Faith for Freedom

by BARBARA WARD

ANY human enterprise, even the smallest, needs a measure of faith. Men must believe that what they have undertaken can be carried through. They must believe that their partners will work with them loyally. How much more is faith needed when the enterprise is the building of a free and peaceful world and the partners include all the races of the earth. One of the greatest obstacles to an effective Western policy is men’s uncertainly whether peace can in fact be maintained. Yet the essence of Containment is the belief that war is not inevitable and that a combination of strength and patience in the West will deter the Soviets from further aggression and persuade them either to negotiate or at least to live as they did in the twenties and thirties primarily concerned with their own affairs.

An almost equal obstacle to successful Containment is distrust between the different partners the tendency of each to pick out and concetrate on the worst aspects of the other’s policy, to rub the sore spots, to put salt in old wounds. Out of a million small reactions of unfamiliarity and misunderstanding, national moods grow up, critical, carping, and envenomed. Yet what do the free peoples expect? That their neighbors should be exactly like themselves? That they should escape altogether from the fatality of human weakness and error? That they should be incapable of stupidity or tactlessness or self-interest ?

No private undertaking, no human enterprise of any sort, could be run on such expectations. The Western allies have to be patient with one another and keep the larger unity of their common purposes alive in their minds to defeat all the day-to-day inconveniences of close alliance. The essence of faith is that it does not depend upon a perpetual renewal of absolute proof. No ally in the West is likely to give its neighbors a daily exhibition of all the virtues necessary for a great undertaking. Let the others therefore give the tolerance they expect. If the concept of British duplicity, of American greed, of French cowardice, of Italian irresponsibility, is brought in over and over again to interpret policies and explain reactions, no common enterprise can possibly succeed. Only an effort of faith, constantly renewed, can counter the tendency of men and nations to misunderstand, to recriminate, to grow suspicious, and at last to permit their alliances to fall apart.

Faith in the enterprise itself and faith in one’s partners are, however, no more than the minimum the least with which free men can hope to survive. The weakness of the word “Containment" is its negative and defensive ring. The Communists do not make the mistake of thinking that they are simply defending themselves against “ Western encirclement.’' This may be the,jargon they use to explain to their own people why they have remained armed and alert. But the essence of their drive, of their propaganda, of their picture of themselves, is that they must remake the world according to their own gospel, the single unalterable Marxist-Leninist gospel of salvation.

Copyright l950, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

It is curious that we in the West should tend so uniformly to underestimate or misunderstand the passion that drives Communism on. Western critics are never tired of pointing out that it is based upon materialism; that there is no room in the Communist system for mankind’s highest aspirations or deepest hopes; that all the power and poetry and inspiration of humanity are banished by Communism’s fundamental tenet that the economic structure of society determines all the rest. It may be that, in theory, there is no room in Communism for these things, but it is vital to remember that, in practical reality, the Communists hardly give economics a thought. They do not condemn Western society because it is inefficient. On the contrary, they are immensely impressed with the technical achievements of the West. They blame it because it is immoral. They do not extol their own system because it is materially more satisfactory. They extol it because it is a new heaven and a new earth, a transfiguration of the conditions of human existence, the raising up of men’s lives to new levels of creativeness and joy.

When a new program of irrigation and public works is announced, the newspapers grow lyrical; —

For centuries the peoples of the East have dreamt of crystal-clear rivers, of fertile gardens in the desert., of a fairyland of happiness. Songs passed down from one generation to the next told of these yearnings. The people were confident that the time would come when clear, transparent rivers and streams would cut through the heart of the desert, when birds would sing in the once-silent stretches of dead sands, when blossoming gardens would flourish under a deep blue sky, when beautiful palaces would appear and crowds of gay people assemble to acclaim with gratitude the conquerors of the desert. Today the Soviet peoples praise in all their tongues the courageous conquerors of the desert — the Bolsheviks; and they glorify the Bolshevik Party and the beloved Comrade Stalin, whose genius has opened the path to fulfillment of these age-old aspirations.

Whatever the shams of Communism and they are immense they come clothed in the language of poetry and hope. The dream that has haunted the world from its infancy — of a golden age from which it has been banished and a golden age to which it can return is repeated in the myth of a primitive communism destroyed by the evil of private property and restored triumphantly in the latter days by the return to communism. The anger and outrage of the prophets of old, denouncing social injustice; the promise of the Magnificat: '“He hath . . . exalted them of low degree”; the exquisite and heartbreaking hope of the Apocalypse; “And there shall be no more death, nor sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away” — all these echoes and intimations which lie deepest in men’s hearts are evoked by these so-called materialists, by these men who are supposed to think only in terms of economics.

