PETER
L.
BERGER
time to catch the mail and straining her limited vocabulary to
convey to Mother, or Sister, how wonderful it
all
had been!
191
Yare does not tell whether Mrs. So-and-so, like some of her spiritual
grandchildren, saw her ecstatic reports (limited vocabulary and all)
printed promptly by the
New York Times;
ecstatic reports with more
sophisticated vocabulary, then as more recently, could be published
readily in scholarly journals of sinology.
It is clear that, in principle, the Western version of "the Third
World as a religious idea" can be linked to positions all over the
spectrum from Right to Left. Thus the constituency of the China
Lobby in the 1950s (interestingly enough, individuals from
Protestant missionary families were prominent in this constituency)
was as religiously mind boggled about China as the Mao Lobby was
a few years later. Perhaps a new right-of-center version of oriental
utopianism is currently in the making in connection with the
celebration of Japan and its alleged mastery of the problems of
advanced modernity. But due to the leftward lurch of the ideological
climate in Western cultural elites, Third-World fantasies since the
1960s have generally taken a leftist or at least an adversary form.
This latest episode in the mirror play between West and East (or
North and South) has its own fascination.
The properly Marxist version of the idea of a salvific Third
World has its roots in a textbook case of eschatological
disappointment. This disappointment, of course, has been the result
of the failure of the proletariat to emerge as the revolutionary class in
the advanced capitalist societies. The workers of Europe and North
America, in other words, have continued refusing to perform the
role assigned to them in the Marxian prophecy.
Embourgeoisement
is
what happened, not "immiseration"; labor unions, not
insurrection; social democracy instead of Bolshevism. Indeed, the
sublime irony is that in many Western countries Marxism, far from
being the consciousness of a revolutionary working class, is a
bourgeois ideology in the literal sense of the word, limited in its
social location to upper-middle-class cultural elites and their
hangers-on. Outside the advanced capitalist societies of the West,
beginning with Russia, successful socialist revolutions were brought
about by coalitions of peasants and elements of the
Lumpenproletariat
led by intellectuals of middle-class background.
It
is one of the basic
propositions of the psychology of religion that faith in prophecy is
