251
Sidney Hook
ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF PHILOSOPHY
Nothing so typifies the cultural mood of Western Europe
as the two world councils--one of religion and one of philosophy–
held at Amsterdam, Holland, last summer. The first was tremendously
publicized as "the greatest church meeting since the Reformation,"
the second was virtually ignored by the world press. The proceed–
ings of both threw into dramatic relief the nervous timidity and
calculated ambiguities of large and representative sections of Euro–
pean intellectuals in approaching the concrete issues of our time.
These intellectuals, for all their talk about "the dignity of man" and
"the spirit of human freedom," persistently refused to "engage them–
selves" in any cultural action which might bring them into open
opposition to Communist totalitarianism. Ideologically disarmed by
their fears of future reprisal in the event of the Red Army surging
across Europe, a great many intellectuals on the Continent, although
not Communists themselves, are in effect accomplices of Stalinism
in
the present struggle for the soul of the West.
Although
it
is well known that the World Council of Protestant
Churches adopted a report calling upon the Christian world "to reject
the ideologies of Communism and laissez-faire capitalism," the
im–
plications and circumstances of this call have not been sufficiently
noted. What
is
the ideology of "laissez-faire capitalism"? Is it the
philosophy of liberalism and democracy, of Jefferson and Condor–
cd? The Declaration of Independence and the French Rights of
Man? This particular report was not merely concerned with questions
of economic organization. Other pronouncements indicated that the
Protestant Churches, and not only at Amsterdam, were
in
the main
sympathetic to some form of New Dealism or mixed economy. The
objective referents of "laissez-faire capitalism" and "Communism"