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IT must be admitted that, in comparison with this apocalyptic vision of the world’s warring between Communist good and capitalist evil, Western policy seems, remarkably and inexplicably, to have lost sight of its own vision of the good society, or at least to have lost confidence in its powers of explaining what that vision really is. If a visitor from Mars had arrived on earth during 1949 and examined the published statements of East and West, it is not likely that he would have found the “materialists” in the Communist half. The constant preoccupation with economics, the careful calculation of what could and could not be afforded, the ceaseless discussion of limits of taxation, of budgetary equilibrium, and of the perils of inflation, would have met him in almost every capital — until he came to the Iron Curtain, beyond he would have found himself in a world dominated not by a certain view of economics but by a new and terrible—view of life. This contrast is all the more extraordinary when one reflects that, on any standard of comparison, the really radical and revolutionary way of life does not lie in the East at all, but in the West. The ideas and aspirations of Western man are still the most startling thing that has ever happened to the human race. Stalin’s views of man and society are, by comparison, mortally static and archaic. In fact the world today presents the astonishing spectacle of Western man sleeping unaware on the powder keg of his own revolutionary philosophy and the Stalinists leaping up and down proclaiming as a new revolution a view of man and society which was old when the Pyramids were built.

We know something of the civilizations that have risen and fallen in the long history of mankind. Through all of them two themes of human belief and organization appear to run: the first, that man and society are molded by the immense impersonal forces of destiny and circumstance; the second, that the state—whether spiritual or temporal — is omnipotent and the source of all meaning. Subjects were no more than shadows of shadows. Reality rested with king and priest and temple. And humankind together, king and peasant, priest and servant, were bound to the “melancholy wheel” of fate, the impersonal and unchanging order of times and seasons, the infinite fatality of history. For thousands upon thousands of years, the great civilizations rose and fell, the people in servitude to the state, state and people alike in servitude to destiny. Behavior, ritual, thought itself, were determined collectively. Men and women lived out their lives within the closed circle of omnipotent government and omnipotent fate.

Into this static world with its slow rhythm of rise and fall, exhaustion and renewal, there broke a new force of ideas and vitality which wrought probably the most radical transformation of the human scene since man became recognizably man. Two peoples brought about this transformation, each small in number and vast in energy and fertility the Jews and the Greeks.

With the advent of these two societies the whole character of human development changed and there entered into history something which we may reasonably call “the Western spirit. The measure of its revolutionary’ power was that it completely contradicted and annihilated the two dominant themes of the archaic world: the fatality of environment and the omnipotence of the state. It is a commonplace that our society is grounded to its deepest foundations in Classical and Christian antiquity. But of all the riches and diversity’, these two entirely revolutionary facts must be remembered, for they are the key to the understanding of our own society and to its fundamental divergence from Communism. It is only in their light that the radical newness of Western thought and the fundamentally reactionary character of Communist thinking can be fully grasped. The Greeks and the Jews shared with the older civilizations the idea of a divine order of society, but whereas earlier this order seemed on the whole to have been made up of the sum of circumstances — the seasons, the days, the cycle of agriculture, the chances of flood and storm, the social order as it existed in Greek and Jewish thought a gulf opened between the divine order as it existed in the mind of God, and the very human order as it existed on earth.

The idea that the sum of things could by human will and action be transformed and remade in the image of the divine took hold of men’s imaginat ions. The static idea of social order began to give way to the revolutionary, to the ideas of a possible perfect society which could be achieved provided men overcame the irrational and immoral aspects of their own lives and their own institutions. The desire to transform, the desire to create, the desire to seize on material circumstances and change and mold them as an artist transforms the material he works with - this was the immense energy injected into the Western world by the rational vision of the Greeks and the moral vision of the Jews. The divine order ceased to be the sum of things that are and began to become the sum of things as they should be. Try as he would—and to return to the static is always a temptation Western man could never again drive the fever of creation and transformation and progress out of his blood.

The two streams of thought were equally potent in sweeping away the other principle of ancient society: the acceptance of the omnipotent state. The Greek saw the reflection of the Logos in the rational nature of man. As a creature endowed with reason he acquired inalienable social and political rights, among them the right to selfgovernment. For the Jew, it was the divine image in man that created in him moral responsibility. From the first question of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?" flowed out the doctrine of personal responsibility. In the Christian tradition the Greek coneept of reason and the Hebrew belief in man’s accountability met in the idea of the “free and lawful man,”which in medieval Europe was the basis of the great constitutional experiment of placing government itself under the law, and in the centuries that followed developed into the full doctrine of representative government and political freedom.

No one will pretend that the progress of these two transforming ideals — of justice and liberty - was regular or complete. The Greek insight into the irrationality of much in man’s nature and the institutions he sets up has been more than justified. The Hebrew and Christian concept of sin —the pride of the mind and the lust of the heart - has darkened every page of Western history. Yet underneath failure and collapse and defeat, the Western spirit has constantly renewed itself, and in the darkest ages the voice of the saint, the prophet, the reformer, was raised to denounce the things that were and to point once again to the things that ought to be. Under these pressures, Western society became the most restlessly dynamic and explosive social order the world had ever seen. There could be no rest once these ideals of progress and perfection had been let loose in the mind of Western man.

