion and moral estimate attaches to the idea of Western suicide. But however we feel about them, the facts are still there.
This book is a set of variations on a single and simple underlying thesis: that what Americans call “liberalism” is the ideology of Western suicide. I do not mean that liberalism is—or will have been—responsible for the contraction and possible disappearance of Western civilization, that liberalism is “the cause” of the contraction. The whole problem of historical causation is in any case too complex for simple assertions. I mean, rather, in part, that liberalism has come to be the typical verbal systematization of the process of Western contraction and withdrawal; that liberalism motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it. But it will not be until the final pages that my thesis can be both amply and clearly stated.
