Word: morale
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...from Another World. There's Freedom is written with infectious moral fervor; few recent books on "world affairs" have made more sense on the essentials of the present crisis. It points out that the greatest menace confronting the West today is not an outside force from "another world." Communism is part and product of Western civilization, a symptom-like a fever sore-of its crisis. Western civilization produced the Communists, and gave them their strongest weapons. The Communists do not win their victories simply by launching "offensives" against the West; they win whenever and wherever a vacuum is created...
There is one Western failure cardinal to all others. It is the disintegration of what McGuire calls the West's moral community...
...society can endure only if its members agree on a body of essential principles and purposes. In a free society, the agreement cannot be forced; but it must be present nonetheless. For centuries, Western man believed in the Natural Moral Law as expounded by Aristotle, Aquinas, Blackstone. This law was found neither in legislation nor divine revelation (although it posits the existence of God); it is achieved by examining human nature and reaching legal rules based on the findings. In practice, the most notable expression of Natural Moral Law was, and is, the English common law. Under the acceptance...
...West's moral community broke under the impact of great historic forces. It began to neglect a simple truth-that liberty, as Edmund Burke put it, cannot exist "without order and virtue...
...began to look for new orders. One consequence was the rise of what McGuire calls the Monstrous State, which "must enforce order when we no longer discipline ourselves." But nationalism only bloodily compounded the disorder in the Western World. Here was the great moral vacuum which Karl Marx sought to fill with his murky and monstrous new faith...