For over 200 years the world has been set
on fire by a revolutionary message.
The message is that every individual human
being is divine.
That all of us despite the constraints and
humiliations that surround us can share in
a greater life and share even in the attributes
that we ascribe to God.
Nevertheless the ordinary experience of human
beings remains an experience of belittlement.
This revolutionary message can only be made
real through a series of transformations.
Transformations in how we organize society,
in how we live and in how we understand the
world.
It is not enough to innovate in our politics.
We must also innovate in our basic ideas about
who we are.
Unless we innovate in these ideas as well
as in the arrangements of society, we cannot
turn the message of our divinity into a real
experience.
And thus the need today for a spiritual revolution
as well as for a social transformation.
The focus of my thinking expressed in this
book, The Religion of the Future, lies precisely
there.
In the relation between the transformation
of personal experience and the reorganization
of social life.
All the major religions and philosophies that
have exerted the greatest influence over the
last 2,000 years arose from a series of religious
revolutions that took place around 2,000 years
ago.
And these religions took three main directions.
One direction one might call overcoming the
world and an example is Buddhism and the philosophies
that prevailed in ancient India.
But it is a position also represented in modern
Western thought, for example, by Schopenhauer.
According to this view all the distinctions
and changes that surround us are illusory.
Our task if we are to escape from suffering
is to communicate with the hidden and unified
being and to escape this nightmare of the
apparent world.
A second orientation, one might call the humanization
of the world, and it teaches us that in a
meaningless world we can create meaning.
We can open a clearing space, a social order
that bears the imprint of our humanity.
And in particular we can do so by creating
a society that conforms to a model of what
we owe to one another by virtue of occupying
certain roles.
The most important example of this position
in the history of religion and of philosophy
has been Confucianism.
The third direction is the direction that
I call in this book, The Religion of the Future,
the struggle with the world.
It tells us that there is a trajectory of
ascent by which through changes in how we
live and in how we organize society we can
rise to a greater life and share in the attributes
that we ascribe to God.
And thus this ascent requires a struggle and
so I call it the struggle with the world.
Now this third direction has had two main
faces in history.
A sacred face and a profane face.
The sacred face is represented in the semitic
monotheisms - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
And the profane face in the political projects
of liberalism, socialism and democracy and
in the project of personal liberation that
has been represented by romanticism, both
the original romantic movement and the worldwide
popular romantic culture.
The third direction teaches us that each of
us is bigger than he seems to be.
That each of us is called to share in the
greater life and to participate in this divinity
that we sometimes treat as a separate entity
that created the world and that intervenes
in history.
It is this third direction that has exerted
the greatest influence on humanity over the
last couple of centuries in forming a series
of revolutionary projects in politics and
in culture that have set the whole world on
fire.
But all of these religions in each of these
three directions that I have just described
– despite their immense differences share
certain common characteristics.
One of these characteristics is that they
have represented as it were a kind of two
sided ticket.
One side of the ticket is a license to escape
the world.
A second side of the ticket is an invitation
to change the world.
And this ambivalence has never been fully
resolved.
Another common characteristic of these religions
is that each of them in some way denies or
seeks to compensate for the incorrigible flaws
in the human condition.
Our mortality, our groundlessness and our
insatiability.
Despite the fecundity of our experience, despite
this fundamental aspect of our humanity which
is that there is always more in us than there
is in all of the social and conceptual worlds
that we build and inhabit, we are all doomed
to die.
We cannot look into the beginning and end
of time or understand the framework of our
existence.
Our presuppositions never reach rock bottom.
The bottom is bottomless, thus our groundlessness.
And all of us, human beings, demand the unlimited
from the limited and project this demand for
the unlimited onto particular inappropriate
objects, thus our insatiability.
All of these religions have attempted to say
that there is a solution, an antidote that
we, in fact, will not die or at least that
there is some compensation – some compensation
for these enigmas and terrors of our existence.
An entirely different moment in the history
of religion would begin if we accepted these
realities for what they are and no longer
attempted to deny them.
Given the enormous impact of the third direction
that I described, the struggle with the world
on humanity over the last two centuries, one
might ask what is the core of its message.
And why has this message been so seductive.
There are two ideas that stand at the center
of this view of the world, both on its religious
side.
The Near Eastern religions of salvation, Judaism
and Christianity and Islam, and on its profane
side, the projects of political and personal
liberation.
One set of ideas has to do with the relation
between the self and others.
The dominant view in the history of world
religion and philosophy, and indeed in modern
academic moral philosophy, is that the fundamental
problem of moral life is selfishness.
And the solution to selfishness is a principle
of altruism.
And this principle of altruism is to be enforced
by conformity to certain rules that define
our obligations to one another.
And these rules are to be determined by some
conceptual method like Kant’s categorical
imperative or Bentham’s calculus of the
greatest happiness for the greatest number.
There is an attitude connected to those ideas.
The attitude is that we should try to come
to the end of our lives bladeless, with clean
hands, having discharged our obligations to
one another on the green side of our book
of moral accounts.
But that is not the view that stands at the
core of the moral beliefs of this third tradition.
There the view is that the basic problem of
our moral experience is not selfishness but
rather a contradiction in the conditions of
personality and in our relations to other
people.
We need the others.
We make ourselves into human beings only through
connection.
But every connection is a threat.
Every connection jeopardizes our freedom,
our autonomy, our self-construction.
And thus all of our relations to the others
are shadowed by an inescapable ambivalence.
Chartres says the others are hell describing
aphoristically this one side of this ambivalence.
So what is then the solution that lies at
the center of this idea?
The solution is radical love in the circle
of intimacy and then some form of cooperation
– of free and equal cooperation outside
the circle of intimacy.
