beyond wishful thinking 27false collective remedy to this evil the romance of the ascent of human-
ity, and the chief false individual remedy Prometheanism.
Th e romance of the ascent of humanity and Prometheanism fail as
responses to the perils of belittlement, or respond to them at an intoler-
able cost to the enhancement of life. Nevertheless, each of them resem-
bles another direction of response that does indicate the path by which
we can hope to triumph over belittlement. Th e 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 ver-
sions of the romance of ascent, but it is possible. (Auguste Comte and
Karl Marx, two phi los o phers 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 oppor-
tunities 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. Th e watchword of
the romance of the ascent of humanity is: you have not seen any-
thing 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 coopera-
tion 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, be-
tween the arrangements that can help make us richer and more power-
ful 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 mea sures and forms that to
us now would be unimaginable. Although we will not achieve eternal