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CULTURE AND RELIGION IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Religion in the Age of

Re-Globalization
A Brief Introduction

Roland Benedikter
Foreword by Mark Juergensmeyer & Ralph Wilbur Hood
 Culture and Religion in International Relations

Series Editor
Yosef Lapid, Department of Government, New Mexico State University,
Las Cruces, NM, USA
Looking at how religion and culture interact with and affect international
relations, this series deals with both theory and case studies.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14946
 Roland Benedikter

Religion in the Age

of Re-Globalization
A Brief Introduction

Foreword by Mark Juergensmeyer, Ralph Wilbur Hood

Roland Benedikter
Center for Advanced Studies
Eurac Research
Bolzano/Bozen, Italy

Culture and Religion in International Relations

ISBN 978-3-030-80856-3 ISBN 978-3-030-80857-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80857-0

© Eurac Research 2022

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 Foreword by Mark Juergensmeyer

For over a hundred years, some of the best minds in the Western world
have predicted the end of religion. It was the “sigh of the oppressed,”
thought Karl Marx, something that would disappear when people under-
stood the real conditions of their oppression. It was an “illusion,” stated
Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is dead.”
Yet in the twenty-first century, in the era of globalization, God seems
quite alive, and religion is thriving. Perhaps the two are related—the rise
of globalization and the resurgence of religion in public life—as this book
artfully demonstrates. The emergence of strident forms of religious and
ethnic nationalism are responses, in part, to the erosion of confidence
in the European Enlightenment’s vision of secular nationalism and the
transnational forces that transcend the nation-state.
But it is not the same old religion that has revived. These new forms of
politicized religion are creatures of the globalized present moment. And
at the same time, new forms of religiosity have emerged that provide indi-
cations of the religion of the future. One of the fastest growing religious
identities is that of the “nones”—people who, when asked, do not iden-
tify themselves as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or even atheist or agnostic,
but “none.” When asked they will often say that they are “spiritual, not
religious.” The implication is that there is a form of non-traditional spiri-
tuality that is sweeping the world, one with no name and no orthodoxy.
But it is often associated with deep moral values—an ascription to human

v
vi FOREWORD BY MARK JUERGENSMEYER

rights and a concern about environmental protection—and a sense of

harmony with all peoples on the planet.
It is an exciting time to think about religion. Perhaps seldom in world
history has it exploded into such diverse new formulations. And the
future is open: religion could ossify into defensive xenophobia or broaden
into the ascription of universal human values. At present, both trends,
contradictory though they may be, are developing side by side.
This book provides a sweeping overview of these diverse developments
in the global age. It is perhaps more a map than a monograph, since
its intention is to give the broad picture, the contours and shapes of
emerging religiosities, rather than to plumb deeply into any one of them.
The reader may want to locate him or herself in this conceptual landscape,
or wander into unfamiliar terrain, for there is much yet to be explored.
To undertake this journey is something of an adventure, and this book
will provide the landmarks for the fascinating facets to be discovered.

Mark Juergensmeyer
Distinguished Professor of Sociology
and Global Studies
Former Director, Orfalea Center for
Global and International Studies
Editor of The Oxford Handbook of
Global Religion (2006)
Co-author of God in the Tumult of the
Global Square: Religion in Global Civil
Society (2015)
Co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Global
Studies (2012)
 Foreword by Ralph Wilbur Hood

This is a wonderful guidebook to what is happening with religion and

re-globalization worldwide. Benedikter provides an amazing wealth of
information. It is as if one had a travel guide to the entire world with
very brief summaries of the key places one could visit. I have not read
a book that packs so much information in such few pages. Benedikter
knows where all the “hot spots” are and invites the reader to use the
guidebook or map for where to explore issues in depth that intrigue them.
The book is not only up to date but engages such rapidly changing issues
as the Covid-19 pandemic, world economies and changes in forms of
religious expressions that seem torn from the most recent headlines or
twitter feeds. The range of scholarship is amazing, as Benedikter provides
insights into the immensely complicated phenomena of religion and re-
globalization. The text reads not simply as an academic treatise, but as
a detective novel in which the only thing that is certain is that being
certain is not simply premature but foolish. Benedikter documents that
the renaissance of religion in its fundamental forms is only one occurrence
among many others, some progressive rather than regressive.
This book is unique in the breadth, rage and scope of its treatment of
religion in the age of re-globalization and as a “map” or “travel guide” has
no equal. It is likely to be adopted in many upper graduate and graduate

vii
viii FOREWORD BY RALPH WILBUR HOOD

college courses from sociology, to political science, to international rela-

tions and religious studies. In addition, one could cite even more courses
not to mention the wide appeal to simply inquisitive readers. This book
is a gem.

Ralph Wilbur Hood

Leroy A. Martin Distinguished
Professor of Religious Studies
Author of The Psychology of Religious
Fundamentalism (2005)
Co-Editor of The Psychology of Religion:
An Empirical Approach (1985)
Co-Editor of Semantics and Psychology
of Spirituality: A Cross-Cultural
Analysis (2015)
 About This book

This book provides a concise introduction to 21 trends that are currently

transforming the role of religion in “re-globalizing” settings, i.e., in times
of “deep” global change. Inter- and transdisciplinary in its approach,
clearly structured and easy to read, this book analyzes the impact of reli-
gious rhetoric, practice and self-understanding into the five typological
core fields of contemporaneity: economics, politics, culture, demography
and technology. Vice versa, it describes the effects of developments in
these fields on religion and its perspectives. Referring to a vast variety
of examples, this book provides an overview of the main transforma-
tions religion is undergoing both in open societies and (neo-)authoritarian
settings. It combines the “big picture” with accuracy for detail and
concrete cases. This book is ideally suited for classrooms and teaching and
can serve as a concentrated basis of discussion for civil society members,
public servants and everybody interested in the topic, either with or
without previous knowledge.

ix
 Contents

Part I The Global Setting

1 Overview: A “Loss-of-Control” Age? 3
2 Introduction: Transfiguring the Ground—Religion
in Our Days: Between Return, Revival and Renewal 11
3 A Shifting Global Scenery: The Age
of Re-globalization 17
4 Re-globalization: An Array of Factors Shaking
the Fundamentals of Neoliberal Globalization 29
5 Religious Re-globalization Rhetoric from the United
Nations 35

Part II A Changing Cultural Horizon

6 The Changing European-Western Setting:
Post-Postmodernity and Meta-Modernity as Carriers
of a Renaissance of Values Toward “Everyday
Spirituality”? 43
7 The Interweavement of the Global and the Western:
The Threefold Return of Religion and Spirituality
on the International Scene 53

xi
xii CONTENTS

8 The Disputed Role of Religion in De-Liberalizing

Settings 61
9 The Business of Religion: A Religious Business? 73

Part III 21 Trends

10 Trends 1–7 83
11 Trends 8–14 147
12 Trends 15–21 197

Part IV Effects of the 21 Trends and the Prospects

13 Summary: The Twenty-One Trends are Changing
the Global Ecosystem of Religion. Will the Outcome
be a Rather Retro- or Post-Religion: A More
Fragmented or More Universal “Structured
Spirituality”? 239
14 When It Comes to the Future: A Non-Unified
Community of Scholars, Civil Society Activists
and Politicians 247
15 A Decisive Question in the Eyes of Many: Toward
More Explicit or More Implicit Religion? 257
16 Chaotic Narratives, Shifting Numbers 265
17 The Demography Factor 271
18 Switching and Migration 275
19 Food Fights, or: Between the Bitter
and the Comical—The Dispute Between
Culturalization and De-culturalization 277

Part V Alternative Visions

20 Civil Religion as a Replacement or Even “End
of Religion”? 287
21 Religious or Spiritual Re-globalization? Toward
a “Secular Spirituality” or a “World Ethos”? 301
 CONTENTS xiii

22 Europe’s Path of the Past Decades: De-religionization

as De-culturalization—An Example for Europe’s
future, for the West or for the World? 311
23 An Additional Variety of Phenomena: Suggestive
Metaphors, Extremist Misuse, Inventive Banalizations 317

Part VI The Debate About the Future of Religion

24 The Debate About the Future of Religion:
A Particularly Wide Field—Between “Happiness”
as a Substitute and the Growing Global Impact
of the Traditional 325
25 Three Main Dimensions to Discern 337
26 A Different Option Perhaps Still Undervalued: The
“Angel of History” Replacing Religion—A More
Humble, Rational, Unifying or Peaceful
Meta-Perspective? 343

Part VII Conclusion and Outlook

27 Conclusion: The Many Questions Ahead 349
28 Institutional and Academic Offensives to Cope
with Increasing “Religious Uncertainty” 363
29 Religion, Critique and the Contemporary Spirit
of Polarization 369
30 Modernizing the Debate: About “Wire-Walking”
Pioneers and Looming Dangers: Is the Future
of Religion About Personal Courage and Individual
Charisma? 377
31 Trends Versus the Eternal: The Lasting
Questions of Religion and Spirituality
Remain—within and Throughout All Twenty-One
Trends 389
xiv CONTENTS

32 Outlook. The Future of Religion

in—and by the Means Of—Re-Globalization:
An Open, Insecure yet Evolving Prospect Inviting
Participation 395

Praise for the Book 407

Index 409
About the Author

Roland Benedikter, Dr. Dr. Dr. born in

1965, is Co-Head of the Center for Advanced
Studies of Eurac Research Bolzano/Bozen,
South Tyrol, Italy, Research Professor of
Multidisciplinary Political Analysis in residence
at the Willy Brandt Centre of the University
of Wroclaw, Poland, Member of the Future
Circle (Zukunftskreis ) of the German Federal
Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
Berlin (3rd Foresight Process 2019–2022),
Global Advisor of the Institute for Culture and
Society of Western Sydney University, Trustee
of the Toynbee Prize Foundation Boston and
Ordinary Member of the European Academy
of Sciences and Arts (EASA) Salzburg. He
was active in European politics from 1995
to 2003. Roland holds three Doctorates in
the Social Sciences and Humanities from
the Free University Berlin and the Univer-
sity of Innsbruck and one Italian “Laurea
quadriennale” from Padova University. He is
advisory board member of Harvard Interna-
tional Review and member of the editorial

xv
xvi ABOUT THE AUTHOR

board of New Global Studies (De Gruyter),

Global-e. A Global Studies Journal (edited by
the 21st Century Global Dynamics Initiative,
University of California at Santa Barbara),
the German foreign policy journal WeltTrends
(WorldTrends) Potsdam and the Brill book
series Global Populisms. Roland edits the series
Re-Globalization in Global-e together with
Ingrid Kofler and is author and editor of
more than 20 books on global affairs, among
them the 7-fold book series Postmaterialism
(Vienna 2001–2005). Homepage: http://
www.eurac.edu/en/aboutus/people/Pages/
staffdetails.aspx?persId=41927.
 PART I

The Global Setting

Part I sketches the global situation and religion’s place in it. This
includes a “loss-of-control” psychology, the rupture of globalization and
its remodeling as “re-globalization,” and an apocalyptic rhetoric now
also employed by global institutions in response to multiplying “bundled
crises.” This setting facilitates the reemergence of religion and spirituality
across political and social systems.
 CHAPTER 1

Overview: A “Loss-of-Control” Age?

Discusses the psychology of “loss-of-control.” In times of “bundled crises” this

psychology is widespread and favors the “return of religion” into private and
public life.

Where does religion stand in the present? And what are its perspectives?
Are there trends which point to substantial transformation—while others
do not, rather reaffirming and reviving traditional concepts and practices?
Are traditional and post-traditional, formal and post-formal trajectories
reconcilable, particularly if they are undertaken simultaneously?
The contemporary religious ecosystem is embedded in a deeply
changing environment and has become a complex and often contradic-
tory puzzle. It is made even more diverse by the transition the world and
its understanding of order, mutuality and hierarchy is undergoing, which a
future retrospect may call epochal. The signs that globalization is entering
a transformation phase: that it is undergoing a “re-globalization”process
are many.1 Among them are the break-up of international agreements,
the crisis of global institutions and the rise of illiberal and authori-
tarian powers; the emergence of a multipolar global order; the active

1 Roland Benedikter and Ingrid Kofler (eds.): Re-globalization: A Topical Article Series.
In: Global-e. A Global Studies Journal, edited by the 21st Century Global Dynamics
Initiative (GDI). University of California at Santa Barbara, https://www.21global.ucsb.
edu/global-e/global-e-series/re-globalization (last accessed February 22, 2021).

