Aging & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Read

Read’s line lands like a coolly delivered warning shot: revolutions can seize banks and factories faster than they can replace the human appetite for meaning. Written with the poet’s feel for the invisible infrastructure of belief, it treats “religion” less as doctrine than as a social technology: a shared story that disciplines private desire, sacralizes authority, and gives suffering a script. If socialism can’t supply that symbolic glue, Read suggests, it won’t merely face dissent; it will face relapse.

The timing matters. “After twenty years of socialism in Russia” points to the post-1917 Soviet experiment as it hardens into a state, discovering that material reorganization doesn’t automatically generate moral consensus. Early Bolshevism tried to swap saints for martyrs, icons for posters, liturgy for parades. Read’s insinuation is that these substitutes weren’t optional propaganda flourishes; they were the project’s unmet spiritual bill. Without a compelling “new religion,” the old one doesn’t die; it waits in the attic of memory, ready to reassert itself through family ritual, local identity, or sheer metaphysical hunger.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of secular hubris. Socialism promises rational planning and emancipation, but Read implies that people aren’t moved by spreadsheets. They’re moved by awe, taboo, belonging, and the comfort of permanence. The barb is that a movement claiming to abolish superstition may end up needing its own myths anyway; refusing that need doesn’t produce a purely rational society, it produces a vacuum. Nature (and culture) abhor one.