(This was my final paper for my spring 2019 American Democracy class at the Harvard Law School with Professors Cornel West and Roberto Unger, two giants of modern philosophy and the democratic tradition. The final paper had very loose guidelines, so I sort of wrote about a bunch of things; this created a sort of free-wheeling journey through a lot of what I was thinking about myself that spring, and makes this a great snapshot of this period in my intellectual development. I talk about my own Great American Novel quest, the relationship between memory and prophecy, TS Eliot, Walt Whitman, ‘muchness’ as a way of thinking about value, the flaws in modern education systems, necessary educational reforms and values for the 21st century, Unger’s ‘religion of the future,’ and my own idea of a water religion. And more— I really love how this essay includes indulgent digressions to philosophy or poetry. It’s not a standard college essay with a thesis and certain format; this was the class that most aligned with my personal intellectual quest, and I was lucky it gave me the freedom to express that. Of all the college essays on this site, this is one of the more relevant ones to the Great American Novel project, and one I’d recommend reading to get a glimpse at a wide range of my thought.)
I nearly left school this semester. For a while, I had been considering taking time off in order to work on a big personal project full time. During shopping week, I went back and forth about whether or not staying would be worth it, weighing the pros and cons, considering how relevant my classes this term would be to my overall project. I was beginning to get quite doubtful that anything I could learn in school this term would be more valuable than what I could teach myself by simply returning home and reading in my room for free. Then, a friend of mine mentioned this class that they had taken last year, and he had extremely high praise. American Democracy. Alarm bells went off in my head, and I went to the first lecture the next day. These two professors, both apparently quite famous, were speaking my language, talking about things I hadn’t been able to talk with anyone else about: Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Prophecy, the promises and shortcomings of American Democracy, the deadliness of dogmatism and institutional inertia, the relationship between the past and the future… my foot was a-tapping the whole class, and I kept looking around to see if everyone else was seeing how incredible this was. Then they were talking about the virtues necessary to be a good democratic citizen, the virtues that I cared about most in the world: honesty, courage… “LOVE!” I shouted out impulsively, sweating. I knew immediately that I had to take this class, and was staying in school for one more term.
After I leave school this spring, I will be taking a year or two off to dedicate myself to reading all of the most important American novels, American poetry, and American philosophy that I can in order to write the Great American Novel. As idealistic as this may seem, I could not be more serious about it. I will also be hitchhiking around America again this summer, since my 8000+ mile hitchhiking trip in the summer of 2017 is the basis for the plot of the novel. The novel’s essential idea is to serve as a sort of conspectus of all the best of American culture, explicitly and implicitly referencing all the greatest American thinkers and works, weaving together a grand dialogue of American thought with the twin goals of teaching Americans about their cultural inheritance and using that inheritance to address the present. I have been working on this project for the last two years, and all of my classes since sophomore year have had some relation to it, although I have gotten to the point where now I understand the direction of the project deeply enough to make self-directed study more fruitful than institutional study. Luckily, before I made that leap, I discovered this class, which spoke directly to the core ideas of American Democracy that I had been struggling with privately. You learn a lot while hitchhiking, and you learn a lot from self-directed study and books; however, there are some values in learning from wise teachers that cannot be replaced, and while I am enormously excited to finally begin my long time off, taking American Democracy with Professors West and Unger has been by far the highlight of this term and the single thing that has most made staying at Harvard worth it. I have gained understandings through their tutelage that I would not have come to on my own in the same way. Since the reconstruction of American life and culture is the explicit aim of my Great American Novel project, the ideas discussed in this paper directly inform some central ideas of my novel and thus have indirect implications for the actual revitalization of American democratic culture that I am dedicated to instigating. In this essay I will discuss democratic culture through the lens of educational reform, the religion of the future, and, most importantly, the relationship between the past and the future.
At the core of this course lays the fundamental tension between the past and the future, memory and prophecy, personified in the respective forms of Cornel West and Roberto Unger. On one hand, you have Professor West, who looks like the ghost of Frederick Douglass, and who speaks as if the same fire from the past is burning through him. West prizes the inheritance of the greatest minds of the past over those living in the present. He believes that we become greater by absorbing the great ghosts of the past and allowing them to speak through us. He cares deeply about what he calls in Democracy Matters the “Deep Democratic Tradition,” the tradition of democratic artists, activists, and intellectuals who have grappled with and embodied what it means to live democratically. West argues that imbibing this tradition allows a person to live more fully democratically, not just politically, but culturally. When feeling the dissonance between American aspirations and American shortcomings, West tells us to dive into the past, to speak with those great individuals who have deeply felt the same dissonance, and who turned that feeling into profound and rare wisdom.
