"Human beings and their actions constitute the advancing front, the surging crest of an ongoing movement that never stops"
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Lamont’s image of humanity as “the advancing front” and “surging crest” is a deliberate demotion of the individual ego. You’re not the ocean; you’re the wave. The phrasing borrows the romance of progress-talk but reroutes it toward a naturalistic, almost scientific worldview: history isn’t a set of heroic episodes, it’s a continuous process with humans as its most visible edge. The rhetoric works because it flatters action without sanctifying actors. “Constitute” makes people structural, not exceptional; “ongoing movement that never stops” removes any comforting endpoint, whether religious salvation or ideological utopia.
The subtext is classic Lamont: humanist confidence without metaphysics. As a mid-century American philosopher and public intellectual, Lamont spent his career arguing for secular ethics, civil liberties, and a non-supernatural basis for meaning. This line reads like a compressed manifesto against both fatalism and providence. If the movement never stops, then responsibility can’t be deferred to God, destiny, or “how things are.” The only forward motion available is the one we collectively generate.
There’s also a subtle political edge. In an era shadowed by world war, the Cold War, and anxieties about mass society, Lamont frames human action as historically consequential while rejecting the cult of the Great Man. The “front” and “crest” suggest struggle and momentum, but they’re impersonal metaphors: no single person owns the wave, yet each person shapes its form. It’s an argument for agency that’s communal, secular, and relentlessly unfinished.
The subtext is classic Lamont: humanist confidence without metaphysics. As a mid-century American philosopher and public intellectual, Lamont spent his career arguing for secular ethics, civil liberties, and a non-supernatural basis for meaning. This line reads like a compressed manifesto against both fatalism and providence. If the movement never stops, then responsibility can’t be deferred to God, destiny, or “how things are.” The only forward motion available is the one we collectively generate.
There’s also a subtle political edge. In an era shadowed by world war, the Cold War, and anxieties about mass society, Lamont frames human action as historically consequential while rejecting the cult of the Great Man. The “front” and “crest” suggest struggle and momentum, but they’re impersonal metaphors: no single person owns the wave, yet each person shapes its form. It’s an argument for agency that’s communal, secular, and relentlessly unfinished.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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