deep freedom 327economy, and failed at all of them. Th e relative diff usion of an ability to
cooperate across the lines of all divisions of class, creed, culture, race,
or gender helps determine the extent to which any institutional model
can be successfully deployed to carry out the practical work of society.
Institutions as well as education may either encourage or inhibit the
development of our cooperative capacities. So, however, does an idea:
the idea, inspired by the past wave of religious revolution, of the shal-
lowness of the divisions within mankind. Th ere is no simple relation
between the authority that this idea exercises and the class structure of
society. Th e force of the idea may lead to the denial of class, in the midst
of its existence, and support, all by itself, the disposition to cooperate
across class lines. In moving from the devaluation of social divisions to
rejection of the fate of belittlement, the religion of the future establishes
the disposition to cooperate with strangers on the strongest foundation
that it can have: the basis of our understanding of who we are and of
what we can become. No defi nitive institutional formula can capture
the potential for cooperation because none, more generally, can do jus-
tice to our powers of experience and of creation. However, one institu-
tional settlement may be better than another because, by facilitating its
own correction, it enables us to innovate, as well, in our cooperative
practices.
Th at cooperation can be both part of the idea of freedom and part— a
large part— of the path to worldly success should encourage us in the
hope of identifying a zone in which the institutional conditions for the
advance of our material interests overlap the institutional requirements
for the promotion of our moral interests.
To move in the direction of deep freedom, a cooperative regime must
exhibit four features. Each of them needs to be manifest in the institu-
tions defi ning the regime as well as in the practices and the beliefs repro-
ducing it. Th ese features modify both the or ga ni za tion and the experi-
ence of the division of labor in society.
It may seem strange to consider the content of such a regime, includ-
ing its consequences for the or ga ni za tion of economic activity, in a
book on religion that is also a religious book. Th e religion of the future,
however, must resemble the religions of the past two and a half millen-
niums in its impulse to inform the whole of our experience. Moreover,
it cannot remain faithful to the image of the person as embodied spirit,