114 humanizing the worldnovels and poetry produced almost anywhere in the world— including
the parts of the world in which the tradition now in question has exer-
cised its greatest infl uence— could accept the view of history and hu-
man nature on which the humanizers of the world have relied.
Th e fi rst such defect is the unjustifi ed hope of achieving a perfect
marriage between the reformed social and cultural order and the dis-
positions of the self. Th is marriage may be fully realized, according to
this approach to existence, only in the lives and minds of the most vir-
tuous, the exemplars of humanity, and even then only at the end of
their lives, when each of them is able “to follow his heart’s desire with-
out overstepping the bounds of right.” It is nevertheless also the ideal
guiding the reformation of society and culture sought by the human-
izers. Harmony in society, as in the soul, represents its byword.
From this perspective, everything in our experience that remains
recalcitrant to such a domestication— to what, in a later vocabulary, we
sometimes called sublimation— is to be feared and, so far as possible,
stamped out. Th e per sis tence of any such residue of recalcitrance shows
that the civilizing work has not yet been brought to a conclusion and
portends anarchy, in morals as in politics. A spontaneous order is bet-
ter than an imposed order: one required by an alien will. An imposed
order is better than no order at all.
However, no order, no matter how much it adorns itself with the illu-
sions of false necessity and specious authority and entrenches itself
against defi ance and re sis tance, can contain our experience. Even a re-
gime that allows people the least space to deviate from the scripts of
behavior and discourse that it forces on them will be the unwilling host
to an endless stream of contrary experience. Much of such experience
will appear merely incongruous or uncanny. Only some of it will seem
dangerous. Yet all of it will reveal the truth about us, which is that we
immeasurably exceed the or ga nized settings of society and of thought.
Th is element of re sis tance in experience then becomes the source of
po liti cal and moral prophecy: the brute material on which the prophets
cast the form of their design. New institutional arrangements and new
images of human association— views of how people can and should re-
late to one another in diff erent domains of social life— draw energy and
inspiration from what had seemed only a shapeless residue of wasteful
or perilous insubordination to the work of the civilizers.