The Christian Leader in Politics

Extract

Bertrand Russell stated the fundamental problem of polities succinctly and in practical form at the beginning of his Reith Lectures with the question: ‘How can we combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress with the degree of social cohesion that is necessary for survival?’ It may be that the distinction that he makes is too clear cut and that there are circumstances where individual initiative is not anarchic or where the particular form of social cohesion imposed carries in itself the seeds of nihilism. Nonetheless, one cannot but agree with Russell when he suggests that the three primary aims of government are security, justice and conservation.

A far too simpliste approach to world polities, of which Russell himself is to some degree guilty, would equate the system in which individual initiative predominates with ‘the American way of life', and the system where social cohesion is created and maintained by unparalleled means of force with the U.S.S.B., and indeed with most of the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. The latter system, almost ex hypothesi, is stable with the monolithic rigidity of fanatical adherence to a doctrine, a messianic doctrine, that must be made to work out in practice. On the other hand, the American system is constantly undergoing changes which bring it nearer to being a balance between the two extremes. (It must not be thought that I am concerned to defend the American way of life—I would merely point out that it is constantly undergoing modifications, and cannot be reckoned static as is the doctrinaire Stalinist position.)