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IT is the tragedy of Marxist Communism that it restores the old fetters of fatality and tyranny. Because it borrows the terminology of the West and speaks of true freedom and true democracy and true science, men often overlook the profoundly and terrifyingly reactionary character of its doctrine. The free and morally responsible human being with rights and duties and aspirations which transcend any given social order vanishes. Why? .Because there is nothing beyond the social order. Every act of human life, every thought of human minds, is entirely conditioned by the general state of material events at that time. History becomes once more the arbiter of all destiny. It is no longer an arena in which men struggle in freedom to remold recalcitrant matter and fashion it to their ideals. Their freedom is an illusion, and recalcitrant matter is itself responsible for their ideals. The world of freedom closes. In its place returns the stifling world of necessity in which the childhood of the race was spent. Once again men are bound to the melancholy wheel of their social conditioning. Once again events mold them, not they events. The collective crust forms once again over the experiment of human freedom, and the Western vision fades.

In such a world, the return to omnipotent government is inevitable. If man is no more than a unit in a social calculation, to what rights and pretensions can he lay claim? It is the total social process, society, the environment as a whole, that has significance just as thousands of years ago the apparatus of the state — city or temple—was reality and men no more than its component parts. No one doubts the omnipotent claims of the Soviet state today, but some are inclined to overlook the even more omnipotent claims inherent in the prophecy that eventually “the state will wither away.” In any conceivable society where, variety of claims and interests is admitted, some government must remain as arbiter. The only highly complex societies that can dispense with government are those in which social conditioning has produced such perfect adaptation to circumstance and work that no conflicts are conceivable and no change and no progress either. We know of such societies. The bees and the ants have reached just such a degree of adaptation to environment. (And if environment is fatality, is reality, is God itself, what greater purpose for humanity can there be than to adapt itself?) Behind the concept of the withering away of the state lies not only the loss of freedom, but the loss of rationality and humanity itself.

These are not idle fears. We know from man’s long history that the Western experiment of freedom and responsibility is a flash in the pan, a spark in the longest night, an experiment bounded in space and time and preceded by aeons of collective servitude. To step back into an older environment, to regress, to abandon an experiment at once so testing and so abnormal, must be a temptation at the very roots of our being. Communism presents it in a form in which language and propaganda are borrowed from the liberal experiment but fundamental thought and direction lead back into the anonymous tyrannies of antiquity and of primitive mankind. Environment as destiny, the state as omnipotence — these are the principles under whose mastery mankind has spent by far the longest part, of its conscious span. The Western phase is a tremendous, a breath-taking experiment. It is not yet certain that it can stay the course.

Yet if the Western experiment is really the most audacious and exhilarating that mankind has ever made, how is it that today the audacity and the creativeness and the revolutionary zeal so often seem to be on the other side? There is a tremendous paradox here. The crusaders for freedom and progress, for man’s ever renewed struggle to build a just and holy society, appear to be on the defensive before those who seek to eliminate human freedom and restore the twin tyrannies of fate and government. The real revolutionaries cede ground to the pseudo revolutionaries. The radicals retreat before the reactionaries, the idealists before the materialists. Indeed, the idealists seem to have turned themselves into materialists and fight their war of words in calculations and statistics while their adversaries sing of deserts blossoming and spring returning to a resurrected humanity. How have we in the West contrived so to dim our vision that we appear to have lost it? When was the initiative lost? How can we recapture it?

There can be only one answer. We have not lost it because the Marxist vision is more potent than ours or because Communism offers a more attractive version of society. Indeed, it would be difficult to find anything more unattractive than, say, contemporary Bulgaria; and even if we prefer our Communism in idealized form, one searches Marx’s pages in vain for a concrete description of what Communist society would be like. No, his strength lay in what he attacked, not in what he promised. And it is still true of Communism today that wherever it is not imposed by force, it owes its strength not so much to its own attractiveness as to the weakening of the Western way of life. In the last hundred years, we have seen our grip slacken on those two revolutionary principles upon which the Western experiment has been based. The Classical and Christian tradition has grown weaker. In its place, even in the West, the concept of fatality and of almighty circumstance has crept back. The men who founded the industrial revolution and believed in unchanging and unaltering economic laws were introducing a god of economic determinism into one sector of their society. It was a savage but appropriate justice that led Marx to turn economic determinism against them in their own industrial stronghold. Workers had been sacrificed in their turn in the name of economic determinism and dialectical materialism. If matter was to be master, Marx had as good a version of the future to offer as Richard Cobden and John Bright and a much more attractive version from the standpoint of the masses.

