Os Guinness. A Free People’s Suicide. Downers Grove IL: Intervarsity P, 2012. Print.

Once many years ago I heard Os Guinness speak. I cannot say that I recall much about it except that he was an Englishman who come to America and one of my friends was excited about him speaking at our college. Though Guinness has an English accent—Oxford and all that—he considers himself Irish. He has lived in the United States for a long time.

A Free People’s Suicide takes its title from a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln which says in part, “As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” This was spoken two decades before the Civil War. Lincoln expressed confidence that size and geography would keep the United States free from foreign conquest. If America were to lose its freedom, it would come from within.

While A Free People’s Suicide can apply generally to Western Civilization, it takes a specific look at the United States. It is thorough and effective.

As an English teacher and reader, what impressed me the most was that this book is simply one of the best examples of nonfiction writing I have read in a long time. I cannot say I believe everything the author does, but I rarely see such good writing. The logic is impeccable. The organization is effective. The sources are not trivial. The language is tight. The reader sees that Guinness knows what he is talking about.

Back in the sixties there was a book called The Suicide of the West. The thesis of that book was that the West’s embrace of socialism and communism under the guise of liberalism would ultimately lead to the decline of Western civilization. A little over a hundred years ago there was a book based on a speech called The Conquest of the United States by Spain which warned about the United States overextending itself through imperialism.

Guinness does touch on these ideas a little. He points out how other empires fell because they had overextended themselves. Rome was of special interest because it had begun as a republic. However, mostly what his book does is explain what freedom is and how Britain and British North America before the Revolution and then the United States afterwards got to be bastions of freedom.

Guinness emphasizes that with freedom comes responsibility. A free society is one in which the people exercise moral self-control. I think of the lines from “America the Beautiful”:

Confirm our soul
With self-control
Our liberty with law

The term Guinness uses to describe this is virtue.

To have virtue, he says, there must be faith. Our culture is rooted in Judaism and Christianity, but even secular philosophers followed Aristotle and Cicero to emphasize that virtue is necessary for mankind’s success and comes from some kind of higher belief or ideal. Guinness himself is a Christian, but he even cites contemporary atheists who promote virtue based on their beliefs.

Then, to have faith, there must be freedom—freedom to embrace and live by a set of beliefs without fear of recrimination or compulsion. Why? So people will have clear consciences and be able to live a virtuous life.

Guinness notes that this triad of freedom, faith, and virtue is more of a cycle than a three-legged stool, but if any of these things fail, then we will lose our freedom. We will lose it not by conquest, at least not at first, but by suicide.

A Free People’s Suicide is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. (Burnham’s Suicide of the West was pessimistic.) It examines history and philosophical truths. Just as with many individuals, there is potential for growth or suicide, so it is with our culture and our country.

Guinness is not especially political. He has strong criticisms of just about every political stripe. Nor does he especially call for religion or religious revival in this book. He is looking at a free society made up of believers of all kinds.

No doubt his biggest concern, unlike Burnham’s in the sixties, is not Communism. He expresses more concern about what is happening in the culture, especially in academia. So much of academia has embraced a simplistic postmodernism—a “philosophy” even more simplistic than Marxism.

Postmodernism tells us that truth does not exist, and every moral or logical appeal is simply meaningless words in a power play. I am correct not because I have used deductive reasoning or the scientific method or even divine revelation. Truth does not exist anyhow. The only way people are persuaded is by force.

This reminds me of another speech by Lincoln, the 1860 Address at the Cooper Institute:

…what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. [Italics in original]

The ramifications are clear. If we are forced to think a certain way, then we are not free.

That perhaps is a fear, but there is also a hope. If we truly understand what freedom means—that it is not a mere social construct devised by dead white males, that we understand history and its importance—then we can continue to be free.

I once had a friend who liked to use yellow highlighter when he read. He occasionally would say that he read a book or article that he just wanted to dip in a bucket of yellow ink. A Free People’s Suicide is like that. It is direct, it is unified, it is inspiring. It is looking for truth. It is eminently quotable, but it is not merely clever. It is serious thinking by a serious thinker to get the rest of us to think seriously, too.