© Eurac Research 2022 3

R. Benedikter, Religion in the Age of Re-Globalization,
Culture and Religion in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80857-0_1
4 R. BENEDIKTER

return of ideologies, including religious narratives, onto the global power

stage; the increasing fallout of the environmental and climate crises; the
intensification of global migration which unavoidably includes religious
migration; and the disruption brought about by the “once-in-a-century
health crisis,”2 the global pandemic Covid-19. Together with globally
growing inequality and profound technological and demographic shifts
over the past years these developments have led to unprecedented psycho-
logical and social volatility and a heightened perception of uncertainty
across many societies.3
In response, new populists now also in open societies decorate them-
selves with an alleged “return to religion” or a touch of spirituality
in order to signal their function of “anchors in the storm.” And so
do old and new authoritarian rulers around the world. In contrast,
political correctness and a juvenile turn to reject authorities and tradi-
tions are leading to a radicalization of efforts towards secularization and
rationalization in the name of freedom and individuality.
In times of such multiple and simultaneous “accelerations,”4 i.e., in an
age of “bundle crises” where many perceived or real crises are interrelated,
it is hard to oversee all single crisis aspects; and it seems almost impos-
sible to integrate them appropriately into one vision for leaders, let alone
for the individual. As a result, many feel a general “loss of control” that
on the one hand fosters radicalization, and on the other hand asks for
new orientation.5 Recent surveys both in Europe and the United States

2 World Health Organization (WHO): Covid-19 Emergency Committee Highlights

Needs for Response Efforts over Long Term. In: WHO News Release, August 1,
2020, https://www.who.int/news/item/01-08-2020-covid-19-emergency-committee-hig
hlights-need-for-response-efforts-over-long-term (last accessed December 31, 2020).
3 Bundesverband der Deutschen Wirtschaft (BVDW): Mensch, Moral, Maschine. Digi-
tale Ethik, Algorithmen und künstliche Intelligenz. Leitfaden Berlin [Man, Morality,
Machine. Digital Ethics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence], February 2019, https://www.
bvdw.org/fileadmin/bvdw/upload/dokumente/BVDW_Digitale_Ethik.pdf (last accessed
December 25, 2020).
4 Thomas Friedman: Thank You for Being Late. An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in
the Age of Accelerations, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2016.
5 Cf. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft: Biointelligenz. Eine neue Perspektive für nachhaltige
industrielle Wertschöpfung [Biointelligence. A New Perspective for Sustainable Industrial
Value Creation], München 2019, https://www.iwm.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/iwm/
de/presse/PM_PDFs/BIOTRAIN%20_Studie_i_d_2019_Fraunhofer_Gesellschaft.pdf
(last accessed December 30, 2020). Cf. Expertendialog der Bundeskanzlerin: Ergeb-
nisbericht 2011/12: Dialog über Deutschlands Zukunft [Dialogue about Germany’s
 1 OVERVIEW: A “LOSS-OF-CONTROL” AGE? 5

indicate that in many open societies citizens facing “cluster crises” feel
that neither they themselves nor politicians and authorities “control” the
overall direction the world or their own context is taking in sufficient
manners.6 This feeling is not confined anymore to the proverbial “loss of
control” regarding national sovereignty, territorial integrity and stability
of the international order due to the rise of transnational corporations
and NGOs. Which establish their own global credos and systems.7 It has
much broader and concrete socio-psychological effects. It induces a large
portion of citizens to believe that crisis is nothing temporary, but rather
the “new normal.” This belief changes the basics of the social game,
including its political and anthropological aspects. The U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services in 2019 listed four ways people “process
information during a crisis”:

We simplify messages; we hold on to current beliefs; we look for additional

information and opinion; we believe the first message.8

Studies confirm the widespread perception of a “loss of control of

parliaments”9 and the growing conviction of citizens particularly in
Europe that “the classical parliamentarism of Western democracies is

Future], Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung Berlin, August 2012, https://
horst-niesyto.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2012_Dialog_Deutschlands_Zukunft_E
rgebnisbericht_Langfassung.pdf (last accessed December 25, 2020).
6 Cf. Transcom: Trendstudie: Chancen in der Krise [Trend Study: Chances in the
Crisis], Halle 2008, https://www.5-sterne-trainer.de/fileadmin/media/download/pdf/
Trendanalysen/Janszky_Trendstudie_Chancen_in_der_Krise.pdf (last accessed December
25, 2020) and Jens Berger: Kontrollverlust. Podcast [Loss of Control. Podcast]. In: Nach-
denkseiten Audiolibrix, November 3, 2020, https://www.audiolibrix.de/de/Podcast/Epi
sode/950963/kontrollverlust (last accessed December 30, 2020).
7 Cf. Saskia Sassen: Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization, Columbia
University Press, New York, 2015, to be found at: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/los
ing-control/9780231106085.
8 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Psychology of a Crisis, Washington,
DC, 2019, https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/CERC_Psychology_of_a_Crisis.pdf (last
accessed December 30, 2020).
9 Monika Ermert: Missing Link: Kontrollverlust der liberalen Demokratien
[Missing Link: Loss of Control of Liberal Democracies]. In: Heise online, July
7, 2019, https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Kontrollverlust-der-
liberalen-Demokratien-Panik-ist-angebracht-4464581.html (last accessed December 31,
2020).
6 R. BENEDIKTER

self-preserving and self-referential, but does not solve any important prob-
lems”—which is the reason why many feel a “loss of control of liberal
democracies,”10 which seem to be penetrated by foreign powers of illib-
eral traits on many levels: via misinformation, via internet propaganda
and manipulation of elections, via infrastructure, migration and invest-
ment. This has caused a gradual loss of confidence in democratic systems,
democratic parties, and a shift of the psychology of democratic elections
from “awarding” to “punishing” a candidate or party.11 Loss-of-control
psychology is also connected with the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence,
which many believe already poses a major threat to open societal systems
since it favors rapid and data-based decision-making instead of dialectics
of opinions, dialogue and consensus-building.12
The result is a crisis psychology that feels at unease with the status
quo.13 As part of the search for hold by means of new or old order
structures this perception triggers both communitarian and egocentric
responses as well as a remoralization and re-politicization of the public
ratio. An expression of these trends is the return of left versus right
patterns, which try to take advantage of the growing polarization of
voters’ opinions regarding the impact of the effects of globalization
on everyday lives. Re-religionization and a massive return of a gener-
ally sincere, sometimes desperate search for spirituality in its remarkably
diverse forms are also answers. Such shifts are decreasingly accompanied
by religion serving less as spiritual purpose in the strict sense, but rather
to foster and strengthen affiliation, to signal apparent maturity or wisdom
of leadership and to generate legitimation for those in power.
Last but not least, all this goes along with a rise of experimental ethics
in the contemporary philosophical realm. Experimental ethics corre-
sponds to a certain extent to the “experimental” atmosphere created

10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Wolfgang Stieler: Autor Tom Hillenbrand: „Schon jetzt Kontrollverlust durch KI“
[Autor Tom Hillenbrand: “Already Now Loss of Control Because of AI”]. In: Heise
online, March 24, 2020, https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Autor-Tom-Hillen
brand-Schon-jetzt-Kontrollverlust-durch-KI-4689476.html (last accessed December 30,
2020).
13 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Psychology of a Crisis, loc cit.
Cf. Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society Research Report 2019,
https://www.hiig.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/encore2019_report.pdf.
 1 OVERVIEW: A “LOSS-OF-CONTROL” AGE? 7

by the “loss-of-control” psychology, to which philosophy reacts. As the

Spanish journal “teorema” announced in its annual 2021 essay prize
competition,

in recent times, the experimental turn in philosophy has gained

momentum. Moral philosophy is a case in point, as ethical debates, theo-
ries and concepts have for some time been combined with experimental
methodologies and approaches.14

This “new fluidity” in moral philosophy favors the return of religion as a

response and as the traditional ethical stabilizing force. The experimental
turn in philosophy is one reason why religious ethics and arguments
return both within philosophy and, more in general, in applied ethics.
Together, these trends have triggered the present stage of “re-
globalization”15 : a transition phase that combines the rise of illiberal
powers and a deep crisis of transnational bodies with a democratic
regression and attempts toward reform and reconfiguration of the liberal
order structure that was in place from the 1990s to the 2010s. This
transition includes the underlying philosophical and cultural mindsets
and paradigms. Re-globalization is also a transition phase of liberal
cosmopolitanism and its principles of dismantling boundaries, univer-
salizing tolerance and extending transnational human rights. And at its
core re-globalization includes the long predicted “renaissance of reli-
gion”16 as a geographical, civilizational and cultural reality within most

14 Revista teorema. International Journal of Philosophy (1971–2021), edited at the

University of Oviedo, Spain: https://www.unioviedo.es/Teorema/English/index.html.
15 Roland Benedikter: What Is Re-globalization? A Key Term in the Making That
Characterizes Our Epoch. In: Saskia Sassen, Nayan Chanda, Akira Iriye and Bruce
Mazlish (eds.): New Global Studies. De Gruyter, New York 2021, Volume 15, Issue
1, January 2021, pp. 35–42, online first publication: January 15, 2021, https://www.
degruyter.com/view/journals/ngs/14/1/article-p83.xml?fbclid=IwAR3X2xr0T2oNkOsn
EbHKwWrCHCC015X5eOvQbkBmL281samZDONkcml526M, https://www.degruyter.
com/view/journals/ngs/14/1/article-p83.xml and https://www.degruyter.com/view/
journals/ngs/ngs-overview.xml?language=en&tab_body=latestIssueToc-68822, https://
doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2019-0026. Preprint of a short version in: Global Policy Journal,
edited by Professor Dani Rodrik and Dr Eva-Maria Nag, Durham University, Wiley &
Sons Publishers London, 08 December 2020, https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/
blog/08/12/2020/what-re-globalization-key-term-making-characterizes-our-epoch.
16 Samuel P. Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2011 edition.
8 R. BENEDIKTER

societies and on the international stage. Religion in “unsettled globaliza-

tion times”17 is a force of both homogenization and differentiation; and
of de-nationalization and de-tribalization on the one hand versus new
cultural nationalizations and even forms of “demographic imperialism”
on the other.
This often conflicting status and position of religion contributes to
a situation where religion in the strict sense and its underlying expe-
riential dimension, namely spirituality, are taking on an unprecedented
variety of forms, applications and habits that seem to adapt to changing
circumstances and an array of groups, interests and intentions. Religion
in the present proves to be as resilient and flexible as innovative when it
comes to self-preservation and evolution. At the same time, the era of re-
globalization is marked by youth protests against the existing global order,
for example in the form of movements such as “Fridays-for-Future” or
“Extinction Rebellion,” which include a fundamental rejection of most
existing value and belief systems and are largely torn over the role and
weight religion and spirituality should have in reforming and renewing
the planet. Re-globalization also comes with a regression of international
standards, which not only widen the gap between different understand-
ings of the rule of law, but also of the standards, ethics and legitimation
patterns of interreligious and trans-spiritual dialogue.
All these trajectories are interconnected, in one way or another, by
a broadening request for certainties. People long for better integrated
patterns of meaning, order, understanding and sense. This request is no
longer limited to Western or Eastern needs but marks a trend that seems
to have caught the whole globe at the interface between secular progres-
sivism and the revival of spirituality. A new hunger for (old or new)
metaphysical grounding accompanies and drives the present transforma-
tion, further accentuated by paradigm shifts in the general mindset such
as “post-postmodernism” and “meta-modernism” mainly in European-
Western open societies. “Post-postmodernism” and “meta-modernism”
are the main cultural trends that mirror the socio-psychological situation
in advanced post-industrial “risk societies.” They both aim to reconcile
the “deconstructive” nominalism that has dominated Western democ-
racies in the educational and intellectual fields over the past 30 years

17 Manfred Steger and Paul James: Globalization Matters. Engaging the Global in
Unsettled Times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019.
 1 OVERVIEW: A “LOSS-OF-CONTROL” AGE? 9

with a more “constructive” realism which may encompass new “substan-

tialisms,” including religion and spirituality. In this sense, re-globalization
is (partly) renewing the medieval dispute about the problem of universals:
whether there are universals beyond the appearances, whether they “exist”
independently of material perceptions, and ultimately, whether immaterial
“essence” (conceived as unchangeable) can be reconciled with material
“becoming.”
What needs, re-globalization means that we see a widespread “loss-of-
control” psychology searching for a new Archimedic point, i.e., for a point
of overview and integration, of new meaning and new balances. What role
does religion play in—and for—such an epochal “global systemic shift”18 ?
And how is itself transformed by it?
The following pages assert that in re-globalization times there are
twenty-one trends to consider to answer these questions. These trends
include the productive dialectics between ideologies, currents and factions
among and within current religious and spiritual approaches as well as
the typological, institutional and practical differences and intersections
between religion and spirituality. Factors to take into account in analyzing
the twenty-one trends are the different terminologies and conceptual
self-reflections developed by—and applied to—both religion and spir-
ituality in diverse settings by different actors. Overall, what needs to
be observed in the greater moving picture are the multifarious inter-
relations implicit in the interface between religion and the developing
political, cultural and social realities—interrelations which are a produc-
tive force for re-globalization in both progressive and regressive ways.
The influence of religion and spirituality is not limited to culture and
psychology in international relations in the strict sense but touches upon
the pillars of the existing global order structure, their underlying value

