“It has become almost impossible to communicate anything outside the stimulus and tone range of the bong- ing bell,” Whittaker Chambers wrote twelve years ago, long before the Liberal clangor was as brassy and persistent as it is now. But he added: “The effort of individuals to understand retains, here and there, its integrity.” He wrote not as a pessimist but as a diagnostician, and though his rhetoric often turned as black as the storm he contemplated (“Who says the West deserves to be saved?”), the most urgent warning in Chambers’ last diaries and letters was for the West to resolve its inner confusion before it tried to fend off its enemy, indeed so that it could fend off its enemy Communism. At the end of last month a hundred and twenty-five conservatives—writers, teachers, priests, economists, historians, philosophers—met in Chicago to discuss the fate of the West, its decline, survival, or metamorphosis, for opinion flowed in many directions. Here, clearly, was “the effort of individuals to understand,” and, though men of like mind, their individuality was firm, tart, and a matter for respect.
Civilization Needs Freedom
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