The Failure of the Left
Sidney
Hook
T.E DISTINCTIVE FEATURE
of the new failure of nerve, we have
argued,* is its effort to break out of our time of troubles by a
faith that would save sinners, but
also
lead to a better social order.
Even the most advanced representatives of this tendency insist
that a concern with sin is a condition precedent for intelligent
reforms. For as the Archbishop of Canterbury reminds us in the
course of the most radical of his social pronouncements: "When
all is said, the trouble with our social life is sin-that strange
perversion and fatality of human nature as a result of which, if
we are not guided by trusting to the grace of God, we convert our
very blessings into curses." **
However it may be with the locus of sin, sin is not the locus of
our social trouble. Because they do not know where to look for
the causes of social trouble, because they rely too much on senti–
ment and magic to solve the economic and social problems of our
day, those who have married supernaturalism to social reform face
a bitter disillusionment. This will be marked by a violent return
to
a theology without social gospel.
But suppose church members were to leave sin to God. Where
could they go? To what groups or organizations could they tum?
The tory right either doesn't recognize these problems as soluble
or would meet them by a dictatorship of the best people. The
liberal center is opportunistic and confused-always waiting for
something to tum up and always taken by surprise. The radical
left-everything left of center- unfortunately would feel very
much like home to them. They would find themselves astonishingly
at ease in the atmosphere of mysticism, of passionate, sometimes
sacrificial, unrealism, and of hysterical busywork which today
fills
the zones of the radical spirit. For in its own way the political
*Partisan Review,
Jan.-Feb. 1943. The present article by Sidney Hook was
mcmany a section of his "The New Failure of Nerve." For reasons of apace, it was
held over until this
issue--Editors P. R.
••Speech of Sept. 26, 1942 at Albert Hall, London.
165
