GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF FASCISM 6ll
its perversions and unlovely forms, its ignorance, its
cruelty and terror man's ineradicable quest for God, in
whom alone he can find rest and fulfilment. If he cannot
find God in heaven, he must fall down before a God on
earth and deify some idol of his own making."
The remark of a recent German writer to the effect
that the only form in which he can accept Christ is in the
character of "a true Hitler nature", admirably illustrates
Canon Barry's diagnosis.
Is It a Revolt Against Civilization? Others attribute
the emotional urge behind Fascism to an unconscious
revolt against the pace of change. Progress, they point out,
by its very nature involves a strain on the human mind
the strain of continual adaptation to new conditions, of
novel reactions to novel complexities. It demands not only
a high and increasingly high level of development, but
certain tolerations and restraints the toleration of ideas,
of habits, and of culture that one does not understand,
the restraint of one's primitive desire to "hit out" at what
one cannot tolerate.
When the process of change goes too fast, it engenders,
inevitably, protest and reaction: the protest of those who,
resenting their felt inferiority in face of the achievements,
the knowledge, and the reputation of the clever, the
cultivated and the learned, are unconsciously looking for a
chance of "taking it out of" those who make them feel
inferior; the reaction which is born of a desire to return
to a simpler and more familiar form of society, in which
discipline and courage are the virtues of the ruled, leadership
and confident dogmatism of the rulers. Thus a civilization
in which the pace of progress has outstripped the
capacity of the average man for adjustment, is always in
danger of slipping back to an earlier level as a result of his
unconscious protest against the strain which it imposes
upon him. 'We do not understand all this progress:
and we do not hold with what little of it we do understand.
Therefore we are going to stop it, if we can.' So