The words of the Gospels and of the Manifesto may have provided equal quantities of courage and inspiration. But there are many respects in which the Manifesto is a better book to give to the young than the New Testament. For the latter document is morally flawed by its otherworldliness, by its suggestion that we can separate the question of our individual relation to God - our individual chance for salvation - from our participation in cooperative efforts to end needless suffering. Many passages in the Gospels have suggested to slave owners that they can keep right on lashing their slaves, and to rich people that they can keep right on starving the poor. For they are going to Heaven anyway, their sins having been forgiven as a result of having accepted Christ as Lord.

Perhaps the most vivid description of the American concept of fraternity is found in a passage from John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck describes a desperately impoverished family, dispossessed tenant farmers from Oklahoma, camped out at the edge of Highway 66, sharing their food with an even more desperate migrant family. Steinbeck writes: '''I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the movement has direction.' As long as people in trouble can sacrifice to help people who are in still worse trouble, Steinbeck insisted, there is fraternity, and therefore social hope.

The movement Steinbeck had in mind was the revolutionary socialism that he, like many other leftists of the 1930S, thought would be required to bring the First Great Depression to an end. 'The quality of owning,' he wrote, 'freezes you forever into the "I," and cuts you offforever from the "we.'" Late twentieth-century liberals no longer believed in getting rid of private ownership, but they agreed that the promise of American life could be redeemed only as long as Americans were willing to sacrifice for the sake of fellow Americans - only as long as they could see the government not as stealing their tax money but as needing it to prevent unnecessary suffering.

[...] Cornel West can still identifY with a country that, by denying them decent schools and jobs, keeps so many black Americans humiliated and wretched.

There is no contradiction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the indilference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. On the contrary, you can feel shame over your country's behaviour only to the extent to which you feel it is your country. If we fail in such identification, we fail in national hope. If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways.

We should help our students understand that social justice in America has owed much more to civil disobedience than to the use of the ballot. The students need to know that the deepest and most enduring injustices, like the unending humiliation of MricanAmericans and the miserable wages paid to unorganized workers, are always downplayed by the political parties, and by most of the press. They need to remember that the same argument now used against raising the minimum wage - that doing so will discourage economic efficiency and productivity - was once used against the eight-hour day. They need to be able to spot the resemblances between what the politicians were indirectly and gently bribed to ignore at the beginning of this century and what they are being indirectly and gently bribed to ignore now. They need to realize that the last 100 years of our country's history has witnessed a brutal struggle between the corporations and the workers, that this struggle is still going on, and that the corporations are winning. They need to know that the deepest social problems usually go unmentioned by candidates for political office, because it is not in the interest of the rich to have those problems discussed in public.

The link between Darwinism and pragmatism is clearest if one asks oneself the following question: At what point in biological evolution did organisms stop just coping with reality and start representing it? To pose the riddle is to suggest the answer: Maybe they never did start representing it. Maybe the whole idea of mental representation was just an uncashable and unfruitful metaphor. Maybe this metaphor was inspired by the same need to get in touch with a powerful nonhuman authority which made the priests think themselves more truly human than the warriors. Maybe, now that the French and Industrial Revolutions have given human beings a new self-confidence, they can drop the idea of representing reality and substitute the idea of using it.

A Deweyan response to such a postcolonial sceptic would go something like this: Sure, pragmatism and utilitarianism might never have gotten off the ground without a boost from colonialist and imperialist triumphalism. But so what? The question is not whether the popularity of these philosophical views was the product of this or that transitory hold on power, but whether anybody now has any better ideas or any better utopias. We pragmatists are not arguing that modem Europe has any superior insight into eternal, ahistorical realities. We do not claim any superior rationality. We claim only an experimental success: we have come up with a way of bringing people into some degree of comity, and of increasing human happiness, which looks more promising than any other way which has been proposed so far.