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Meet Roberto Unger
Professor Roberto Unger believes that everything we do can be like love-and he can tell us why that notion sounds so ridiculous to us. The problem lies with the predominance in Western society of what he calls the "Christian-romantic picture of man." In that picture, there is always an opposition between the highest things to which individuals can aspire-such as perfect faith, or true love-and those things to which their societies encourage them to aspire-such as wealth or stability. Because we have inherited this picture of ourselves, we are confronted with the tragic choice between ourselves and our society, the choice between transcendence as a form of escape from the world and participation in the world at the price of that transcendence. For Unger, this is how the world works-but not how it must. We can replace that picture with a better one-one that rejects the opposition between the forms of individual transcendence and social structures-and once we do, then everything really can be just like love. Unger is an originally Brazilian professor at Harvard Law School and teaches two classes open to undergraduates: Government 1092: The Past and Future of the Left, and Humanities 11: Self, Serenity and Vulnerability. His website, the Roberto Unger websource ( www.robertounger.com ), is an online compendium of works by and about him, accessible free of charge. Almost everything he has published is available there, including a practically endless supply of his delightfully truculent aphorisms (which cycle through every page reload)-and he has published on a diversity of topics, from architecture to personal psychology. But also available at the site is perhaps Unger's most important contribution: a 1200-page work of social and political theory entitled simply, Politics . Since its publication in 1987, the three volumes of this work- Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task , False Necessity , and Plasticity into Power -have formed the centerpiece of Unger's project of global moral and political transformation. With this project, Unger hopes to achieve nothing less than to cure the world of all that ails it-which he believes can only be accomplished by recasting people's everyday experiences with the transformative character of love. In Politics , and in numerous shorter works, Unger launches a resounding critique of most forms of Western political and social life and proposes radical alternatives in both theory and practice. On the strength of this project, Richard Rorty-among the most well- respected of contemporary American philosophers-has given Unger "a better chance than most to be linked to some world-transforming event." Certainly, the scope of Unger's ambition is remarkable; even more remarkable is the ease with which his project moves from the theoretical to the genuinely plausible. Though it entails a complex discussion of the relationship between individuals and their institutions, and speaks plainly about subjects like love, Unger's project addresses itself to an immediate political problem, what he and others have referred to as 'the crisis of the Left': All over the world, people complain that their national politics fail to deliver real alternatives: especially alternatives that would give new meaning, new life, and new efficacy to the old progressive idea of a better chance for everyone - a chance to ensure the decencies as well as the necessities of life, a chance to work and to be cared for when one cannot work, a chance to engage in the affairs of one's community and one's society, a chance to do something with one's life that has value in one's own eyes. In the past, the function of the Left had been to provide such alternatives, but the Left has failed. No one is seriously an anti-market socialist anymore, and the Left has nothing to replace it. Leftist parties have abandoned the attack on capitalism and campaign today on platforms of 'distributive justice' and 'safety nets'-what Unger calls "capitalism with a discount." There are simply no credible theoretical heresies with which to combat the established order associated with the rich North Atlantic democracies and the ideas emanating from their universities. As a result, "Many countries are now governed by people who would like to be Franklin Roosevelt and do not know how." And the failure of the Left is the failure of the West to deliver "the central promise of democracy. that ordinary men will have a chance to become freer and greater." Unger believes that the vision, the ideology, that the Left (and the West) must adopt has its basis in the rejection of a "role-based morality." Americans almost universally seem to think that their social and political institutions exist to make them free, to enable them to choose for themselves about how they want to live their lives. But American society, like most societies, understands morality-and therefore the choices that people have-through socially constructed roles. We act in the world by playing roles; we try, for example, to be a 'good friend,' a 'good employee,' or even a 'good President,' but what constitutes these roles has been decided for us, without our input and before we were born. According to Unger, individual people can and should exercise much more control over what society expects of them. The destruction of the system of role-based morality is the condition for the goal of Unger's project: "the divinization of humanity." The most common defense of role-based morality maintains that even though roles may stand in the way of a divinizing project, roles