In Time of Trial

THE ATLANTIC

THESE are the times that try men’s souls.” Nearly two centuries have passed since Tom Paine wrote these words, but they are as relevant to our own day as to his. Now, as then, we face the most profound trial that can test the courage of man. Such trials are not created by the surface play of politics — the ins and outs of government, civil discussions, even wars which occur within a reasonably stable order of society. The real test comes in times of radical change in the foundations of the social order. During Tom Paine’s lifetime the Americans were engaged in such a revolution. They were attacking not simply the colonial link with Britain, but the principle of imperialism itself. They proclaimed republicanism in a system of monarchies, the rights of man in an aristocratic world, and federalism in the dawning age of nation-states. In short, they were engaged in a fundamental redrawing of the social and political map of humanity.

Such crises of change strike straight to the soul. Faced with a drastic reordering of the very bases of social life, men can hardly remain indifferent. They must react. But they may do so in opposite ways, with fear and rejection, or with steadfastness and hope. It is very easy to be afraid. Thousands of American settlers denounced the Revolution as treason and subversion, fought it, retreated to Canada or took ship to England, leaving behind the men of faith, who went on to build a continent. Before the French Revolution, all France was in the grip of that strange phenomenon which came to be known as La Grande Peur. Fifty years later, the Manchus reacted to the incoming West with hatred and rejection and a backward-looking fear. The collapse of Europe’s inter-war economy combined with Communist pressure produced, in the Nazi Party, the greatest organized movement of hate, fear, and reaction the world has ever seen.

Today the crisis of change is so much more profound than any that has gone before that we must expect the reactions to be more violent. What is left that is stable? Science has abolished distance, established instant communication, and placed us on the brink of planetary space. The world order based on Western dominance has collapsed in a single decade. The interdependence of economies has become such that a small percentage increase in one nation’s interest rates can undermine the gold reserves of another. Above all, the world has become a single neighborhood of potential atomic destruction. These facts of upheaval and interdependence are inescapable. They spring from a century of growing scientific and technological sophistication — in short, from the most far-reaching technical revolution to overcome humanity since the advent of agriculture and the wheel. But they are exploited, too, by Communism — the first post-industrial world philosophy, and one which claims to work with and not against the grain of a world caught in revolutionary change.

We need not, therefore, be surprised to see the reactions of fear and rejection and hate reappear. They are apparent in certain aspects of General de Gaulle’s foreign policy, and Dr. Adenauer’s. They come to the surface in the negative defeatism of some of Britain’s nuclear disarmers. And perhaps the most radical expressions of the mood are beginning to reappear in the United States. The hate is there. All the crises and upheavals of our current world are attributed to “the Communist conspiracy.”Without the machinations of these evil men, so goes the argument, the old order could continue in blissful stability despite, apparently, such stubborn facts as supersonic flight, sputniks, and atomic power.

The refusal to face change is there, in the tendency to look with nostalgia to a golden past in which America was free of Communists and allies and taxes and unions and “big government.” in the exaltation of purely nationalist interests, in economic isolationism and the growth of the protectionist spirit.

Above all, fear is there. Only fear could paint the picture of a vast, successful Communist conspiracy, advancing irresistibly on every front to extinguish freedom. It is fear, as General Eisenhower has reminded us, that paints our adversaries ‟eight feet tall.” And only a fearful collapse of confidence in the democratic system could suppose that a majority of its elected leaders are ‟soft on Communism” and dupes of a nationwide system of subversion. Fear breeds more fear until reality is left behind for a world of paranoiac obsession in which every neighbor is a potential subversive and, as in Hitler’s Germanv, extremists of the right destroy freedom in the name of defending it.

This loss of nerve is all the more tragic in that its picture of craven retreat by the West before the triumphant advance of Communism is a perversion of the facts. The greatest single development in the post-war world has been the West’s extraordinary recovery of political creativeness and initiative. In the 1930s, it was indeed possible to think of the West as in a process of retreat and disintegration. The fascists spoke contemptuously of ‟plutodemocratic decadence.” and there was more than a little truth in their analysis of a society in which large-scale poverty and unemployment coexisted with great wealth in essentially stagnant economies, in which nationalist rivalries choked all efforts at recovery and the vast colonial world drifted on in a mixture of political malaise and economic decline.

Since the end of the war, all this has changed. The old stagnant economies of western Europe now regard an annual growth rate of anything less than 5 per cent as near recession. Brave new techniques of economic cooperation, starting with the magnificent gesture of the Marshall Plan, have built the Common Market in Europe and introduced the idea as a new and hopeful expedient to Latin America and Africa. The old dependent world is largely independent, and in economic assistance the West has discovered a new tool of worldwide solidarity, which it is learning by experience to use better.

As a result, any Communist hope of conquering by subversion the heartland of the West has vanished in the newfound prosperity. The wall across Berlin is the symbol of the fact that, on the contrary, the pressures now work the other way. In Asia, two major societies, Japan and India, are increasing their economic elbowroom. one precipitately, the other steadily, within the frame of freedom. And even where pressure is greatest on the Asian fringes, in the unstable new lands of Africa, or amid the feudal poverty of Latin America — only in Southeast Asia have the Communists made, by brutal military intervention, an important breakthrough. Elsewhere, there has been no Gadarene rush to Communism. The ‟contested lands” can still be contested; and this situation, in view of their poverty, their pride, and their colonial or semicolonial experience, is no negligible setback to the Communists” confident prophecies of rapid victory.

