A Witness - The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century - Book Review

National Review, Nov 11, 2002 by Brian C. Anderson

But even faced with this history as process, politicians and citizens still mattered-mattered more than anything, in fact. If England and France had stopped Hitler from reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936, Aron suggests, World War II might never have broken out. And without Hitler, would Nazism have existed at all? Without Churchill, would England have found the inner will to resist the Nazi menace? Aron leads us to doubt it.

Aron was a keen analyst and determined opponent of the "secular religions"-a phrase he coined during World War II-of Fascism and Communism. The Dawn of Universal History features the first English translation of "The Future of the Secular Religions," a 1944 essay that is one of the most penetrating of Aron's writings. The secular religions were perversions of real faiths, but they were religions nonetheless, capable of inspiring fierce devotion. They provided a global interpretation of reality. They explained "the meaning of the catastrophes suffered by wretched humanity"-by singling out in Manichean fashion the villains of history: capitalists and Jews. These ideologies demanded discipline and sacrifice and instilled a sense of community in the here and now. Instead of directing man's gaze to the transcendent, however, they placed salvation in this world, after a Promethean upheaval that would demolish the old, unjust order. The Marxists dreamed of a universal order, open to all; the Nazis of a closed one, open only to members of the "superior" race. Both proved seductive to the masses whom modernity-history as process-had violently uprooted from their traditions.

The new faiths could only bring disaster, though, since they ignored or distorted human nature and the laws of social reality. For Aron, the French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos had it exactly right: The earthly paradise inevitably becomes "the paradise of beasts." To try to create utopia is to conjure dystopia. But the secular religions exposed a danger at the heart of liberal societies: Liberal democracies, under the influence of liberalism as a worldview, can lose what Pierre Manent calls an "instinct" for political existence. Complacent, they begin to assume that political evil is not a permanent feature of human life- that there are no enemies, only misunderstandings. People are basically rational, liberals think, and if we could all just grow rich together, then we would all just get along. This apolitical temptation weakens democratic regimes, since it leaves them vulnerable to their enemies, who continue to exist-whatever liberals might believe.

Aron, truly a conservative liberal, always rejected this naivete. Healthy open societies demanded political courage. "It is grotesque," he warned, "to believe you can resist guns with butter or effort with rest." Democracies had to have "self-confidence," a sense of their "own mission," a "minimum of common faith or will." This meant being militarily prepared. It also meant balancing freedom and security. "The democracies tolerate heresies, but they cannot tolerate all heresies," Aron held, especially when heresy involved spying and sabotage. To remind liberal societies of such unpleasantness was the job of statesmen and, more broadly, of a ruling elite that was "neither cynical nor cowardly, that has political courage without being Machiavellian."