18 Roland Benedikter: Global Systemic Shift. A Multidimensional Approach to

Understand the Present Phase of Globalization. In: Saskia Sassen, Nayan Chanda,
Akira Iriye and Bruce Mazlish (eds.): New Global Studies. De Gruyter and
Berkeley Electronic Press, Berkeley and Berlin 2013, Volume 7, Issue 1, April
2013, pp. 1–15, http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ngs.2013.7.issue-1/ngs-2012-005/
ngs-2012-005.xml?format=INT (last accessed December 15, 2020). Cf. Roland Benedikter
and Katja Siepmann: Global Systemic Shift Redux: The State of the Art. In. Saskia
Sassen, Nayan Chanda, Akira Iriye and Bruce Mazlish (eds.): New Global Studies. De
Gruyter and Berkeley Electronic Press, Berkeley and New York 2015, Volume 9, Issue 2,
August 2015, pp. 167–198, http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ngs.2015.9.issue-2/ngs-
2015-0014/ngs-2015-0014.xml (last accessed December 15, 2020).
10 R. BENEDIKTER

system and their implications for the—perhaps unprecedented—multitude

of different lifestyles affected by re-globalization.
This overview thus focuses on the penetrating power of religion and
spirituality with regard to the vast variety of contemporary realities,
including realities that are still in the making.
 CHAPTER 2

Introduction: Transfiguring
the Ground—Religion in Our Days:
Between Return, Revival and Renewal

Describes the character of religion and spirituality in the present global

transition as floating between progressive, regressive and hybrid trends.

There are profound differences in the assessment, evaluation and critical

judgment of the place of religion and spirituality in the contemporary debate.
This includes substantially different viewpoints regarding the conditions and
roles of often incomparable contexts and even incommensurable pretexts
and use of terminology. For example, among the highly contested issues
currently debated is gender language applied to religion, relating to the
gender question more generally. The dispute about the very primordial
conceptual frameworks of how to discuss basic topics at all is producing
deeper ramifications on the self-understanding of the religious debate in
the more specific sense, too. For instance, as one of many organizations
in the Western world, the German Catholic Youth Association (Bund der
Deutschen Katholischen Jugend, BDKJ ) with its 80,000 official members has
been arguing whether to “provide god with a gender star or a plus letter”1 in
order to make the term “god” trans-gender adequate (and as a consequence

1 Bild Zeitung: Diskussion bei den jungen Katholiken: Bekommt Gott ein Gender-
Kreuz? [Discussion among young Catholics: Will god get a gender star?], October 28,
2021, https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/politik-inland/gendern-gott-mit-gendersternc
hen-oder-pluszeichen-thema-bei-den-jungen-katholike-78082474.bild.html (last accessed
November 1, 2021).

© Eurac Research 2022 11

R. Benedikter, Religion in the Age of Re-Globalization,
Culture and Religion in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80857-0_2
12 R. BENEDIKTER

in the medium or long term probably also its content). Although termino-
logical reframing still remains a phenomenon largely confined to trends in
Western open societies and thus might be regarded as marginal from the view
of other global areas, it may expand over the coming years both within and
beyond Western democratic systems. The rebranding of language in the reli-
gious realm could produce profound, yet probably rather non-consensual
and inhomogenous fallout with regard to both the self-understanding and
the guiding imaginaries of religion, as well as on related issues of political
correctness, tolerance, and inter-religious dialogue, including the dialogue
between “patriarchic” and “post-patriarchic” concepts and imaginaries.
Whatever the outcome of such attempts to historic re-conceptualizations
may be, one thing at least seems to be rather common ground: religion, in
the very basic and common (pre-scientific at first) understanding of the term,
plays a pivotal role for—and within—contemporary and upcoming change.
Most observers would agree: religion, understood as a specific relation to
orientation, meaning and metaphysics, is co-transfiguring the ground on
which the contemporary historical passage stands. But the question is, how
exactly, and with which perspectives is it doing that?
Rarely has the topic been so multifaceted and pluri-involved as today—
and rarely has it been discussed so controversially. Some observe a new
coexistence, if not convergence of religion with politics, culture and the
social both in open and closed societies. Others think this is just a tempo-
rary phenomenon. Be it as it may, the variety of religious and spiritual
trends that characterizes the current global landscape is transfiguring the
ground on which globalization has been standing. The new importance
of religion requires a sound investigation into its very diverse contempo-
rary fields of application, which are all connected by the common purpose
of re-ligio, to “relate,” as the word says, the present to the past, and the
realities that are phenomenologically present on an experiential basis to an
ultimate, unchanging ground. We need an encompassing critical debate
that assets, acknowledges and integrates the many pieces of the puzzle to
facilitate dialogue for the benefit of a changing world. This book tries to
identify some crucial building stones for such a debate.
The following pages draft a (by no means complete) map of the current
ecosystem of religion. They sketch a brief introduction to what many
conceive as a crucial driving dynamic of today’s world: the new conflu-
ence of religion with a vast multitude of timely developments in politics,
cultures and social spheres. Religion in our age has become both a mirror
and driver of global change, and the two roles often interfere with or
 2 INTRODUCTION: TRANSFIGURING THE GROUND … 13

strengthen each other. Far from being outdated, as parts of Europe and
the secular West believed from the 1990s until the 2010s, its return as
a new-old core actor is occurring through—and decisively contributing
to—the current phase of “re-globalization.”
What is going on? And why, and to what extent could the phase of
“re-globalization” become a catalyst for the return, and perhaps even for
the further rise of religion and spirituality?
“Re-globalization” is an experimental term coined by us,2 an array
of scholars3 and politicians4 to describe the present historical passage
in which globalization is undergoing its allegedly deepest transformation
since its post-Cold-War, neoliberal and “post-modern” inception with the
fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism in 1991.
It is a phase that we, together with researchers like Tony Payne,5 but
also politicians like Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya,6
call “re-globalization,” because it doesn’t only put globalization to the
probably most fundamental, if not existential test since the 1990s, but
also “reboots” it to some extent. The fact that a leading globalization

2 Roland Benedikter, Ingrid Kofler: Globalization’s Current Transition Phase: The 5R’s.
In: Global-e. A Global Studies Journal, edited by the 21st Century Global Dynamics
Initiative (GDI), University of California at Santa Barbara, Volume 12, August 29, 2019,
Issue 36, Series Re-Globalization, Tome 1, https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/aug
ust-2019/globalization-s-current-transition-phase-5-r-s (last accessed October 18, 2020).
Cf. Essay series “Re-globalization” (since 2019) in: Global-e, loc cit., https://www.21g
lobal.ucsb.edu/global-e/global-e-series/re-globalization (last accessed October 18, 2020).
3 Wolfram Elsner: Globalization, De-globalization, Re-globalization. A Conceptual Frame
on Old Globalization, De-globalization pre and under Corona, and the Restructuring of
VACs “Post Corona”. A preprint published in: ResearchGate, July 2020, https://www.
researchgate.net/publication/342833438_Globalization_De-Globalization_Re-Globaliza
tion_A_Conceptual_Frame_on_Old_Globalization_De-Globalization_pre_and_under_Cor
ona_and_the_Restructuring_of_VACs_post_Corona_1 (last accessed October 16, 2020).
4 Mehmet Ozturk and Busra Nur Bilgic Cakmak: Re-globalization Is Hall-
mark of Post-COVID-19 World: Spanish Minister. In: Anadolu Agency (AA),
July 28, 2020, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/health/exclusive-re-globalization-is-hallmark-
of-post-covid-19-world-spanish-minister/1924990# (last accessed October 18, 2020).
5 Tony Payne: ‘De-globalization’ or ‘Re-globalization’? The Former Is the New
Project of the Populist Right; the Latter Needs to be the New Vision of the Centre-
Left. In: speri. Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield,
January 23, 2017, http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/01/23/de-globalisation-or-re-glo
balisation/ (last accessed October 15, 2020).
6 Mehmet Ozturk and Busra Nur Bilgic Cakmak: Re-globalization Is Hallmark of Post-
COVID-19 World, loc cit.
14 R. BENEDIKTER

journal such as Globalizations is now dedicating a special issue to “re-

globalization”7 is a sign that the idea is taking hold and is gradually
asserting itself as an analytical concept. Theorists such as Matthew Louis
Bishop, Ben Clift, Te-Anne Robles, James Scott and Rorden Wilkinson
are beginning to form a critical mass of discussion and to theorize
“re-globalization”.8
Their common blueprint is in essence, that if “de-globalization” has
been the project of the radical currents in contemporary socio-political
thought and activism leading to new nationalisms and confrontation,
“re-globalization” must be the answer by the moderate and center-
oriented movements9 which try to improve globalization by renewing its
main pillars and saving international cooperation, not by demolishing its
fundamentals. As Tony Payne put it,

Globalisation… can be reformed; there is actually quite a lot that states

could do collectively, at least potentially, to reshape globalisation for the
future into a different, and much more attractive, economic, social and
political process. States have acted previously to construct or adjust global
orders….10

On the other hand, the term is often exploited and misappropriated by

authoritarian and repressive regimes such as China11 as a legitimation of
their allegedly “new” contribution to globalization, i.e., their attempts of
undermining the liberal global order by the means of regressive patterns,
which is not meant by us and has nothing to do with the progress

7 Globalizations, Volume 18, Issue 1, 2021, Reglobalization, https://www.tandfonline.

com/toc/rglo20/18/1?nav=tocList (last accessed November 18, 2020).
8 Vgl. Matthew Louis Bishop and Anthony Payne: The Political Economies of Different
Globalizations: Theorizing Reglobalization. In: Globalizations, Volume 18, Issue 1, 2021,
Reglobalization, pp. 1–21, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.
2020.1779963.
9 Tony Payne: ‘De-globalization’ or ‘re-globalization’? The Former Is the New Project
of the Populist Right; the Latter Needs to Be the New Vision of the Centre-Left, loc cit.
10 Ibid.
11 Wang Dong, Cao Dejun: Re-globalization (Chinese Edition), Social Sciences
Academic Press (SSAP) (China), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing
2018.
 2 INTRODUCTION: TRANSFIGURING THE GROUND … 15

mentioned by Payne. Something similar is undertaken with the term re-

globalization by “steered democracies” such as Russia12 whose elite tends
to adapt it to its own interests and views. Taken together, re-globalization
as of today retains two very different and colliding meanings: one oriented
toward progress, the other one toward regress. Both must be considered
to an equal extent (and simultaneously) in assessing the current state and
future trajectories of religion on the world stage.
In essence, what is widely undisputed despite this differing termino-
logical use is that after an incubation phase of roughly three decades
(1990–2020), globalization is currently undergoing a “reset” process
which seems to be underway on all levels of the international stage—
both in open and closed, liberal and illiberal, pluralistic and authoritarian
systems. “Re-globalization” means that globalization as we knew it
is fundamentally put into question: if and how it should be refined,
reframed, reformed, redefined or revisioned. Such skeptical review is
caused by the effects of neoliberal globalization such as rising inequality,
and by overarching global crises such as the migration and environ-
mental crises connected with dwindling trust in information and elites
and the perception that local citizen needs have decoupled from global-
ization logics. Over the past few years this has led, through an escalation
of stages, to a trend toward renationalization, the rise of populisms
and globalization-critical youth movements such as Fridays-for-Future
or Extinction Rebellion (XR, shared by adults), as well as to a crisis of
almost all international institutions. The coming-into-existence of a multi-
polar global order with illiberal and authoritarian societies now taking the
lead on crucial fields of international cooperation, and pandemics such
as the Coronavirus have also interrupted the habitual global system and
shrugged off well-known securities believed to be safe.
Overall, the multiplying of crises, growing uncertainty, and the simul-
taneous break-up of many layers of known patterns imagined as secure
have triggered a new request for religion and spirituality in a way rarely
seen since the end of World War II. They have furthered a new craving
for orientation among all strata of global populations often identified
with the need for “ultimate values” and metaphysics. Re-globalization

