ABSTRACT
If the intellectuals who were responsible for rationalizing the religious version of the Western worldview were forced to do so in a manner that inadvertently prepared the ground for Easternization, then this was no less true of those struggling to rationalize the secular version of the Western theodicy. But then, just as Christianity did not appear at first sight to be in crisis in the immediate aftermath of World War II, neither did the West’s secular theodicy. After all, this utopian, predominantly Marxist, tradition of thought had, unlike Christianity, been strong and relatively successful during the first half of the twentieth century, a period that had witnessed its greatest success in the revolution in Russia and the founding of the first communist state. Now with the future of that state apparently secure following the epic struggle against fascism, and communist parties or their socialist allies poised to take power in several Western European countries, it seemed that the future was rosy for this, the second great pillar of Western culture and civilization. Yet, as we have already seen, the young postwar generation was as alienated from this secular worldview as it was from the religious one, its suspicion of political ideology being at least as intense as its skepticism concerning orthodox religious doctrine and dogma. Hence by the 1960s, this worldview was also in crisis (Kellner, 1984).