Nor was the Manchester School’s confidence in the beneficence of laisser faire the only entry point for fatalism and historical materialism. The present, reality of God and of an ideal world of law and justice which men should struggle to observe and create, even if circumstances drag them the other way, began to fade and the great fatalities — environment, conditioning, heredity, evolution — sapped and weakened the concept of freedom, moral responsibility, and will. Unconsciously at first, but with steadily increasing realization and indifference, a vast mass of Western men and women sloughed off their society’s traditional idealism and became in practice, if not in belief, materialists as convinced as any on the other side of the Iron Curtain— but with this difference. The materialism preached by Communists was a religion of materialism— materialism raised to a total explanation of life, guide of conduct, and spur to action. The materialism of the “West was all too often no more than an attitude of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”In a conflict between religious materialism and practical materialism, it seems certain that the religious variety will have the strength to prevail. An idea has never yet in human history been defeated by no idea at all.

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YET although it is true that Communism has gained strength by the West’s own weaknesses, it may yet be true that the West will learn from the Communists how to recapture its own freedomloving, transforming, and creative spirit. In the first place, men and women in the West can see in Soviet society some of the possible results of their own betrayal of the Western ideal. They see what a society can become which is systematically materialist, godless, and “scientific.”They see how speedily the safeguards of freedom vanish once the idea of law independent of race or class fades and in its place is put the convenience of the community. They see how terribly human compassion can be maimed if there is no appeal to a higher authority than that of government. They see that science itself, on which the regime is supposedly based, can be perverted if the search for truth gives way to the acceptance of the politically expedient. And reflecting on these things, they are perhaps more ready to reconsider the old safeguards of independence and of pity, of justice and of truth. They look perhaps with new interest at an earlier belief that liberty itself is grounded in the fact that God’s authority overrules all others and that, in St. Thomas More’s words, a man can be the state’s “good servant, but God’s first.

But Communism does more than provide the Western world with a species of rake’s progress of some of its own ideas and assumptions. It is, in a real sense, the conscience of the West. Every pretension, every false claim, every complacency of our Western society, is relentlessly exposed by Communist propaganda, and all too often our dislike of the critics is rendered a thousand times more bitter by our inner knowledge that their gibes are true. It is infuriating, it is exasperating, it is exhausting for the West to know that every weakness is spied on, every social failure capitalized, every injustice trumpeted abroad, every lack of charity and understanding blown up into a major social crime. But is it certain that without these enraging critics we in the West should be so aware of where we fail ourselves? Might we not drift on in indifference beyond the point at which this weakened institution or that false situation could be repaired ?

In many ways, we today are paying for the complacency of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It was not only the injustice, it was also the appalling smugness, of the Victorian possessing classes which put the real vitriol into Marx’s pen. Today, at least, no false complacency can hold us back from seeing where lie the shams.

Communists today leave us in no doubt where our weaknesses lie. They await in a fever of tension and expectation the coming of another disastrous depression, They seek to exacerbate by every means the gulf between East and West, between Asia and the Atlantic, between developed and backward areas, between rich and poor, slave and free. They search for every chink in the armor of Western unity. They batten on every national prejudice and try to poison every potential conflict between the allies of the West. Above all, They preach the decadence and decline of Western ideals, the false pretensions of Western society, the myth of Western religion, the hypocrisy of Western freedom, and the certainty of Western collapse.

We need therefore have no doubts about the necessary means of Western survival. To be stable, reliable, and prosperous ourselves; to share with others our prosperity; to rebuild our defenses; to be patient allies and good friends; to restore our vision and moral purpose; to drive out the gods of fatalism; to restore the “glorious liberty of the sons of God”; and, in this spirit, to confront our adversaries with a calm fortitude that allays both their fears and their ambitions — there are the main themes for a common policy in the West. Nothing in them is beyond the competence of the Western powers. Never, indeed, have the material means of fulfilling them been so assured. If there is a doubt at all, it can only be a doubt of the necessary vision and will.

This surely is the crux. In all that they say of the Western world, the Communists are proclaiming the fatal laws of historical necessity. Capitalist society must collapse. The United States must pracdice selfish imperialism. The Western states must exploit their workers, fight for markets in the world at large, trample down their Asiatic helots, and plunge the world into wars of aggression. It follows that every policy of the West that contradicts these fears — every Marshall Plan, every extension of economic aid to backward areas, every increase in social economic opportunity, every act of justice and reconciliation — breaks with the Communists’ fundamental gospel— the fatality of history — and restores, triumphantly and creatively, the freedom of the West. We are not bound by collective selfishness. No iron law of economics holds us down. The Western world is a world of freedom, and in it the Western powers can freely choose and freely act.