12 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2016, organized by Roscongress: Re-

globalization: Tectonic Shifts in the Geo-economic Landscape, 17 June 2016, https://
roscongress.org/en/sessions/reglobalizatsiya-otkhod-ot-universalnykh-pravil/about/ (last
accessed October 18, 2020).
16 R. BENEDIKTER

is, as one of its core aspects, about reinventing and re-involving (or even
re-evolving) religion in prominent roles in many, if not all typological
dimensions of global change by varying, broadening and recalibrating the
spectrum of its organizations, expressions, concepts, habits and applica-
tions. This has created an overly complex conundrum of where “religion”
is or may be moving, if it is not a left-behind, outdated or overcome issue
at all. Contradictory or directly mutually opposed trends such as the “spir-
itualization of everyday life,” “scattered religion” or “implicit religion”
go hand in hand with the open re-politicization of religion and neo-
fundamentalist movements, as seen in the Islamic, Christian and Hinduist
worlds. The manyfold current trends toward re-religionization and re-
spiritualization produce a variety of trajectories, including some unwanted
ones. On the one hand, increasingly more actors of re-globalization are
(re-)adjusting and (re-)using religion as a tool and instrument for their
purposes. On the other hand, many of them are in turn influenced
and transformed by religion, both consciously and unconsciously, and
often even against their will. While the reader reads these lines, all these
ongoings are underway, with an open outcome.
Despite such complexity of the contemporary process of interweave-
ment between religion and globalization toward re-globalization, one
thing is sure: religion and re-globalization are increasingly pushing each
other. This occurs in the forms of return, revival and renewal of religion—
three different paths and options which are not the same and cannot be
reduced to each other. They vary contextually and interact in multifarious
ways. Particularly, the mutual realignment between religion, spirituality,
values and public rational debate in open European-Western societies
seems to be triggered by a paradigm shift towards both more poly-valent
and inclusive traits of what is considered “rational” and “common sense.”
These are the elements that we will investigate closer in the following
pages.
 CHAPTER 3

A Shifting Global Scenery: The Age

of Re-globalization

Interprets the current rupture and reset of globalization as “re-globalization.”

Re-globalization consists of a crisis-driven renewal of many of the “classi-
cal” neoliberal-cosmopolitan globalization’s basic features, mechanisms and
structures.

Re-globalization1 is a relatively new term. It intends to frame and charac-

terize the most recent phase of globalization: the phase we are currently
in. Although the term is not undisputed,2 in every respect still in
the making and must be contextualized according to different environ-
ments, it serves as a connecting bond between a variety of phenomena
that suggest that globalization has entered a phase of transition, if not
profound transformation. In fact, for a couple of years now, the dynamics

1 Cf. Roland Benedikter: Re-Globalization: Aspects of a heuristic umbrella term

trying to encompass contemporary change. An introductory overview. Book chapter 1.
In: Roland Benedikter, Ingrid Kofler, Mirjam Gruber (eds.): Re-Globalization: New
Frontiers of Political, Economic and Social Globalization. Routledge book series:
Rethinking Globalizations, Volume 95, London et al.: Routledge / Wiley &
Sons 2022, https://www.routledge.com/Re-Globalization-New-Frontiers-of-Political-Eco
nomic-and-Social-Globalization/Benedikter-Gruber-Kofler/p/book/9780367642846.
2 Barrie Axford: Where Globalities Are Made. In: Global-e. A Global Studies Journal,
edited by the 21st Century Global Dynamics Initiative (GDI), University of California at
Santa Barbara, Volume 13, February 28, 2020, Issue 12, Series Re-globalization, https://
www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/february-2020/where-globalities-are-made (last accessed
October 21, 2020).
© Eurac Research 2022 17
R. Benedikter, Religion in the Age of Re-Globalization,
Culture and Religion in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80857-0_3
18 R. BENEDIKTER

of “re-globalization,” i.e., of both rethinking and remodeling known

globalization patterns due to increasing rifts and ruptures, are affecting
most, if not all aspects of globalized practices, habits and lifestyles. As
Ingrid Kofler and I described the current situation of transition,

Globalization as we have known it for the past nearly three decades seems
to be stagnating—or at least it is changing its face. The international
economy is no longer growing as fast as before; states are increasingly re-
orienting themselves around the national imaginary, and trade agreements
are breaking down. Social inequalities intensify public dissatisfaction in
both open and closed systems, while refugee and migration flows increase.
Global forms of terrorism wars increase insecurity and fear. Meanwhile,
political, economic, and military balances are in flux, and tensions are
increasing in many parts of the globe. Climate change and shrinking
resources threaten the environment, inspiring the mobilization of youth
movements against the current global order. Rapid technological develop-
ment is contributing to changes in familiar norms and values, with global
internet giants forming their own trans-national institutions, economies,
and cultures within and across existing nation-states.3

Similarly, the Princeton Fung Fellowship Initiative4 2020–21 “Thinking

Globally” stated:

How people have thought about the planet has informed the institutions,
norms, and policies that have pulled it together and torn it apart. For
centuries, ideas of free trade, human rights or global governance have
framed cooperation and competition, order and disorder. Such ideas have
also spawned border-crossing movements, from campaigns to end slavery
to commitments to reduce carbon emissions. In turn, global thinking and
action have often reinforced commitments to national ideas and efforts to
curb global exchange… Nowadays… cooperative norms [are] under chal-
lenge, global institutions under stress, and a century of guiding ideas about
global convergence in doubt… [Where are] the prospects for intellectual
renewal or rethinking [?] The goal… will be to explore the ways people
learned to… imagine how global relationships came to be and could be
different.5

3 Roland Benedikter, Ingrid Kofler: Globalization’s Current Transition Phase: The 5R’s,
loc cit.
4 Princeton Fung Fellowship Initiative 2020–21: Thinking Globally, https://piirs.prince
ton.edu/funggfp (last accessed October 26, 2020).
5 Ibid.
 3 A SHIFTING GLOBAL SCENERY: THE AGE OF RE-GLOBALIZATION 19

Indeed, due to the ascent and increasing global outreach of illiberal

powers, made decisively possible and fostered by globalization, in the
meantime some even have posited the question whether globalization and
globalism are the real “threats to democracy.”6
Others, for the present phase, think of re-globalization as “reversed
globalization” in the first place—not least in the framework and aftermath
of the Coronavirus crisis of 2020, which put half of the global population
into forced lockdown.7 It and its lasting implications and follow-ups not
only “hit individualism and consumerism as we have known them hard,”8
triggering a new search for meaning and purpose, as the bishop of the
Italian town of Lodi put it. The global pandemic may also have changed
the basic perception of boundlessness, internationalization and globaliza-
tion toward rather negative connotations for years, and perhaps even in
(unconsciously) lasting ways for a good part of the public, experts and
politicians. The turnaround in the perception of globalization all started
with economics, but didn’t remain limited to it:

Globalisation has been one of the buzzwords of the past 25 years. It

may seem a rather strange concept, since any economic historian will tell
you that people have been trading across vast distances for centuries, if
not millennia… But globalisation is really about the scale and speed of
international business, which has exploded in the past few decades to
unprecedented levels. Easier travel, the world wide web, the end of the
Cold War, trade deals, and new, rapidly developing economies, have all

6 Oren M. Levin-Waldman: Globalism and Inequality Are the Real Threats to Our
Democracy. In: Challenge, Volume 63, January 3, 2020, Issue 2, Routledge/Taylor &
Francis Group, online version to be found at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.
1080/05775132.2019.1709725 (last accessed October 21, 2020).
7 Juliana Kaplan, Lauren Frias, and Morgan McFall-Johnsen: Our Ongoing List of
Which Countries Are Reopening, and Which Ones Remain Under Lockdown. In: Business
Insider, September 23, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-on-lockdown-
coronavirus-italy-2020-3?IR=T (last accessed October 21, 2020).
8 Ulrich Ladurner: Coronavirus in Italien: „Wir haben uns allmächtig gefühlt“. Den
Menschen im Norden Italiens ging es gut. Doch die Corona-Krise habe dem ‚Indi-
vidualismus und Konsumismus‘ dort einen Schlag versetzt, sagt der Bischof von Lodi
[Coronavirus in Italy: “We felt almighty”. The People in the North of Italy Were Going
Well. But the Corona Crisis Dealt a Blow to ‘Individualism and Consumerism’ There, Says
the Bishop of Lodi]. In: Zeit Online, April 5, 2020, https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/
zeitgeschehen/2020-04/coronavirus-italien-bischof-lodi-maurizio-malvestiti (last accessed
November 4, 2020).
20 R. BENEDIKTER

combined to create a system that is much more dependent now on what

is happening on the other side of the world than it ever was.
Which is why the spread of coronavirus, or Covid-19 to be specific,
[in 2020] has had such an immediate economic effect. Professor Beata
Javorcik, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, says that the pace of change in the global economy over just
the past 17 years has been profound. ‘When we look back at 2003, at the
Sars epidemic, China accounted for 4% of global output,’ she says. ‘Now
China accounts for four times as much, 16%. So that means that what-
ever is happening in China affects the world to a much larger extent’…
But this is not just a matter of scale - there is also a deeper problem
with globalisation. Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation and development
at Oxford University, and author of ‘The Butterfly Defect: How Glob-
alization Creates Systemic Risks, And What To Do About It’, says that
‘risks have been allowed to fester, they are the underbelly of globalisation’.
That, he says, can be seen not only in this crisis, but also in the credit
crunch and banking crisis of 2008, and the vulnerability of the internet
to cyber-attacks. The new global… system brings huge benefits, but also
huge risks.9

According to Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, the “butterfly defect” of

globalization started in the 1990s and consists of

Global hyperconnectivity and increased system integration [which] have led

to vast benefits, including worldwide growth in incomes, education, inno-
vation, and technology. But rapid globalization has also created concerns
because the repercussions of local events now cascade over national
borders, and the fallout of financial meltdowns and environmental disasters
affects everyone. [There is a] widening gap between systemic risks and their
effective management… The new dynamics of turbo-charged globaliza-
tion has the potential and power to destabilize our societies… The current
complexities of globalization will not be sustainable as surprises become
more frequent and have widespread impacts. The recent financial crisis
exemplifies the new form of systemic risk that will characterize the coming
decades... Systemic risk issues are now endemic everywhere—in supply
chains, pandemics, infrastructure, ecology and climate change, economics,
and politics. Unless we are better able to address these concerns, they
will lead to greater protectionism, xenophobia, nationalism, and, inevitably,

9 Jonty Bloom: Will Coronavirus Reverse Globalisation? In: BBC News Business,
April 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52104978 (last accessed October
21, 2020).
 3 A SHIFTING GLOBAL SCENERY: THE AGE OF RE-GLOBALIZATION 21

deglobalization, rising conflict, and slower growth… Mitigating uncer-

tainty and systemic risk in an interconnected world is an essential task
for our future.10

It is exactly this “butterfly defect” that is now leading to increasing

efforts of “re-globalization.” This includes a (re-)mobilization of reli-
gious value structures and beliefs by a variety of actors for “mitigating
uncertainty” both individually and collectively, and with a variety of very
diverse and often contradictory interests, aims and goals involved. As BBC
analyst Jonty Bloom judged, the current insight in retrospect over the past
decades is that globalization

while it has helped raise incomes, rapidly develop economies and lift
millions out of poverty, has come at the increased risk of contagion, be
it financial or medical. So what does this latest crisis mean for globaliza-
tion? For Prof Richard Portes, professor of economics at London Business
School, it seems obvious that things will have to change, because firms and
people have now realised what risks they had been taking. ‘Look at trade,’
he explains. ‘Once supply chains were disrupted [by coronavirus], people
started looking for alternative suppliers at home, even if they were more
expensive. If people find domestic suppliers, they will stick with them…
because of those perceived risks.’ Professor Javorcik agrees… ‘Companies…
will re-shore activities that can be automated, because re-shoring brings
certainty.’11

Such “re-shoring” may be the case, in quite natural ways, also with regard
to the cognitive, moral, and spiritual “superstructure” of economic and
political re-globalization: a “re-shoring” of values. This kind of re-shoring
would occur, most probably, to the experientially proven value structure

