“We today . . . can recognize that Communism . . . is not a thing that can be rooted out of the world.” These terrible words from Herbert Butterfield’s International Conflict in the Twentieth Century: A Christian View (Harper, $3.00) fix, as in a symbol, the temper of the Western mind today. Spiritually we have moved a long way from the mood that swept the free world when Hungary climbed out of her grave if but for a few glorious days, in 1956. We have since traveled far down a road whose only end can be the sepulchre of civilization itself. Mr. Butterfield’s testimony to despair is buttressed by the very title of Stuart Chase’s Live and Let Live: A Program for Americans (Harper, $3.50). The two books together are symptomatic of the West’s declining will to survive.
Stuart Chase’s book is simply appalling. Written altogether without grace of style and totally lacking in imagination and insight, it skips through every aspect of contemporary life from the United Nations to juvenile delinquency to overpopulation. Mr. Chase is for more world government; Mr. Chase is against war; Mr. Chase favors education, birth control, World Men, the intelligent use of television, peaceful coexistence and the elimination of smog. Above all Mr. Chase favors Life, especially the comfortable life. He is aghast that some of us believe that Russia might well gamble everything on an atomic war were she convinced that she would emerge the victor. Do not the Russian leaders want to enjoy the good things that an expanding technology is now giving them? The author fails to note the heavy irony behind his very question. The presence and dominance of the Stuart Chases in our Western society have made it possible for Russia to get just what she calculates she can get at any given moment within the cold war, without having to resort to a hot one. Chase makes it abundantly clear that for him there is only one ultimate evil: death. Comfortable survival for us and for all peoples is his program for Americans.
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