RAYMOND ARON
25
above the fray.
To some extent, the multiplicity of cultures resembles the multiplicity of
arts: we should appreciate the diversity, not deplore the anarchy. We
Westerners are, so to speak, in the soup. More than anyone else, we have
become aware of this diversity, and we simultaneously aspire to universal
truths or values. A contradiction that troubles, tears apart our historical con–
sciousness, but which we are not unable to overcome, or at least to with–
stand.
Should we curse the Roman conquest of Gaul or celebrate it as the
origin of France? Everyone will answer this question according to his feelings
and his knowledge. A historical judgement of this kind should be left to the
scholars, if they have the taste tor it, to polemicists, or even to a philosopher
like Fichte, possessed by the demon of propaganda. These historical
judgements trouble us only when they become political judgements.
In our time, millions of people are living through and suffering from the
acute contradiction between a culture that is dying and a culture that they si–
multaneously hate and desire because it offers the path to power and opu–
lence. Nearly a half-century ago, I wrote that the West no longer knows
whether or not it prefers what it contributes to what it destroys. Deprived of
their empires, the Europeans no longer have the same responsibilities; they
may still be committing ethnocide, but they do so less through their actions
than through their very nature. The history of humanity is strewn with dead
cultures, sometimes even cultures that have vanished in living memory.
History was tragic for the Indians, the I ncas , the Aztecs. Who can
doubt it? It tramples on the corpses of cultures as it tramples on the corpses
of men. What is it leading to? Will what comes tomorrow even justify the
suffering of those who fell along the way? Here too, no one can answer.
Today, in this century, we have been freed from the provincialism charac–
teristic of all past cultures, freed from naive progressivism, and also from
facile relativism. The truth of science, recognition ofthe dignity of all, nobles
and commoners, form the basis of our convictions. The events of the century
have dissipated our illusions: the progress of science is no guarantee of the
progress of men or societies. The horrors of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin,
contrary to current opinion, tear us away from a coarse form of progres–
sivism. We know that everything, including the worst, is possible, but also
that the worst is not morally indistinguishable from the acceptable.
By means of this approach, I would have arrived at a more thoroughly
developed theory of "historical consciousness in thought and action."5 How
5. A title I gave to two series of lectures in Aberdeen, the "Gifford Lectures."
