To compare the communist party to the church is a
well-worn clich‚. Both religions - the secular and the divine - were
threatened by the spirit of freedom and initiative embodied in urban
culture, commerce and finance. The order they sought to establish,
propagate and perpetuate conflicted with basic human drives and
desires. Communism was a throwback to the days before the ascent of the
urbane, capitalistic, sophisticated, incredulous, individualistic and
risqu‚ West. it sought to substitute one kind of "scientific"
determinism (the body politic of Christ) by another (the body politic
of "the Proletariat"). It failed and when it unravelled, it revealed a
landscape of toxic devastation, frozen in time, an ossified natural
order bereft of content and adherents. The post-communist countries
have to pick up where it left them, centuries ago. It is not so much a
problem of lacking infrastructure as it is an issue of pathologized
minds, not so much a matter of the body as a dysfunction of the psyche.
The historian Walter Ullman says that John of Salisbury thought (850
years ago) that "the individual's standing within society... (should
be) based upon his office or his official function ... (the greater
this function was) the more scope it had, the weightier it was, the
more rights the individual had.
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