320
PARTISAN REVIEW
Out of this promise, a new political religion developed. And in
Germany, the defeated nation of the First World War, a counter
religion of politics to the new "progressive" political religion also rose.
Liberal alternatives were sacrificed by default. More and more,
thinking was centered directly or indirectly around the following
questions: How is power attained? What is the best type of organi–
zation for the seizure of power? How is the future to be planned,
i.e. blueprinted. And along with this, came the patronizing idealiza–
tion of the masses. Such crude and politically theological conceptions
affected thinking, even the thinking of many who were removed from
these ideas and did not accept them. In a world in crisis, minds were
drugged, frightened, distorted and assaulted.
Many liberal intellectuals acted out their dream of the future in
front organizations and even in conspiracies. Some became puppets
of the Russian secret police. They defended and even practiced lying
and deceit. Even the murders of the Moscow Trials were defended.
The world of the liberal intellectuals became cowardly and morally
poisoned. Finding ones way in the face of it was difficult, painful,
and, at times, involved mistakes. Underlying all this is one significant
and alarming fact. Many of the best members of the Western in–
telligentsia surrendered their minds, their values, their personal self–
confidence, and the values of western civilization, which they saw
as doomed, to what we can now see as a vicious and enslaving
Asiatic barbarism. This surrender set the tone of much of our in–
tellectual life for more than a decade.
In the light of these events, .a return to religion is more than
understandable. At the same time, I should here caution readers
against seeing religion in an over-all categorical manner. There are
as many differences among religious persons as there usually are
between religious .and non-religious persons. On political, social and
economic issues, religious and non-religious persons align themselves
regardless of theological and religious differences. There are religious
persons who see the maxim, "Love thy neighbor" as the basis for a
sound and humane social morality: there are other religious per–
sons who see this maxim as a justification for Inquisitions of the
past and intolerant absolutism in the present. There are men who
believe in God-including some Catholics-who are pro-Stalinist.
Also, the religious and the non-religious have both been broken be-
