Suicide of the West. James Burnham

       The Universal Dialogue

      I

      INSIDE THE LIBERAL SYSTEM OF IDEAS, we have so far found, human nature is changing and plastic, with an indefinitely large potential for progressive development. Through reason, freed from superstition, authority, custom and tradition, human beings can discover the truth and the road toward the betterment of society. There is nothing inherent in human nature that prevents the attainment of peace, freedom, justice and well-being—of, that is, the good society. The obstacles are ignorance and faulty social institutions. Because both these obstacles are extrinsic and remediable, historical optimism is justified. Social problems can be solved; the good society can be achieved, or at any rate approximated.

      Let us proceed to the liberal beliefs that explain the means and the rules by which the progress that is possible will be brought about in practice.

      6. In order to get rid of the ignorance that is one of the two factors blocking progress toward the good society, what is needed, and the only thing needed, is universal, rationally grounded education. It was Maximilien de Robespierre, leader of the Jacobin Club, who—in the midst of the Terror, as it happened—put forward the first law, modeled on a project of Condorcet’s, instituting a system of free (that is, state-financed), universal education. This has been an inviolate article of the liberal creed ever since; and obviously must be, for it follows with syllogistic simplicity from the other liberal principles.

      We should stop to note that there is implicit here a particular view of education that is not the only view. By liberal principles strictly applied, the specific function of education is to overcome ignorance; and ignorance is overcome by, and only by, acquiring rational, scientific knowledge. All the myriad beliefs within the range that liberalism regards as non-rational or irrational, as the debris of superstition, prejudice, intuition, habit and custom, would be admitted to the curriculum only as miscellaneous data to be studied objectively by psychology, history, anthropology and the social sciences; and so, too, religion, or rather, religions. As Lord Russell and John Stuart Mill so unconditionally assert in the quotations given at the end of the last chapter, the purpose of genuine education as understood by liberalism is, precisely, to liberate the mind from the crippling hold of custom and all non-rational belief.

      For liberalism, the direct purpose of education cannot be to produce a “good citizen,” to lead toward holiness or salvation, to inculcate a nation’s, a creed’s or a race’s traditions, habits and ceremonies, or anything of that sort. Nor is there any need that it should be, for the logic of liberalism assures us that, given the right sort of education—that is, rational education—the pupil, in whose nature there is no innate and permanent defect or corruption, will necessarily become the good citizen; and, with the right sort of education universalized, the good citizens together will produce the good society.

      The child, for liberalism, approaches the altar of education—for the school is, in truth, liberalism’s church—in all his spiritual nakedness as a purely rational, or embryonically rational, being, shorn of color, creed, race, family and nationality: the Universal Student before the universal teacher, Reason. This is the conception, gradually crystallized out of the logic of liberalism, that makes intelligible the liberal position on the multitudinous educational issues that are presently of so much public concern in the United States, and on the typical educational programs that are put forward for the new and underdeveloped nations.

      7. In order to get rid of the bad institutions that constitute the second of the two obstacles to progress, what is needed, along with education, is democratic reform, political, economic and social. Properly educated, and functioning within a framework of democratic institutions, human beings will understand their true interests—which are peace, freedom, justice, cooperation and material well-being—and will be able to achieve them.

      Bertrand Russell summed up this encouraging outlook in another of his essays, called “The World As It Could Be Made,” originally published as part of a book entitled Proposed Roads to Freedom—the two titles are themselves unmistakable symptoms from the liberal syndrome. Men, he wrote, are beset by three types of evil: from physical nature (death, pain, tough soil); from character (chiefly ignorance); from power. “The main methods of combating these evils are”—and I now quote his words directly—“for physical evils, science; for evils of character [that is, for ignorance], education . . . ; for evils of power, the reform of the political and economic organization of society.”

      But I want to stress especially the words of a spokesman still more significant for the liberalism of present-day America. Robert Maynard Hutchins is intelligent, learned and eloquent in his own person. Though he has been a liberal all his public life, his liberalism is not excessively doctrinaire and sectarian, except perhaps on the matter of free speech. In his ideas about the content of education Mr. Hutchins has deviated from liberal orthodoxy: in particular when, on revising a university curriculum, he treated pre-Renaissance philosophy as not merely a historical artifact but part of rational knowledge, and therefore part of what would help overcome ignorance.

      Mr. Hutchins has reflected carefully on the meaning of the doctrines he believes, not just picked them off the ideological shelf. Our society has marked his eminence by the high posts, many distinctions and abundant publicity it has bestowed on him, and the large sums of money it has placed at his disposal. After his years as head of the Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago, he directed the Ford-endowed Fund for the Republic, and has more lately shifted his primary attention to an offshoot of the Fund that has become something of a magnet for liberal fundamentalists, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—tax exempt, of course, like the parent Fund, its parent, the Ford Foundation, and the University. The Center, both Funds and the University of Chicago are all among our active and influential opinion-forming institutions. The voice of Mr. Hutchins is not that of a prophet crying in the wilderness; it is more nearly that of a herald proclaiming the sovereign’s will.

      On January 21, 1959, Mr. Hutchins received, with due ceremony, the Sidney Hillman Award for Meritorious Public Service. As so often, the very name is symptomatic—honoring the career of a member of a minority that is the classic target of discrimination, who achieved fame first by building one of the major organizations of the advancing labor movement and then by becoming integrated into the power structure of the Rooseveltian New Deal, the regime that marked the rise of the liberal ideology to national predominance. On the occasion of this award, Mr. Hutchins delivered an address that is a condensation of much of the theoretical side of the liberal ideology. He called it, “Is Democracy Possible?”—meaning by “democracy” what we are calling “liberalism.”

      Let me quote from that address a few sentences that bear on the seven symptoms that I have so far listed, very directly on the last two. I shall return to it later on.

      “The democratic [i.e., liberal] faith is faith in man, faith in every man, faith that men, if they are well enough educated and well enough informed, can solve the problems raised by their own aggregation.” Mr. Hutchins then added a comment admitting with surprising candor that liberalism is not a scientific theory nor a cognitive assertion of any kind, and is immune to fact, observation or experience: “One advantage of this faith is that it is practically shock-proof.”

      He went on: “Industrialization can sweep the world. Nationalism and technology can threaten the extinction of the human race. Population can break out all over. Man can take off from this planet as his ancestors took off from the primordial ooze and try to make other planets to shoot from. Education can be trivialized beyond belief. The media of communication can be turned into media of entertainment. The [democratic] dialogue [made possible by the right of free speech] can almost stop because people have nothing to say, or, if they have something to say, no place to say it. And still it is possible to believe that if democracy and the dialogue can continue, if they can be expanded, freedom, justice, equality, and peace will ultimately be achieved.”

      I cannot forbear taking a moment to taste the irony of this moving declaration of faith. The doctrine that begins by proclaiming its emancipation from all prejudice,