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Chapter 14
Absolute Absolution
The leading principle of Utopian religion is the repudiation of the doctrine of
Original Sin.
— H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)
Everything functions as if death did not exist. Nobody takes it into account; it
is suppressed everywhere....We now seem possessed by the Promethean desire
to cure death.
— Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
Education is the modern world’s temporal religion...
— Bob Chase, president, National Education Association, NEA TODAY,
April 1997
The Problem Of God
The problem of God has always been a central question of Western intellectual life. The flight
from this heritage is our best evidence that school is a project having little to do with education as
the West defined it for thousands of years. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who lacks an
understanding of Western spirituality regarding himself as educated. And yet, American schools
have been forbidden to enter this arena even in a token way since 1947.
In spite of the irony that initial Protestant church support is the only reason we have American
compulsion schools at all, the rug was pulled out from beneath the churches quite suddenly at the
end of the nineteenth century, under the pretext that it was the only way to keep Catholicism out
of the schools. When the second shoe dropped with the Everson decision by the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1947, God was pitched out of school on His ear entirely.
Before we go forward we need to go back. The transformation businessmen wrought in the idea
of education at the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth is the
familiar system we have today. Max Otto argued in his intriguing book-length essay Science and
the Moral Life (1949) that a philosophical revolution had been pulled off by businessmen under
everybody’s nose. Otto described what most college graduates still don’t know—that the
traditional economy, where wants regulate what is produced, is dead. The new economy depends
upon creating demand for whatever stuff machinery, fossil fuel, and industrialized imagination can
produce. When this reversal was concluded, consumption, once only one detail among many in
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