On the other hand, you have Professor Unger, who believes in the importance of orienting oneself to the future rather than to the past, in the importance of prophecy over memory. As he says in The Religion of the Future, the goal of a free society should be to promote constant reinvention in order to assert the primacy of the living over the dead and to enable prophecy “to speak more loudly than memory.” Unger might acknowledge the importance of learning from history in order to gain information about how to proceed into a better future, but he does not believe in the primacy of the greatest speakers of the dead. This is obvious even in the way he talks and writes, which rationalizes and recasts the insights of profound personalities and clear influences, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, into a future-oriented academic idiom. Whereas ghosts speak directly through West, and West prefers to speak through ghosts, Unger’s thought is informed by ghosts but denies them their use of his distinctive voice. I agree with them both to a degree, because the past and future are interrelated, yet also have to critique both positions as incomplete.
The orientations of both professors are important, and there is an essential inextricability between the past and the future that their dialectic points towards. My view on this is informed by the famous essay “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” by T.S. Eliot. In this essay, Eliot argues that the role of the individual poet (and, by extension any individual or creator) is subordinate to the Tradition. The Tradition is the totality of inherited cultural knowledge, which must be obtained through great labor. It requires “the historical sense,” which “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity,” (The Tradition and the Individual Talent). He says that “the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show. Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” To be truly conscious in the present requires us to have a deep understanding of the past. In Eliot’s view, the role of the individual is simply to act as a repository for the Tradition, for the past— a sort of catalyst-chamber, a synthetic and recombinatory locus that takes pieces of the past and fuses them into something truly novel, something greater than and other than the sum of its parts. When this happens, the creation of the poet becomes a part of the Tradition, which was whole and remains whole by the adjustment of the entire Tradition to accommodate the new element which emerged from within it.
This view would seem to privilege Cornel West’s orientation to the past over Roberto Unger’s orientation to the future, because it places the production of the future entirely within the domain of the past. Eliot believes that novelty, reconstruction, and progress can only come from laborious absorption of the Tradition; he believes that all prophecy is simply the warnings of memories remembered and recombined. This vindicates West’s view that the most important resource we have are the memories of the greatest of the dead; that the path to prophecy, the path to the future, the path to freedom is the same as the path of memory. The only way out is backwards. Brother West, like me, has undoubtedly repeated this incredible line from Eliot’s final poem, Little Gidding, in the shower many, many times, burning it into his mind:
“This is the use of memory:
For liberation— not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.”
Only by looking into the past can we become free; only by actively remembering, and thus involving the past in our present and involving our present in the past, can we liberate ourselves from the weight of that past, and from the weight of the future as well. Our existential condition of being thrown into a world created by our ancestors requires us to begin digging. Thus, West’s orientation to the past seems to be the correct way to emancipate our future.
This all would appear to contradict Professor Unger’s desire to make prophecy speak louder than memory, because it makes prophecy entirely dependent upon and emergent from memory. However, further critical reading of Eliot reveals some justification for Unger’s belief in prophecy as somehow greater than the memories that inform it. The latter half of “The Tradition and the Individual Talent” makes some more controversial claims than the former half. Essentially, Eliot argues for a depersonalized poet, affectless, neutered, and unattached with the present world. In Eliot’s view, the best poet would allow no individual personality into his work; they would simply be an empty catalyzing agent, allowing the Tradition to recombine in their head. This depersonalization of poetry had profound consequences that I believe to be negative. It led to a “New Criticism” paradigm at English departments like Harvard’s which rejected what they called the “Affective Fallacy” (allowing a poem’s emotional and personal impact to effect criticism) and the “Intentional Fallacy” (allowing the perceived intentions of the author or any authorial biography or personality to effect criticism). This neutered poetic criticism for a generation in an attempt to academicize it. I think Eliot is wrong to believe that personality has no place in creation; if this were the case, then, tracing backwards along a web of developments in the Tradition, you would be left with no “prime mover.” It is individuals who provide the necessary differences in interpreting the Tradition that allow it to develop. It is ridiculous to see the mind as merely a recombinatory space; the individual mind has agency, feelings, social relationships, genetics, unique upbringings, and more that necessarily can and do influence the unique way that they synthesize novelty (or prophecy) out of the Tradition (or memory). For example, it is not enough to say that my channeling of Walt Whitman is different from Eliot’s merely because of the presence of other traditional influences; there is also an obvious difference in personality and temperament between the two of us that simply must come to bear on the output.
