The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
of the state will be fully taken care of by its secular agencies. In this endeavor, our major task will be to maintain a counterbalancing endeavor against the perversion of our nation’s image and the distortion of our antagonist’s image resulting from the natural feelings of ethnocentric arrogance and “collective thought.”
MONOSATANISM, SUBVERSION, AND INTERVENTION
In the world view of monotheism, the creative forces in the universe are believed to derive from one source. God is Truth and Love and Peace. But, the diverse evils of human life are due to many unrelated factors. There is not in opposition to God, an Ahriman, an all-encompassing Principle of Evil that rivals Him in unity of purpose and concentration of power. Satan in the Bible is also an obedient servant. Mastema of the Book of Jubilees and Ashmedai, the prince of the devils, belong to popular religion. For the populace finds it easier to believe in the unity of satanic forces than in the unity of the Divine. Monosatanism is more common than monotheism.
The assumption that all the unrest in our world is due to communism corresponds to the equally fatuous dogma of the communists that all the evil in the world is due to capitalism. Both axioms are examples of contemporary monosatanism in the secular domain, the one area of life which modern man takes seriously. Actually, social unrest is more often the rule, in human affairs, than the exception. Thucydides tells us that the Greek cities of his day were divided, each in two cities. The battles between the popular and the aristocratic factions were interrupted only occasionally by the rise of a ruthless tyrant. And each faction sought aid from the super-powers of the day—Athens or Sparta, Persia, Macedonia, or Rome.
If the United States and Russia were simply super-powers in a shrunken globe, the various factions in the infantile and adolescent areas of the world would still have aligned themselves with one or the other. They would have invented ideologies to justify their pleas for help, if such ideologies had not already existed.
However, in many areas of the world we have acted as if there were only one common enemy, as if we were confronted not by an ideology but by the conspiracy of a few masterminds to control the entire human race. Living in a country where the social struggles of the underprivileged never reached the boiling point of revolution, we find it difficult to imagine that in many areas of the world a genuine democracy is impossible. And it is precisely in those areas that communist subversion is going on. The choice there is not between democracy and dictatorship, but between the maintenance of one ruling group as against another.
We cannot maintain that it is right for us to intervene in an internecine struggle, such as is going on in South Vietnam or such as is likely to arise in Africa or Latin America, if the legal government invites us. For we know only too well that such governments have no real roots among the people. Should we transfer to all ruling cliques the ancient illusion of the Divine Right of King’s or Hegels abstract idealization of the state? Such notions have done incalculable harm in the past.
By the same token, the communists have no right to help the so-called “liberation” movements. These struggles are actually latter-day imperial wars, led by governments that disavow imperialism and derive no selfish benefit from their enterprises. Yet those governments are equally guilty of imperialism, in the sense of extension of influence, hidden under the guise of an ideological crusade—freedom, in our case, “anticolonialism,” in the case of the communists.
Crusades are perversions of religious idealism. If the moralistic fig leaf were torn away, these struggles, exposed in their naked brutality, would soon simmer down. In the hybrid union of idealism and national interests, the real interests of the nation are distorted by the pious patina of propaganda. On any basis of enlightened selfishness, crusading wars do not make sense. They are secularized versions of the medieval crusades, deriving from the distortions of the political faiths of the Western World.
A crusade is morally wrong, first, because it is likely to be based on false premises either initially or as it continues; second, because it is based on the ineradicable sin of hubris, the endeavor to play the part of God. To doubt our own wisdom or strength is the first implication of humility. We cannot attempt to run the affairs of the whole world and to arbitrate every dispute, because we must not assume that we alone are worthy of the trust of all mankind. If the skepticism of the Age of Reason ended the frenzy of the religious wars, a similar skepticism in the domain of politics is likely to dampen the fervor of the embattled secular ideologies. Religious skepticism was made possible by faith in man; a healthy skepticism in regard to all global crusades derives from faith in God.
Furthermore, in view of the world-wide competition between the Free World and the communists, we have to assume that our opponents will seek to counter every one of our moves to combat communism by equal and opposite moves of their own. And we have to allow the moral equivalence of their efforts, in many parts of the world, since the status quo governments in former colonial areas were instituted in the first place by their former masters.
Should we, then, do nothing to counter the deliberate attempt by aggressive communist nations to destroy neighboring governments? Not by ourselves, but we should assist the United Nations and its agencies to stand guard over the legitimate rights of all peoples.
RELIGIONS IN A PLURALISTIC, SECULAR SOCIETY
The role of the historical religions in the pluralistic society of our day cannot be delimited by a hard-and-fast rule—such as by the separation of religion and government. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize the interpénétration of all elements of culture and the restless dynamism of society. As there is a democracy of people, so there is a corresponding democracy of ideas, a certain range of freedom for ideas within an existing context. At any one time, the prevailing pattern is a patchwork of compromises, the product of historic contingencies. As situations change, the compromises of the past need to be reviewed.
The Jewish attitude to the relations between the government and religion consists of two antithetical principles—the one deriving from the Bible and Talmud, the other emerging out of the recent centuries of Jewish history. In the ancient tradition of Judaism, there was no division between religion and public life whatever. As we have seen, Moses Mendelssohn, living at the dawn of the Emancipation, contended that the Mosaic unity of religion and state referred to a unique period; hence it was not normative for the future. In the reconstituted State of Israel in our day, there is still a firm integration of the Synagogue and the state. But, many of the non-Orthodox groups would like to separate the Synagogue and the rabbinate from the agencies of government.
In the past two centuries, Jewish people were impelled to associate themselves with the Liberal thesis that government on all levels must be free from any entanglement with religious bodies. The Jews drifted into the various Liberal camps, since their rights and their rootedness in the lands of the Diaspora depended entirely on the acceptance of the Liberal thesis. The Conservative parties and the clerical lobbies could not but resist the breakdown of the walls of the ghettos.
Armed with two mutually contradictory axioms, Jewish leaders cannot be unanimous on the issues of religion and government. The Orthodox groups, deriving their guidance from the sacred tradition rather than from the configurations of modern history, will be prone to build parochial schools and to seek government support for them. The non-Orthodox, particularly the secularists, may go so far as to demand a doctrinaire, total separation of all the institutions of faith from all the agencies of government. A synthesis of the opposing theses of Jewish faith and Jewish history is still a desideratum.
In our analysis, Judaism is a pattern of institutions and symbols plus an outreaching of ideals, sentiments, and hopes. A similar situation obtains not only in the other faiths of America, but in secular society as well. For the term “secular” does not necessarily imply a total divorce from the ideal content of religion. American society is secular in an institutional, not in an ideal sense. It still assumes that a certain philosophy of life, containing the ideals and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, will be conveyed to its citizens, directly or indirectly. Every society must provide for the moral and psychological undergirding of its social-legal texture. A communist society has its commissars, a fascist its uniformed squads. In a democratic society,