Books: Downfall

THE WORLD’S IRON AGE—William Henry Chamberlin—Macmillan ($3).

IDEAS FOR THE ICE AGE—Max Lerner —Viking ($3).

To the question that more & more people are asking in the deepening privacy of their own minds—What is really happening to western civilization?—these two books try to give answers. They both assume that civilization is collapsing, and they want to salvage something from the wreck.

For twelve years William Henry Chamberlin was the Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent in Russia, “where,” he says, “the revolt against European civilization began and where it has proceeded to the greatest lengths.” He was present at the fall of France which “resounded through the world like that of Rome in the fifth century and Constantinople in the fifteenth.” The World’s Iron Age is an attempt to trace the connection between these modern disasters.

Ideas for the Ice Age is a collection of the essays, reviews, social and political theorizing that Economist Max Lerner has written in the last six years for pinko magazines like the Nation and New Republic. These essays are also inspired by the collapse of civilization, chiefly as it affects the U.S.

In what and how they write and think these two authors are poles apart. Chamberlin’s thinking brings him out at an isolationist position which strangely underestimates the crushing military, economic and political power of Naziism. Max Lerner is a left-handed interventionist because he sees Naziism as a dangerous perversion of a world revolutionary process which he calls the “socialization of democracy.” World War II, he believes, must be fought until this perversion is cleared away so that the revolution can go on. He is also aware that the war itself is a pretext for stepping up the revolutionary process to a speed that would never get by in peace time.

Yet the mood of both books is the same. The common bleakness of their titles —Iron Age, Ice Age — is no accident. It springs from the bewilderment of men who are living through the apparently irrational collapse of a great civilization, “the happiest,” says Chamberlin, “and certainly the most creative in the history of Europe.” The sense of irrationality is all the greater because this civilization did not decay like Rome or Byzantium by agelong stages of dry rot, but apparently cracked up suddenly and catastrophically, like an incomparable machine shak en to pieces by the super-power of its own superb engines.

One result of the supposed wreck is an almost universal claustrophobia, a feeling that everybody is trapped by the debris, and that the ways out are worse than the fact of being trapped. The alternative posed by Author Lerner, for example, is totalitarian socialism as an escape from totalitarian fascism. Author Chamberlin, on the other hand, deems it wiser simply to lie low, meanwhile poking in the wreck age, in the hopeless hope that some clue will somehow lead to some other escape.

Autopsy. Author Chamberlin doubts “whether most Americans realize the ex tent of the fall of liberal civilization in Europe, the thorough sweep of old stand ards and values.” In chapters like The Russian Revolt Against Civilization; Ital ian Fascism: Middle Class Bolshevism; The German Power Machine; The Clash of Revolutions in the Orient; The Fall of France; America Faces the Iron Age, he makes sure that they will.

His description is accurate, dramatic, elegiac. Europe’s breakdown “cannot be explained in terms of any single revolutionary formula.” A series of sinister political geniuses, he believes, had something to do with it. “Lenin was its herald and pioneer. Hitler has made a great contribution. Mussolini and Stalin have played important roles. . . . But the revolt is not the handiwork of any single man or group of men. . . . Over this tremendous collapse . . . broods a strong element of fatalistic inevitability.”

For it Author Chamberlin finds four reasons: 1) the spread of industrialism; 2) the growth of population due to the progress of science and medicine; 3) inequalities of wealth between classes and between nations; 4) and “most important,” the inability of “collective human intelligence and good will” to cope with these problems. Hence the “infernal cycle”—wars and revolutions. “War breeds revolution as the natural response to its miseries and dislocations. Revolutionary regimes in turn make for new wars. And the wastage of human, cultural and material resources during this infernal cycle soon eats up the indispensable reserves of civilization.”

