The Dimensions of the War.

The Dimensions of the War

THE MAKING OF TOMORROW--Raoul de Roussy de Sales --Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

This book about the issues of World War II offers no solutions, draws few conclusions, tells nobody who has thought about the subject at all any fact that he did not know before. Nevertheless, it is one of the important books about World War II. Reason: it brings into the open some of the fears that are secretly gnawing at democratic minds. Its method is that of the doctor who tries to make a mental patient cure himself by laying bare the hidden causes of his psychosis. Its therapeutic value is great, for the democracies are bedeviled by fear.

It is not primarily the military strength of the Axis that the democracies fear--it is the moral strength. It is not their own eventual war potential that the democracies question--it is the ability of democracy to survive as a political system. What the democracies really fear is that Naziism (and Communism too) has got something they have not got, that it is young and they are old, that it is the future and they are the past. Concealed, this fear secretly saps democratic morale. This doubt also reinforces other cognate doubts--bewilderment at the mixed character of World War II (here a national war, here a social revolution, here a colonial revolt); bewilderment at the failure of the religious and moral standards by which nations have lived; bewilderment at the carelessness with which the masses seem ready to trade in hard-won political freedom for economic security; a feeling that we have known all along that this would happen, but, like King Lear in the storm, understanding beggary for the first time, "have taken too little care of this."

Century of Despair. The democratic sense of moral guilt (which Author de Sales discusses at some length) long antedates Hitler and his fifth column. Books are an index to a civilization's moral health, and for the last hundred years most of the world's great books have been despairing indictments of that civilization; diagnoses of its doom. In every quarter of Europe a series of secular seers warned civilized men that civilization was dying of social septicemia. In Norway, Ibsen indicted modern society, in a series of dramas whose strict respect for the dramatic unities (the thing that impressed the critics) was symbolic of the cold rigor of his rage. In Russia, Tolstoy, having incomparably described the society he repudiated, then repudiated his own writings as a symptom of that society. In England, Alfred Lord Tennyson was obsessed all his life by the disintegration of 19th-Century civilization, which he dressed up for poetic purposes in Arthurian armor. Though he tried to trust the larger hope, he could never quite blind himself to visions of a startling realism:

The fortress crashes from on high,

The brute earth lightens to the sky,

And the great Aeon sinks in blood.

Bernard Shaw, despairing of any serious communication with his age, tried clowning to convey his belief that 20th-century man must change or nature would supersede him as she had the dinosaurs. Thomas Hardy, unable to conceive that the world in which he found himself could have been created by a conscious Power, saw evidences of "the coming universal wish not to live." Such is the cultural background of modern man's moral fears. It is also the cultural background of Author de Sales.

Yet Europe in the first decade of the 20th Century looked superficially healthy. Even now Author de Sales remembers that time as "the fabulous world of peace, security, order, stability," when "only the Russians had passports" and "a dollar was worth five francs and nobody thought that it could be worth anything else until the Day of Judgment." That Day arrived with World War I. Most of its victims did not recognize it. They failed to realize that the Russian revolution was an organic part of World War I--the first serious lesion in the civilized social body. The second was Naziism. Only slowly did men realize that World War II was what Europe's writers had been prophesying about. And then they realized it with panic rather than understanding. Instead of clearing up, the war's terrible innovations thickened "the blind haze" that "folded in the passes of the world." The first task Author de Sales sets himself is to dispel that haze.

Cross-Conflicts. What are men really fighting--a war for survival or a social revolution? Author de Sales answers: Both. He calls World War II "this multidimensional crisis," and finds the key to its irrational pattern in "the vertical conflicts in which nations fight one another, and the horizontal conflicts which are ideological, political, social and economic." These latter "transcend boundaries," for no nation, including the Axis powers, is free of them. "They overlap purely national allegiances, and disrupt the national fronts." Author de Sales warns his readers that this picture "is anything but simple. . . . The vertical conflicts are frequently in apparent or real opposition to the horizontal ones. . . ."

The democracies used to enjoy what Author de Sales calls the "pendulum movement." "The pendulum movement from Right to Left and from Left to Right has been characteristic of all democracies during the 19th Century and up to a few years ago. A period of consolidation and sometimes of reaction has normally followed a period of social reform. . . . It can be argued that this cyclical behavior assured the stability of democratic institutions during the times when only a few extremist groups challenged the advantages of democracy over any other form of government. But this easy and regular pulsation of democratic organisms has been violently disturbed ever since the last war. . . . One of the slogans of the French Republic--'always to the Left but never further'--became suddenly less humorous. The democratic pendulum . . . became erratic. . . . Whenever it went to the Left, the specter of Communism reared its bloody head. Whenever it swung to the Right, the alarm of Fascism sounded."

