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 possibilities of cooperation from the rigid schemes of social division and hierarchy that have weighed on them in all the historical civilizations. We no longer take such a convergence for granted. However, we are entitled to hope that there is an area of possible overlap, a zone of potential intersection, between the arrangements that can help make us richer and more powerful and the arrangements that can help make us freer.
Some day, if we learn to restrain our hatreds and our wars, we shall escape our corner of the universe. We shall establish presence far from our earthly home. Our powers will assume measures and forms that to us now would be unimaginable. Although we will not achieve eternal life, we shall live not only longer but also much better. Our successors will look back on us and wonder how the human race could ever have been so fragile, so powerless, and so confined.
We, their precarious forerunners, can look forward and share in the vision and in the joys of this rise. We are entitled to hope that all the good that we do to one another and to ourselves will live on, as part of the adventure of mankind.
This romance of ascent supplies a response to our trials of belittlement that is inadequate in two distinct ways. It is, in the first instance, inadequate because unless the individual can share in his own lifetime in this rise, he casts himself in the role of instrument of the species, as if we were ants rather than human beings. We allow biographical time to vanish within historical time, or make it figure only as a period of servitude, even when our indenture is voluntary. We become estranged from the supreme good, indeed the only good that we ever really possess: life in the present.
Augustine said that all epochs are equidistant from eternity. What are we to tell the individual who, in a scheme like those of Comte or of Marx, happens to have been born far before the consummation of history? That the miseries of slave society or of the capitalist sweatshop were necessary to the emancipation of an unborn humanity? The positive social theorist, or the philosopher of history, who believes that he has uncovered the hidden script of historical necessity may profess no interest in such an anxiety. The individual, however, who has resorted to the ascent of humanity as a response to the trials of belittlement must ask himself how the future empowerment of the species makes up for his present subjection. If he has come to understand that history has no such script and that although the future rise of the race is possible, it is neither inevitable in its occurrence nor foreordained in its content, his dissatisfaction will be all the greater.
The romance of the ascent of mankind is inadequate, in the second instance, as a solution to the problem of our susceptibility to belittlement because its true and hidden attraction comes from another, largely unacknowledged quarter. Under cover of being a response to belittlement, it is in fact also an answer to death. If we cannot bring ourselves to believe the metaphysic (which I call in this book the overcoming of the world) according to which the distinct existence of the self, and indeed the entire phenomenal and temporal world, are less real than the unified and timeless being from which all emanates and to which all returns, we can nevertheless persuade ourselves to accept a weaker version of that doctrine.
According to this version, we are indeed the real individuals that we seem to be, living in a historical world that is also for real. We shall have to accept death and the dissolution of the body to which consciousness remains tied. We shall nevertheless survive in the onward rush of emergent humanity.
I, the individual, however, will not survive. The future glories of the human race will not elate me now, nor its future absurdities and savageries now cast me down. Each of us can indeed
