James Burnham
RHETORIC AND PEACE*
The style of an age is also defined by its moral rhetoric.
Charged words of approval, like favored groupings of colors, sounds, or
masses, express, in their own most human medium, patterns of feeling
and prejudice. The expression, however, is not direct. The rhetoric
of morality is not morality. Positive and negative words serve often to
obscure, rather than to reveal, the structure of values which constitutes
the moral reality.
Let me exclude private and family questions, and limit my attention
to the moral rhetoric of public life.
The typical "good" public figure of the past fifty or a hundred
years has been easy to recognize. He appears before the people as "pro–
gressive" and "forward-looking." He is for "reforms," quite possibly
for "revolution," and certainly "of the left." It goes without saying
that he is for "democracy," and is himself a stalwart "democrat" who
submits himself to the sovereign "will of the people." He is against
"race prejudice" and "class distinction." At the same time, by what in
his rhetoric is not a contradiction, he finds virtue unattainable by
"capitalists," "landlords," and "aristocrats," and restricted to "peasants,"
"the common man," "the working class," and "the colonial peoples."
"Social progress," "democracy," "peace," and the rest of his emotions
disguised as abstractions, are "bound up with" the struggle of the working
class, the common man, or the colonial peoples "for well-being and
emancipation."
One characteristic of our good man is above all universal and
unquestioned: he is absolutely "against war" and totally "for peace."
His every public action, from kissing a baby to building an atom bomb,
is first of all directed toward that invariant and mandatory goal, "the
preservation of peace."
This rhetoric of public goodness, since it is complete on the verbal
plane, has the advantage of immunity from check by fact.
It
is not
necessary to inquire whether in fact the net results of "peoples' revo–
lutions" are in the profit or the loss column; or whether, if profit,
methods less rough than those of revolution might not have done as
*
An address delivered at the Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom.
