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decline of Greek society; the new failure, only a few years old, will
evidently produce the collapse of Western civilization. By this apocalyp·
tic threat he hopes to win his readers to ideological support of the war.
In his articles it turns out that among those who are hostile to
science and look for theological justifications, some, like Niebuhr, show
failure of nerve although they share Hook's views about the war and
socialism, and others, like the Catholics, who also support the war and
are therefore his momentary allies, have not lost their nerve, but under
circumstances favorable to their propaganda, have become bolder and
more scurrilous in attacking science. He taxes with failure of nerve
individuals who have courageously maintained, at the risk of persecution,
the same unpopular views about the war that they held before it began.
At the same time he is silent about those who have abandoned the camp
of socialism for a shallow and palpably false doctrine of a new man·
agerial society. By his strange criteria, the late Leon Trotsky, to whose
memory he dedicated his book on "Reason, Social Myths, and Democ·
racy", would be a case of Platonism, lunacy and loss of nerve; but he
excepts from the charge of failure "the miscellaneous but very large
assortment of individuals who have fallen out of the fight for a better
world because they are discouraged or tired or emotionally exhausted by
the political failures of the last generation. Some of them have earned
a rest ..." It seems that the only radicals he excuses are the silent
ex-radicals.
During the last war the internationalists accused of cowardice and
intellectual failure the socialists who had earlier predicted the war as
a result of imperialist rivalries, but justified it when it broke out. Hook
is in a great hurry to turn the tables on his accusers; according to him,
it is they who have lost their nerve, while he emerges as the only
scientific and true socialist spirit among them all.
It may be that the writings of the anti-war radicals show traces of
metaphysics. Why this should earn for them the stigma of intellectual
and moral failure is something I cannot understand. Would Hook bring
the same charge against his philosophical colleagues, few of whom are
free from metaphysics, for example against Russell, whose logical
theories have been characterized as Platonic, or against Dewey, who
opposes the method of intelligence to the method of force, as
if
they
were inherently antagonistic, like spirit and matter, good and evil?
Beside the faith of certain Marxists .in Engels' dialectical laws and the
part of theology in Niebuhr's politics, the religious in Roosevelt's pro–
nouncements and policy is immeasurably more important. I have
in
mind not simply his unfailing invocation of God-he has also declared
that the aim of this war is religious-but his more concrete and mys–
terious relations with the Vatican. We should expect Hook to attack the
President as No. 1 in the series of failures of nerve. But no, it is
the
Trotskyists, Lenin's Witnesses, who are religious and metaphysical ner·
vous cases. The germ of dialectic infects all their arguments. In the
case of the bourgeois politicians, however, he only observes "the absence
<!f connection between the pleas for divine guidance ... and the content
of the speeches." Hook will some day recognize the connection:
the
appeal to God replaces the appeal to understanding, to science and
to