10 Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan: The Butterfly Defect: How Globaliza-
tion Creates Systemic Risks, and What To Do About It. Princeton University
Press, 2014, https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/the-butterfly-defect-how-
globalization-creates-systemic-risks-and-what-to-do-about-it/ (last accessed November 4,
2020). Cf. Ian Goldin Homepage: The Butterfly Defect (2014), https://iangol
din.org/books/the-butterfly-defect/ (last accessed November 4, 2020); and Oxford
Martin School, Oxford University: “The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates
Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It” with Prof Ian Goldin, November 10,
2014, https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/the-butterfly-defect-how-globalization-
creates-systemic-risks-and-what-to-do-about-it/ (last accessed November 4, 2020).
11 Jonty Bloom: Will Coronavirus Reverse Globalisation?, loc cit.
22 R. BENEDIKTER

of one’s own environment and context, which is always and unavoidably

co-influenced by the religious history of a place. While now such a “re-
shoring” of values seems to be not simply a neo-conservative program, it
could trigger a de-internationalization shift from purely secular values—
which were conceived to be the only ones capable of becoming truly
globalized as part of a meta-civilizational unification strategy after WWII
and 1968—to more geographically confined values also within, in prin-
ciple, continued cosmopolitan elites. And it is more plausible than
not that such re-confinement would, in principle, strengthen the re-
religionization of value structures. The question is less if there will be
such a trend over the coming years, but rather how it will unfold:

The idea that globalisation is just about moving manufacturing or supply

chains… is too simple. It has also led to massive increases in foreign
students willing to pay to study at our colleges and universities, and a
huge influx of wealthy tourists who want to spend money here, to name
just two service sector businesses. Slowing or even reversing globalisation
would hit those industries very hard indeed… The real concern is, however,
not whether… changes happen, but how far they go, and how they will
be managed? […] Will globalisation be reversed? Probably not, it is too
important an economic development for that to happen, but it could well
be slowed down. The bigger question is, however, have we learnt the
lessons…? Will we learn to spot, control and regulate the risks that seem to
be an integral part of globalisation? Because the cooperation and leadership
necessary to make that happen seem to be in short supply.12

And what is in even shorter supply, we may add, is value integration,

which is at the very basis of “cooperation and leadership.” And which is,
by far, the rarest resource in a de-globalizing world.
Overall, after various, successive concussions, the Coronavirus crisis
of 2020 in particular has led to a halt of what some branded as
“exaggerated globalization”—for example in the field of critical medical
production, which Europe has recently decided to engage in again instead
of making itself 80 percent dependent on Asia and China. Dubbed the
globe’s “greatest test since WWII”13 by the U.N. secretary-general, many

12 Ibid.
13 BBC News World: Coronavirus: Greatest Test Since World War Two, Says UN Chief,
April 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52114829 (last accessed October 21,
2020).
 3 A SHIFTING GLOBAL SCENERY: THE AGE OF RE-GLOBALIZATION 23

asserted the shockwaves of the Corona crisis may reshape globaliza-

tion,14 or could even remake the entire global order.15 Many observers,
such as Yuval Noah Harari,16 decried a lack of joint global leader-
ship because of renationalization trends and their “MeFirst” mindset,
and that “xenophobia, isolationism and distrust now characterize most
of the international system.” Other analysts asserted that Corona deci-
sively accelerated both the de- and re-globalization debate—i.e., both
passive and active, conservative and progressive approaches to reform
and renewal—also in highly globalized and therefore previously skep-
tical nations such as Germany or Western and Central European nations.
Because it “put globalization at risk”,17 it also underscored the needs for
its renewal in rather drastic ways.
More importantly, the Coronavirus crisis has shown how fast and easy
it is to subvert globalization patterns thought to be solid and untouch-
able, uncovering the fundamental vulnerability of a global system which
probably had never been as secure and stable as it was depicted by its
propagators and perceived by the media and the public after decades of
routine. Some have even dubbed the Coronavirus just the last factor of a
“death knell” for globalization18 in a longer row that started with 9/11,

14 Javi López: The Coronavirus a Geopolitical Earthquake. In: European Council on

Foreign Relations, April 2, 2020, https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_the_corona
virus_a_geopolitical_earthquake (last accessed October 21, 2020).
15 Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi: The Coronavirus Could Reshape Global Order.
China Is Maneuvering for International Leadership as the United States Falters. In:
Foreign Affairs, March 18, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-
03-18/coronavirus-could-reshape-global-order?utm_medium=promo_email&utm_source=
pre_release&utm_campaign=special_send_pei_china_coming_upheaval_regusers&utm_con
tent=20200403&utm_term=registrant-prerelease (last accessed October 21, 2020).
16 Yuval Noah Harari: In the Battle Against Coronavirus, Humanity Lacks Leadership.
In: Time, March 15, 2020, https://time.com/5803225/yuval-noah-harari-coronavirus-
humanity-leadership/ (last accessed October 21, 2020).
17 Mark Leonard’s World in 30 Minutes: Corona Angst—How the Virus
Puts the European Project and Globalisation at Risk. In: Soundcloud, March
18, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/ecfr/corona-angst-how-the-virus-puts-the-european-
project-and-globalisation-at-risk (last accessed November 3, 2020).
18 Philippe Legrain: The Coronavirus Is Killing Globalization as We Know It. The
Outbreak Has Been a Gift to Nativist Nationalists and Protectionists, and It Is Likely to
Have a Long-Term Impact on the Free Movement of People and Goods. In: Foreign
Policy, March 12, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-killing-glo
balization-nationalism-protectionism-trump/ (last accessed October 21, 2020).
24 R. BENEDIKTER

continued with the global financial and economic crisis in 2007–08 and
the migration crisis since 2015, and culminated in the global renational-
ization (and partly de-solidarization) of Corona times, which were, in the
eyes of some, “killing globalization.”19 While this was most probably a
judgment too hasty for globalization as a whole, it came with some good
arguments for a variety of single sectors, including the vast and particu-
larly complex contemporary field of secular versus spiritual and religious
values behind and within contemporary ongoings. And while the post-
Coronavirus scenarios20 were (and continue to be) multiple and often
range from the speculative to the sometimes adventurous or fantastic, the
impact of the global pandemic on values, spirituality and religion—and
on the dramatic amplification of re-globalization trends in general—has
been highly visible and intensely debated.
In fact, while the Coronavirus crisis of 2019–21 gave a push to global
future technologies such as advanced robotics,21 with China using disin-
fecting robots and thermal camera-equipped drones among other gadgets
to fight the virus,22 its perhaps even more dramatic impact has been
the revival of religious rhetoric in the public space of secular Western
nations—which many have seen as one decisive aspect of re-globalization
already underway. For example, then US President Trump declared
March 15, 2020 a “national day of prayer”23 over the Coronavirus crisis.
With regard to New York, the headlines of global media declared: “Young

19 Ibid.
20 Frederik van Til: Three Scenarios for Globalisation in a Post-Covid World. In: Clin-
gendael Spectator, April 1, 2020, https://spectator.clingendael.org/nl/publicatie/three-
scenarios-globalisation-post-covid-19-world (last accessed October 21, 2020).
21 Rana Jawad: Coronavirus: Tunisia Deploys Police Robot on Lockdown Patrol. In:
BBC News World/Africa, April 3, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-521
48639 (last accessed October 21, 2020).
22 Pratik Jakhar: Coronavirus: China’s Tech Fights Back. In: BBC News Tech, March
3, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51717164 (last accessed October 21,
2020).
23 Donald J. Trump: Proclamation on the National Day of Prayer for all Americans
Affected by the Corona Pandemic and for our National Response Efforts. In: The White
House, Washington, DC, March 14, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-act
ions/proclamation-national-day-prayer-americans-affected-coronavirus-pandemic-national-
response-efforts/ (last accessed October 21, 2020).
 3 A SHIFTING GLOBAL SCENERY: THE AGE OF RE-GLOBALIZATION 25

doctors asked to play god”24 by having to select those who deserved

priority treatments due to a shortage of beds and equipment. And when
the world during the crisis became calmer as a whole—even in its overall
cosmic movement25 —this was interpreted by some as a “cosmic rebal-
ancing” sign which, allegedly, furthered meditation and self-awareness
of humanity, not least in the form of a spreading a variety of pre- or
proto-spiritualities.
Religious connotations reached from praise about how fast religious
practices were adapted to new circumstances26 in all major religions, to
warnings against religious mass-gatherings and against using crises “to sell
religion,”27 to assertions such as that “in a pandemic, religion can be a
balm and a risk,”28 to advise on how religious leaders can help to stop
the spread of the virus29 and to the adaptation of religious judgments
to the potential impact of ruptures such as Coronavirus on religion and
the international system,30 as Gökhan Bacik observed, giving particular

24 Jon Sopel: Coronavirus: The Young Doctors Being Asked to Play God. In: BBC
News World/US & Canada, April 2, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can
ada-52137160 (last accessed October 22, 2020).
25 Bild Zeitung: Planet im Ruhemodus. Corona lässt die Erde weniger
wackeln [Planet in Sleep Mode. Corona Makes the Earth Shake Less], April
3, 2020, https://www.bild.de/news/2020/news/corona-laesst-die-erde-weniger-wackeln-
planet-im-ruhemodus-69829924.bild.html (last accessed November 3, 2020).
26 France 24: Religion in Conservative Mideast Adapts to Coronavirus. March 22,
2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200322-religion-in-conservative-mideast-adapts-
to-coronavirus (last accessed October 22, 2020).
27 Jane Dalton: Coronavirus: Christians Must Not Use Pandemic to Sell Reli-
gion, Says Church Leader. ‘The Challenge Is Not to Become a Good Salespeople
of Religion as Much as Free Gifts of God’s Grace’. In: Independent, March 26,
2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-religion-faith-
church-christian-martyn-atkins-a9427816.html (last accessed October 22, 2020).
28 Vivian Yee: In a Pandemic, Religion Can Be a Balm and a Risk. As Scien-
tists and Politicians Struggle for a Response to the Coronavirus, Many People Are
Turning to Faith. But Some Practices Raise Public Health Concerns. In: The New York
Times, March 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/world/middleeast/cor
onavirus-religion.html (last accessed October 22, 2020).
29 Elaine Howard Ecklund: How Religious Leaders Can Help Stop the Spread of Coro-
navirus. In: Time, March 21, 2020, https://time.com/5807372/coronavirus-religion-sci
ence/ (last accessed October 22, 2020).
30 Gökhan Bacik: The Coronavirus and Its Impact on Religion and the Interna-
tional System. In: Ahval News, March 19, 2020, https://ahvalnews.com/turkey-corona
virus/coronavirus-and-its-impact-religion-and-international-system (last accessed October
22, 2020).
26 R. BENEDIKTER

attention to the religiously “conservative” Middle East where the ruptures

in globalization are creating a new generation of religious youth:

It is important not to politicize this struggle. For example, one should not
be like the Muslims who claim the virus has confirmed the truth of their
religion, nor like the many socialists who say that governments’ distribu-
tion of free testing kits and similar initiatives has proven socialism to be
true. These are all problematic takes… There are different ways to read the
political impact of the coronavirus. One could say that the virus has eroded
globalization… COVID-19 is also eroding the reputation of the modern
state. The public discourse over the coronavirus may also vary according to
region. In Turkey, India and Iran, for example, the relationship between
religion and science is referenced during debate. New York Magazine
columnist Ed Kilgore has said the coronavirus is testing organised reli-
gion, and that as a result people could begin to view crowded religious
rituals with suspicion once the pandemic is over. This could lead religious
people toward a more individualistic faith. This debate could also lead to
the concepts of religious worship and innovations being linked again. For
example, it could lead to the production of single-use prayer rugs for situ-
ations where a person has run late for prayers and finds themselves rushing
with wet feet after quickly performing ritual ablutions.31

But according to Bacik, this is by no means all:

A broader debate could form around the theoretical relationship between

religion and science. In countries like Turkey and Iran, the arguments
triggered by the arrival of the virus have rocked the popular image of
religion, particularly among younger generations. For example, the ideas
of the popular cleric Abbas Tabrizian, who found fame preaching about
faith-based treatments of illnesses, have become an object of mockery for
young Iranians. We can see that traditional religious commentators are at a
loss on how to define their mission and what they can contribute to topics
like the coronavirus… Take Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, or
Diyanet, which finally announced… that it was suspending congregational
prayers in mosques. The decision saved Diyanet from the high degree of
damage it could have suffered in the biggest challenge to its legitimacy of
recent times. Whichever religion they are from, events like the Pope’s self-
isolation and the closure of Islam’s holiest site, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, will
hold a much bigger place in young people’s memories. I believe that there

