Читать книгу Suicide of the West - James Burnham - Страница 8

FOREWORD

JAMES BURNHAM IS USUALLY seen as a cool and unsentimental analyst of world politics and ideological movements in the twentieth century. This description is certainly one that fits most of his major works, such as The Machiavellians (his best book, in my judgment) and The Struggle for the World (his most consequential book). It also accords with his advice in these works for assessing and dealing with global politics and ideologies. And it probably reflects his own image of himself as a sober realist warning people not to trust the idealistic slogans that mask the cruel realities of all power.

In most of his works, he seems to be saying, like the Prophets: This world is a vale of tears. Don’t expect justice in it. The wicked flourish like a green bay tree. The good are doomed to be continually betrayed and disappointed. The best we can hope for is that a balance between different masters, between greater and lesser evils, will allow the humble to enjoy a moderate temporary prosperity. Analyze your way to that clearing in the jungle as best you can.

His famous maxims at National Review—where he is remembered by Linda Bridges and Rick Brookhiser as a quiet, authoritative, exacting editor and a kindly colleague beneath a restrained, gentlemanly exterior—exude the same dry, unillusioned tone of rebuke to human self-deception. For instance: You can’t invest in retrospect.

Some of Burnham’s critics, notably George Orwell, accept this self-portrait of the artist as a self-consciously scientific, even amoral, analyst of power politics. Orwell’s criticism, indeed, includes the accusation that Burnham displays altogether too much relish when he is describing the remorseless necessities that drive men to oppress and murder others in uncertain times. He comes close, writes Orwell, to the worship of power under a mask of realism.

All these aspects of Burnham’s literary personality, except perhaps the last, support the picture of him as a realist, almost passionless, analyst. But this impression is blown away by reading even a few pages of Suicide of the West. There can be no real doubt that this is the work of an engaged and passionate writer responding fiercely to events in the world that strike him as something between a tragedy and an outrage.

The realism is there still, as it always is. So is the cold logical reasoning. But they are not expressed coldly—and not indignantly either, since a Lear-like raging at the political weather is for Burnham the mark of modern American liberalism. On the contrary, the realism and logic are expressed sarcastically, wittily, savagely, and at times with a kind of despairing enjoyment at the repeated follies of his inveterate opponents in the liberal camp.

Suicide of the West is the first book in which Burnham grabs his readers by the lapels and shakes them hard rather than merely pointing quietly to obvious facts they have managed to avoid noticing. His arguments are as strong as ever, but not always as minutely documented. He builds his case against liberalism with bold insights as much as with his usual logical deductions. His tone is prophetic rather than professorial. Injustice and folly no longer amuse him; they enrage him. This is the unbuttoned Burnham. And the result may not be his best book, but it surely is his most inspired.

What inspired him, then? Let me suggest three things.

First, as Roger Kimball’s fine and informative introduction establishes, Burnham’s life was a succession of different moral, political, and artistic commitments until he reached a permanent haven in the 1950’s. He was an aesthete in the 1920’s, a Trotskyist in the 1930’s, a theorist of oligarchic collectivism (see Orwell) in the first half of the 1940’s, an anti-communist strategist in the second half, and a founder of a new American conservatism in the 1950’s. These are the conversions of a man highly attuned to the spirit of the age even when he was sharply opposed to it. As such, he divined in the early 1960’s what was to happen in the later Sixties. And this shaman-like sensitivity transformed the tone of his arguments even when he was rehashing older material from his lecturing days.

Second, the contradiction between the objective realities of the early 1960’s and the response of liberal policymaking must have been infuriating to an observer of Burnham’s insight and ability. Though the West and in particular the United States were dominant economically, militarily, and morally, they were everywhere faltering, uncertain, or even in retreat—over Hungary, Suez, Algeria, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and so on. Burnham had argued for a form of political warfare designed to undermine the Soviets; he thought containment inadequate, and even that was being feebly enforced.

Third, even while he was helping to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1940’s to win Europe’s liberal intelligentsia to the side of anti-communism, he had glimpsed that liberal intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic would bolt toward a morally equivalent “neutralism” as soon as the United States had to take some action internationally that could not be justified in simplistic liberal terms.

He knew by now that the Western order of global power was the freest, most prosperous, and most just order available to mankind in that era. He had looked into the soul of American liberalism and seen the vacancy there. He could guess what was coming. And in response, he cast aside his customary restraint and indicted liberalism as the doctrine that reconciled the West to its own needless defeats and eventual dissolution.

We should probably read Burnham’s other works in the light of Suicide of the West. But we should also follow the light that it casts forward to illuminate his final years. On his deathbed, Burnham returned to the Catholic Church that he had left in his twenties without, as Kimball notes, any apparent soul-searching. What prompted his return to faith? Any man’s reasons for turning to faith can only be known fully to God. But it would hardly be surprising if someone who saw clearly that injustice is the way of this world while also finding injustice intolerable should seek—and find increasingly necessary—a world in which the wicked no longer flourish and the good no longer suffer and the intelligent analyst can find more pleasurable pursuits than indicting crime and folly for what they really are.

— John O’Sullivan