Suicide of the West. James Burnham
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.
I
EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN subjected to an elementary course in philosophy has run up against some of the tricky paradoxes that have been used by philosophy teachers since the time of the Greeks to try to provoke the minds of students into active operation. One well-known example goes like this: Epimenides, the Cretan, declared that all Cretans are liars. Run through a computer, that will block the circuits. Then there are the famous paradoxes of Zeno, which prove that change and motion are impossible. At any given moment an arrow must be either where it is or where it is not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest. Zeno invented three or four others along the same line, proving that Achilles could never catch the tortoise, and so on.
Socrates was especially concerned with one other of these classical paradoxes which, as a matter of fact, can be understood as a starting point for Plato’s philosophical system. In a number of the Platonic dialogues, Socrates proves, apparently to his own satisfaction, that it is impossible to learn, or to teach, the scientific truth about anything. His reasoning, in brief, is this. Unless you knew the truth beforehand, you would have no way of recognizing it when you found it.
Let me translate this into a practical problem. Suppose that I want to find out the scientific truth about dogs. I will get it, presumably, by studying a lot of dogs: by observing their behavior, dissecting them, performing experiments on and with them. It sounds straightforward enough. But suppose someone asks me: how do you know those creatures you have assembled for study are really dogs? Maybe they are coyotes or wolves or cats or a missing link. You are just reasoning in a circle. Unless you already knew the truth about dogs, unless you had in advance of your observations a scientific definition of what a dog is, you would have no basis for bringing these particular creatures rather than others into your laboratory. Let us add that this is not just juggling with words. There is a very difficult philosophical issue at stake here, which has come up repeatedly in the history of thought from Socrates’ day to our own.
In the analysis of American liberalism that we here begin, we face the same initial problem as our student of dogs. We have got to get our dogs