What cultural idea led people [incorrectly] to generalize the idea of Fascism to the point of including [in it] any movement that was either authoritarian or generically inclined to defend the past … [and also] to interpret Nazism as the necessary conclusion of this idea?
You must think of the standard education of a secular intellectual. It was based – and it is still based, although recently there has been more critical awareness – on an act of faith (which is analogous to the faith in religious revelation of medieval philosophers) …
… [in] the idea of “modernity” as a “value”, i.e., the vision of history as an irreversible process toward the disappearance of religious transcendence. … Supposedly, a certain order of truths and values passed away, and it is no longer possible to return to them.
[Allegedly] those who want to do so at the intellectual level make themselves unable to understand the modern world, [and] those who want to act at the political level must rely on myths, and this is where the road to practical irrationalism and barbarism begins.
However, there is a superabundance of evidence showing that the new situation does not fit into this framework, and we have to wonder [at] how little the pressure of reality has been felt and recognized.
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