religious revolution now 223
In many parts of the world today, the moral and religious sensibili-
ties of the mass of ordinary men and women are divided, in varying
proportions, between the scriptural and the romantic faiths. Al-
though they proceed on diff erent premises, exert their infl uence by
diff erent devices, and make diff erent promises of happiness, they
converge in suggesting the idea of the great and godlike character of
ordinary humanity. Th e manifest confl ict of this idea with the tenor
of ordinary life in a counterrevolutionary age strengthens its power of
disturbance.
- Th e pervasive experience of poverty and drudgery, of oppression and
belittlement, affl icting, in the face of the idea of the godlike character of
the ordinary person, the vast majority of people throughout the world.
Th e inclusion of hundreds of millions of former peasants and disen-
franchised industrial workers in a world labor market; the perpetua-
tion of indigence and near- enslavement, on a vast scale, with children
as the most numerous victims, not only in some of the poorest coun-
tries but also in some of the richest ones; the weakening of the tradi-
tional devices of state- supported social protection both in major emerg-
ing economies (beginning with China) and in the historical home
ground of high social protection (Western Eu rope); the disruption of
family life and community bonds at the very time and in the very
places when and where they would be most important as antidotes to
the abandonment of the ordinary person by the state; the narrowness
of access to the advanced sectors of production and learning in even
the freest, richest, and most equal contemporary societies; the un-
ashamed renunciation by the latter- day progressives of any antagonism
to eco nom ical ly dependent wage labor as an adequate and lasting ex-
pression of free labor, in contrast to the views of their nineteenth-
century pre de ces sors; the continuing consignment of most workers to
forms of repetitious labor that in a free society only machines should
perform; the inability or unwillingness of liberals and left ists today to
translate their professed goals into projects of institutional reconstruc-
tion; the failure in all but a small number of small countries to provide
the majority of young people with access to a form of education that
equips the mind with analytic power and imaginative reach rather than
occupying it with useless information; and the consequent confi nement