N O TES TOWARDS A UTOPIA
525
still share so many animal traits? Why did he lust, procreate, die
like an animal? All of pre-Darwinian man was haunted by these
queries, and much of our post-Darwinian anguish is still caused by
them. Although the answers to these questions have taken various
and sometimes opposite forms, they have all been made in terms
of the same original shock or wonder: why, being so different from
the beasts, aren't we
radically
different? Given this false starting
point, this primitive logic of inquiry, made inevitable by man's
early pride in his specific difference (his language and reason, enab–
ling him to project symbols) it was equally inevitable that he should
seek the answer to the desperate question in his own mythic past.
Thus there arose the concept of a lost perfection, together with
the correlative concept of a perfect creator who saw fit, at some
mythic point in the past, to make man in his image; then, at some
later point in that mythic progression, to divest him of this per–
fection in punishment for a dreadful crime.
Human history has been one long attempt to atone for a
criminal act which, though perfectly imaginable, never took place
-except in the human psyche, where it has wrought the appro-:
priate anguish hereditary to this day. The final triumph of Dar–
winism has not succeeded in erasing man's sense of a primal guilt–
not because we don't fully believe in the theory of evolution, but
because a drastic conditioning that has continued for several mil–
lennia is not likely to
be
overcome in a mere century. Even though
today must of us are consciously concerned with closing the gap
between man and animal, the inherited impulses all point the other
way-towards widening it even further, no longer by becoming
god-like but by becoming gods ourselves,
secular
gods. Our pre–
sent choice
is
precise but difficult. It is the choice between con–
tinuing the logic of history, which is also a logic of instincts, and a
resolute ·about-face that would be both instinctual and conceptual
-but primarily conceptual. Man's perfection, that is to say, has
to be placed where it belongs: in
th~
future; and it has to be
seen for what it potentially is and actually might be: not absolute
perfection but relative perfection, bo·unded by man's possibilities
as a biological species.