31 Ibid.
 3 A SHIFTING GLOBAL SCENERY: THE AGE OF RE-GLOBALIZATION 27

has been a great conceptual split between faith and religion in countries
like Turkey and Iran. We are seeing the first signs of a generation that will
keep their faith, but remain distant from organised and institutionalised
religion.32

Yet, spiritual leaders have declared that due to the new, very practical,
personalized and immediate perception of global interdependency the
Coronavirus crisis brought about, it has contributed to eventually bring
the two main spiritual problems of contemporary humanity to the fore as
they deserve: the environmental issue and the transformation of emotions,
i.e., self-transformation. For example, in June 2020 when many countries
in Europe and the Western world declared the worst lockdown measures
over and lifted most restrictions imposed during the crisis for at least
three months (March to June), the Dalai Lama stated that the Coron-
avirus crisis could further “a sense of oneness of seven billion people,”33
which in his view is the main spiritual task of humanity over the coming
decades, needed to address all global problems. In his view, global emer-
gencies such as the pandemic could have contributed to the acceleration
of its development and thus unfold a proto-spiritual effect in the medium
and long term. And this would mean a strengthening of “positive” glob-
alization in the sense of a more accentuated common consciousness of
humanity at the expense of “negative” globalization such as that driven
by greed and the thirst for the expansion of power. More than that,
the Coronavirus crisis could turn out to be a catalyst of transnational
transformation toward a more spiritual view on and practice of life:

The leader of Tibetan Buddhism sees reasons for optimism even in the
midst of the coronavirus pandemic. People are helping one another…, and
if seven billion people on Earth develop ‘a sense of oneness’ they may yet
unite to solve the problem of climate change. ‘Many people don’t care
about their own safety but are helping, it is wonderful… When we face
some tragic situation, it reveals the deeper human values of compassion.
Usually people don’t think about these deeper human values, but when
they see their human brothers and sisters suffering the response comes
automatically.’ The important thing is to try not to worry too much, he

32 Ibid.
33 BBC News Stories: Dalai Lama: Seven Billion People ‘Need a Sense of Oneness’.
June 12, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53028343 (last accessed February
25, 2021).
28 R. BENEDIKTER

suggests. ‘If there is a way to overcome your situation then make effort,
no need to worry,’ he explains. ‘If truly there is no way to overcome then
it is no use to worry, you can’t do anything. You have to accept it…
We must take very seriously global warming,’ says the leader of Tibetan
Buddhism. He urges the world to invest more in wind and solar energy
and to move away from dependence on fossil fuels. The important thing,
he tells, is for us to recognise that we are not individuals alone, we depend
on the community we are a part of… ‘In the past there was too much
emphasis on my continent, my nation, my religion. Now that thinking
is out of date. Now we really need a sense of oneness of seven billion
human beings.’ This, he says, could be one of the positive things to come
out of the coronavirus crisis… The challenge ties in to another of the
Dalai Lama’s great preoccupations: education. ‘The whole world should
pay more attention to how to transform our emotions... It should be part
of education not religion. Education about peace of mind and how to
develop peace of mind. That is very important.’34

Summing up, in face of multiplying ruptures in the system of global-

ization as we knew it for the past three decades, the question arises,
and we take this as a heuristical question for what follows in this book:
Were 9/11, the financial and economic crises of 2007–08 and the Coro-
navirus crisis of 2020 just early warning signs of over-the-top global
risks—building up toward the need of re-globalization, and by that also
anticipating unknown effects on religious futures, too?

34 Ibid.
 CHAPTER 4

Re-globalization: An Array of Factors

Shaking the Fundamentals of Neoliberal
Globalization

Describes the effects of the re-globalization process on the forms of global-

ization that have been in place since the 1990s, i.e., the combination of a
neoliberal economic project with a hyper-cosmopolitan cultural mindset. These
two fundamentally different components have formed an “unholy alliance”
over decades which now presents serious fractures.

Despite their importance for the destiny of globalization, global

pandemics, financial and economic crises are not all that drives the
current trend toward re-globalization, be it constructive (i.e., positively
building) or deconstructive (i.e., implemented through dialectics of nega-
tivity, dismantling what is not working well). Borderless societies have
set free a huge mobilization of people, both as migrants and voyagers.
In the eyes of many populations around the world, along with a recent
“mobility turn”1 of often para-religious traits (mobility is treated as an

1 Thomas Faist: The Mobility Turn: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences? In: Ethnic
and Racial Studies, Volume 36, 2013, Issue 11, Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group,
pp. 1637–1646, June 25, 2013, to be found at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/
10.1080/01419870.2013.812229 (last accessed October 22, 2020).

© Eurac Research 2022 29

R. Benedikter, Religion in the Age of Re-Globalization,
Culture and Religion in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80857-0_4
30 R. BENEDIKTER

absolute value), these factors have step by step created an “exaggerated”

openness and neoliberal boundlessness.2
As a reaction, counter-forces stepped in. The result is that there are
two more forces currently in play when it comes to discussing the main
drivers of “re-globalization.” These are the two (in their own inten-
tion) “re-balancing” concepts against “exaggerated” openness of open
societies in times of hyper-connectedness: (1) “weak globalization” and
(2) “compatriot partiality,” which are not meant to undo globalization
but to improve it.3 Widely unnoticed by the greater public of liberal
societies, the rather strict cosmopolitan and sometimes openly “leftist”
stands which dominated the European and Western elites over the past
decades have been in increasingly sharp contrast to more balance-oriented
conservative scholarship, including some of the few remaining academic
religion-friendly European-Western ones.
To mention just one example, even way before the recent crises,
David Miller of Oxford University coined the terms “weak globaliza-
tion” and “compatriot partiality.”4 Although religion here consciously
plays a theoretically “weak” role in order not to involve it too much
in political or even partisan strategy fights, these concepts are about
restricting “exaggerated” globalization by providing a reasonable “pos-
itive discrimination”5 or “reasonable partiality”6 to locals in order to
avoid turning them into populism, and to strengthen local identities in
the face of de-localizing mechanisms such as the global secular advertising

2 WZB Berlin Social Science Center: The Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and
Communitarianism, https://www.wzb.eu/en/research/completed-research-programs/cos
mopolitanism-and-communitarianism (last accessed February 22, 2021).
3 Gary Pinkus, James Manyika, and Sree Ramaswamy: We Can’t Undo Globalization,
but We Can Improve It. In: Harvard Business Review, January 10, 2017, https://hbr.
org/2017/01/we-cant-undo-globalization-but-we-can-improve-it (last accessed January
12, 2021).
4 David Miller: Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2016.
5 Barbara Bertoncin: Cosmopolitismo Debole e “Compatriot Partiality” [Weak
Cosmopolitanism and ‘Compatriot Partiality’]. In: Una Città, n° 252/2018 ottobre,
https://unacitta.it/it/intervista/2657-cosmopolitismo-debole-e-compatriot-partiality (last
accessed October 22, 2020).
6 Veit Bader: Reasonable Impartiality and Priority for Compatriots. A Criticism of
Liberal Nationalism’s Main Flaws. In: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 8, pp. 83–
103 (2005), April 2005, to be found at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10
677-005-3292-6 (last accessed December 12, 2020).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
and massagecream. Ellen talked very low into the receiver. The gruff
man’s voice at the garage growled pleasantly in her ears. “Sure right
away miss.” She tiptoed springily back into the room and closed the
door.
“I thought he loved me, honestly I did Elaine. Oh men are so
dweadful. Morris was angwy because I wouldn’t live with him. I think
it would be wicked. I’d work my fingers to the bone for him, he knows
that. Havent I been doing it two years? He said he couldnt go on
unless he had me weally, you know what he meant, and I said our
love was so beautiful it could go on for years and years. I could love
him for a lifetime without even kissing him. Dont you think love
should be pure? And then he made fun of my dancing and said I was
Chalif’s mistwess and just kidding him along and we quaweled
dweadfully and he called me dweadful names and went away and
said he’d never come back.”
“Dont worry about that Cassie, he’ll come back all right.”
“No but you’re so material, Elaine. I mean spiwitually our union is
bwoken forever. Cant you see there was this beautiful divine
spiwitual thing between us and it’s bwoken.” She began to sob again
with her face pressed into Ellen’s shoulder.
“But Cassie I dont see what fun you get out of it all?”
“Oh you dont understand. You’re too young. I was like you at first
except that I wasnt mawied and didnt wun awound with men. But
now I want spiwitual beauty. I want to get it through my dancing and
my life, I want beauty everywhere and I thought Morris wanted it.”
“But Morris evidently did.”
“Oh Elaine you’re howid, and I love you so much.”
Ellen got to her feet. “I’m going to run downstairs so that the
taximan wont ring the bell.”
“But you cant go like this.”
“You just watch me.” Ellen gathered up the bundle of books in one
hand and in the other carried the black leather dressingcase. “Look
Cassie will you be a dear and show him the trunk when he comes up
to get it.... And one other thing, when Stan Emery calls up tell him to
call me at the Brevoort or at the Lafayette. Thank goodness I didnt
deposit my money last week.... And Cassie if you find any little odds
and ends of mine around you just keep em.... Goodby.” She lifted her
veil and kissed Cassie quickly on the cheeks.
“Oh how can you be so bwave as to go away all alone like this....
You’ll let Wuth and me come down to see you wont you? We’re so
fond of you. Oh Elaine you’re going to have a wonderful career, I
know you are.”
“And promise not to tell Jojo where I am.... He’ll find out soon
enough anyway.... I’ll call him up in a week.”
She found the taxidriver in the hall looking at the names above
the pushbuttons. He went up to fetch her trunk. She settled herself
happily on the dusty buff seat of the taxi, taking deep breaths of the
riversmelling morning air. The taxidriver smiled roundly at her when
he had let the trunk slide off his back onto the dashboard.
“Pretty heavy, miss.”
“It’s a shame you had to carry it all alone.”
“Oh I kin carry heavier’n ’at.”
“I want to go to the Hotel Brevoort, Fifth Avenue at about Eighth
Street.”
When he leaned to crank the car the man pushed his hat back on
his head letting ruddy curly hair out over his eyes. “All right I’ll take
you anywhere you like,” he said as he hopped into his seat in the
jiggling car. When they turned down into the very empty sunlight of
Broadway a feeling of happiness began to sizzle and soar like
rockets inside her. The air beat fresh, thrilling in her face. The
taxidriver talked back at her through the open window.
“I thought yous was catchin a train to go away somewhere, miss.”
“Well I am going away somewhere.”
“It’d be a foine day to be goin away somewhere.”
 “I’m going away from my husband.” The words popped out of her
mouth before she could stop them.
“Did he trow you out?”
“No I cant say he did that,” she said laughing.
“My wife trun me out tree weeks ago.”
“How was that?”
“Locked de door when I came home one night an wouldnt let me
in. She’d had the lock changed when I was out workin.”
“That’s a funny thing to do.”
“She says I git slopped too often. I aint goin back to her an I aint
goin to support her no more.... She can put me in jail if she likes. I’m
troo. I’m gettin an apartment on Twentysecond Avenoo wid another
feller an we’re goin to git a pianer an live quiet an lay offen the
skoits.”
“Matrimony isnt much is it?”
“You said it. What leads up to it’s all right, but gettin married is
loike de mornin after.”
Fifth Avenue was white and empty and swept by a sparkling wind.
The trees in Madison Square were unexpectedly bright green like
ferns in a dun room. At the Brevoort a sleepy French nightporter
carried her baggage. In the low whitepainted room the sunlight
drowsed on a faded crimson armchair. Ellen ran about the room like
a small child kicking her heels and clapping her hands. With pursed
lips and tilted head she arranged her toilet things on the bureau.
Then she hung her yellow nightgown on a chair and undressed,
caught sight of herself in the mirror, stood naked looking at herself
with her hands on her tiny firm appleshaped breasts.
She pulled on her nightgown and went to the phone. “Please send
up a pot of chocolate and rolls to 108 ... as soon as you can please.”
Then she got into bed. She lay laughing with her legs stretched wide
in the cool slippery sheets.
 Hairpins were sticking into her head. She sat up and pulled them
all out and shook the heavy coil of her hair down about her
shoulders. She drew her knees up to her chin and sat thinking. From
the street she could hear the occasional rumble of a truck. In the
kitchens below her room a sound of clattering had begun. From all
around came a growing rumble of traffic beginning. She felt hungry
and alone. The bed was a raft on which she was marooned alone,
always alone, afloat on a growling ocean. A shudder went down her
spine. She drew her knees up closer to her chin.
III. Nine Day’s Wonder

T
he sun’s moved to Jersey, the sun’s
behind Hoboken.
Covers are clicking on typewriters, rolltop
desks are closing; elevators go up empty,
come down jammed. It’s ebbtide in the
downtown district, flood in Flatbush,
Woodlawn, Dyckman Street, Sheepshead
Bay, New Lots Avenue, Canarsie.
Pink sheets, green sheets, gray sheets,
FULL MARKET REPORTS, FINALS ON
HAVRE DE GRACE. Print squirms among
the shopworn officeworn sagging faces, sore
fingertips, aching insteps, strongarm men
cram into subway expresses. SENATORS 8,
GIANTS 2, DIVA RECOVERS PEARLS,
$800,000 ROBBERY.
It’s ebbtide on Wall Street, floodtide in the
Bronx.
The sun’s gone down in Jersey.

