210 religious revolution nowTh e development of the missing ideas along the lines suggested in the
earlier parts of this argument does much more than provide a secure basis
for what we now accept as sacred or secular versions of this approach to
the world. By enabling us to take ourselves as the true seat of the dialectic
between transcendence and immanence, it produces a view of humanity,
its powers, and its endeavors that believers in the present sacred or secular
teachings of the struggle with the world are unlikely to recognize as the
doctrine that they embrace. Th ey will say, “Th is is not our religion; it is
another religion.” Although to us this other religion may seem to have
done nothing but draw out the implications of the religion that they pro-
fess, with the help of insights that they lacked, who is to say that it has not
become, by virtue of such changes, a diff erent religion?
Consider the example of the suppressed orthodoxy about self and
structure, discussed in Chapter 4, as it applies to the secular, revolu-
tionary forms of the struggle with the world. Once we reject the Hege-
lian and the Sartrean heresies, recognize the decisive importance of
our institutional and conceptual structures, and conceive the project of
changing not only their par tic u lar content but also the way in which
they impose themselves upon us and inhibit our power to change them,
we have begun to revolutionize our view of ourselves. One of the impli-
cations of this change may be to see our susceptibility to belittlement,
by contrast to our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability,
as something that we can repair or overcome. We can begin to entertain
the thought that the acknowledgement and ac cep tance of those other
fl aws in our existence, rather than representing a threat to our ascent to
a great life, can serve as its condition.
It is not only our ruling ideas about self, society, and history that
inhibit the advance of our secular projects of liberation and empower-
ment. It is, above all, the ways in which contemporary societies are ac-
tually or ga nized. Lack of structural vision, and therefore as well of the
imagination of institutional alternatives, reinforces our resignation to
the established arrangements. Th e recalcitrance of these arrangements
to challenge and revision in turn lends plausibility to ideas that dis-
count our transformative capabilities.
In an earlier section in this chapter, I enumerated four ways in which
the institutions of contemporary societies fail to give practical conse-