becoming more human by becoming more godlike 425nity to change the framework of arrangements or assumptions within
which we act arises in the midst of our everyday business.
Movement in this direction does not exempt us from the call to be
both insiders and outsiders. It is rather that this ideal sets its mark on
the arrangements of society and the practices of culture. As a result, we
can pursue it non- heroically and all the time.
Th ere are three great forces in the world that favor the spread of the
attitudes that press on us the need to be both insiders and outsiders.
Th e fi rst is the message of the divinity or the greatness of the ordinary
man and woman, conveyed by the orientation to existence that I have
called the struggle with the world. Th e second is democracy, invoking
faith in the constructive genius of ordinary people, even as it begins to
create the institutional equipment for the ongoing revision of the terms
of social life. Th e third is the reinvention of the nation, or of the divi-
sion of humanity into separate states, as a species of moral specializa-
tion within humanity, through which we develop our powers by devel-
oping them in diff erent directions.
A premise of such a view of the distinct nations and states of the
world is that no form of life, expressed in law— the institutional form of
the life of a people— can serve as the defi nitive setting of our humanity.
A practical implication is that everyone ought to have the freedom to
escape from the country in which he happens to have been born, and to
join another one as well as to be a voice of criticism and re sis tance if he
remains.
By virtue of the infl uence of these three forces, our consciousness
and activity as outsiders lose any sharp contrast to our consciousness
and activity as insiders. In a world, however, in which those forces re-
main inhibited in their transformative work, the insider remains clearly
distinct from the outsider, and both of them must live within each of
us. Th e person who becomes both insider and outsider gives profane
meaning to the biblical injunction to be in the world without being of
it. He can engage wholeheartedly and single- mindedly in par tic u lar
activities that absorb him to the point of seeming to suspend the pas-
sage of time: a passion, for example, that has turned into a craft. How-
ever, he must never allow himself to devote such single- mindedness
and wholeheartedness to the regimes of society or of thought that he
fi nds established in his circumstance. Toward those regimes his loyal-
ties must remain confl icted. He sees their shared or implicit standards