REFLECTIONS

World historian William McNeill states: "The radical instability that prevails worldwide, as the human majority emerges painfully from rural isolation and struggles to accommodate itself to the dictates of an exchange economy, gives religious fundamentalists an extraordinary opportunity to channel mass responses either into an angry assault on aliens and infidels or toward peaceable symbiosis with strangers. Both paths are sure to be tried; which will work best and prevail in the long run is, perhaps, the capital question for the twenty-first century."