How can we live in such a way that we die only once? How can we organize a society that gives us a better chance to be fully alive? How can we reinvent religion so that it liberates us instead of consoling us? These questions stand at the center of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future: an argument for both spiritual and political revolution. It proposes the content of a religion that can survive without faith in a transcendent God or in life after death. According to this religion—the religion of the future—human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives. They can become more godlike without denying the irreparable flaws in the human condition: our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability.
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Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The Religion of the Future
The Religion of the Future. Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Contents
1. Beyond Wishful Thinking. Life without Illusion
2. Overcoming the World
3. Humanizing the World
4. Struggling with the World
5. Religious Revolution Now. Its Occasions and Instruments
6. Deep Freedom. The Politics of the Religion of the Future
7. Becoming More Human by Becoming More Godlike. The Conduct of Life in the Religion of the Future
A Note on the Three Orientations. and the Idea of the Axial Age
Notes
Proper Name Index
Thematic Index
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For Tamara
“I can think of no greater happiness than to be with you all the time, endlessly …, and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you, and you would hide your face in me …”
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The aim guiding and unifying all these initiatives is the cumulative reformation of the institutions and practices of society in the service of the ideal that was ever paramount for the progressives and leftists: not equality, whether of outcomes or of opportunity, but greatness, the greatness of the ordinary man and woman, the discovery of light in the shadowy world of the commonplace, which is the defining faith of democracy. To this marriage of the effort to lift up the ordinary lives of ordinary people with the method of institutional experimentation and reconstruction I give the name deep freedom.
Deep freedom, rather than the romance of the ascent of humanity, is the collective answer to the problem of belittlement. Because it is within our power to move in the direction of deep freedom, we must never mistake our susceptibility to belittlement for an irreparable defect in human existence, alongside our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.