“G
odamighty,” shouted Phil Sandbourne and pounded with his
fist on the desk, “I don’t think so.... A man’s morals arent
anybody’s business. It’s his work that counts.”
“Well?”
“Well I think Stanford White has done more for the city of New
York that any other man living. Nobody knew there was such a thing
as architecture before he came.... And to have this Thaw shoot him
down in cold blood and then get away with it.... By gad if the people
of this town had the spirit of guineapigs they’d——”
 “Phil you’re getting all excited over nothing.” The other man took
his cigar out of his mouth and leaned back in his swivel chair and
yawned.
“Oh hell I want a vacation. Golly it’ll be good to get out in those
old Maine woods again.”
“What with Jew lawyers and Irish judges ...” spluttered Phil.
“Aw pull the chain, old man.”
“A fine specimen of a public-spirited citizen you are Hartly.”
Hartly laughed and rubbed the palm of his hand over his bald
head. “Oh that stuff’s all right in winter, but I cant go it in summer....
Hell all I live for is three weeks’ vacation anyway. What do I care if all
the architects in New York get bumped off as long as it dont raise the
price of commutation to New Rochelle.... Let’s go eat.” As they went
down in the elevator Phil went on talking: “The only other man I ever
knew who was really a born in the bone architect was ole Specker,
the feller I worked for when I first came north, a fine old Dane he was
too. Poor devil died o cancer two years ago. Man, he was an
architect. I got a set of plans and specifications home for what he
called a communal building.... Seventyfive stories high stepped back
in terraces with a sort of hanging garden on every floor, hotels,
theaters, Turkish baths, swimming pools, department stores, heating
plant, refrigerating and market space all in the same buildin.”
“Did he eat coke?”
“No siree he didnt.”
They were walking east along Thirtyfourth Street, sparse of
people in the sultry midday. “Gad,” burst out Phil Sandbourne,
suddenly. “The girls in this town get prettier every year. Like these
new fashions, do you?”
“Sure. All I wish is that I was gettin younger every year instead of
older.”
“Yes about all us old fellers can do is watch em go past.”
 “That’s fortunate for us or we’d have our wives out after us with
bloodhounds.... Man when I think of those mighthavebeens!”
As they crossed Fifth Avenue Phil caught sight of a girl in a
taxicab. From under the black brim of a little hat with a red cockade
in it two gray eyes flash green black into his. He swallowed his
breath. The traffic roars dwindled into distance. She shant take her
eyes away. Two steps and open the door and sit beside her, beside
her slenderness perched like a bird on the seat. Driver drive to beat
hell. Her lips are pouting towards him, her eyes flutter gray caught
birds. “Hay look out....” A pouncing iron rumble crashes down on him
from behind. Fifth Avenue spins in red blue purple spirals. O Kerist.
“That’s all right, let me be. I’ll get up myself in a minute.” “Move along
there. Git back there.” Braying voices, blue pillars of policemen. His
back, his legs are all warm gummy with blood. Fifth Avenue throbs
with loudening pain. A little bell jinglejangling nearer. As they lift him
into the ambulance Fifth Avenue shrieks to throttling agony and
bursts. He cranes his neck to see her, weakly, like a terrapin on its
back; didnt my eyes snap steel traps on her? He finds himself
whimpering. She might have stayed to see if I was killed. The
jinglejangling bell dwindles fainter, fainter into the night.

The burglaralarm across the street had rung on steadily. Jimmy’s

sleep had been strung on it in hard knobs like beads on a string.
Knocking woke him. He sat up in bed with a lurch and found Stan
Emery, his face gray with dust, his hands in the pockets of a red
leather coat, standing at the foot of the bed. He was laughing
swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet.
“Gosh what time is it?” Jimmy sat up in bed digging his knuckles
into his eyes. He yawned and looked about with bitter dislike, at the
wallpaper the dead green of Poland Water bottles, at the split green
shade that let in a long trickle of sunlight, at the marble fireplace
blocked up by an enameled tin plate painted with scaly roses, at the
frayed blue bathrobe on the foot of the bed, at the mashed cigarette-
butts in the mauve glass ashtray.
 Stan’s face was red and brown and laughing under the chalky
mask of dust. “Eleven thirty,” he was saying.
“Let’s see that’s six hours and a half. I guess that’ll do. But Stan
what the hell are you doing here?”
“You havent got a little nip of liquor anywhere have you Herf?
Dingo and I are extraordinarily thirsty. We came all the way from
Boston and only stopped once for gas and water. I havent been to
bed for two days. I want to see if I can last out the week.”
“Kerist I wish I could last out the week in bed.”
“What you need’s a job on a newspaper to keep you busy Herfy.”
“What’s going to happen to you Stan ...” Jimmy twisted himself
round so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed “... is that you’re
going to wake up one morning and find yourself on a marble slab at
the morgue.”
The bathroom smelled of other people’s toothpaste and of
chloride disinfectant. The bathmat was wet and Jimmy folded it into a
small square before he stepped gingerly out of his slippers. The cold
water set the blood jolting through him. He ducked his head under
and jumped out and stood shaking himself like a dog, the water
streaming into his eyes and ears. Then he put on his bathrobe and
lathered his face.
Flow river flow
Down to the sea,
he hummed off key as he scraped his chin with the safety-razor.
Mr. Grover I’m afraid I’m going to have to give up the job after next
week. Yes I’m going abroad; I’m going to do foreign correspondent
work for the A. P. To Mexico for the U. P. To Jericho more likely,
Halifax Correspondent of the Mudturtle Gazette. It was Christmas in
the harem and the eunuchs all were there.
... from the banks of the Seine
To the banks of the Saskatchewan.
He doused his face with listerine, bundled his toilet things into his
wet towel and smarting ran back up a flight of greencarpeted
cabbagy stairs and down the hall to his bedroom. Halfway he passed
the landlady dumpy in a mob cap who stopped her carpet sweeper
to give an icy look at his skinny bare legs under the blue bathrobe.
“Good morning Mrs. Maginnis.”
“It’s goin to be powerful hot today, Mr. Herf.”
“I guess it is all right.”
Stan was lying on the bed reading La Revolte des Anges. “Darn it,
I wish I knew some languages the way you do Herfy.”
“Oh I dont know any French any more. I forget em so much
quicker than I learn em.”
“By the way I’m fired from college.”
“How’s that?”
“Dean told me he thought it advisable I shouldnt come back next
year ... felt that there were other fields of activity where my activities
could be more actively active. You know the crap.”
“That’s a darn shame.”
“No it isnt; I’m tickled to death. I asked him why he hadnt fired me
before if he felt that way. Father’ll be sore as a crab ... but I’ve got
enough cash on me not to go home for a week. I dont give a damn
anyway. Honest havent you got any liquor?”
“Now Stan how’s a poor wageslave like myself going to have a
cellar on thirty dollars a week?”
“This is a pretty lousy room.... You ought to have been born a
capitalist like me.”
“Room’s not so bad.... What drives me crazy is that paranoiac
alarm across the street that rings all night.”
“That’s a burglar alarm isn’t it?”
“There cant be any burglars because the place is vacant. The
wires must get crossed or something. I dont know when it stopped
but it certainly drove me wild when I went to bed this morning.”
 “Now James Herf you dont mean me to infer that you come home
sober every night?”
“A man’d have to be deaf not to hear that damn thing, drunk or
sober.”
“Well in my capacity of bloated bondholder I want you to come out
and eat lunch. Do you realize that you’ve been playing round with
your toilet for exactly one hour by the clock?”
They went down the stairs that smelled of shavingsoap and then
of brasspolish and then of bacon and then of singed hair and then of
garbage and coalgas.
“You’re damn lucky Herfy, never to have gone to college.”
“Didnt I graduate from Columbia you big cheese, that’s more than
you could do?”
The sunlight swooped tingling in Jimmy’s face when he opened
the door.
“That doesnt count.”
“God I like sun,” cried Jimmy, “I wish it’d been real Colombia....”
“Do you mean Hail Columbia?”
“No I mean Bogota and the Orinoco and all that sort of thing.”
“I knew a darn good feller went down to Bogota. Had to drink
himself to death to escape dying of elephantiasis.”
“I’d be willing to risk elephantiasis and bubonic plague and
spotted fever to get out of this hole.”
“City of orgies walks and joys ...”
“Orgies nutten, as we say at a hun’an toitytoird street.... Do you
realize that I’ve lived all my life in this goddam town except four
years when I was little and that I was born here and that I’m likely to
die here?... I’ve a great mind to join the navy and see the world.”
“How do you like Dingo in her new coat of paint?”
“Pretty nifty, looks like a regular Mercedes under the dust.”
 “I wanted to paint her red like a fire engine, but the garageman
finally persuaded me to paint her blue like a cop.... Do you mind
going to Mouquin’s and having an absinthe cocktail.”
“Absinthe for breakfast.... Good Lord.”
They drove west along Twenty-third Street that shone with sheets
of reflected light off windows, oblong glints off delivery wagons,
figureeight-shaped flash of nickel fittings.
“How’s Ruth, Jimmy?”
“She’s all right. She hasnt got a job yet.”
“Look there’s a Daimlier.”
Jimmy grunted vaguely. As they turned up Sixth Avenue a
policeman stopped them.
“Your cut out,” he yelled.
“I’m on my way to the garage to get it fixed. Muffler’s coming off.”
“Better had.... Get a ticket another time.”
“Gee you get away with murder Stan ... in everything,” said
Jimmy. “I never can get away with a thing even if I am three years
older than you.”
“It’s a gift.”
The restaurant smelled merrily of fried potatoes and cocktails and
cigars and cocktails. It was hot and full of talking and sweaty faces.
“But Stan dont roll your eyes romantically when you ask about
Ruth and me.... We’re just very good friends.”
“Honestly I didnt mean anything, but I’m sorry to hear it all the
same. I think it’s terrible.”
“Ruth doesn’t care about anything but her acting. She’s so crazy
to succeed, she cuts out everything else.”
“Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I’d like to meet
somebody who wanted to fail. That’s the only sublime thing.”
“It’s all right if you have a comfortable income.”
 “That’s all bunk.... Golly this is some cocktail. Herfy I think you’re
the only sensible person in this town. You have no ambitions.”
“How do you know I havent?”
“But what can you do with success when you get it? You cant eat
it or drink it. Of course I understand that people who havent enough
money to feed their faces and all that should scurry round and get it.
But success ...”
“The trouble with me is I cant decide what I want most, so my
motion is circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging.”
“Oh but God decided that for you. You know all the time, but you
wont admit it to yourself.”
“I imagine what I want most is to get out of this town, preferably
first setting off a bomb under the Times Building.”
“Well why don’t you do it? It’s just one foot after another.”
“But you have to know which direction to step.”
“That’s the last thing that’s of any importance.”
“Then there’s money.”
“Why money’s the easiest thing in the world to get.”
“For the eldest son of Emery and Emery.”
“Now Herf it’s not fair to cast my father’s iniquities in my face. You
know I hate that stuff as much as you do.”
“I’m not blaming you Stan; you’re a damn lucky kid, that’s all. Of
course I’m lucky too, a hell of a lot luckier than most. My mother’s
leftover money supported me until I was twentytwo and I still have a
few hundreds stowed away for that famous rainy day, and my uncle,
curse his soul, gets me new jobs when I get fired.”
“Baa baa black sheep.”
“I guess I’m really afraid of my uncles and aunts.... You ought to
see my cousin James Merivale. Has done everything he was told all
his life and flourished like a green bay tree.... The perfect wise
virgin.”
“Ah guess youse one o dem dere foolish virgins.”
“Stan you’re feeling your liquor, you’re beginning to talk
niggertalk.”
“Baa baa.” Stan put down his napkin and leaned back laughing in
his throat.
The smell of absinthe sicklytingling grew up like the magician’s
rosebush out of Jimmy’s glass. He sipped it wrinkling his nose. “As a
moralist I protest,” he said. “Whee it’s amazing.”
“What I need is a whiskey and soda to settle those cocktails.”
“I’ll watch you. I’m a working man. I must be able to tell between
the news that’s fit and the news that’s not fit.... God I dont want to
start talking about that. It’s all so criminally silly.... I’ll say that this
cocktail sure does knock you for a loop.”
“You neednt think you’re going to do anything else but drink this
afternoon. There’s somebody I want to introduce you to.”
“And I was going to sit down righteously and write an article.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh a dodaddle called Confessions of a Cub Reporter.”
“Look is this Thursday?”
“Yare.”
“Then I know where she’ll be.”
“I’m going to light out of it all,” said Jimmy somberly, “and go to
Mexico and make my fortune.... I’m losing all the best part of my life
rotting in New York.”
“How’ll you make your fortune?”
“Oil, gold, highway robbery, anything so long as it’s not
newspaper work.”
“Baa baa black sheep baa baa.”
 “You quit baaing at me.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here and take Dingo to have her muffler
fastened.”
Jimmy stood waiting in the door of the reeking garage. The dusty
afternoon sunlight squirmed in bright worms of heat on his face and
hands. Brownstone, redbrick, asphalt flickering with red and green
letters of signs, with bits of paper in the gutter rotated in a slow haze
about him. Two carwashers talking behind him:
“Yep I was making good money until I went after that lousy broad.”
“I’ll say she’s a goodlooker, Charley. I should worry.... Dont make
no difference after the first week.”
Stan came up behind him and ran him along the street by the
shoulders. “Car wont be fixed until five o’clock. Let’s taxi.... Hotel
Lafayette,” he shouted at the driver and slapped Jimmy on the knee.
“Well Herfy old fossil, you know what the Governor of North Carolina
said to the Governor of South Carolina.”
“No.”
“It’s a long time between drinks.”
“Baa, baa,” Stan was bleating under his breath as they stormed
into the café. “Ellie here are the black sheep,” he shouted laughing.
His face froze suddenly stiff. Opposite Ellen at the table sat her
husband, one eyebrow lifted very high and the other almost merging
with the eyelashes. A teapot sat impudently between them.
“Hello Stan, sit down,” she said quietly. Then she continued
smiling into Oglethorpe’s face. “Isnt that wonderful Jojo?”
“Ellie this is Mr. Herf,” said Stan gruffly.
“Oh I’m so glad to meet you. I used to hear about you up at Mrs.
Sunderland’s.”
They were silent. Oglethorpe was tapping on the table with his
spoon. “Why heow deo you deo Mr. Herf,” he said with sudden
unction. “Dont you remember how we met?”
 “By the way how’s everything up there Jojo?”
“Just topping thanks. Cassahndrah’s beau has left her and there’s
been the most appalling scandal about that Costello creature. It
seems that she came home foxed the other night, to the ears my
deah, and tried to take the taxi driver into her room with her, and the
poor boy protesting all the time that all he wanted was his fare.... It
was appalling.”
Stan got stiffly to his feet and walked out.
The three of them sat without speaking. Jimmy tried to keep from
fidgeting in his chair. He was about to get up when something
velvetsoft in her eyes stopped him.
“Has Ruth got a job yet, Mr. Herf?” she asked.
“No she hasnt.”
“It’s the rottenest luck.”
“Oh it’s a darn shame. I know she can act. The trouble is she has
too much sense of humor to play up to managers and people.”
“Oh the stage is a nasty dirty game, isn’t it Jojo?”
“The nawstiest, my deah.”
Jimmy couldn’t keep his eyes off her; her small squarely shaped
hands, her neck molded with a gold sheen between the great coil of
coppery hair and the bright blue dress.
“Well my deah ...” Oglethorpe got to his feet.
“Jojo I’m going to sit here a little longer.”
Jimmy was staring at the thin triangles of patent leather that stuck
out from Oglethorpe’s pink buff spats. Cant be feet in them. He stood
up suddenly.
“Now Mr. Herf couldnt you keep me company for fifteen minutes?
I’ve got to leave here at six and I forgot to bring a book and I cant
walk in these shoes.”
 Jimmy blushed and sat down again stammering: “Why of course
I’d be delighted.... Suppose we drink something.”
“I’ll finish my tea, but why dont you have a gin fizz? I love to see
people drink gin fizzes. It makes me feel that I’m in the tropics sitting
in a jujube grove waiting for the riverboat to take us up some
ridiculous melodramatic river all set about with fevertrees.”
“Waiter I want a gin fizz please.”

