Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in
the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable
power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the
spirit of religious asceticism -whether finally, who knows?- has escaped from the
cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs
its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment,
seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling
prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the
fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual
and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as
economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it
at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the
pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to
become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the
character of sport. 115
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end
of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will
be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized
petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the
last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said:
"Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity
imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
achieved."
