424 becoming more human by becoming more godlike
maintain an inner distance from them, even as we try in good faith to
perform them. We must struggle to reinvent the role the better to enact
a vision or to foreshadow another future. By performing them and
resisting them at the same time, we become larger and more alive.
We cannot do so, however, without causing trouble to others and to
ourselves.
A third mark of a life lived under the light of such aspirations general-
izes the signifi cance of our two- sided relation to social roles. We must
be both insiders and outsiders to the regimes of society and thought in
which we participate. To be an insider is to think and feel as if the order
of life or of thought in which we engage resembled a natural language
suitable to the expression of every thought worth thinking. It is to act
as the committed functionaries of that world, taking its assumptions
about the valuable and the dangerous, as well as about the real and the
possible, as if they were our sole reliable basis for insight and judgment.
It is to believe that the only acceptable means with which to revise
that world are the practical and conceptual instruments that it sup-
plies. To rely on anything else, it may seem, would be authoritarianism,
or metaphysical arrogance, or betrayal. It would be to substitute a false
view of reason for a tangible expression of solidarity: its expression in
par tic u lar societies and cultures and par tic u lar groups of people.
To be an outsider is to chafe under the rule of an ordering of life or
thought and to experience such a regime as alien: alien because inade-
quate to what most needs doing, or making, or inventing, or imagin-
ing, or experiencing. It is therefore as well to refuse conformity, and to
act either to revise or to subvert this order.
Everything said earlier about the imperative of ambivalence to roles
applies more generally to being an insider and to being an outsider. Be-
ing an insider is the road to engagement. Without engagement we are
not free. Neither, however, are we free if we renounce all re sis tance to
the context and conduct ourselves as if it defi ned our humanity and
circumscribed our powers.
All our most important material, moral, and spiritual interests are
engaged in the work of creating arrangements that diminish the dis-
tance between our ordinary context or structure- preserving moves and
our extraordinary structure or context- transforming activities. As we
narrow that distance, change ceases to depend on crisis. Th e opportu-