But this practical solution, if one can call
it that, depends on an imaginative capability,
the capacity to imagine the others, to imagine
their otherness.
And that is then the teaching, the real teaching
that lies at the center of this tradition.
For the ancients and for most of the world
religions and philosophies the highest ideal
was the ideal of an impersonal and detached
benevolence from on high, from a distance
implying no risk on the part of the altruist,
of the benevolent person.
But here now comes a different conception.
That this impersonal altruism, this gift of
benevolence from on high is, in fact, not
the center of our moral experience.
That the highest form of moral experience
is reconciliation with the other on the basis
of equality and at the price of a heightened
vulnerability.
Now there’s a second set of ideas at the
center of this tradition and the second set
of ideas has to do with the relation between
the structures of social life and the human
spirit.
Now what I mean by spirit is the aspect of
our humanity that has to do with our excess
over all the regimes that we create and inhabit.
Now there are two distortions that have had
a long career in the history of religious
and philosophical thinking.
One distortion might be called the Hegelian
heresy.
It’s the idea that there is a definitive
structure towards which history is evolving
and which will be the final home of the human
spirit.
And the other heresy one might call the Sartrean
heresy or the romantic heresy or the existentialist
heresy and it was prefigured by the mystics
within Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
According to this heresy every structure is
death to the spirit.
So the routines of marriage by contrast to
romantic love or the bureaucratic apparatus
of the state in opposition to the crowd in
the streets.
We can’t get rid of the structures definitively
but we can momentarily rebel against them.
And these interludes of rebellion are then
the time when we become fully human.
So it is a kind of despair.
It is a failure of our hope of changing the
relation of structure to spirit.
Now these two sets of ideas about the self
and others and spirit and structure have never
been adequately developed, much less fully
realized in political and personal practice
in the history of our civilizations.
Both the political doctrines and the religious
traditions have lived in compromise with the
existing forms of social organization and
with ethical attitudes that contradict their
impulse.
That is another reason for spiritual revolution
now.
If we were to take these ideas seriously,
if we were to push them to the hilt, if we
were to ask how we should live under the light
of these ideas, we would come to a completely
different conception.
A completely different conception of our situation
in the world and of the way to organize society.
We have, in fact, in the history of our culture,
in the history of the culture that has been
shaped by this third tradition, the tradition
of a struggle with the world, only two completely
developed images of how to live.
One is the image of the sacrificial altruist
who devotes himself to the others without
experiencing any intimate risk or jeopardy.
And the other is the image of the romantic
adventurer who experiences life as a perpetual
trial in the effort to deepen and affirm his
subjectivity.
Neither of these images is adequate as a conception
of how to live.
And the absence of an alternative view demonstrates
once again the need for religious revolution
now.
One should begin by understanding the points
of departure, the provocations for such a
spiritual change.
So one provocation is the need no longer to
deny the incurable defects in the human condition.
Our mortality, our groundlessness and our
insatiability.
A second provocation is the importance of
not confusing our belittlement with these
inescapable defects in human life.
We are belittled and humiliated, all of us
in some way to some degree.
But this belittlement has a cure unlike our
mortality, our groundlessness and our insatiability.
The cure is for us to make ourselves bigger,
to ascend to a higher life and that cure requires
a reorientation of the way we live and of
the way in which we organize society.
And a third provocation to this spiritual
change is then the unwillingness to allow
those ideas about self and others and spirit
and structure to be compromised and circumvented
as they have been in the history of our religions
and of our societies.
So what does this mean?
What does this mean by way of a moral orientation
and what does it mean by way of a political
project?
Let me illustrate what it means by way of
a moral orientation by referring to how each
of us is to respond to one of the characteristic
incidents in every human life.
As we grow older, each of us, a shell of compromise
and routine begins to form around us.
The self becomes rigidified in a character.
The ancient Greeks said that character is
fate.
Character is the rigidified form of the self.
And the marriage of the character with a social
circumstance to which we are resigned then
becomes a proxy for the living self, a mummy
that begins to form around each of us within
which each of us slowly dies many small deaths.
What we must then do is to break the mummy
apart.
The better to live and to become more God-like
so that we can live.
We do not live to become more God-like, we
become more God-like to live.
And how are we to break the mummy apart?
We cannot simply will ourselves transformed
but the will can project us into situations
in which we are unprotected, in which we lose
our habitual protections, in which we are
forced to become more vulnerable.
And in this way awaken to a greater life.
So the rebellion against mummification is
one of the many telling consequences of such
a reorientation to existence.
And what does it mean by way of a political
project?
For two centuries now ideological debate in
the world has taken the form of a contrast
between what you might call shallow equality
and shallow freedom.
The major political forces in the world accept
the established institutions and then we think
that the conservatives are those who within
that institutional framework give priority
to freedom and the progressives or leftists
are those who give priority to equality.
But it is shallow equality against shallow
freedom because it’s based on this acceptance
of the established framework.
Now suppose we imagine that we can begin to
change this framework, to innovate in the
institutions that define the market economy
and democratic politics.
To democratize the market economy and to deepen
democracy.
The method is the cumulative institutional
transformation of society.
And what is the objective?
The objective is not equality of outcome or
circumstance.
The objective is a greater life for the ordinary
man or woman.
Thus I would say deep freedom.
Who then are the progressives or revolutionaries
today?
First they are those who refuse to take the
established institutional structure for granted
and second they are those who demand not simply
to sugar coat those structures with some compensatory
redistribution but to bring the mass of ordinary
men and women to a greater level of intensity
of capability and of scope so that they can
live eyes wide awake and share in these attributes,
in these attributes of transcendence that
we ascribe to the divine.
And that then projects us into a world of
institutional proposals and institutional
changes.
