The Making of Tomorrow
By.Reynal & Hitchcock. $3.00
THIS book by a Franco-American journalist is an attempt, shrewd and in some of its aperçus profound, to analyze the elements of the world situation that are fundamentally new. The title is no commitment to prediction; in fact, the author consistently affirms that in all important particulars— including the military outcome of the war — the future is unpredictable. What his title says is that tomorrow, being ot today’s making, can be expected to differ from all the yesterdays of history in at least the proportion of today’s major differences.
What makes the present world struggle so formidably confusing, the book begins by pointing out, is that it is ‘a combination of national and revolutionary struggles’—a combination of ‘vertical conflicts in which nations fight one another’ with ‘horizontal conflicts which are idealogical, political, social, and economic’ and which ‘overlap purely national allegiances and disrupt the national fronts.’ When Mr. de Sales looks for the great dominant and shaping forces of the time, he finds three that can be combined or opposed in an infinitude of ways, some of which are bound to eventuate in wars or revolutions or both. The three are nationalism, collectivism, and pacifism. It is shown that these are all but universal in the modern world. The detestation of war, for example, is hardly more observable in the so-called democracies than it is in the civilian population of Germany, where sweeping triumphs and unlooked-for setbacks have been received with almost indistinguishable apathy. Nationalism, in every sharp conflict with the impulse to collectivism or the impulse to peace, has triumphed —so far. The most crucial question posed in these chapters 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.’
This first half of the discussion also builds up an implicit recognition that the shape of tomorrow is almost certain to be decisively affected by the present acts and choices of the United States. Out of this recognition there grows by a very natural process the remainder of the book, which exists to set beside each other, as historical processes, as present facts, and as implacably opposed principles, the basic realities of Americanism and Germanism, democracy and National Socialism, the America of the New Deal and the Germany of the New Order. Here Mr. de Sales faces without bigotry if not entirely without bias, and certainly without any false optimism, the inescapable question whether Germany, if defeated, will be assimilable into a worid order regulated by the principles that will have triumphed over hers; also, the equally burning question whether we can make democracy work well enough to perpetuate and to expand ‘the best of two thousand years of human effort toward a better world.’
On most of his topics Mr. de Sales is objective beyond what anyone is entitled to expect of a civilized Occidental man in 1942. His objectivity tends to break down, however, on the subject of the man-monster Hitler, whom he hates to the point of perceiving only the monster even where it is relatively easy to detect the man. For a small example, Hitler is quoted by Hermann Rauschning as having said: ‘The era of personal happiness is closed,’ and Mr. de Sales (who perfectly understands that Hitler is not to be judged as a master of exact, definitive expression) takes the utterance at its face value as a flat denial of democracy’s claim to the pursuit of happiness. What Hitler meant, it is fair to suppose, is that happiness in these times is tor those who forget it as a personal preoccupation and submerge themselves in a cause transcending the individual — exactly the demand made upon each of us by every religion, by all patriotism, by every timely insistence upon the universal necessity ot sacrifice. This is an example of the few points at which Hitler comes indistinguishably close to us — the points that make him morally dangerous to us and to our world. If his meanings were antithetical to ours at every point, the fight against him would be purely physical and therefore simple. But at these_ few points he introduces the insidious element of ‘horizontal ‘ war, confusing the issue and laying it upon us to fight something in ourselves. It is rather surprising to find Mr. de Sales, in this particular context, sparring with Hitler for a purely verbal point, for in other passages he drives his axe to the very taproot of fifth columnism — the enemy masquerading as tolerance and sweet reasonableness within our own spirit.
WILSON FOLLETT
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