Joe Harland had slumped down in his chair until his head rested
on his arms. Between his grimestiff hands his eyes followed uneasily
the lines in the marbletop table. The gutted lunchroom was silent
under the sparse glower of two bulbs hanging over the counter
where remained a few pies under a bellglass, and a man in a white
coat nodding on a tall stool. Now and then the eyes in his gray
doughy face flicked open and he grunted and looked about. At the
last table over were the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces
crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms. Joe Harland sat up
straight and yawned. A woman blobby under a raincoat with a face
red and purplish streaked like rancid meat was asking for a cup of
coffee at the counter. Carrying the mug carefully between her two
hands she brought it over to the table and sat down opposite him.
Joe Harland let his head down onto his arms again.
“Hay yous how about a little soivice?” The woman’s voice shrilled
in Harland’s ears like the screech of chalk on a blackboard.
“Well what d’ye want?” snarled the man behind the counter. The
woman started sobbing. “He asts me what I want.... I aint used to
bein talked to brutal.”
“Well if there’s anythin you want you kin juss come an git it....
Soivice at this toime o night!”
Harland could smell her whiskey breath as she sobbed. He raised
his head and stared at her. She twisted her flabby mouth into a smile
and bobbed her head towards him.
 “Mister I aint accustomed to bein treated brutal. If my husband
was aloive he wouldn’t have the noive. Who’s the loikes o him to say
what toime o night a lady ought to have soivice, the little shriveled up
shrimp.” She threw back her head and laughed so that her hat fell off
backwards. “That’s what he is, a little shriveled up shrimp, insultin a
lady with his toime o night.”
Some strands of gray hair with traces of henna at the tips had
fallen down about her face. The man in the white coat walked over to
the table.
“Look here Mother McCree I’ll trow ye out o here if you raise any
more distoirbance.... What do you want?”
“A nickel’s woirt o doughnuts,” she sniveled with a sidelong leer at
Harland.
Joe Harland shoved his face into the hollow of his arm again and
tried to go to sleep. He heard the plate set down followed by her
toothless nibbling and an occasional sucking noise when she drank
the coffee. A new customer had come in and was talking across the
counter in a low growling voice.
“Mister, mister aint it terrible to want a drink?” He raised his head
again and found her eyes the blurred blue of watered milk looking
into his. “What ye goin to do now darlin?”
“God knows.”
“Virgin an Saints it’d be noice to have a bed an a pretty lace
shimmy and a noice feller loike you darlin ... mister.”
“Is that all?”
“Oh mister if my poor husband was aloive, he wouldn’t let em
treat me loike they do. I lost my husband on the General Slocum
might ha been yesterday.”
“He’s not so unlucky.”
“But he doid in his sin without a priest, darlin. It’s terrible to die in
yer sin ...”
“Oh hell I want to sleep.”
 Her voice went on in a faint monotonous screech setting his teeth
on edge. “The Saints has been agin me ever since I lost my husband
on the General Slocum. I aint been an honest woman.” ... She began
to sob again. “The Virgin and Saints an Martyrs is agin me,
everybody’s agin me.... Oh wont somebody treat me noice.”
“I want to sleep.... Cant you shut up?”
She stooped and fumbled for her hat on the floor. She sat sobbing
rubbing her swollen redgrimed knuckles into her eyes.
“Oh mister dont ye want to treat me noice?”
Joe Harland got to his feet breathing hard. “Goddam you cant you
shut up?” His voice broke into a whine. “Isnt there anywhere you can
get a little peace? There’s nowhere you can get any peace.” He
pulled his cap over his eyes, shoved his hands down into his pockets
and shambled out of the lunchroom. Over Chatham Square the sky
was brightening redviolet through the latticework of elevated tracks.
The lights were two rows of bright brass knobs up the empty Bowery.
A policeman passed swinging his nightstick. Joe Harland felt the
policeman’s eyes on him. He tried to walk fast and briskly as if he
were going somewhere on business.
“Well Miss Oglethorpe how do you like it?”
“Like what?”
“Oh you know ... being a nine days’ wonder.”
“Why I don’t know at all Mr. Goldweiser.”
“Women know everything but they wont let on.”
Ellen sits in a gown of nilegreen silk in a springy armchair at the
end of a long room jingling with talk and twinkle of chandeliers and
jewelry, dotted with the bright moving black of evening clothes and
silveredged colors of women’s dresses. The curve of Harry
Goldweiser’s nose merges directly into the curve of his bald
forehead, his big rump bulges over the edges of a triangular gilt
stool, his small brown eyes measure her face like antennæ as he
talks to her. A woman nearby smells of sandalwood. A woman with
orange lips and a chalk face under an orange turban passes talking
to a man with a pointed beard. A hawk-beaked woman with crimson
hair puts her hand on a man’s shoulder from behind. “Why how do
you do, Miss Cruikshank; it’s surprising isn’t it how everybody in the
world is always at the same place at the same time.” Ellen sits in the
armchair drowsily listening, coolness of powder on her face and
arms, fatness of rouge on her lips, her body just bathed fresh as a
violet under the silk dress, under the silk underclothes; she sits
dreamily, drowsily listening. A sudden twinge of men’s voices
knotting about her. She sits up cold white out of reach like a
lighthouse. Men’s hands crawl like bugs on the unbreakable glass.
Men’s looks blunder and flutter against it helpless as moths. But in
deep pitblackness inside something clangs like a fire engine.

George Baldwin stood beside the breakfast table with a copy of

the New York Times folded in his hand. “Now Cecily,” he was saying
“we must be sensible about these things.”
“Cant you see that I’m trying to be sensible?” she said in a jerking
snivelly voice. He stood looking at her without sitting down rolling a
corner of the paper between his finger and thumb. Mrs. Baldwin was
a tall woman with a mass of carefully curled chestnut hair piled on
top of her head. She sat before the silver coffeeservice fingering the
sugarbowl with mushroomwhite fingers that had very sharp pink
nails.
“George I cant stand it any more that’s all.” She pressed her
quaking lips hard together.
“But my dear you exaggerate....”
“How exaggerate?... It means our life has been a pack of lies.”
“But Cecily we’re fond of each other.”
“You married me for my social position, you know it.... I was fool
enough to fall in love with you. All right, It’s over.”
 “It’s not true. I really loved you. Dont you remember how terrible
you thought it was you couldnt really love me?”
“You brute to refer to that.... Oh it’s horrible!”
The maid came in from the pantry with bacon and eggs on a tray.
They sat silent looking at each other. The maid swished out of the
room and closed the door. Mrs. Baldwin put her forehead down on
the edge of the table and began to cry. Baldwin sat staring at the
headlines in the paper. Assassination of Archduke Will Have
Grave Consequences. Austrian Army Mobilized. He went over
and put his hand on her crisp hair.
“Poor old Cecily,” he said.
“Dont touch me.”
She ran out of the room with her handkerchief to her face. He sat
down, helped himself to bacon and eggs and toast and began to eat;
everything tasted like paper. He stopped eating to scribble a note on
a scratchpad he kept in his breast pocket behind his handkerchief:
See Collins vs. Arbuthnot, N.Y.S.C. Appel. Div.
The sound of a step in the hall outside caught his ear, the click of
a latch. The elevator had just gone down. He ran four flights down
the steps. Through the glass and wrought-iron doors of the vestibule
downstairs he caught sight of her on the curb, standing tall and stiff,
pulling on her gloves. He rushed out and took her by the hand just as
a taxi drove up. Sweat beaded on his forehead and was prickly
under his collar. He could see himself standing there with the napkin
ridiculous in his hand and the colored doorman grinning and saying,
“Good mornin, Mr. Baldwin, looks like it going to be a fine day.”
Gripping her hand tight, he said in a low voice through his teeth:
“Cecily there’s something I want to talk to you about. Wont you
wait a minute and we’ll go downtown together?... Wait about five
minutes please,” he said to the taxidriver. “We’ll be right down.”
Squeezing her wrist hard he walked back with her to the elevator.
When they stood in the hall of their own apartment, she suddenly
looked him straight in the face with dry blazing eyes.