It follows that in these days, when once again history is forcing on the souls of free men a time of trial, those who work and look forward in hope and confidence can confront the heavier tasks that lie ahead by drawing on an existing capital of achievement. The precise nature of the trial we face is that each of our new Western initiatives has now to be carried further, and into new fields of difficulty. The prospect can exhilarate us or daunt us. But the difficulty is not in doubt.

IN THE Western world, two economies have lagged behind the others in vigor, competitiveness, inventiveness, and growth. Since 1953, Britain and the United States have shown growth rates which are only half of those of western Europe and not an eighth of Japan’s. In America, the sluggishness is further manifest in something like a hard core of unemployment. Britain, in the wake of the sixth or seventh exchange crisis since the war, has started to reconsider its future radically. By adopting a version of France’s Monnet Plan, it hopes to use government stimulus to expand and modernize private industry. By seeking to join Europe’s Common Market, it expects to bring into the more conservative sectors of the British economy that enlargement of both markets and competition which has changed the face of Europe since 1958.

These are tough steps for traditional Britain. But the larger challenge for the West lies in the question of whether the United States will accept the same logic of events. Will it be ready for a judicious use of the powers of government to stimulate and modernize the whole economy, or will cries against ‟planning” and “inflation‟ keep it jogging along at the old inadequate 2 per cent rate of growth? Will it be ready to seek creative association with an enlarged European Common Market and, in Christian Herter’s vivid phrase, ‟take a giant step” toward the building of a cooperative, free-trading, expansive Atlantic commonwealth? Or will it shrink back before the rigors of the choice? The whole momentum of the West depends upon a bold response.

The first task before the Atlantic powers is to consolidate their base. The next is to secure, inside and outside the Atlantic community, the widest possible extension of the benefits gained. The shape and extent of economic assistance in this context will be decisive for the future. On the one hand lies the choice of minimal appropriations granted grudgingly for the negative purpose of stopping Communism. On the other lies a united effort on the part of all the Atlantic nations to commit a given amount of their resources to a sustained effort of modernization in the developing world, with the ultimate objective of making lively, progressive common markets in Asia, in Africa, in Eatin America partners in a cooperative ordering of the world economy. Here, too, the time of decision is at hand, for under the old negative aim of anti-Communism. the aid program is losing hope, drive, and popular support. Only with new efficiency, and as an Atlantic community policy, can long-term assistance recover its proper place in the West’s worldwide vision of a good society.

At this point, critics may be inclined to dismiss these prospects as at best irrelevant and at worst injurious in the West’s crisis of survival. Why talk of growth rates, of economic assistance, of Atlantic cooperation when the stark issues turn on war, on hydrogen bombs, on the outcome of Berlin, on potential total nuclear destruction? ‟Do not let us divert our attention from the real challenge,” they argue. ”Survival is at stake, not Pollyanna illusions of a reordered world. Even to talk of such hopes deflects men from the stern task of resistance. We are soldiers, not prophets. Give us discipline. Do not give us dreams.”

In fact, however, every one of these wider issues is relevant to the immediate needs of defense. If an arms race lies ahead, how can the West better sustain it than by more rapid industrial advance and the provision of a larger base for the whole economy? If the battle is engaged with Communist subversion throughout the developing world, what other, better instrument has the West at its disposal than economic aid, which can attack the poverty, the hopelessness, the hunger of millions — conditions from which Communists derive so much of their support?

What is more relevant to survival than a strong, unified Atlantic world? If power alone deters Khrushchev, the closer Western unity, the greater its strength. If, on the contrary, a genuine fear of German military revival underlies his pressure on Berlin, a completely united Atlantic community can more safely negotiate special concessions on its fringe — say, a non-nuclear zone in central Europe — than a divided alliance which the least abrasion might cause to fly apart.

Above all, there is no evidence in history that men who face challenges in fear and reaction survive to win great rewards. Nineteenth-century China lost its autonomy to the West by looking backward: Japan, at the same time, maintained itself by strenuous, forward-looking reform. Europe in the twenties and thirties destroyed itself by trying to restore 1914. Learning nothing and forgetting nothing, it contrived, almost with a sleepwalker’s automatism, to walk twice into the same war.

Nor shouldd we be surprised that the historical record gives us this verdict. In its roots and aspirations. Western civilization is turned toward the future, not the past; toward experiment, not the status quo; toward creation; toward ‟a new heaven and a new earth,” not a safe and static world. It is precisely this quality of inventiveness, of vision, of the courage to dream that has made Western society, for good and evil, the catalyst and prime mover in a world of magnificent but somnolent civilizations. If that quality were lost today, if no vision of the future informed its policies, no lift of hope encouraged its efforts, no faith to go further and do better inspired its aims, then the hulk of its greatness might survive. But the spirit would be dead. The trial of soul we face today is to outdream the Communist visionaries, outwork the Communist fanatics, and outdare the voices of defeatism and discouragement within our own society. And this is precisely the challenge which Western man, again and again in his millennial record, has met and measured and triumphantly overcome.