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Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism Paperback – November 25, 2014
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Its author maintains that western suicidal tendencies lie not so much in the lack of resources or military power, but through an erosion of intellectual, moral, and spiritual factors abundant in modern western society and the mainstay of liberal psychology.
Devastating in its relentless dissection of the liberal syndrome, this book will lead many liberals to painful self-examination, buttress the thinking conservative’s viewpoint, and incite others, no doubt, to infuriation. None can ignore it.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEncounter Books
- Publication dateNovember 25, 2014
- Dimensions6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-101594037833
- ISBN-13978-1594037832
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- Publisher : Encounter Books; Revised ed. edition (November 25, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1594037833
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594037832
- Item Weight : 1.36 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #262,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customers find the book insightful, penetrating, and chillingly accurate. They also say it holds up extremely well and reads well. Readers also mention that it has a contemporary feel and read well.
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Customers find the book insightful, sound, and on-point. They also say it's an extremely precinct and thought-provoking look at modern liberalism. Readers also mention that the analysis is chillingly accurate and unbelievably prescient.
"...this book is "old," published originally in 1964, its analysis remains sound and directly on-point on the subject of liberals and liberalism..." Read more
"Despite its age, this 1964 work holds up extremely well, offering an insightful analysis of modern Liberalism's appeal and its inherent flaws...." Read more
"...This is the clearest explication of the liberal/progressive ideology that I have read...." Read more
"Burnham's "Suicide of the West" is an extremely precinct and thought look at the inevitable fruits of Progressivism...." Read more
Customers find the book relevant and fresh.
"...over 45 years ago, The Suicide of the West feels fresh and remains relevant...." Read more
"Written in the 1960's, this book has a contemporary feel to it...." Read more
"It's amazing that this book was written a half century ago. It seems apropos to today. It should be required reading in all schools." Read more
"A great, older book -- as relevant now as it was when written. Needs to be re-read." Read more
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"Easy to read, great book." Read more
"Lucid writing , penetrating analysis, and chillingly accurate prediction of where the neo tolitarian American left was headed.A must read" Read more
"Good read, gives good examples of how liberalism falls short when faced with reality." Read more
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What exactly is this dangerous ideology capable of motivating the decline of Western Civilization? "Modern liberalism, which contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being. Ideals that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define "the good society." Liberalism is about optimism. Liberals believe that all men have equal civilizing potential. They hold that freedom of speech should extended to all, no matter how extreme their ideas, and that the vote of the people should always decide who is right. Liberalism believes in the potential of humankind to be raised to a state of world peace and harmony never before seen in history. Terrible and obviously suicidal, right? I didn't think so either.
The question is, do I, or indeed, do liberals really believe this? With enough education, science, technological progress, good government etc. is it possible to take humans with all our foibles and create the perfect society? What about just ending hunger? Poverty? War? Oppression? The belief that any or all of those goals are realistically achievable is actually fairly modern according to Burnham. It became popular within the last 400 or 500 years, starting with Bacon and Descartes. Before them, and others like them, achieving the perfect society wasn't the goal or ideal of government. It simply wasn't considered possible given human nature and human history. People weren't waiting on science to create an earthly paradise, they were waiting on Jesus.
If liberals believe that they should work on the noble goal of forming a perfect society, what do conservatives want? A conservative wants slow change. He prefers either to maintain the status quo or possibly even return to how things were in "the good ole' days." The basic idea is "if things work okay now, why risk the unknown potential negative implications associated with changing them? Instead, let's do everything we can to maintain what we have." Does that sound pessimistic to you? Depressing even? It does to me. Is it realistic though? Is it more rational than the liberal's constant tendency to reform? Maybe.
If a perfect society is possible, why haven't we achieved it yet? A liberal's answer is fairly simple: people are still ignorant and we still have not created the necessary social institutions to remedy the ignorance. For someone like Burnham, this is the perfect chance to lay into the ideology and, at times, succeed in making it look pretty absurd.
He does this by showing how liberalism explains away any crime committed by someone who is poor, a minority or in almost any other social situation, as a failure of society, rather than as a personal failure of the criminal. He shows that often the problems liberals are trying to solve are problems of people who have no desire to have their problems solved and how liberals, motivated by guilt, waste enormous resources trying to bring about worldwide equality.
It's hard to argue that liberalism is ALL bad, and Burnham doesn't. He cautiously concedes that liberalism has led to some societal good. Still, despite the fact that many liberal ideals are laudable, most attempts to implement them are misguided. The human condition can be improved, but you can't always convince terrorists to resort to peaceful methods for achieving their goals by negotiating with them. You can't solve hunger by sending lots of money to Africa and alas, you'll never create a perfect society by having millions of voters with diverse motivations and interests participate in a democracy. To state the root of the problem, "the liberal assumes... that men, given a knowledge of the problem and freedom to choose, will opt for peace, justice and plenty. But the facts do not bear him out either for individuals or for societies. Individuals choose, very often, trouble, pain, injury, for themselves and for others." In other words, the problem of liberalism lies in human nature as defined by history.