are necessary and even helpful. This defense contends that people need roles to have even the slightest clue about what they want or what is possible in society. And even if roles are inevitable, they are merely optional guidelines, mere social expectations, that people, once they understand them, can struggle with and potentially undermine. For Unger this view is a "failure of imagination." He admits that roles do indeed serve an important function for people in societies on which they are based, but there is no reason to think that roles are natural or eternal. Because they present a tragic opposition between individual aspirations and social expectations-and because, in principle, we have the power to revise and deny them-we should do just that. The roles we play are defined by our institutions-for instance, the norms of the nuclear family or the prevailing economic policy-so opposition to a role-based morality must take the form of institutional change. Role-based morality-and the defense that roles are natural and inevitable-fails to understand that "the relation between our contexts and ourselves as context-revising agents is itself up for grabs in history." There are neither ahistorical laws of human nature, nor impersonal laws of history. The very relationship of individuals to history (and to the roles that have been created throughout it) is itself a historical contingency. It is possible, Unger claims, to set up our institutions in such a way that individual people have the power to both authentically shape themselves and to shape history. Every person can, with respect to his society and his context, "hold the relation of a creator god to his creation." Unger identifies the conditions required for the divinization of humanity. The basic idea is to change institutions so that they endow individuals with more of his version of "negative capability." Unger writes that "we may use [Keats'] turn of phrase to label the empowerment that arises from the denial of whatever in our contexts delivers us over to a fixed scheme of division and hierarchy and to an enforced choice between routine and rebellion." Negative capability is, thus, essentially a context-smashing ability-it is the extent to which each individual can negate and revise the roles and institutions of his society within the scope of his own life. People possess negative capability most completely when they live within "structure-denying structures," or institutions that readily facilitate their own transformation. No institution that exists today remotely resembles Unger's structure-denying structures. Nevertheless, Unger is not an idle visionary; he stresses the importance of a coherent link between an ultimate vision and practical proposals-there must be a middle as well as a beginning and an end. Unger argues that The Left must begin by 'raising the shield over heresy.' Specifically, it must begin by undermining the 'golden shadow' (or what Thomas Friedman has called the 'golden straitjacket') that places international economic development at the mercy of international finance capital. In order to do this, the governments of large developing countries must, above all, make two reforms: they must heighten (forcibly, if necessary) the domestic rates of savings, in order to extend productive resources to a wider portion of the population; and they must commit themselves to extensive but responsible redistributive spending (which would be possible by replacing current tax regimes largely with value-added taxation). Unger believes that a large developing country-such as India or Brazil-that undertakes these measures has the best chance of raising the shield of heresy and thereby kicking off the project of global transformation. But these reforms will not themselves endow negative capability or create the conditions for the divinization of humanity. Their implementation is merely the vantage point from which we will be able to understand how to practically implement structure-denying structures. They are the measures required to attain the 'middle' part of the program. Raising the shield over heresy will deepen democracy by establishing a more democratic economy alongside existing democratic political institutions, and it will allow governments to pursue educational policies that do not simply cater to the needs of the international economic establishment. Only once these conditions are established will we be able to institute structure-denying structures and endow ourselves with the negative capability required to escape a role-based morality. A few years ago Unger attempted to run for president of his native Brazil in an effort to kick-start this whole process himself, but he was unable to muster enough support. What he if he had been successful? At one of his recent lectures, he offered "a first approximation, an evocation, a sketch, rather than an analysis" of his project's approach to the world: The elementary experience from which it begins is the intimation, the prophecy, that we are not as small as we seem to be; that there are infinities within us, in each of us individually as well as in all of us collectively; that we must struggle with the social world so that it will not shackle us; that we must struggle with it not only to become freer from it but to change it; to make it hospitable to our claim to share more fully in the attributes of divinity. And what we seek, then, as the final reward of our efforts is not serenity but this enlargement of ourselves, not benevolence but love, or at least the possibility of love among equals.
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