First resource to go, because no totalitarianism feels safe until it is liquidated, is the questioning human mind. “Europe today is faced with something that has never occurred in its history, except perhaps in the darkest period of confusion after the fall of the Roman Empire: the disappearance of its intelligentsia. The havoc among the older generation of the educated classes has been frightful. . . . But it is the outlook for the future that is darkest. . . . The youth … is being brought up to act mechanically, not to think; to shout, not to reflect; to respond like trained animals to definite stimuli. … A revolution of moral nihilism has engulfed the continent.”

Religion is recognized to be as dangerous as the questioning mind. In Russia, “the Orthodox Church, the Jewish synagogue, the Mohammedan mosque, the sectarian meetinghouse, have been involved in a common ruin.” In Germany the extremist persecutors of the church troop back to the primeval forest to revive the fervors of Wotan worship and inspire pagan Siegfrieds to blitz the Fafnirs of “pluto-democracy.” History, the record of the race, has been perverted to glorify the party, the leader, or serve the changeable politics of the total state.

“Along with the persecution of religion and the disappearance of generally recognized moral values,” says Chamberlin, “there has been a tremendous increase in state sponsored inhumanity . . . imprisonment and execution without trial, torture of political dissidents, holding of relatives as hostages, outlawry of whole classes and races.” Possibly more sinister is the silence with which the totalitarian Governments have been able to blanket their total atrocities.

Author Chamberlin ends with a pessimistic question mark—Toward a New Civilization? He hopes that “somehow a means [will] be found to reconcile the liberty of man, the most precious inheritance of the Liberal Age, with the social security that is an imperative necessity of an industrial era.” He fears that the problem is “comparable in difficulty with the squaring of the circle,” and “still waits in vain for a sign of salvation.”

Frankenstein’s Darling. Author Lerner begins where Author Chamberlin leaves off. The dreary drama of collapsing civilization does not interest him per se. He long ago saw the ghost, heard the bell toll one and translated what he saw into the creepiest catchword of the time: It Is Later Than You Think (1938). Max Lerner is interested in what to do about it.

The answer, he thinks, is planned economy with all its implications. He is keen enough to know that in the dead vast and middle of the night, these implications make one planned economy look much like another. He also thinks he knows what makes one planned economy preferable to another—democratic control from below.

This clarity gives him assurance in polemics. But, though cocky, Lerner lacks the brass-knuckle intolerance of the true radical infighter. He suffers from humanistic shadings which sometimes give to his preachments on socialized democracy the tone of a proud paternal but slightly embarrassed Frankenstein saying to his victims: “Look at my nice monster, you really only have to see him to love him.” Most of the 27 pieces in Ideas for the Ice Age are devoted to explaining how desirable the monster is. Included are: The War as Revolution, Democratic Ends and “Totalitarian” Means; Economic Empire and Monopoly State; Machiavelli and Machiavellism; Notes on the Supreme Court Crisis; Constitutional Crisis and the Crisis State; The Administrative Revolution in America.

Highly significant is Machiavelli and Machiavellism, an attempt to refurbish and stake a claim upon the crafty Florentine theoretician of power politics. Author Lerner discovers that Machiavelli was a great “republican”—”what we should call today a brain-truster and bureaucrat” who “loved his job as idea-man for some of the stuffed-shirt Florentine politicians”—a fairly accurate description. Machiavelli’s The Prince is a “grammar of power.” Lerner’s advice to leftists: learn from it.

Equally significant is Democratic Ends and “Totalitarian” Means which means just what it says. Key query by Author Lerner: “If the end does not justify the means, then what does?”

Ideas jor the Ice Age is an important revelation of the mind of a leftist planner. For those who really want to know what is happening to them by studying the ideas of those who are making it happen, Lerner is recommended reading. Bleak as he is, Author Chamberlin’s alternatives are no sunnier. In the civilian rout that accompanied the fall of France, Chamberlin ran into a refugee Belgian official. The Belgian was a Hellenist and a Latinist. He “spoke with great pathos of the Latin civilization that was perishing. . . . When I told him that capitulation was imminent, he started up with an exclamation: ‘I must get away immediately. Perhaps … I can catch a boat for the Belgian Congo. There I can lead a civilized life.’ . . .”