212 religious revolution now
Such changes could not survive and persist without successive in-
novations in the institutional arrangements of the market economy.
Th e market itself could not remain fastened to a single, entrenched ver-
sion of itself. Alternative regimes of private and social property— as
well as the contract systems that they demand— would begin to coexist
experimentally within the same economic order.
A renewal of the methods of education would need to accompany
these economic innovations. Such a renewal would be required to make
the new economic institutions work. Moreover, it would be informed
by the same impulse to achieve a greater life that would inspire and
inform those institutions. Th e imagination would be equipped by an
approach to learning that is directed to capabilities of verbal and math-
ematical analysis, that prefers selective depth to encyclopedic coverage,
that is cooperative rather than individualist or authoritarian in its so-
cial setting, and that approaches all subjects from contrasting points
of view. Such an education enables the school to become the voice of
the future within the present and to subordinate the mimicry of the
family and the ser vice of the state to the acquisition of future- making
capabilities.
We could not advance very far in the trajectory defi ned by such
economic and educational innovations (themselves only fragments of
a more inclusive program of reconstruction) without changing our-
selves. Human nature, understood simply as what we are like now—
the stock of our established predispositions— would remain much as
it is. It would shift only slowly and at the margin, as new arrange-
ments and revised beliefs began to encourage some forms of experi-
ence and to discourage others. Nevertheless, we would have already
become too big, in our fi eld of vision and in our experience of em-
powerment, to embrace a sacred or secular religion that places the
highest good in a providential or historical future beyond our reach.
If the living person formed in the circumstance that I have described
were to cling to the outward form of these future- looking faiths, he
would nevertheless insist on opening the channel back from the fu-
ture to the present. For all his protestations of fi delity to the inherited
sacred or secular religion, he would have become, against his will, a
religious revolutionary.