becoming more human by becoming more godlike 429An endeavor that is small by the standards of the world, and aff ords
no power or honor, may seem to resemble the three- foot pyramid that
Th omas Carlyle viewed as so pathetic. To the agent, however, it is not
three- foot if it frees him from the bondage of alien routine and gives
him the keys to a more vibrant state of being. It is this reversal that
matters in the avoidance of the mummy.
Th e clearest instance of such a project arises, in modern experience,
in the context of a view of work that is characteristic of the freest and
most innovative societies in the last few centuries: the idea of the trans-
formative vocation. According to this idea, we are most fully ourselves
when we seek to change some part of the world. World transformation,
always piecemeal and fragmentary, and always subject to the adven-
tures of unintended consequences, may succeed or fail. In seeking to
change the world, we change ourselves. Th e most important change is
that we break the spell of the routinized existence that was willed on us
by the alliance between chance and society. We live as if the new were
not only feasible but also in our power to make.
Th e institutions and the culture of deep freedom, designed to make
good on the moral promise of democracy, create the conditions in
which the transformative vocation can cease to be the prerogative of a
small band of visionaries and become instead the common possession
of ordinary men and women. In the or ga ni za tion of production, many
goals contribute to the same end: the eff ort to detach the market econ-
omy from any single, dogmatic version of itself and to allow diff erent
regimes of property and contract to coexist within the same economic
order; the progressive substitution of wage labor by the combination of
self- employment and cooperation as the predominant form of free la-
bor; the use of machines to save people from having to work as if they
were machines and the consequent redirection of labor time to activi-
ties that we have not yet learned to repeat; and the reformation of the
world order so as not to impose submission to a formula of coercive
institutional convergence as the condition of access to the global public
goods of po liti cal security and economic openness. In the or ga ni za tion
of demo cratic politics, the creation of a high- energy democracy— one
that raises the temperature and hastens the pace of politics, even as it
facilitates, in par tic u lar places and sectors, the creation of counter-
models of the national future— advances the same purpose. It does so