religious revolution now 217rather than of the Buddha, in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Now art
comes to the assistance of philosophy in helping us resist the tyranny of
the will and look at our own lives from the vantage point of the stars.
Only in the teachings of Confucius and in its latter- day counterparts
(including the conventional secular humanism of today) is the war
against the inexpungable taints on human life partly abandoned. How-
ever, the recognition of those taints has no central signifi cance for our
elevation to a greater life; we build civilization and improve our minds
and hearts despite them, not because of them. In this anti- metaphysical
metaphysics, we respond to the indiff erence of nature and to the mean-
inglessness of the cosmos by building a social order responsive to our
concerns.
In this way, we create meaning in a meaningless world, and ground
ourselves in the only fashion in which such self- grounding is feasible:
through the collective work of society and culture. We put solidarity in
the place of false theology. We resign ourselves to the certainty of death
by devoting ourselves to a good that will live aft er us, in other good
people. To the extent that each of us diminishes his selfi sh attachment
to his own interests and existence, he begins to see himself as the expres-
sion and the agent of a human community, and ceases to imagine him-
self as the center of the world.
Th e same decentering, accomplished in a cultivation of other- directed
mindfulness and benevolence, transforms the life of desire, rescuing it
from the stigma of insatiability. Instructed by ritual, shaped by role,
and animated by our awareness of other people, our desires— so the
humanizer hopes— no longer condemn us to perpetual yearning. Here
is a way of dealing with the fl aws in human existence that blunts their
terrors and deprives them of the power to undermine society as well as
the self. It does so without disregarding the reality of the threat that
they pose to the work of civilization.
Th is response to the defi ciencies in human life, by what a lawyer
calls confession and avoidance, is not good enough for the religion of
the future. An uncompromising ac know ledg ment of these fl aws must
be one of its starting points. Such a confrontation is required for three
distinct reasons.
Th e fi rst reason is that denial of the truth of the human condition
corrupts all our endeavors. Th e conversion of religion into a form of