International: WHAT’S UP & WHAT’S TO DO

Russia and Communism become a major danger only in our divisions and confusions. We may have to resist Communism by force of arms. That does not give us warrant to load it with our sins and treat it as a universal scapegoat . . .

That, to the West, fighting for survival, is the most important point in an important new book. Paul McGuire’s There’s Freedom for the Brave (William Morrow Co., $4) is a powerful statement of the thesis that the West cannot defeat the evils of Communism without conquering the weakness and the evils in its own body & soul. The book has two parts and two aims. In the author’s words, the first is to show the world “What’s Up,” the second, “What’s to Do.” Author McGuire is considerably more successful in the first than in the second task.

Not from Another World. There’s Freedom is written with infectious moral fervor; few recent books on “world affairs” have made more sense on the essentials of the present crisis. It points out that the greatest menace confronting the West today is not an outside force from “another world.” Communism is part and product of Western civilization, a symptom—like a fever sore—of its crisis. Western civilization produced the Communists, and gave them their strongest weapons. The Communists do not win their victories simply by launching “offensives” against the West; they win whenever and wherever a vacuum is created by the failure of Western power, Western nerve or Western ideals.

There is one Western failure cardinal to all others. It is the disintegration of what McGuire calls the West’s moral community.

A society can endure only if its members agree on a body of essential principles and purposes. In a free society, the agreement cannot be forced; but it must be present nonetheless. For centuries, Western man believed in the Natural Moral Law as expounded by Aristotle, Aquinas, Blackstone. This law was found neither in legislation nor divine revelation (although it posits the existence of God); it is achieved by examining human nature and reaching legal rules based on the findings. In practice, the most notable expression of Natural Moral Law was, and is, the English common law. Under the acceptance of Natural Moral Law, Europe achieved a relatively high degree of order, applicable to all phases of life, alike “to the work of the craftsman and to the policies of the princes.” If Christian morality was not universally practiced at all times, it was at least universally accepted in the West as a guide for action, a beacon, a standard.

But the West’s moral community broke under the impact of great historic forces. It began to neglect a simple truth—that liberty, as Edmund Burke put it, cannot exist “without order and virtue.”

Men began to look for new orders. One consequence was the rise of what McGuire calls the Monstrous State, which “must enforce order when we no longer discipline ourselves.” But nationalism only bloodily compounded the disorder in the Western World. Here was the great moral vacuum which Karl Marx sought to fill with his murky and monstrous new faith.

Not Bread & Beer Alone. Consequently, Communism (or any similar manifestation) cannot be stopped in the long run either by diplomacy, wealth or war, though McGuire thinks all three may have to be applied as intermediate measures. The West can stand against Communism only if it will put its own house in order—an order that will end the insane fissions of industrial civilization. The West’s moral community must be renewed.

“Somehow,” McGuire pleads, “we must come to understand that morality is really essential to the solution of major problems. Community cannot be founded on negatives: on fear or some temporary alignment . . . Man, even in his work, does not live by bread alone . . . His nature is not wholly filled or expressed in the production and consumption of bread and beer and radio sets and patent medicines. He has not his answer or his end in these. They cannot ease his discontent.”

To give man in the machine age his answer and his end, capitalism must goand get itself a conscience. The moral revolution for which McGuire calls must be led by the U.S. He believes that America must render the services which Britain rendered the world during the 19th Century: “… What will the Americans get out of this? They will get the burdens and the privileges of world leadership . . . the losses, profits, kicks . . . They may also, if they manage well, get world order.”

McGuire believes that the only thing that can save the West is a supreme effort of will: “However the story ends, our business is to resist the bastard fatalism which now infects us … Freedom is not found in fatalism and passivity. Freedom is for men of good will. Freedom is for the brave . . .”