The Religion of the Future The Religion of the Future roberto mangabeira unger Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Th e religion of the future / Roberto Mangabeira Unger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72907-0 (alk. paper) 1. Religion. 2. Forecasting. I. Title. BL51.U645 2014 200—dc23 2013034082 Contents 1. Beyond Wishful Thinking: Life without Illusion 1 Death 1 Groundlessness 5 Insatiability 17 Belittlement 23 Religion and the fl aws in human life 35 Th e common element in past religious revolution 40 What religion is, or has been 49 2. Overcoming the World 62 Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision 62 Incitements to overcoming the world 72 Serenity and benevolence 74 Criticism: betrayal of the past 77 Criticism: the school of experience 80 Criticism: betrayal of the future 84 3. Humanizing the World 90 Central idea, historical presence, and metaphysical vision 90 Making meaning in a meaningless world 96 Our situation and our task 98 Th e ennoblement of our relations to one another 103 Criticism: betrayal of the past 106 Criticism: the school of experience 113 Criticism: betrayal of the future 117 viii contents 4. Struggling with the World 121 Central idea, spoken in sacred and profane voice 121 Metaphysical vision 125 Conception of the self 136 Only one regime 143 Spirit and structure 162 Self and others 170 Twin orthodoxies suppressed 180 Criticism: strength and weakness of the struggle with the world 182 Criticism: estrangement from life in the present 188 5. Religious Revolution Now: Its Occasions and Instruments 196 Reasons for religious revolution 196 Th e unique position of the struggle with the world 199 Resolving the ambivalence of the higher religions to the transformation of the world 204 Radicalizing the signifi cance of the struggle with the world for our ideas and institutions 207 Achieving a greater life, without Prometheanism 213 Recognizing the defects in human existence 216 Occasions and sources of religious revolution 221 In what sense a religious revolution 236 Th e practice of religious revolution 239 A tragic contradiction in the history of religion 245 Philosophy and religion 250 Direction and indirections of the religion of the future 255 Christianity as the religion of the future? 257 6. Deep Freedom: The Politics of the Religion of the Future 290 Po liti cal theology without God 290 Conception of a free society 293 Four principles 300 Th e principle of apostasy 303 Th e principle of plurality 308 contents ix Th e principle of deep freedom 314 Th e principle of higher cooperation 324 7. Becoming More Human by Becoming More Godlike: The Conduct of Life in the Religion of the Future 341 Th e enhancement of life 341 Method and vision 344 Th e overthrow: from self- subversion to self- transformation 355 Virtue as self- transformation 366 Virtues of connection 370 Virtues of purifi cation 378 Virtues of divinization 382 Th e course of life: decentering 387 Th e course of life: downfall 393 Th e course of life: mutilation 397 Th e course of life: mummifi cation 405 Th e reward 438 Countercurrents 439 Life itself 443 A Note on the Three Orientations and the Idea of the Axial Age 445 Proper Name Index 457 Thematic Index 459 The Religion of the Future 1 Beyond Wishful Thinking Life without Illusion Death Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable. Our lives fail adequately to express our natures; our circumstances reg- ularly subject us to belittlement. Religion has been both an attempt to interpret the meaning of these irreparable fl aws in the human condition and a way of dealing with them. It has told us that everything is ultimately all right. However, everything is not all right. A turn in the religious con- sciousness of humanity would begin in an approach to these defects that abandoned the impulse to deny them. Religion would cease to con- sole us for these frightening facts. Our hope might survive, changed. Life is the greatest good. With life come surfeit, spontaneity, and sur- prise: the capacity to see more, make more, and do more than all the social and conceptual regimes in which we move can countenance. In the face of all constraint, the experience of life is an experience of a fe- cundity and a fullness without foreordained limits. We exceed immeasurably the social and cultural worlds that we build and inhabit. Th ere is always more in us, in each of us individually as well as in all of us collectively, than there is or ever can be in them. Th ere is always more that we have reason to value and power to produce than any of these orders of life, or all of them together, can contain. 2 beyond wishful thinking Th e principle that applies to the or ga ni za tion of society and culture applies as well to thought and discourse. No method, no system of pro- cedures of inference and modes of argument, no apparatus of reason- ing in any one discipline, or in all disciplines combined, can do justice to our capacities for insight. We can always discover more than our es- tablished practices of inquiry can prospectively allow. Vision exceeds method. Method adjusts retrospectively to suit vision. We are unlimited, or infi nite, with respect to the practical and dis- cursive settings of our activity. Th ey are limited, or fi nite, with regard to us. Our excess over them is what, in a traditional theological vocabu- lary, we call spirit. Everyone dies anyway. Th e response of nature to our experience of fecundity, of amplitude, of reach over circumstance and context is to decree our death. Th e fi nality of this annihilation, in contrast to the vibrant presence that preceded it, is the fi rst and fundamental reason why death is terrible. Th e good that is the highest, preceding all others and making all others possible, is the good that will be most defi ni- tively destroyed. Our fall toward death is surrounded on every side by tokens of the wasting of life. At any given moment on our planet, as Schopenhauer reminded us, countless living creatures tear one another apart the bet- ter to live a while longer. We are unable to distinguish our situation from theirs as much as we would like. Science teaches that death forms part of the continuance of life. However, what is necessary for the spe- cies is fatal to the individual. Th e hour of death comes sometimes with agitation and suff ering, and sometimes with resignation or even in sleep. Some people report, from near death experiences, that they see a great light. However, there is no great light, other than in the minds of some of the dying. According to certain conjectures, they perceive such a light because the brain is starved of oxygen, or because there is stimulation, as life wanes, of the temporal lobe, as if the body, on the very verge, were to play a fi nal trick on us. Regardless of whether death is resisted or accepted, its aft ermath fol- lows a regular course. Th e body is now a corpse. It becomes fi rst rigid, then bloated. It soon rots, stinks, and begins to be devoured by vermin and bacteria, unless it is promptly burned. From having been revered, it turns into an object of revulsion. beyond wishful thinking 3 So life ends in a strange sacrifi ce. Each of us is brought to the altar. Th is time, no angel stays Abraham’s hand. What is the point of the sac- rifi ce, and what faith does it serve? It is an incident in a cult the secrets and purpose of which remain forever closed to us. It is all the more terrifying to know that those whom we love most will be brought to the same altar, and off ered in the same sacrifi ce, sometimes under our eyes. In their death we see what we can only imagine for ourselves: the annihilation to which we are all doomed confi rmed, as love proves powerless to sustain the life that love may have given. Th e terribleness of death becomes clear as well from another vantage point: the perspective of consciousness and of its relation to the world. Th e experience of life is an experience of consciousness. Th e mark of consciousness is to present a complete world: not just how I see, feel, and think about myself, but a whole world centered on me, extending outward from my body. For consciousness, everything that exists, or that has existed, or that will exist exists only because it plays a part in this mental theater of mine. Beyond the perimeter of its stage, there is no world, and there is no being. Continuity of consciousness, embodied in an individual human or- ganism, is what we mean by a self. Th e experience of selfh ood is the experience of consciousness associated with the fate of the body and per sis tent over time, until the body fails and dissolves. Th ere are no hu- man beings for whom the world fails to be manifest in this way as extending outward, and backward and forward in time, from the con- scious and embodied self.