For the same reasons and in the same sense, no social role in any society can do justice to any individual human being. No scheme of social organization can accommodate all the activities that we have reason to value or all the powers that we have cause to exercise and to develop. This excess over the determinate circumstances of existence should excite in the mind the idea of our greatness, or of our share in the attributes that some of the world religions have ascribed to God.
Nevertheless, the ordinary experience of life, although punctuated by moments of joy, which may be sustained and prolonged by our engagements and attachments, is one of blockage and humiliation. The persistent disproportion between our context-transcending powers and the objects on which we lavish our devotions threatens to turn existence into an ordeal of belittlement. “In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,—between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.” “So each man,” wrote Emerson, “is an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself.”
The extremes of economic deprivation and social oppression to which most of mankind has been condemned for most of history make this ordeal seem all the more bitter and inescapable. If, however, we look beyond the surface of life, we see that not even the privileged, the powerful, the gifted, and the lucky are free from the burdens of belittlement. For these burdens result universally from the recurrent, shaping incidents of a human life. Even a man whose circumstances and fortune have shielded him from deprivation and oppression must face these trials in three successive waves in the course of his existence.
First, at the beginning he must be driven out of the sense that he is the eternal center of the world. He must come to understand not only that he is just one among countless many but also that he will soon be nothing. Even if he allows himself to be persuaded that he will gain eternal life, he cannot regain the illusion of being at the center.
Later, he must resign himself to taking a particular course in life, if indeed the course is not imposed on him by the constraints of society. If he resists committing himself to such a course, he does not become universal; he merely becomes sterile and sick. However, the consequence of the particularity of the course of life is to open a rift between who we ultimately are and know ourselves to be and how we must live. The individual knows himself darkly to be more, much more than his outward existence reveals. Instructed by the world religions and, today, by the democratic and romantic creeds, he may even feel that he is entitled to scale the heights of experience and vision because he has unplumbed depths. That, however, which he knows himself ultimately to be he is unable to express in a course of action in the world. The result is that existence becomes an ordeal of self-distortion and self-suppression. It is not the tragedy of Hamlet alone; it is every man’s pain.
He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments.
It is crucial to a moral and political vision, and therefore as well as to any religion, that it mark in the right place the division between the inalterable circumstances of existence and the alterable arrangements of society. To represent flawed and revisable ways of organizing social life as inescapable is the characteristic form of superstition about society and history: the illusion of false necessity. The consequence of such illusion is to help entrench a particular ordering of society against challenge and transformation. It is to leave our ideals and interests hostage to the institutions and practices that represent them at a particular moment, and thus as well to inhibit our efforts to reconsider their meaning. A contemporary example of such institutional fetishism is the unwarranted identification of the abstract ideas of a market economy or of representative democracy with a particular, path-dependent way of organizing markets and democracies.
To deny the inescapable features of existence—death, groundlessness, and insatiability—is to commit no less grievous an insult against ourselves. In failing to confront them, we cease to awaken to a greater life from the sleepwalking of compromise, conformity, and the petrified self. We seize upon devices and stratagems that divide and enslave us under the pretext of empowering us.
Our susceptibility to belittlement is a persistent and pervasive feature of our experience. However, it is not, like mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability, an irreparable defect in human life. It allows for a range of response, both individual and collective, in biographical as well as historical time. It is, consequently, not to be mistaken for a fourth incurable deficiency in the human condition.
Just what we can and should do about our susceptibility to belittlement, as individuals and as societies, is crucial to the course of life and to the advance of humanity. Our struggle with the threat of belittlement can easily be misdirected. One such false direction seeks to avoid or overcome belittlement by holding before us false hope of escaping our mortality, our groundlessness, or our insatiability. Another mistaken path accepts a particular established, or proposed, regime of society or of thought as the definitive template for our triumph over belittlement. The most important disorientation of all fails to see how the conduct of life may preserve us from the evils of belittlement, so long as we are not overwhelmed by the frailties of the body and the cruelties of society. It regards belittlement as no more avoidable than death.
What we are to do about our susceptibility to belittlement has always been a theme in the religious consciousness of humanity. For the more than twenty-five hundred years that witnessed the emergence, spread, and influence of the present world religions, it has, however, remained largely a subterranean theme. An argument of this book is that it should now become a central and guiding concern.
The generic antidote to belittlement is empowerment, collective or individual. There are principal false forms of individual and collective empowerment: a species of each that now exercises commanding influence. They are not false in the sense that they fail to increase the power of the species or of the individual. They are false in the sense that, despite their contribution to our empowerment, they cannot keep their promises; they fail to repair our susceptibility to belittlement, as it must be faced by each man and woman in the course of life. I call the chief false collective remedy to this evil the romance of the ascent of humanity, and the chief false individual remedy Prometheanism.
The romance of the ascent of humanity and Prometheanism fail as responses to the perils of belittlement, or respond to them at an intolerable cost to the enhancement of life. Nevertheless, each of them resembles another direction of response that does indicate the path by which we can hope to triumph over belittlement. The development of these better counterparts to the errors of Prometheanism and of the romance of the ascent of mankind is one of the main aims of this book.
Here is a rendering of the romance of our ascent. Humanity rises. Its rise is not inevitable, not at least in the more guarded and realistic versions of the romance of ascent, but it is possible. (Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, two philosophers of this romance, were not so circumspect.) We the human race, the species, have already gone far to diminish our haplessness before nature. When we depended completely on her, we used to worship her. Now we have built great civilizations. We have formed, through science and technology, instruments with which to extend our powers and to prolong our lives. We have created opportunities for many more people to have much more time to explore the secrets of the universe as well as the workings of society and of the mind. All these achievements are only a beginning. The watchword of the romance of the ascent of humanity is: you have not seen anything yet.
We used to believe in a pre-established harmony, a foreordained convergence, between the institutional conditions of our material and of our moral progress: the development of our powers of production and innovation and the disentanglement of the