more clearly not only what Chambersnhad to tell the West about its enemiesnin Moscow and their agents in Washington,nbut also what he wanted to tellnthe West about itself. That message,nwhatever happens to communism andnthe West in the hature, is likely to provenmore enduring than the facts about thenWoodstock typewriter, the prothonotarynwarbler, and the vapid youngntraitor whose perjury made Chambersnfamous.n”The social symbol of our age,”nChambers wrote in The AmericannMercury in 1944, “is autolysis, a medicalnterm for the process whereby thenstomach, for example, by a subtle derangementnof its normal functions,ndestroys itself by devouring its” ownntissues.” He could not, before the HissnCase, fully substantiate his belief, implicitnin this passage, that the West wasndying by suicide. To have done sonwould have involved telling what henlater would tell the House Un-AmericannActivities Committee about hisnown descent into the Marxist Avernus,nand Chambers was not yet ready to tell,nnor was the world yet prepared tonlisten.nThroughout these popular piecesnthere runs the theme of the worldhistoricalnmeaning of current events andnthe suggestion that the West, even as itnwas crowing with glee in its triumphnover the Axis and its grand illusion ofnglobal peace and progress, is of thensame flesh with Ninevah and Tyre, yetnfinds its own mortality altogether inconceivable.nBut the experiences that hadnbrought Chambers to this bleak visionnremained known only to him, and hisneffort to convince his readers of hisnbelief, never quite fully stated in thesenpieces, relied on symbolism and suggestionnrather than the police-blotter factualitynof Witness and the hearing room.n”The rouge applied by an undertakernto the lips of a 20th Century corpse,”nhe wrote in Time in 1947, “is onenmeasure of 20th Century civilization.nBut modern man’s effort to deny ornminimize death is part of a much morenimportant necessity — the need tondeny or minimize God.”nTo Chambers, the most completenorganization of that need was communismnitself, “the world’s second oldestnfaith,” as he calls it in Witness, whosen”promise was whispered in the firstn28/CHRONICLESndays of the new Creation under thenTree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:n’Ye shall be as gods.'” But communismnwas not the only manifestation of thatnneed, which permeated the West and,nin what became Chambers’s view ofnhistory, modernity itself. From Toynbee’snA Study of History, Chambersncame to believe that “one hopefulnmeaning stands out: not materialist butnpsychic factors are the decisive forces ofnhistory.” His seven-part series for Lifenon “The History of Western Culture”nextrapolates the “psychic factors” thatnhad brought the West to the brink of itsndissolution.nThe Enlightenment, he wrote, wasnthe “one great source of modern culture.”nIt “revised the fundamental ideanof man’s destiny and purpose whichncivilization had developed over morenthan 1,000 years” and was “the intellectualnchemistry whose gradual precipitatenwas the modern mind — secular,npractical, and utilitarian.” Thendenouement of the Enlightenment hensaw in the Edwardian era, which wasnthe fulfillment of the 18thnCentury’s Enlightenment, andnthe Enlightenment’s basicnintuition was the idea ofnprogress — the belief that man,nby the aid of science, cannachieve a perfection of livingnlimited only by the imaginativenpowers of the mind. Implicitiynthe Enlightenment denied faithnin the name of science and thenKingdom of God in the namenof the kingdom of this world. Itnwhetted that knife-edge, dividingnthe world’s greatest focuses ofn’ force—the power of religionnand the power of sciencen— along which the thoughtfulnman has teetered ever since.nThe Edwardians — not merely the Britishnin the decade after Queen Victoria’sndeath, but also the Americans and Europeans—wrappednthemselves in thenexuberant confidence of the Enlightenment’snlegacy. “A new tempo was enteringnlife with the abridgement of timenand distance by speed and the multiplicationnof power by the generation ofnenergy. . . . The Edwardian era wasnone of those rare interiudes of historynwhere everybody who could possibly donso had a wonderful time.”nOf course, it was all an illusion, hadnnnbeen illusory ever since the Enlightenment,nand would be dashed in WorldnWar I and the Russian Revolution, thenpolitical, economic, and intellectualnwreckage of the 20th century, and thenchaos that ensued. It was neither Voltairennor the Edwardians who understoodnwhat would happen when thenillusion broke, but a squat little gentlemannunknown to and unimagined byntheir cherubic innocence. “When thentrain of history makes a sharp turn,” saidnLenin, “the passengers who do notnhave a good grip on their seats arenthrown off.”nThe shallowness of the Enlightenmentnand its legacy in the liberal, democratic,nand industrialized West innChambers’s view had weakened thengrip of Western men on their seats andnhad failed to prepare them to surviventhe sharp turn history was about to take.nThat Chambers saw the weakness ofnWestern liberalism in the face of thenchallenge is clear enough. That is whynhe can never be a hero to contemporarynanti-Soviet social democrats andnneoconservatives who pride themselvesnon their pragmatic humanism and theirnown adherence to the values of thenliberal, modern West. Only by ignoringnChambers’s dark vision of human unreasonnand sin and his belief that liberalismnwas a close cousin to communism,nor by twisting him into a Third Generationnyuppie chirping about SDI, taxncuts, and Jonas Savimbi, can today’sn”right” honestly regard Chambers as annicon. “For of course,” he wrote in Lifenin 1953,nthere is a strong familynresemblance between thenCommunist state and thenwelfare state. The ends each hasnin view have much in common.nBut the methods proposed fornreaching them radically differ.nEach is, in fact, in directncompetition with the other,nsince each offers itself as annalternative solution for the crisisnof the 20th Century; andnFabian Britain has at lastnsupplanted Soviet Russia in theneyes of political liberals whennthey look abroad. Nevertheless,nthat family resemblance isnnerve-wearing, since all thenminds that note it are notnequally discriminating, especiallyn