I wondered aloud whether economic health was a sufficient and sustainable indicator of a society s strength. I did not hear a very satisfying answer. The heart of his contention was that we ought to leave this trouble behind and move on. One of my favorite poets, Steve Turner, puts it like this in History Lesson. It is simple and succinct, and so you have to listen carefully.
History repeats itself.
The most important things in life are not things. At the end of the century it is clear to all but the most insular and ideological that there were fundamental flaws in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of what economic life could and should be. And so autonomy is to make one s own laws. Or in the story of Soviet autonomy, do it our way. His years of patient protest, marked as they have been by his unusual understanding of a responsible hope, have earned him a moral authority to speak about God, human nature and history.