"The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies"

Huston Smith points to a crisis deeper than political or economic arrangements. He signals that the modern world’s turbulence arises from a wounded worldview: a thinning of meaning, a loss of confidence in transcendent purpose, and a fragmentation of the human spirit. Rearranging institutions without revisiting the assumptions that give them direction is like rebuilding a ship’s deck while its compass spins. Political systems and markets reflect a culture’s sense of what a person is, what life is for, and what counts as knowledge. When those foundations erode, the superstructures wobble regardless of how cleverly they are designed.

The twentieth century’s achievements in science and technology magnified power but did not determine wisdom. As instrumental reason expands, it risks crowding out questions of ultimacy: What is the good life? What do we owe one another? What is sacred? Without anchoring myths, symbols, and practices that form character, societies default to consumption, competition, and spectacle. The resulting maladies, environmental devastation, loneliness amid hyperconnection, corrosive cynicism, are symptoms of a deeper metaphysical and moral dislocation. The problem is not simply bad policies; it is a narrowed imagination of the human, reduced to producer and consumer, detached from community, nature, and the transcendent.

Smith’s diagnosis invites a re-enchantment of perception rather than a mere reengineering of systems. Renewal would mean recovering wisdom traditions that teach humility, reverence for life, and the cultivation of the virtues; nurturing contemplative disciplines that quiet the ego and awaken compassion; educating for meaning as well as for skills; and approaching the natural world as kin rather than quarry. Interfaith dialogue, not as bland syncretism but as shared inquiry into truth and goodness, can rebuild common moral grammar. Political and economic reforms remain necessary, but they must be rooted in a revitalized vision of reality, one that honors the good, the true, and the beautiful, so that power serves purpose and freedom is ordered toward flourishing.