Furthermore, and possibly most importantly, we live in temporally situated contexts, with unique intellectual adversities to deal with which also must influence the way we think. Intellectual activity is always a reaction to some perceived adversity, present or future, because ideas are inherently grounded in the potential for action. That is why they exist; thoughts are adaptations to an environment. The work of prophecy, in the tradition of Jerusalem, is always a reaction to present and imminent crisis. For example, the way Eliot read (and rejected) Whitman was inevitably influenced by the culture of 1910s Harvard and the First World War, and the prophecies that poured forth from Eliot in “The Waste-Land” (no matter how much Eliot attempted to depersonalize his work to a mere recombination of cultural fragments) were prophecies made of and for that time, that context, and its needs; and they spoke in the direction towards which he wanted to move in the immediate future. Similarly, my reading of Whitman, and the prophecies that emerge from my interaction with this dead man, must necessarily be different than Eliot’s, both in content and in direction, due to the radically different broad historical circumstances we respond to. To clarify, Eliot is wrong to think that prophecy is merely recombination of Tradition— otherwise, my prophecies would only be different due to the presence of influence from Spongebob and The Hunger Games and the lack of having read St. John of the Cross. Instead, we must understand the historical and social context of the individual talent as hugely influential on the direction that prophecy takes when it emerges from cultural memory. This context is like the oxygen in the air of the catalyst chamber where the chemical synthesis takes place in Eliot’s example of the catalyst— it may be invisible, but it is another element present for the interaction. This element of environmental and social adversity, the challenges of a person or of an age, are of the present; the prophecy created in response to the challenge, via the interaction of cultural memory with this challenge within the mind of the individual in the present, is inherently future-oriented. Prophecy can be louder than memory.
Thus, Roberto Unger is justified in believing that there is more in us, individually and collectively, than there is existing in our cultural and institutional contexts. Even though these things created us, even though we are beings constituted by outside powers, we still have, within us, the potential for more, the potential to create a future that does not follow directly and blindly from the past, but rather comes from us and becomes actual through our intentions. The Tradition does not merely recombine through us; we can use the Tradition to respond to the present, and to create prophecies for a better future that can emerge from that present. To respond to crisis is to say “What do we do next? What direction do we take from here?” Our response to this, our prophecy, cannot come solely from the inheritance of the past, for the ghosts responded to different contexts, and cannot give us the full solution. We must use the power of projection, of association, of possibility, of imagination to be prophetic. For some reason, humans have this imaginative power that goes beyond mere recombination of memories, personal or cultural. We can take memories and twist them, extend them, imagine different directions, simulate, dream, and this power seems to be innate to our humanity. Memory of the past provides the raw material for imagination and for prophecy, but it does not directly produce prophecy; we produce prophecy; we are not an inert catalyst through which the Tradition acts, but rather we are catalyzing agents. We have that burning vitality, that divine spark, that will to power, that elan vital, that living and ever-growing life force that adapts to an environment, that continues growing and becoming in order to survive and thrive in an ever-changing universe. We are full of potential for the future, and thus we ought to orient ourselves towards creating that future, even while acknowledging that the most important material for creating that future comes from the dedicated imbibing of cultural memory. We have more in us than there is.
This belief in the value of an orientation to the future, through a deep understanding of the past within us alongside the imaginative potential for the future, led me to disagree with Cornel West on a key point. On the first day of class, West proclaimed that he believed that the greatest human beings are all behind us, that there could never be another Beethoven since Beethoven’s time period allowed much greater space for large leaps of progress and novelty. Now, because we have Beethoven’s example, as well as the examples of thousands and thousands who followed him and filled out more of what is possible in his field, West believes that the potential for individual greatness is greatly diminished, that the greatest individuals are all dead, never to be surpassed. At the end of that first class, I went up to him to challenge him on this. While I do believe in the importance of the past (as evidenced by the way that Walt Whitman spoke through me in this discussion), I said, I think it is untrue that the greatest are all behind us. Whitman said that
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.”
