188
PARTISAN REVIEW
also includes various neo-Hindu and neo-Buddhist devotees (not to
mention the millenarian transformations undergone by Asian folk
religion in several places).
It
is important to understand the human
realities-and, let it be said, the moral validity-of these Third–
World aspirations, for they serve to explain the plausibility of a
political rhetoric that otherwise must seem simply insipid and
self-serving. Never mind for the moment that, often enough, this
rhetoric is indeed insipid and blatantly serves the vested interests of
miscellaneous elites or would-be elites: it
also
expresses profound
human hopes-of the poor, of peasants, of many to whom no one
ever listened before-and for this reason it cannot be so easily
dismissed, be it on political, moral, or religious grounds. It is
perhaps the religious proposition
par excellence
that the deepest
human hopes are not in vain and merit the most serious respect. (To
say this in no way implies utopianism, romanticism about peasants,
or illusions about those who bend such hopes to their own political
ends.)
To think of
lavelas
is to restore the balance. It is also clear,
though, that most inhabitants of
lavelas
have never heard of the
Third World.
Their
religious expressions have, at most, what Max
Weber called an "elective affinity" with the religious undertones to
be detected in the ideologies of intellectuals and politicians.
It
is to
these ideologies that one must, reluctantly, return in order to explore
"the Third World as a religious idea."
As already indicated,the religious associations evoked by the
phrase Third World have deep roots in the eschatological tradition of
the West. Long before Joachim di Fiore, Jewish and Christian
eschatology looked toward an age of redemption in the near or
farther future. It could be argued that in the course of Christian
history the
temporal
expectation was mutated into a
spatial
one, so
that the original promise of a redemptive
age
(Hebrew
olam,
or
aion
in the Greek New Testament) became the promise of a redemptive
place,
leading the Hebrew and Greek terms to be translated as
"world" in modern Western languages. The further mutation by
which this salvific place is transposed from the supernatural sphere
to that of history might then be seen as the foundation from which
grew the plethora of modern utopias traced by Frank and Fritzie
Manuel in their magnificent recent book
Utopian Thought in the
l#stern World.
Be this as it may, there are many antecedents in the
imagination of the West positing the idea that somewhere on this
