A GROUP of U.S. antiwar activists visiting North Vietnam earlier this year were asked by their hosts about the strange metamorphosis of Rennie Davis. The North Vietnamese were curious about Davis, who had been an antiwar leader for almost a decade but then had inexplicably left the movement to organize worshippers of the 15-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji.

As the visitors tried to describe the Guru and explain the growth of his following in the United States, the Vietnamese grew increasingly confused. But then one of the activists had a brainstorm. "Cao Dai," he said, and the North Vietnamese instantly beamed with understanding and sympathetic smiles.

The Cao Dai was a religious sect which was born in colonial southern Vietnam in the middle 1920s, and extended its influence deeply into Vietnamese politics. Cao Daism was a bizarre blend of various elements in Eastern and Western religions, with a healthy measure of Western-style hero-worship thrown in. The Cao Dai, whose temples were adorned with the Masonic eye, considered as major deities Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed. They harbored in their pantheon of lesser deities such people as Marcus Aurelius, Georges Clemenceau, Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Jefferson. Winston Churchill was enshrined after 1945, but Charlie Chaplin was considered and dropped as a candidate for sainthood at about the same time.

There are more than accidental similarities between the Cao Dai and various popular movements in America such as Divine Light, the Jesus movement, and the followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the mentor of meditation. Both the Cao Dai and the American gurus are initially arresting because they are so incongruous: the images of Vietnamese civil servants worshipping Victor Hugo and young people from America's suburbs genuflecting before a 15-year-old Indian Guru are strangely symmetrical. But the similarities run much deeper than this curious congruence of the odd: the popularity of both the Cao Dai in Vietnam and the yogis in America is evidence of societies weakened by a special kind of dissolution.

French colonialism was rapidly transforming Vietnamese society in the first decades of this century. Modern French agricultural techniques were opening up vast stretches of riceland and creating a new class of powerful client landlords. French labor agents were uprooting growing numbers of Vietnamese from their ancient villages and shipping them to burgeoning rubber plantations, where the Vietnamese--the French took their names away and assigned them numbers--bitterly confronted a hard and tenuous life torn from their past. Also at this time, Vietnamese national pride was increasing, particularly among the growing class of Vietnamese civil servants who the French trained to administer but did not let rule. The French were swiftly eradicating traditional Vietnam; what would replace it was an open question.

The ruptures that are spreading across contemporary U.S. society are more difficult to analyze, but few would disagree that the past decade has brought unprecedented change. The defeat in Indochina and an increasingly fragile economy have reduced U.S. power in the rest of the world; a growing class of college-educated young people has appeared which increasingly questions that American order. Watergate, the growth of the Wallace movement, antiwar demonstrations, the crisis of the dollar in international money markets; the puzzle has yet to be put together in a satisfactory way but the pieces are certainly there. It is hardly far-fetched to speak of the structural crises of colonial Vietnam and contemporary America as being of similar magnitude.

In both societies, ideological dilemmas have accompanied the structural earthquakes. Traditional Vietnam enshrined the harmonious order of the local, autonomous village placed snugly in the context of the ritualistic Confucian state. The traditional Vietnamese lived in a meticulously ordered moral universe, conscious of their rights and obligations regarding family, village and the Confucian court.

As traditional Vietnam crumbled under the stresses of colonialism, this sense of order dissolved also. The uprooted villager, bewildered at the vast array of changes buffeting him about, was lost without a coherent view of the world. The Confucian emperor was obviously a French vassal; how could he be respected anymore as the pinnacle of the universe? Where did the new large landowners and the managers of the rubber plantation owners fit into the old scheme of things?

The United States, of course, differs markedly from colonial Vietnam, but this country just as clearly had a view of the world that has eroded under the structural changes of the past ten years. Young people trained to compete for positions of authority found themselves headed for deadening make-work bureaucratic positions. What went wrong? The United States, once seen as the powerful defender of the free world, lost a long war to Asian peasants who looked less like enemies as the war continued. Why?

Both the Cao Dai and the new gurus are attempts to respond to this growing erosion of consistency. Cao Daism attempted to synthesize the experience of a frightening clash between the Eastern and Western world that was taking place in colonial Vietnam. With its Joan of Arcs and its Buddhas, it attempted to provide for its followers a new, relevant sense of order to replace the one that had shattered.

The gurus and the yogis serve a similar function in the present-day United States. Young people groping for sense amid the numbing madness can grasp at anything that seems ordered and coherent--even a chubby teen-age Perfect Spiritual Master who rides a motorcycle when he is not dispersing the Word. Suffering, illogic and irrationality must be explained if people are to function in the world, and in the swirling confusion of the moment, almost any form of consistency can pass for truth.

BUT SOME truths can mark the route out of confusion, while others merely add to it. Cao Daism in Vietnam did not talk about the real sources of the problems tearing Vietnam apart. It did not deal with colonialism, other than to appropriate French heroes for its own purposes, nor did it talk about landholding patterns or the need to unionize the rubber workers. It had no vision of national independence and no call for political struggle. Ho Chi Minh and the first Vietnamese socialists who worked with him at the same time also lived in the same dissolving Vietnamese society, yet they were more accurate in both describing the reasons for the cataclysms and in charting a way out. The Viet Minh program of revolutionary nationalism, socialism and land reform, provided growing numbers of Vietnamese with an explanation for their confusion and a political program that helped resolve it. In a sense, both the Viet Minh and the Cao Dai tried to answer the same questions posed by a crumbling traditional society, yet because the Viet Minh's answers were more accurate and also provided some resolution to the problems, they gained wider adherence.

There is as yet no American analogue to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. No coherent explanation for the current confusion has yet come forward. Traditional socialist analysis in the United States, borrowed from other areas of the world, is generally useless in explaining the current unrest. In its continued absence, some people in this country will turn to gurus and yogis, many more will just mill about in a bewildered ideological confusion.

Structural changes in the economic, social and political spheres of a society will always give rise to feelings of unease, to the sense that change is imperative. But these changes, crude Marxism notwithstanding, will not by themselves create a revolution. The task of revolutionaries is not to create social movements, not to tell Vietnamese peasants or U.S. students that all is not well with their world. Revolutionaries must provide a reasonable explanation for that confusion. The battle of ideas is the primary task, and socialists in this country have not even begun to deploy their troops.

Socialism can probably never answer the really big questions that have always plagued people. Even in a perfect socialist society, people will still wonder why their parents die, why they fall in love, whether the universe extends infinitely. But a socialist society should provide an atmosphere of harmony, warmth and fellowship within which people could begin to at least try to answer those questions.

The people in the world today, however, cannot afford to be philosophers. They are preoccupied by more immediate problems--problems which can be understood and resolved without any recourse to an ethereal metaphysics. Vietnamese peasants were distraught in the 1930s not because they wondered if Victor Hugo was a deity, but because French colonialism was destroying their traditional society. American young people today are not confused because they find it difficult to choose between the merits of the Guru and the Yogi, but because this country is rocked by a deep structural and ideological crisis, a crisis for which no group, gurus or socialists, have provided a reasonable explanation.

Philosophy has historically been the province of a select few. If, as Thoreau said, "The great mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," their anguish can usually be traced to social conditions, to conditions made by men that can be changed by men. Workers control in the factories of this country, for example, would do much toward eradicating the sense of futility felt by the people who labor in them. The bigger questions can be examined only after this sort of immediate, resolvable problem has been tackled and a new society is being created. In this sense, then, a goal of socialism is to extend philosophy throughout society, and enable every person to wrestle with the problems that confound us all.