Reappraisals Read Online Free PDF Page A

redundant, commentators today are inclined to dismiss the ideological “culture wars” of the twentieth century, the doctrinal challenges and counter-challenges, as a closed book. Communism confronted capitalism (or liberalism): It lost, both in the terrain of ideas and on the ground, and is thus behind us. But in dismissing the failed promises and false prophets of the past, we are also a little too quick to underestimate—or simply to forget—their appeal. Why, after all, were so many talented minds (not to speak of many millions of voters and activists) attracted to these promises and those prophets? Because of the horrors and fears of the age? Perhaps. But were the circumstances of the twentieth century really so unusual, so unique and unrepeatable that we can be sure that whatever propelled men and women toward the grand narratives of revolution and renewal will not come again? Are the sunlit uplands of “peace, democracy, and the free market” truly here to stay? 6
    WE ARE PREDISPOSED today to look back upon the twentieth century as an age of political extremes, of tragic mistakes and wrongheaded choices; an age of delusion from which we have now, thankfully, emerged. But are we not just as deluded? In our newfound worship of the private sector and the market have we not simply inverted the faith of an earlier generation in “public ownership” and “the state,” or in “planning”? Nothing is more ideological, after all, than the proposition that all affairs and policies, private and public, must turn upon the globalizing economy, its unavoidable laws, and its insatiable demands. Indeed, this worship of economic necessity and its iron laws was also a core premise of Marxism. In transiting from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, have we not just abandoned one nineteenth-century belief system and substituted another in its place?
    We are no less confused, it seems, in the moral lessons we claim to have drawn from the past century. Modern secular society has long been uncomfortable with the idea of “evil.” Liberals are embarrassed by its uncompromising ethical absolutism and religious overtones. The great political religions of the twentieth century preferred more rationalistic, instrumental accounts of good and bad, right and wrong. But in the wake of World War II, the Nazi destruction of the Jews, and a growing international awareness of the scale of Communist crimes, “evil” crept slowly back into moral and even political discourse. Hannah Arendt was perhapsthe first to recognize this, when she wrote in 1945 that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe”; but it is Leszek Kołakowski, a very different sort of philosopher working in an avowedly religious tradition, who has put the matter best: “The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.”
    But now that the concept of “evil” has reentered discursive usage, we don’t know what to do with it. In Western usage today the word is deployed primarily to denote the “unique” evil of Hitler and the Nazis. But here we become confused. Sometimes the genocide of the Jews—the “Holocaust”—is presented as a singular crime, the twentieth-century incarnation of an evil never matched before or since, an example and a warning: “Never again.” But at other times we are all too ready to invoke that same evil for comparative purposes, finding genocidal intentions, “axes of evil” and “Hitlers” everywhere from Iraq to North Korea, and warning of an impending repeat of the unique and unrepeatable every time someone smears anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue wall or expresses nostalgia for Stalin. In all this we have