NEW FAlLURE OF NERVE
9
The left lives from day to day in a world going from worse to
worse.
Into the breach has stepped the motley array of religionists
filled with the
elan
of salvation and burdened with the theological
baggage of centuries.
This is the one respect
in
which the new
failure of nerve basically differs from the old.
The failure of
nerve of the early Christian era sought to . convert the soul to
God in order to withdraw it from all concern with the world.
Today the churches are so much of this world that their other
worldliness is only a half-believed prophecy of man's inescapable
destination rather than an ideal of personal and social life. As
interpreters of divine purpose, they have now become concerned
with social healing, with the institutions of society and with the
bodies of men, as necessarily involved in the healing of individual
souls. The world-order is to become a moral and religious order.
Plans for the post-war world and for social reconstruction are
coming from the Pope as well as from the humblest Protestant
sect. They are now at flood-tide. The Churches bid well to replace
political parties as sounding boards, if, not instruments, of social
reform.
It is characteristic of the tendencies hostile to scientific method
that they reject the view that the breakdown of capitalism and
the rise of totalitarianism are primarily the result of a conjunction
of material factors. Rather do they allege that the bankruptcy of
Western European civilization is the direct result of the bank–
ruptcy of the scientific and naturalistic spirit. The attempt to live
by science resulted in chaos, relativism, Hitlerism and war. The
latter are treated as superficial evils destined to pass like all of
God's trials. But the radical evil is a scientific attitude which
sacrificed true understanding for prediction and individual sal–
vation for social control.
That science was king in the social life of the Western world,
that modern ills are the consequences of our attempt to live by
scientific theory and practice--these assumptions border on fan–
tasy. No convincing evidence has ever been offered for them. On
the contrary, the chief causes of our maladjustments are to be
found precisely in these areas of social life
in
which the rationale
of scientific method has not been employed.
Where is the evidence
that any Western State ever attempted to meet scientifically the
