This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series

The Persistence of Faith given by Jonathan Sacks was originally broadcast in 1990.

There are moments when you can see the human landscape change before your eyes,

and 1989 was one of them. In retrospect, it will seem as significant a turning point in history,

as 1789, the year of the French Revolution and the birth of the secular state.

Throughout Eastern Europe, in one country after another,

communism appeared to crumble. The 20th century had broken its greatest

idols, the two versions of an absolute secular state, fascism defeated in 1945, and communism last year.

But what in this revolution of the human spirit lies ahead?

In the middle of it all, the American historian Francis Fukuyama

wrote an article entitled The End of History.

In it, he described the global spread of liberal democracy,

not as the triumph of an ideal, but as the victory

of consumer culture. In the end, color television had proved a more seductive prospect

than the communist manifesto. Politics had moved beyond ideology. As Edward Shefford Nazi, the Soviet foreign minister put it,

the struggle between two opposing systems had been superseded by the desire to build up

material wealth at an accelerated rate. Dialectical materialism was over. Mailorder catalogue materialism had taken its place.

Eastern Europe had discovered the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie.

It was, said Fukuyama, the end of history as we'd known it,

the struggle over ideas that had once called forth daring, courage,

and imagination. Instead, we'd increasingly see societies based on nothing but the free play

of choices and interests. What would absorb the human imagination would no longer be large

...