religious revolution now 211
quence to the conception of humanity lying at the center of the struggle
with the world: the denial to the majority of men and women of eco-
nomic opportunity and equipment; the failure to universalize a way of
teaching and learning enabling the mind as imagination to become
ascendant over the mind as modular and formulaic machine; the ab-
sence of a practical basis of social solidarity stronger than money, as well
as more hospitable to the exercise of our creative powers, than social and
cultural homogeneity; and the lack of a way of or ga niz ing demo cratic
politics that diminishes the dependence of change on crisis and sup-
ports the permanent creation of the new.
Suppose a practice of institutional innovation that breaks through
these constraints, step by step and part by part. Th e method would be
experimental and gradualist. Th e cumulative outcome might neverthe-
less be radical. With each step along the way, we would become stron-
ger. Our unwillingness patiently to work toward a greater life that we
could never ourselves experience, because it would occur in the provi-
dential time of divine salvation or the historical time of a future social
order, would consequently diminish.
Such beings as we would then become would no longer rest content
with the postponement of our rise to a greater life— a postponement
that all established sacred and secular forms of the struggle with the
world accept. Th ey would say, “We want it now.” Would they not have
changed their sacred or secular religion in the course of fulfi lling it?
Consider the example of the combined eff ects of a change in the in-
stitutions of production and in the character of education. Economic
reconstruction might begin with the development of decentralized and
experimental forms of collaboration between the state and private
fi rms, designed to widen access to the advanced sectors, in which pro-
ductive activity increasingly becomes a practice of collective learning
and permanent innovation. We would, by steps, move toward a future
in which no person would be condemned to do the work that ma-
chines can carry out. All of our time would be saved for what we had
not yet learned how to repeat. Th rough a related series of changes, self-
employment and cooperation, combined, would assume their rightful
place as the predominant forms of free labor, displacing eco nom ical ly
dependent wage work.