One Common Faith: 5

The reawakened interest in religion is clearly far from having reached its peak, in either its explicitly religious or is less definable spiritual manifestations. On the contrary. The phenomenon is the product of historical forces that steadily gather momentum. Their common effect is to erode the certainty, bequeathed to the world by the twentieth century, that material existence represents ultimate reality.

The most obvious cause of these re-evaluations has been the bankruptcy of the materialist enterprise itself.

For well over a hundred years, the idea of progress was identified with economic development, and with its capacity to motivate and shape social improvement. Those differences of opinion that existed did not challenge this worldview, but only conceptions as to how its goals might best be attained.

Its most extreme form, the iron dogma of "scientific materialism", sought to reinterpret every aspect of history and human behavior in its own narrow terms. Whatever humanitarian ideals may have inspired some of its early proponents, the universal consequence was to produce regimes of totalitarian control prepared to use any means of coercion in regulating the lives of hapless populations subjected to them. The goal held up as justification of such abuses was the creation of a new kind of society that would ensure not only freedom from want but fulfilment for the human spirit.

At the end, after eight decades of mounting folly and brutality, the movement collapsed as a credible guide to the world's future.
Tomorrow: Other systems of social experimentation

Karridine