Marx
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Much has been written about the need for faith in our century. Perhaps it would be more correct to remember that a need for a simplified outlook on life, which could be contained in a catechism or a brochure, has always existed. Marxism probably had such great drawing power because it appeared at a time when the world had become too difficult to grasp either scientifically or humanistically; and the more primitive the mind, the greater the pleasure in reducing unruly, disparate quantities to a common denominator.
Czesław Miłosz -
Nature’s time, thought of as linear, was more or less encompassed by the formula of evolution: the passage from inanimate matter to the first vertebrates, to fish, birds, animals, and at last to man, was progressive. As the natural sciences developed, the line was extended even further to the history of human societies. Here, too, there was to be constant progress, but until Marx there were no guarantees beyond rather vague faith.
Czesław Miłosz -
Nineteenth-century science fostered a completely naïve picture of history by creating contempt in the popular mind … for more complicated factors than mechanistic, material ones - in a sense, Hitler took Darwinism, “the struggle for existence” and the “survival of the fittest”, too seriously, and by identifying history with nature he ignored the limits of blind force. That naïve outlook was overcome in Marx’s analysis, and all the errors of his successors may be due to their neglect of his intention.
Czesław Miłosz