In the U.S., the disruption of the pendulum movement was less real because "American conservatism is a powerful shock absorber." Rightly or wrongly, Author de Sales believes that the third-term election of Franklin Roosevelt "had two important consequences: on the vertical plane--that is, nationally--the American electorate expressed its willingness to play a part, at least temporarily, in world affairs. . . . On the horizontal plane it recognized the implications of the revolutionary forces and their possible effect on the evolution of American democracy."

Though Author de Sales finds World War II multidimensional, he finds "nothing local or episodic" in it. He deprecates concentrating on certain aspects of the war to the exclusion of others. "I would even say that it is impossible to explain the times we are living in if we adhere to any particular point of view, be it national or political."

Nevertheless, he sees three forces "acting on all nations and all individuals"--nationalism, collectivism, pacifism. These three forces Author de Sales believes are "the three fundamental elements of these modern times."

Nationalism & Collectivism. Most exciting part of The Making of Tomorrow for most readers will be the first 153 pages, in which Author de Sales analyzes nationalism and collectivism and the chances of democracy's survival in the U.S. Nationalism he calls "the one categorical imperative that cannot be disputed." Nevertheless, he finds the trend toward collectivism "no less irresistible and no less universal."

He uses collectivism "for want of a better term, to designate in the most general way the tendency to integrate the individual into the complex organization of our modern industrial society in such a manner as to obtain more efficiency from and--if possible--more security for that individual. If this definition is accepted, it will be seen that the practical aims of such varied political doctrines or systems as those of Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and Social Democracy are the same."

Some readers may feel that the inclusion of capitalism in this series is much like saying that garter snakes and rattlesnakes are both snakes.

The supreme example of combined nationalism and collectivism is Naziism. "To deny that this system works," says Author de Sales, "would be foolish. It has in fact worked so well that it has enabled Hitler --starting from scratch--to build up in six or seven years a collectivist society relatively so efficient that none of the other systems opposed to it, although possessing infinitely larger resources, has been able to compete with it as yet." As a result, the question for the democratic nations is: Will they be able to develop an economic society as efficient as the Nazi collectivist war machine "without renouncing the philosophical principles upon which these nations are founded"?

Democratic society has always had to struggle to solve the contradiction between its two major objectives: 1) technological efficiency ("which implies a strong centralized organization tending toward collectivism"); 2) the liberties of the individual. There are two classic solutions : 1) the capitalist solution (preserving free enterprise in spite of economic inequalities) ; 2) the socialist solution (repudiating capitalism in the name of economic justice). Whether it is admitted or not, says Author de Sales, this conflict is now a definite "horizontal" factor in the U.S. at war.

Author de Sales does not believe that capitalism will disappear in this conflict. "It is my belief that the vitality of capitalism is underestimated not only in America but in Europe, and that it can still undergo many transformations and adapt itself to many changes."

Democratic Dilemma. Neither does Author de Sales believe that democracy is doomed in its struggle with Communism and Naziism. "Democracy," he says, "is still in a position to absorb many doctrines, such as socialism, without necessarily destroying itself, because it still remains the only mode of life and the only mechanism of society sufficiently broad as far as its philosophical basis is concerned, and sufficiently vague as to its outlines, to encompass a vast number of contradictions." He feels that "democracy is the only form of Government . . . strong enough . . . to avoid the 'grim horrors of revolution.' "

Author de Sales is a great admirer of the New Deal. But he states without alarm that "the general trend of the New Deal has been toward socialization and centralization." The question, he says, is not whether democracy can be made to work according to capitalist or socialist formulas: "the dilemma is whether a collectivist society--that is, one founded on our real possibilities of production--can be established without destroying the essential principles upon which democracy rests."

In view of this question, and his estimate of the socialist trend of the New Deal, it is strange that Author de Sales should charge U.S. conservatives with having a "psychosis" about the future. A psychosis is a mental bugaboo. What De Sales describes is very real. It will continue to be real until he finds a better word than "collectivism" to describe what he means by full use of resources. Most Americans, who think collectivism means socialism and who know that socialism leads to tyranny, will reject the dilemma as he states it. Nor can he sell them on its historical necessity. Americans have a way of taking history into their own hands.

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