RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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to Rome, took two steps forward to indicate courage and determina–
tion, and then one step backward, to indicate caution.
Many of our intellectuals today are taking their one step back–
ward. I hope they will soon move forward again.
JAMES T. FARRELL
Secular thinking, which acquired a large historical meaning
in the Enlightenment, has tended, in recent years, to degenerate into
cliches, catchwords, slogans. The liberal intelligentsia as a whole,
which had been the guardian and exponent of the secular ideals of
the Enlightenment, lost or sacrificed its own independence. Many
liberal intellectuals, becoming embroiled in the politics of the day,
found a deceptive conviction of strength, a delusion of force and
power, .and a false sense of new importance in association with radical
or allegedly radical tendencies. Robert Morss Lovett, in an article
entitled "Liberals and the Class War," expressed the moods and
attitudes of many liberal intellectuals at the end of the twenties.
Lovett observed that liberalism had been tested in the First World
War, and in the Sacco Vanzetti case, and had failed in both instances.
While still avowing his faith in reason, which was a significant article
in the liberal credo, he stated that the liberal must align himself on
the side of the proletariat in the class struggle. Due to the historical
circumstances of the time, this meant what we now know to be
Stalinism.
Stalinism turned Marxism completely into a cynically mani–
pulated theology, with gods and saints and devils, and with a new
martyrology. Along with
this,
socialist and liberal thinking were
increasingly influenced by Leninism and its degeneration into Stalin–
ism. Questions somewhat removed from practical politics and direct
political issues, questions of thought and philosophy, of literature, of
culture, of psychology, were all crudely dragged into the orbit of
political thinking. A new world seemed to be in the making. It had
been conquered by power, and that power had been organized in
terms of a disciplined band of revolutionaries. While in the West, there
had been a degeneration of the post-Versailles world, the fruits of the
Russian revolution seemed to offer promise for the entire world.
