22
PARTISAN REVIEW
tween American protection and the Soviet peace that Moscow offered at the
price offreedom; a Europe that was more liberal and libertarian than ever
before, and tormented by a rebellion against the constraints of industrial
society; a Europe that was perhaps decadent, because civilizations flourish in
freedom and decay in unbelief; a Europe within a humanity that, despite the
decline in economic growth between now and the end of the century, is con–
demned to the expansion ofscience and production.
More than these uncompleted tasks, I often regret that I did not deepen
the question the
Introduction
formulated without providing an answer: What
is the status of historicism? Are we prisoners of a system of beliefs that we
internalize at a very early age and that governs our distinction between good
and evil? Is the civilization that the West is spreading throughout the world
worth more than the cultures it is stifling, flattening, and has more than once
condemned to death? In a certain sense, I have remained a man of the En–
lightenment. Of course, I do not eliminate with a word - superstition - the
dogmas of the churches. I often sympathize with the Catholics, loyal to their
faith, who demonstrate a total freedom of thought in all profound matters.
The horror of secular religions makes me feel some sympathy for transcen–
dent religions.
Do secular religions differ in nature from social beliefs in general? Our
society constantly teaches us to judge men, actions, books; secular religions
lay claim to a monopoly of ultimate values. In my view, they are a sign of
regression in comparison to the differentiation of orders, ideas, systems. The
West, at least in part, owes to the duality of powers, spiritual and temporal,
its greatness and fecundity; in the Soviet Union, pseudo-believers maintain a
pseudo-religion, a so-called social truth that would bring together and assume
leadership over secondary truths. For Western Europeans, the establishment
of Marxism-Leninism as the truth of the state would mean more than a re–
gression, it would be an abdication. The West lives and survives only
through plura\ism.
Marxism-Leninism can accurately be called a superstition in the full
sense of the term. The dogmas of salvationist religions avoid refutation be–
cause they assert realities or truths that, by their very nature, are inaccessi–
ble to investigation conducted according to the rules of rational knowledge.
On the other hand a dogmatism that lays claim to ultimate truth in an area
susceptible to scientific analysis is subject to criticism.
I profess the systematic anticommunism that has been attributed to me
with a clear conscience. Communism is no less hateful to me than Nazism
was. The argument that I used more than once to distinguish class messian–
ism from race messianism no longer impresses me very much. The apparent
universality of the former has become, in the last analysis, an illusion. Once a
