Downgrading Ourselves

November 13, 1961

In addressing an international meeting of economists at Turin, Italy, last September, Karl Brandt, formerly a member of President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers, warned his listeners that:

“This task of undermining the self-assurance and good conscience of the public in the leading Western countries is the easiest part of the Soviet’s ideological warfare. . . . The weakening of the Western position is made relatively easy for the Soviets and their sympathizers by all those Western ex post anti-colonialists to whom the history of Western civilization is one chain of many centuries of crimes, exploitation, and brutality. . . .

“Nothing could better serve the cause of those who one day promise to bury us, another day threaten to wipe England and France off the map with twenty rockets, and do their utmost to destroy the prestige of the West than the masochistic and morose auditing of nothing but the errors and shortcomings of our history by so many academic professors in Western universities.”

ON WHOSE SIDE GOD?

A perfect example is a speech on Oct. 27 (i.e., in the week between Soviet Russia’s explosion of the 30-megaton thermonuclear bomb and its explosion of the 50-megaton bomb) by the Rev. Dr. John C. Bennett, Dean of the Faculty at the Union Theological Seminary:

“It is our temptation to assume that, because our opponents are atheists, God must be on our side and to overlook the extent to which Communism itself is a judgment upon the sins and failures of the middle-class world, upon the Christian world. The very atheism of Communism is a judgment upon the churches which for so long were unconcerned about the victims of the industrial revolution and early capitalism and which have usually been ornaments of the status quo, no matter how unjust it has been.”

There are two chief implications here. One is that God may be a Neutralist, or is belatedly punishing the present generation of the Western world for the sins committed by some of its ancestors nearly two centuries ago. I shall leave analysis of this argument to Dr. Bennett’s fellow theologians. But his second implication is economic. It is that the Industrial Revolution and early capitalism was a period in which economic conditions became more unjust and more miserable than in the periods preceding.

MARXIST HISTORY

Dr. Bennett no doubt came by this opinion innocently enough. Under the influence and example of Marx and Engels, it was the idea popularized by a whole school of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historians. But a sober review of the facts shows it to be false. The Industrial Revolution was a period of greatly accelerated economic progress. It was marked both by a great rise in wages and a dramatic increase in population. (England had 8.5 million inhabitants in 1770, 16 million in 1831.) By cheapening goods through mass factory production the Industrial Revolution first made possible consumption of such goods by the masses.

In the light of our present standards many of the conditions of early capitalism seem shockingly bad. But it was precisely the accelerative economic growth that capitalism, factory production, and free markets themselves made possible, which led to the infinitely improved working and living standards of today by which we so harshly judge early capitalism.

I should like to prescribe a short reading course for Dean Bennett: Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises, pages 613–619; Capitalism and the Historians, edited by F.A Hayek, and The Industrial Revolution, by T.S. Ashton.

What is most “amazing to contemplate” is not (as the Dean insists) “the utterly self-defeating character of the intransigent forms of conservative anti-Communism in this country,” but, I suggest, the utter defeatism of the intransigent anti-anti-Communists whose guilt complex keeps supplying propaganda material for the Russian Communists to use against us. It is time our self-styled intellectuals learned and called attention to the truly enormous and inspiring achievements of the West, made possible by its respect for private property and economic freedom.