"This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy.
There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet.
It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. October 8, 2014 By ISI Archive . Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one's precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one's nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism.
Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. The Watergate hearings and Vie…
Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them capable of entirely destroy ing the other. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative.
State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. But such is the logic of materialistic development.The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. This is the real crisis. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.