DANIEL BELL
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society, or tha t without religion a society will dissolve. I do no t believe
in religion as a pa tch for the unravell ed seams of society. Nor do
societies "dissolve," though in periods of extreme crises (like times of
war ) the loss of legitima tion may sap the will to resist. Religions
canno t be manufactured. Worse, if they were, the results would be
spurious and soon vanish in the next wh irl of fashion .
As Max Weber bitingly o bserved more than a half century ago :
The need of literary, academic, or cafe-society intellectuals to
include religious feelings in the inventory of their sources of impres–
sions and sensations, and among the topics for discussion, has never
yet given rise to a new religion. Nor can a religious renascence be
generated by the need of authors
to
compose books, or by the far
more effecti ve need of clever publishers
to
sell such books. No maller
how much the appearance of a widespread religious interest may be
stimu lated, no reiigion has ever resulted from the needs of intellectu–
als or from their chatter. T he whirl gig of fashion will presently
remove this subj ect of conversation and journalism, which fashion
has made popular.
Religions grow out of the deepes t n eeds of individuals sh aring a
common awakening, and are not created by "engineers of the soul. "
My concern with religion goes back to wha t I assume is the
constitutive character of culture: the wheel of questions tha t brings on e
back to the existential predicaments, the awareness in men of their
finiteness and the inexorable limits to their power (the transgression o f
which is
hamartia ),
and the consequent effort to find a coherent answer
to
reconcile them to the human condition. Since that awareness
touch es the deepes t springs of consciousness, I believe tha t a culture
which has become aware of the limits in expl oring the mundane will
turn , a t some po int, to the effort to recover the sacred.
We stand, I believe, with a clearing ahead of us. The exhaustion of
Modernism, the aridity of Communi st life, the tedium of the unre–
strained self, and the meaningless of the monolithic po litical chants ,
all indicate tha t a long era is coming to a slow close. The impulse of
Modernism was to leap beyond: beyond nature, beyond culture, beyond
tragedy-to expl ore the
apeiron,
the boundless, driven by the self–
infinitizing spirit of the radical self. Bourgeois society sundered
economics from moral norms to all ow the individual to pursue his
own self-defin ed wants, ye t a t the same time sought to bend the culture
to its res tricted moral norms. Moderni sm was the major effort to break
away from those res trictions in the name of experience, the aes thetic
and the experimental and, in the end, broke all boundaries. Yet if we