Not only do I agree with this, but I would take it a step forward. Given that the universe is always expanding— both literally and, in the human world, metaphorically— there are always more and more novel particles synthesized in this smashing expansion which can then in turn be recombined in ever-more complex combinations. It’s like a recurring fractal pattern, always outwards in every direction. The procreant urge of the world means not only that there will always be inception, but that there will always be more inception, that there will always be more inception than there is now.
West’s view that the greatest are dead and will never be surpassed is, I think, based on a flawed understanding of valuation and novelty. It is true that people like Beethoven could make “greater” innovations due to their position as an earlier branch of the fractal, leaving later musicians smaller roles for novel complication and extension. But West here is confusing the value of an innovation with the directional magnitude of innovation as such. He is confusing the true human value of a particular novelty with the more generic value of novelty qua novelty. When we are surrounded by more and more good things, it becomes easier to devalue the individual things; in my philosophy, I use the term “Muchness” to denote how valuable something is to me, and this term could be compared to West’s use of “greatness.” West is valuing how novel something new is compared to what previously existed as his criteria for “greatness”; to me, this is a limited standard of greatness. It is easy to see how valuable a flower is when it is the first flower to bloom in the flower patch, and an argument could be made that that flower does truly have more Muchness or greatness to an observer at that time than the second flower that blooms, the third, and so on. But what if the flowers have all bloomed? It is much harder to understand the value of that first flower when it is in a bouquet of flowers of the same kind, or, even more so, when it is in a bouquet of flowers of its own kind alongside qualitatively different flowers. We today, using the memory of the dead, are like flower-pickers with many beautiful flowers available to us. The flower’s value, it’s Muchness, to us today is purely based on its beauty, its smell, what it does for us, what it means to us. The first flower may mean more to us than the others; however, the others still have value, even if they are less “novel” after the first flower. They still smell good, and many will smell different than the first flower. Just because the magnitude of the leap in novelty from no flowers to the first daffodil is greater than the leap from the daffodil to a rose does not deprive the rose of its value, its muchness, its greatness in a more holistic sense. Of course, valuation is subjective, and not objective, but I think Whitman would agree with me that it is important to actively appreciate similarity and difference, to appreciate greatness as intrinsic to an object itself and not merely based on its difference from other objects. Furthermore, even if the second and third flowers individually do have less value to me than the first, they are still valuable, and add their value to the bouquet. So, the Muchness of a bouquet of flowers is inherently greater than the first flower alone. To make this analogy more explicit— yes, Beethoven was greatly novel, but he was also just great in a non-temporal sense, because of the quality of his music. But an artist today, who could deeply imbibe Beethoven, plus Bach, plus the Beatles, plus Brockhampton, could easily be “greater” than Beethoven, by virtue of Beethoven’s place as merely one flower among their bouquet. Of course, this would require an impossibly full channeling of these dead, but the synthesizing interaction between the artists creates something greater than and other than the sum of its parts. The aesthetic of the bouquet, with the interplay of colors and forms, is sui generis. It is fair to assume that the bouquet at least can be greater than that first flower, even if we assign more value to that first flower by virtue of its firstness. I think that West’s view of the greatest as all behind us is not only wrong, but detrimental to Ungerian progress, which requires hope for the future and a belief that the future can be greater than the past.
