Enough Good Men

The Burke Center is pleased to provide for you a free download of the digital version of Dr. Burke's book, Enough Good Men: A Way of Thinking, originally published on November 19,1962. The visionary concepts in it, while 48 years old and seemingly dated, are as fresh today in political, scientific and environmental happenings as they were when the book first appeared. Below is a sampler from it by which you can judge for yourself on the relevance of what he said then that is still applicable to the situation of the world today. More than that, while we have attempted below to “categorize” what he has said, his uncanny ability to connect many of the divergent issues to each other transcends categorization and those connections add a whole new dimension. The insights are timeless and continue to offer sound guidance for the many needed solutions that still evade us.Individual FreedomWe have an American creed. It consists of the things we have believed as we made ourselves one of history's great nations. The American creed encompasses one of the widest ranges of faiths and beliefs in history. We have had freedom, under law, to think freely, to question freely, to investigate freely, and to act freely. But today the creed that made us great is under fire by men in government, men in business, men in labor, and even men in the church. They would like to see our range of freedom narrowed down to a set of faiths and beliefs approved by them. They want a safer, more manageable set of faiths and beliefs, something less risky, less challenging, than the old...This attitude is not just un-American; it is anti-American. p.45.

In our time, there is as great a need as there ever was for brave men who know that it takes more than lip service to our traditions in Memorial Day and Veterans' Day speeches to make us what the last line of our national anthem says we are: "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It takes brave men to fight those who fear differences in faith and belief, here at home and in the rest of the world. It takes brave men who know that if we succeed in wiping out those differences; if we succeed in keeping Americans from thinking about "isms" and from having "strong personal views"; if we succeed in wiping out all radicals, all odd-balls, all the troublemakers who make history, then we will destroy our greatest strength. And we will do exactly that if we fail to recognize that it was the odd-balls, the troublemakers, and the radicals (whatever that word means) who made it possi­ble for us to enjoy a greater degree of human dignity than most of the world has known. p. 47.

Responsibility

Today's much larger American population has less of that "elbowroom," on farmlands, in mines, in good water, good air, or in any natural resource. Today's American has less, and poorer quality resources to work and live with. We are no longer free to do as we please with them…This resentment has led to a new parlor game in this country during the last thirty years, a dangerous game of name-calling called "creeping socialism." It is played by too many Americans today who simplify things too much. Often they know little or nothing about the kind of American history made by irresponsible men who forced the government into what were then our private affairs. That record clearly shows what happens when individual Americans misuse their private affairs by making them public problems. When that point is reached, the government always steps in.

Americans who play this dangerous new game of "creeping socialism" see that government, their government, as one of the greatest dangers to our future as a free people. In doing so they misuse the word "socialism" and they misread their own history.

The problem has never been "creeping socialism" in our American government. It has always been creeping irresponsibility among too many Americans. pp. 190-191.

It is easy to join a national movement to save the world from communism, or whatever. It is the harder, however (because it is more demanding), to join with the people of our community in an effort to save through our schools only a small part of the world in which our children will live. p.178

On Business

America's businessmen once believed that there was nothing like competition between people in a free market to produce the best possible product. The stiffer the competition, they said, the better the product. This nation once believed, too, that there was nothing like competition between ideas in a free country to produce the best thinkers. In economics, and in politics, those old principles have weakened, and that Congressional committee report, and the oil company's advice (and they are only a few of many), show how far the United States has traveled since the days of the Founding Fathers. pp. 46-47.

Human Rights

They [our Founders] had a strange idea for their time. It was that every man and woman had a God-given free will, and a God-given responsibility to use it to govern himself, and to make lives of dignity possible for all men. Men and women could not use that free will responsibly as long as they accepted unquestioningly the order of things generally approved. It was the obligation of all free men to question everything, those men said, in order to know. It was the obligation of all free men to disagree with evil, to dissent against ignorance, against bigotry, and poverty, and greed, and stupidity. Dissent, these men said—and improve things. p. 112.

The Environment

We know how to control air and water pollution. Ten billion dollars spent on new sewage disposal plants in places like St. Joseph, Missouri, would remove pollution from nearly all the nation's water. The same amount would solve our air pollution problems. The problem is not money. It is a problem of education, education to inform Americans about the close tie that has always existed between a wide margin of resources and freedom. Reduce that margin of resources, reduce the quality of those resources, and you reduce what Americans have always meant by the word "freedom. p. 202.

Factories, home heating units, incinerators, and other fires will add thousands of additional tons ofdebris every day. About a thousand tons of the total are made up of hydrocarbons like benzopyrene. Time after time that substance has triggered wild cells—cancer cells —in laboratory animals. That garbage in the air has given cities around the world sewers in their skies. p.195.

Resources

…another important order, a directive ordering … a machine to change sunlight into usable energy. If successful, it will be a completely different kind of sunpowered generator from what has been worked out anywhere on earth. If this order is carried out, it means the Russians will have perfected a source of cheap power wherever there is sunlight. This development alone can change the world's industry, shaking the world's politics and economics to their roots. p. 88.

The point is that in today's world, as never before in history, whoever controls the world's mineral resources can control the world. That point becomes significant in light of the fact that none of the western powers has, inside its own territories, the minerals and metals it needs to be strong in war or peace. Remember Suez, and what cutting off just one important raw material, oil, did to every European economy? That can be repeated indefinitely by means short of war, such as political and economic influence in the affairs of the countries exporting raw materials. p. 130.

Greek resources, Plato told his people, were gone. Timber had been cut down, but not replaced. The soil was blown or washed away from farms and pasture lands. The mines were worked out. About twenty-three hundred years later President Kennedy sent a special message to the Congress of the United States which was a modem version of that warning to the ancient Greeks. "Our entire society rests upon, is dependent upon, our water, our land, our forests and our minerals," Mr. Kennedy told the people.

"How we use these resources influences our health, our security, economy, and well-being."

… Our minerals are being used up at increasing rates. p. 185.