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If we were unaware of these encroachments, the country would be in a great deal of danger. But we recognize what is happening, which may be why beneath the village of common thought lie disagreements on practically everything. We are beginning to resist our manipulators. That is the secret. In the sweet and deadly mass marketing of thought, we are quietly reclaiming our individual lives.
The result is a second secret of our age: the re-emergence of faith and religion. In its extreme manifestations, this is no secret whatever. Iran is run by a spiritual leader who governs ruthlessly according to God's revelations. Our own country is filling up with people of political ambitions who claim to have God's ear. Some spread the gospel of Fundamentalism. Others preach intolerance and hate to giddy television audiences. The preachers smile quite well. These extremists have power, which derives less from dogma than from a deep public need to retrieve the values and comforts of belief. The preachers will be rejected eventually, but the need will survive. It is that need that lies below the speed of the times, swimming in the opposite direction of science and technology.
The places where faith begins to reappear are those where science and technology fail or fall short. You may look back at us and say that no age in history ever grappled with so many painful and complicated moral problems, but you will also see that no age did so much to create them. Thanks to our dogged inventiveness, we are now in a position to keep a body functioning as a biological organism without allowing it real life. We know everything about sex, except how to keep teenage girls from pregnancy. We are on the verge of being able to juggle our genes without the slightest grasp of the emotional consequences. If I have a fatal brain tumor, I know exactly where to go for the best mechanical support. But who will tell me how to face my death?
% For so long now has the world sprung away from religion and faith that it may be ready to move back toward a compromise. Our 19th century ancestors did a thorough job of divorcing feeling from intellect. Your 20th century ancestors are beginning to seek a reconciliation. For all our dials and buttons, we have known from the start how helpless we often are before the consequences of our ingenuity. One still sees a lot of machinery these days, but very little machine worship, and almost none of the irrational overconfidence in human knowledge that the 19th century willed us.
In philosophy, the pragmatic, linguistic and analytical directions taken in the early part of our century are being replaced by the old-fashioned philosophical questions of how to live. Universities that only 15 years ago were promoting a do-it-yourself education for undergraduates are lunging back to the basic, orderly curriculums of the past. In art and architecture too, one begins to feel a resistance to the antihuman cant of modernism. It is not quite so chic to be modern anymore, not a necessary declaration of one's moral and aesthetic worth. We ride on a supersonic vehicle from our century into yours, yet a great many seats are facing backward.