186 struggling with the worldTh e po liti cal institutions of contemporary societies continue to
make change depend upon crisis. Th ey are not designed to increase the
temperature of politics (the level of or ga nized pop u lar engagement in
po liti cal life) or to hasten its pace (the facility for decisive experiment).
Democracy consequently fails to serve as an antidote to the rule of the
dead over the living and as a device by which to subordinate structure
to will and imagination.
In even the freest and most equal contemporary societies, humanity
remains shackled and diminished. Th e greater life promised by the
struggle with the world is postponed, indefi nitely, to a future in histori-
cal or providential time. Th e humanization of society— the improve-
ment of an order that we feel powerless to reimagine or to remake—
takes the place of the divinization of humanity, the increase of our
share in attributes that we ascribe to divinity. Th e sacred and profane
versions of the struggle with the world are then converted into a for-
mula for patience and resignation.
Th e or ga nized religions and the secular projects of social and per-
sonal liberation appear in the world under the restraints of all these
compromises. Sometimes the theologians and the ideologists do the
work of the world themselves, shrinking, in religion, the message until
it is reduced to obedience to the sacred law or, in politics, to conformity
to a restrictive legal and institutional formula. At other times, they re-
main silent accomplices to the association of the message with beliefs
that contradict its presuppositions and with institutional arrangements
that defeat its promises.
To the extent that the sacred or secular teachings of the struggle with
the world are not diminished in doctrine, they are contradicted in prac-
tice. Th ey come to coexist, unresistingly, with beliefs that belie their as-
sumptions. Th e widespread ac cep tance of such beliefs in turn helps ex-
plain how the theologians and ideologists of the struggle with the world
can accept a social order that stands in such stark confl ict with the prom-
ise of a greater life. Th e fulfi llment of the promise may be delayed to the
historical or providential future. However, it ceases to live in the mind or
to convert the will if it cannot be foreshadowed in the present.
From these successive accommodations there result the fossilized
forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, preserved as ways to kill
time and to deny death; the evisceration of the ideological programs of