In years to come, Islamic political and economic concepts and practices will remain a force to be reckoned with and a serious effort must be made in all societies to engage in a dialogue with their promoters in order to avoid increasing recourse to extremist goals and violent methods which have already created a situation of dangerous confrontation in many parts of the world.
While the rise or rather the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism is controversial, due in part to a long history of inter-religious wars, the growing strength of Hinduism as a source of political and economic principles and institutions, in India and in other countries where there is a Hindu presence, is to be seen mostly as a factor of stability and tolerance, just as the return of Confucianism and Buddhism in China has a moderating and humanizing influence on the harsh legacy of Maoism as well as on the state-driven capitalism embraced by the Communist Party.
Christianity, which for centuries decisively regulated and shaped political and economic institutions when the sway of its followers was nearly universal, seems to be in an advanced state of decline; especially in Europe which has not been able to agree on the notion that it is the seat of a historically Christian civilization.
The United States where Christians, and particularly Born Again Protestants or Evangelicals are the most numerous and yield considerable clout, is also secularizing fast, as a result of ideological and technological transformations that partly reflect the rapid influx of other religions and ways of life. The supremacy of consumeristic materialism has played havoc in recent decades with the Old American Bible-based Creed which has also, paradoxically been challenged by a dominant Jewish agnostic lobby that does not always hide its hostility to Christianity and its preference for an atheistic or at least multi-cultural society devoid of religious identity.
Russia is perhaps the only major state, on the level of a world power, which acknowledges the founding role of its national Church because even the USA has no official denomination and equally recognizes many different forms of "Bible-based" faith while Britain, Germany and Brazil are drifting away from their traditional state creeds in the name of agnosticism, pluralism and individual freedom.
C- ARCHAEO-FUTURISM
Under that label, seemingly coined by French futurist and "dissident thinker" Guillaume Faye, we can regroup all those socio-political and economic projects which borrow from the past and try to integrate it with the current realities and especially the scientific and technical breakthroughs that are reshaping reality in an transformed planetary and intellectual context. Thereby we can also avoid the pitfall into which the votaries of "deep ecology" fallby becoming biocentric to the point of sacrificing the survival of civilization and even most of the human species to the supremacy of wild and unspoilt nature.
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