While I deeply value the past, and see it as the essential resource for creating the future, I think a hopeful orientation towards a greater future is necessary to prevent the fatalism that a belief in the primacy of the dead would produce. I do not think that Brother West is fatalistic, but I do believe that his belief that the greatest humans are all behind us is folly and could discourage people from actively becoming great. The future can only be greater if individuals believe that they can be greater. On the flip side, Roberto Unger’s belief in the future, and in humanity’s ability to recreate themselves constantly, is not complete without a deep understanding of the way the past creates the future, and how memory is the material of prophecy. For example, if his prose sang more with the un-obscured personal voices of the dead, I believe his writing would be more effective in its goals of inspiring progressive change. In covering up his intellectual roots in favor of a future-oriented academic style, Unger sacrifices some of the power of the dead, which West is more able to channel effectively. This complex relationship between past and present, memory and prophecy, culture and the individual is one of the main animating principles of my Great American Novel project. The title of my book is “Beatin’ Path” and the bibliography section is entitled “Beaten Paths.” The novel deeply explores the relationship between the beaten paths which constitute us— history, power, society, culture, the Tradition, our social world— and the singular compound path I am always beating in the persistent present as an individual. I explicitly kneel to the power of the past and the value of cultural memory by implicitly and explicitly referencing American culture. I pastiche the styles of various great American artists and even weave quotes into my prose through the use of italics, rather than quotations (which is itself an homage to Whitman’s idea that “These really are the thoughts of all men in all languages and lands, they are not original with me.”) The interplay of italics and normal text speaks to the interplay of memory and prophecy in all of us. However, the Ungerian orientation to the future is still essential. In the book, I come to understand the supremacy of that transcendent power in us, that creative fire that fuses memory into prophecy, that Ungerian belief in our ever-greater potential. Only by an orientation towards solving the pressing problems of the present can we use that power to make a better world. I personally need to believe, contra West, that, despite the novel greatness of Moby-Dick, my own novel could be “greater” in the same way that a bouquet can be greater than a flower, and in the sense of relevance to our temporal situation. Belief in the possibility is enough. The past and the future are both essential, and only by being mindful of the power of both, and by deeply involving them with each other through our thoughts and actions, can we make a better world for ourselves and for our nation.
In order to create a better world, we must actively imbibe the past, especially the “Deep Democratic Tradition,” and the main tool we have for ensuring that this happens on a broad scale is the public education system. It is no secret that the American public education system has long been a lot worse than it should be. It performs poorly on many measures— and even these measures, I believe, are flawed. The priorities of the American education system are systemization, bureaucracy, teaching to the lowest common denominator, ever-proliferating standardized tests, discipline, and preparation for a Fordist economy that no longer exists. The current push for STEM prioritization may help some students get jobs, although even these will continue to be threatened by machines. It is not the solution economically, because the jobs of the future will require humans to be good at thinking and acting in ways that machines can’t; our current education system is very systemizing. In lecture, Professor Unger laid out his proposals for reforming the education system with an eye towards the needs of the economy of the future. Firstly, there is a strong need to move resources from the rich to the poor, in order to ensure that every child, no matter their existential lottery, has the chance to obtain a quality education. Secondly, the focus should shift from acquiring broad, encyclopedic and superficial information to learning how to think critically about important issues with selective depth. The goal will be to develop the analytic and synthetic powers of the imagination rather than merely absorb facts. After all, in a world where any relevant fact can be Googled, it is far more important to learn how to think than what to know. Imagination is what the machines still can’t do. Unger acknowledges that we will still need examinations, but they will be much less narrow, allowing more room for the child to innovate and develop in reaction to the examination, just as I have done with this open-ended final essay assignment. Thirdly, Unger wants education to be more cooperative, in line with his vision of a free society engaging in plural and experimental forms of cooperation in order to achieve its goals and test out new ways of producing together and living together. Our schools can be an early experimental ground for such “higher cooperation.” Fourthly, Unger wants us to revamp the way we teach and learn to be much more dialectical, engaging multiple viewpoints about an issue, whether those viewpoints are from multiple teachers or multiple students. This will train students in the social and critical skills necessary in the modern world and, more philosophically, train them in the very dialectical process of transcendence that Unger prizes as part of our essential humanity. Finally, Unger’s political vision of a free society involves the fluidity to redefine oneself repeatedly, and this requires the ability to always retrain for another job if one’s current job is unsatisfying. Thus, vocational education must become available to Americans of all ages and at any time.
I agree with everything that Unger believes here, and his reforms will be necessary for the 21st century economy; we are already behind on getting young people prepared for it, sending them through outdated (not to mention restrictive and often detrimental) public schools. However, I would extend Unger’s critique of the economic and “statecraft” relevance of our educational system with a more Cornel West critique of the philosophical failure of our education system in its role of “soulcraft.” The philosophy of our education system is undergirded implicitly by capitalist values; the point of education is seen as explicitly transactional, as training for a role in the wage-labor economic system. We are supposed to learn to sit still, to be disciplined in a Foucauldian sense, to respect hierarchy, to perform busywork, to answer explicit questions with specific answers, to respond when called, to move at the bell. We learn with the goal of either directly entering a vocation or of gaining entrance to the next established system (which will then prepare us for a vocation). In other words, as a society, we only value education as an instrumental good, an economic tool, something we have to do in order to subsist within capitalism. The view that education is a good in itself— for the enlargement of the human mind, for the expansion of internal and external freedom, for the transmission of cultural memory, for the joy of understanding as a communicative good, for the increased ability to act well in the world, for the humanizing of humanity, for the possibility of remaking the world for the better with an educated imagination rather than taking one’s place as a cog in the existing machine— is elided. This view of education as bildung is practically absent from public discourse, as evidenced by the frequently heard question asked of college students at Thanksgiving: “What are you gonna do with that?” Material subsistence is not enough for humanity— we have a deep desire for transcendence, for the creation of meaning, and education can provide us with this.
