PETER L. BERGER
195
He attended a service that featured a ceremony, which seemed to
him a dervish dance choreographed in California. He listened to a
sermon, which contained a similarly piquant mixture of Islamic
terminology and the jargon of pop psychotherapy. After these
proceedings he strolled through the community.
It
was a sunny
summer day, and both adults and children were relaxing on the
grounds. And then he came upon a young woman sitting under a
tree, idyllically, indeed an avatar of neopeasant (or neo-Sufi)
wholesomeness. She was pregnant. She was wearing a coarse,
presumably homemade smock, and her feet were bare. She was
knitting. And next to her, containing the wool, was a shopping bag
from Bloomingdale's.
From a political point of view, one should always recall the
murderous propensity of all forms of this-worldly messianism. Few
things are as inimical to human life and happiness as political
agendas parading as a religious or pseudoreligious idea. By adding
even the minimal estimates of murders committed by the Stalinist
and Maoist regimes in Russia and China respectively (leave aside
such "sideshows" as Cambodia) one arrives at the conclusion that
these particular utopians have deliberately killed the largest number
of human beings in this century, and quite possibly in history. This
should give pause, not only to the many decent people who still want
to salvage a "human face" from this particular vision, but to
everyone, in
any
place on the ideological spectrum, who wants to
endow this or that political agenda with the pathos of religious
expectations. That is the most important, indeed the morally
ultimate, reason why one must caution against any religious or
quasi-religious conceptions of the Third World. More precisely, one
must insist to Third-World spokesmen and their Western
sympathizers that the Cargo Cult is an illusion. Those who are really
concerned with the moral offense of extreme poverty must grapple
with the question of how wealth is
to be produced-and not
how it is to
be transferred, expropriated, or distributed, activities that have
never engendered the cargo of modern amenities. One must also
insist to those Westerners who want to use the Third World as the
arena for their own spiritual dramas-be it as missionaries or as
pilgrims-that this is an attitude of contempt for the real people of
those countries. The Third World has its own problems, many of
them of intense human and moral urgency. To some extent, though
only to a limited extent, the West can be helpful. The projection onto
