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Liberalism is not equipped to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in our time.
Liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society. The guilt that is always part of the liberal syndrome swells painfully when liberals gain power and find that the world's sorrows show no tendency to vanish at their sovereign touch.
Liberalism's inaptitude for power bears directly on the crucial fact: that the issue before Western civilization today is survival. The liberals have no replacement for the structure they have so enthusiastically helped to tear down.
The liberal ideology has by now got so far out of touch with fact that through its lens it has become impossible to see reality, much less to act positively on reality. Goldberg writes. Throughout Suicide , Mr. Goldberg also draws upon the thought, and citations, of Deirdre McCloskey, author of a trilogy of studies on commercial civilization and its underpinnings: The Bourgeois Virtues , Bourgeois Dignity , and Bourgeois Equality.
Largely absent from Mr. The significance of this misunderstanding is that it leads Mr. Goldberg to be more optimistic than is warranted. For Burnham, modern, progressive liberalism was an excuse for Western weakness, a pretext for declaring that defeats were really victories, as bourgeois capitalist civilization lost ground to managerial organization the Communist bloc, for example and self-liquidated when challenged by more confident non-European cultures.
Burnham was against fatalism, too, but he understood that liberalism was perhaps the most virulent form of fatalism. In The Managerial Revolution , Burnham pointed to the New Deal, fascism, and Communism as early forms of the new managerial control that was replacing capitalism. The much cheerier thinking behind Mr.
To preserve the unnatural freedom and prosperity that are our patrimony, it is necessary, Mr. Failure to do so is a choice, and so the life or death of the modern West is a matter of choice: its decline, natural in one sense, is ultimately the result of our own decisions, and thus a suicide.
If Christianity has at times succeeded in squaring that circle, it is because Christianity is simultaneously both worldly and otherworldly, capable of affirming universalism and tribalism at the same time. The family and political community, for example, have their particular rights alongside the universal spiritual justice of God. Liberalism, by contrast, is a purely worldly thing; its justice is not a matter of the eternal soul but of earthly outcomes.
Both works by Burnham owe an acknowledged debt to Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and social philosopher whose masterwork is translated into English as The Mind and Society. What Mr.
Under a misleading guise of consistency and logic, they serve to justify and explain—to the individual himself, as well as to others—feelings and actions that arise from the residues. Chamber of Commerce. Also noteworthy is that in listing various nonliberals in academia, Burnham includes classical liberals such as Milton Friedman and F.
Suicide of the West includes some discussion of how liberalism has changed over time, though Burnham leaves open the question of just how closely classical liberalism may be related to its modern variety. Burnham places great emphasis on liberal attitudes toward racial equality and the injustice of colonialism, for example. He is surely correct to highlight the importance of these beliefs for liberals.
But he creates the impression, only partly dispelled by modest disclaimers, that anyone who would not defend Southern racial segregation was likely a liberal. Burnham could claim not to be making value judgments and not to be implying that whatever is not liberal such as segregation is therefore good.
But the presentation of race and related questions in Suicide of the West is blundering, to say the least. They prompt the reader to consider how they could be corrected. Intractable political problems may occasionally have psychological remedies—that is, remedies in good character and a balanced outlook on life.
What drives the West to suicide, for Burnham, is not liberalism or its putative logic but rather the way in which our civilization has come to value certain types of mind over others—foxes over lions—in a proportion that leaves the West excessively reliant on cleverness or fraud and incapable of effectively wielding force or the threat thereof. In a passage that perfectly anticipates the way much of U.
It is not that liberals, when they enter the governing class.. But because of their ideology they are not reconciled intellectually and morally to force. They therefore tend to use it ineptly, at the wrong times and places, against the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts. The use of force, modulated by liberalism and its underlying psychological residues, becomes idealistic and technical, a matter of communicating healthy values and practices by means of oh-so-precise munitions.
The reality that war is chaos in which innocent people die is scrubbed and polished away. Burnham did not write Suicide to refute liberalism.
What accounts for its suicidal turn in the first place? Burnham only hints at the answers. The loss of traditional religious faith is part of the tale, but even that may be, in earthly terms, as much effect as cause. But in fact the nation-state, along with a broadly Christian culture, has always been the surest foundation for a classically liberal order of the sort that Mr. Goldberg wishes to defend.
Republished with gracious permission from Modern Age Spring The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility.
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About the Author: Daniel McCarthy. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age. From through he served as editor of The American Conservative. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of other publications, including The Spectator , Reason , and Orion.
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