Due to this belief in the holistic value of education, my ideal educational reform would inculcate a reformation of values as well as systems. This reformation of values, reemphasizing the humanizing qualities of education, the fact that learning makes us more human, would dovetail well with Unger’s reforms. Focusing on dialectics, selective depth, developing our synthetic imaginative powers, and encouraging higher forms of cooperation all would promote bildung much more effectively than the current system. However, it is not enough; I believe that we need to emphasize the importance of self-education in our public schools. We need to teach students how to investigate something that interests them, how to surf the web intelligently, how to read books effectively, how to criticize their existing beliefs, how to learn what they do not yet know they want to learn as well as how to learn what they do know they want to learn. Most importantly, however, we need to teach them to love learning. We need to show them early the joys of learning qua learning, for oneself, whether or not a teacher is involved. We need to make them love learning in such a way that encourages them to spend the rest of their lives learning for their own sakes. We need to make them love learning in such a way that makes it a social process, a fun social activity, so that one student comes to school excited to tell her best friend all about octopuses, and another student asks the teacher if he can present to the class what he learned over the weekend about Thomas Jefferson. We need to make learning something that students want to do, not have to do, so that it becomes a lifelong process, and one that they continue outside of the classroom to their own benefit and to the benefit of their peers. This would also ideally encourage higher forms of cooperation, as students will discover they learn better together (dialectically and cooperatively) and may even extend this to creating together. This ethos needs to be inculcated carefully yet enthusiastically in the minds of our young people so that they believe it to be their own. For my part, I am attempting to achieve this effect with my novel. My own main character’s excitement (based on my own genuine excitement) about interesting books and ideas and histories, which will be displayed through the writing as well as through discussions with drivers, will hopefully rub off on the readers in a mimetic fashion, inspiring them to feel the same way about learning. I will even explicitly address this in the parts that deal with John Dewey. If I ever obtained a platform from this book, I would then use it to try and promote interest in American culture and interest in learning in general; I would specifically target young people. I would use that platform to demonstrate my genuine enthusiasm for self-education and to advocate for others to do the same. I want to make it a fun social phenomenon, to share poems with friends, or new discoveries, and to embark on projects of learning with one’s friends for the joy of it. For a long time, possibly as a legitimate reaction to our ossified school system, the dominant narrative has been that school sucks, and that by extension learning is lame. I want to reverse that disastrous cultural paradigm, in order to bring more of the past into the minds of the present, which will lead to a world in which every individual is a prophet. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “I tell you in truth: All men are prophets, or else God does not exist.”
The final course theme I will discuss, related to the general themes elaborated so far, is the theme of Roberto Unger’s “Religion of the Future.” Unger’s argument is that politics and religion are inherently interrelated, and calls for a religion of the future that will complement and help to bring about a more free society. This religion is based ultimately on Unger’s belief that the essential thing about humanity is their innate ability to transcend every context that they find themselves within, in a continuous dialectic with the universe that produces a continual expansion of humanity. We may be groundless, but we can still continuously surpass ourselves and reshape ourselves, reshape our beliefs, and reshape our institutions. Unger’s religion is not defined, but paints a direction in which a religion of the future would move; continuous reformation is part of the deal; the focus is on “structure-revising structure.” One essential aspect of this political religion would be “an education equipping the mind as imagination to gain [ascendance] over the mind as machine,” connecting it explicitly to the previously discussed educational reforms. It would encourage apostasy and radical pluralism, in order to ensure continuous experimentation with ourselves and with the structures we create, experimentations that explore different directions. It is deeply indebted to American pragmatism, which emphasizes this continual experimentation of life as opposed to a belief in any final answers. Unger’s religion would instantiate a situation of “deep freedom” in society, defined as “freedom, grasped and realized through change of our institutions and practices: not just through a one-time change but through a practice that can generate future, ongoing change in the institutional order of society. Deep freedom is thus also freedom as understood within the bounds of what I earlier described as the conception of a free society. The idea of deep freedom develops through an interplay between the conception of a free society and the institutional arrangements required to make that conception real. The conception informs the making of the institutional alternatives. The making of the alternative prompts us to enrich and revise the conception.” A society with deep freedom would encourage experimentation, plurality, and higher forms of cooperation. Fluidity is a key theme here; fluidity for more human particles to interact dialectically, expanding themselves in the process in innumerable directions.