Most people desire life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the social conditions necessary to optimize those rights. The question then becomes, what is the best way to achieve these conditions? An ideologist will have a ready answer to almost any problem that arises. In the case of liberalism, the solution is almost always the opposite of "conserving" tradition or the status quo. Instead, a liberal's approach is to value hope over experience and to destroy or drastically reform existing foundations and build again. Occasionally this approach leads to desirable results but, as any software developer will tell you, starting over usually isn't the best way to fix a bug.
The correct approach, Burnham would argue, is to look at each problem individually and without the lens of an ideology, liberal or otherwise. Something much easier said than done. He points out: "As a rule, a man, when his ideological lenses are shattered, is in haste to replace them with another set ground to a new prescription. The unfiltered world is not his dish of tea."
A conservative prefers renewal to reform. He advocates an "equality of legal rights" rather than striving for equality of class or condition. He opts for individual improvement over collective, patriotism over internationalism, family and community over the "bloodless abstraction" of humanity and peace over strength as the "highest social value."
Again, why is liberalism the root of the Suicide of the West? Because it values global equality over strength, global order over national order. It means that the West must stop expanding either through the spread of native ideas and truths that we hold to be inalienable as well as stopping all physical expansion such as colonialism or imperialism. Burnham argues that if we choose not to expand, we are choosing to contract. Liberalism doesn't deny this contraction, in fact it tries to reconcile us to it.
Despite being written over 45 years ago, The Suicide of the West feels fresh and remains relevant. It definitely altered my way of viewing the world and it has really caused me to take a closer look at what I know and believe.
The central topic of the book is liberals and liberalism: more specifically, the ideas and intellectual predilections of liberalism. He begins by defining liberals as those who, more or less, subscribe to a set of liberal ideas that are expressly identified. He identifies a liberal syndrome: a tendency, more or less consistent, to adhere to the set of liberal ideas. He points out that liberals tend not to like to be confronted with their allegiance to these ideas all at one time -- because, to some extent, they conflict with one another -- but the ideas, all of them, are needed to claim an intellectual underpinning for the political positions liberals do in fact maintain.
An important point made is that often both conservatives and liberals, in fact, hold the same values. The difference comes in how these different dispositions prioritize these values. Often the values are in conflict with each other in common political issues. The values identified were peace, social justice (more or less consonant with monetary assistance or welfare to the needy and freedom from political oppression or hard exploitation), liberty (defined as favoring national sovereignty and the preservation of a distinctive national identity), and freedom. Liberals tend to prioritize these in the order (1) peace, (2) social justice, (3) freedom, and (4) liberty. Conservatives tend to prioritize these in the order (1) liberty, (2) freedom, (3) peace, and (4) social justice. With a little reflection one can see how these different prioritizations would lead to different positions on contemporary political issues such as enforcing the border, multinational quasi-governmental organizations (trading blocks such as the EU, the United Nations, etc.).
The book starts from the observation that Western civilization is in obvious rapid decline. This decline is NOT due to forces outside the West but forces, not identified explicitly in the book, from within the West. The book says this can be viewed as a kind of suicide and further observes that many civilizations in the past have similarly committed suicide, without identifying any (maybe the Roman empire comes to mind?). Liberalism, Burnham argues, is the balm applied to the dying man of Western civilization. Events and trends which are damaging to the West are deemed blessings according to the Liberal evaluation of these events and trends: apparent evils that are truly goods misunderstood, I suppose. He does not say liberalism is the CAUSE of the death of the West but that it is the ideology of the death of the West. Liberalism makes the death of the West more palatable. Maybe Liberalism, in this sense, is like La Rochefoucauld's maxim: "Hope, however deceitful she may be, at least leads us to the end of life by an agreeable path."
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Thank God, there is no foul language here ….
This book was written in the 60s, so it is not inclusive of the last 50 years of history, but it is still very interesting …. I wonder what he would have made of these chaotic times and the unfortunate rise of the right wing parties.
It is a shame he did not discuss the situation in the UK as well, by the way I wonder when he mentions ‘England’, does he mean the UK …?
Highly recommended.
Anyone who is familiar with the terminology will know that what Americans call "liberalism" is actually the exact opposite of classical liberalism, therefore the terms have to be separated.
Since the book is from the mid-sixties and has only been republished, all his examples and references are of course from this time and age but nevertheless amazingly comparable to todays violations of "First Amendment" rights or free speech in general (for non-US citizens).
This is just a sad example of one of the few smart and sensible people who knew early on where American liberalism and every other left-wing party with them were going and nothing has changed so far. Instead, thing are worse than ever for free speech across the globe; in that sense this is a rather sad book.








