becoming more human by becoming more godlike 415For civil society, it implies that our practices and institutions should
enable civil society to or ga nize itself outside the state, and generate
from within itself experiments that can serve as points of departure for
the reor ga ni za tion of other areas of social life. Th e apparatus of tradi-
tional private and public law proves inadequate to this task. It does not
suffi ce to develop a third body of social law, or of public non- state law.
We need to place alongside a law made by the state, and imposed down
upon society, another law, created by society itself, bottom up.
Th e same impulse and conception animate all these changes: in poli-
tics, the economy, and civil society. Th e task is to narrow the distance
between our ordinary structure- preserving activities and our context-
changing moves. In this way, we enhance our power to engage a par tic-
u lar historical world without surrendering to it. We preserve and de-
velop our powers in the midst of our engagement.
A society and a culture that move in this direction enhance our abil-
ity to resist mummifi cation. Th ey keep us awake, and recall to us at
every moment the good that we too readily forget and abandon. How-
ever, just as the reconstruction of the social order cannot spare us our
moral ordeal, so too our advance toward a higher form of social life
cannot exempt us from the imperative of self- transformation. We then
come to the central point in our thinking about mummifi cation: how
we should act when, as usually happens, culture and society do little to
rescue us from our fall or actively conspire in robbing us, before we die,
of life.
Th e way not to surrender life to the mummy is to live life as a search. A
search for what? For people to whom and for a task to which we can
give ourselves wholeheartedly. Re sis tance to mummifi cation requires
that we grasp the right relation between these answers and orient the
conduct of existence accordingly.
It may seem that such an ideal amounts to a luxury, reserved for the
small part of humanity that is not ground under by material depriva-
tion and social oppression. Th e centrality of this concern to all men
and women will become clearer as the reign of material scarcity weak-
ens and the bonds of subjugation are loosened. Moreover, even under
constraint, a human being in any society is more than what he ap-
pears to be. His stratagems of resilience and re sis tance, driven by the