I have been theorizing a religion of my own for a year now, and it can fulfill and extend Unger’s vision of a religion of the future. My religion is a water religion. It sees water as the ultimate symbol in all human life and meaning-making. Water is present in every religion on earth and every great story or philosophy tends to use water imagery or water metaphors. Water can symbolize life, time, flow, change, cohesion, sociality, adaptation, content, form (ice), form-filling (water), reformation (water’s erosive ability to change the contours of its own environment), and form-transcendence (evaporation). It can symbolize much more than that: the beauty of water as the ultimate symbol is that it can reflect whatever meaning we choose to see in it. Thus, water religion is not owned by me or by anyone else; anyone can interpret it in their own way, making themselves the prophet of their own religion. However, they simultaneously will be participating in something shared with all those who ascribe meaning to water, and, by extension, all humanity and all life, since all life is based on water. It is the only common denominator, and it is 70% of what we are. Before we left the sea, we were water within water. Earth is a water planet, and we are water beings. Thus, water forms the most ideal conceivable ground for religious feelings. What I see as missing in Unger’s call for a religion of the future is precisely the “religious” aspects of it; he is right that religion and politics are intertwined, but he does not make his ideas concrete. Water provides this opportunity. A key aspect of any religion is the feeling of connection to a larger, higher whole; in Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he ascribes the origins of man’s religious feeling to his vague consciousness of being part of society, of being part of a larger whole from which individuals are partially estranged. When we die, our water remains part of the whole, just as our memory flows into the ocean of consciousness that lives on after us in the minds of those still flowing. This water is always passing through us; we sweat and pee as we live; and then we are reborn by drinking more. Another key aspect of any religion is ritual; drinking water is one of the only rituals which all humanity shares, and we share it many times daily. Thus, the bare minimum required to be a practitioner of the water religion is to simply be conscious every time you drink or interact with water, to be conscious of its larger flows and what it connects you to, and to be grateful for it. Civilization is simply the story of plumbing; a home is where water is. Water can fill any vessel it finds itself in, and it can transcend those vessels or remake them. It is fluid, as humanity would be fluid in a society of deep freedom. It is cohesive, yet the individual molecules are polar, like people are. There are different rivers with different makeups, yet they are joined in the same sea. Every river is simultaneously a new existence (per Heraclitus) while also being composed of the same water molecules that have been cycling forever. Water reflects human society’s condition of being both a collective and composed of individuals, both all the same and all different. A water religion can thus easily be interpreted as a democratic religion of the sort that Walt Whitman called for in his Democratic Vistas, a religion that melts and unites humanity into one common whole through the levelling powers of democracy and love, while also providing room for the free play and interaction of its individual parts for themselves and in service of this whole. He envisions, and I’m sure Unger would echo this, a “Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from its own interior and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing society.” Water religion connects individuals with society, and with the living earth, which is in desperate need of reverence at this time. We truly do need water, and take it for granted; why not ascribe sacrality to it, when it is clearly so ripe for it? If we could simply see, or at least keep in the front of our minds, the way that water moves around the earth, within each of us, and through all of life— if we could see all life, from the grass to each other, tinged with the same blue aura— who could imagine what a free and connected world that could bring about! A water religion, in sum, provides a plausible and actual unifying principle for a political religion of the future to orient itself around, and furthermore provides the necessary religious aspects of feeling unified with a higher whole and of individually performable rituals. Of course, this is not the only possible ground for a fluid religion of the future, but it is the ground I have chosen, and it has worked well for me and my many converted friends. I plan on continuing to develop my own ideas around water religion for the rest of my life and in all of my work; firstly, I will be impressing its core ideas into the heads of every person who reads my book, who hopefully will be unable to drink at a water fountain again without thinking of how grateful they are for water. Thank water!
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 