We can step back from the edge of the abyss and build a human realm sufficing to itself. In this realm, human beings create meaning, albeit in a meaningless world. The power and authority of their production of light can be all the greater by virtue of its contrast to the surrounding darkness and of the consequent urgency and value of the saving intervention. Only in this way can we rescue ourselves from the absurdity of our condition.
The creation of meaning in a meaningless world is not, however, a matter of mere speculative fabrication. It is not enough to spin out consoling stories about our position in the universe. In fact, such an activity forms no part of our rescue, the premise of which is to acknowledge unflinchingly the reality and the gravity of our situation. It is the securing and the improvement of what is human, not a changed description of what is non-human, that can save us.
The aim is to ensure that society not be contaminated by the meaninglessness of the world, that it not operate under the sway of forces and according to standards that make life among our fellows almost as alien to our deepest concerns as is nature to the shared experience of humanity. If this inner line of defense fails, all is lost. If we can hold the enemy, of life-shadowing meaninglessness, at bay, in the zone between an indefensible outer line and an indispensable inner line, we can go forward. We have reason to hope.
In the transformation of the human world, we must succeed in preventing force and guile from overtaking cooperation and solidarity. At any moment a struggle may break out over the terms of social life—the terms on which people lay claims to one another’s loyalty and labor and to the resources produced, or made useful, by labor. This struggle may be accompanied by war among states or societies.
Any social and cultural order amounts to a temporary halt in this practical and visionary fighting. However, if that is all it is—an unconditional surrender of the defeated to the triumphant, the order will not be stable because it will not be legitimate in the eyes of either the losers or the winners. Its arrangements will not be susceptible to being read as fragments of an intelligible and defensible plan for cooperation. Consequently, they will be incapable of being translated into laws that can be interpreted, elaborated, and applied in the mutable and varied settings of social life.
Will society amount to the enslavement of the many by the few under disguise? Will its principle be the exhaustion and despair of the enslaved and the anxious vigilance of their masters? Will the disguise be culture? Will the possibilities of cooperation and the claims of solidarity be held hostage to the requirements of a scheme of subjugation, tolerated as the sole remaining alternative to continued violence and insecurity and sanctified by the hopelessness of both its manifest victims and its supposed beneficiaries?
If all these evils come to pass, the order of society and culture will take on the attributes of meaningless nature. The inner line of defense will be broken. We shall have to retreat into what Max Weber called “the pianissimo of personal life.” In that domain of intimacy, we may hope to sustain what remains of a life that speaks to our most intimate concerns.
It is not enough to describe the modification of social life necessary to avoid such a result in negative terms. It has an affirmative content. The overriding goal is to reshape our relations to other people according to a vision of what we owe one another by virtue of occupying certain roles: friend and friend, husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and student, ruler and ruled, boss and worker. In this saving exercise, we shall be guided not only by the practical imperatives of the division of labor in society but also and above all by a sense of the relativity of these roles with respect to our common humanity.
Fate has cast us in different roles. The centrality of roles to the organization of society reveals our dependence on one another. This dependence is a mark, rather than a denial, of our humanity. It reveals our strength as well as our weakness. Cooperation, organized through the performance of roles and the observance of social conventions, is not only a requirement for the advancement of our practical interests; it is also an expression of a basic fact about our humanity. Incomplete in ourselves, we complete ourselves through service to others. To serve them, we must understand them. Thus, the development of our imagination of the otherness of other people—the perception of their states of consciousness—forms part of the process by which we complete ourselves, affirming and developing our humanity. Such imagination must inform our performance of social roles.
What is sacrosanct is the person, together with the fine texture of relations among individuals. All else in society and culture remains subservient to the experience of personality and of personal encounter. In a meaningless world, only personality and the relations among persons are hallowed. We should recognize one another as instances of the sacred—that is to say, of that which can create meaning. Everything else in society is a means to an end.
The nourishment of personality and of personal encounter can alone count as an end in itself: its value is not ancillary to the attainment of any other purpose. To turn ourselves into beings who act in this spirit because they understand one another and their situation in this way is the overriding goal of social reform. Our success in this enterprise determines whether we can make a practical success of life in society and prevent it from degenerating into a nightmare of force and guile.
In conformity to this aim and in the service of this goal, the division of labor in society must be softened and spiritualized. It must become the vehicle of our role-based practices of cooperation and of our slowly developing capacity to imagine one another. Our cooperative practices, anchored in the performance of social roles, must be both accommodated and spiritualized, according to the demands and the resources of each historical circumstance. Ravenous self-interest must be mastered in the interest of such a humanization of social life. Some element of hierarchy may be admitted, but only so long as it can be justified by the practical requirements of coordination (rather than by belief in the intrinsic qualities of different classes and castes). Only to the extent that we reform society in this way can we prevent its fall into a nightmare of domination, and tame selfishness.
Such a program affirms its fidelity to the goals inspiring the past religious revolutions. It upholds, in practice as well as in doctrine, the preeminence of our shared humanity over the divisions and hierarchies within humankind. It repudiates the heroic and martial ethic of lordship and honor, and replaces it with a vision of the attenuation of the contrast between the instrumental and the non-instrumental, the brutal and the spiritualized, the prose and the poetry of social life. It remains far from offering a full-fledged political and moral program. It does, however, describe the starting point of such a proposal.
This program may at first seem not to exemplify the first and most fundamental attribute of those religious revolutions: the establishment of a dialectic between the transcendence and the immanence of the divine in the world. For the overcoming of the world, the transcendent divine is impersonal and unified being, in which the beings that populate our phenomenal experience must find ultimate reality and value. For the humanization of the world, it is the experience of personality itself, dwelling in our social experience but never exhausted by it or reducible to it.
Here is an idea of transcendence that is neither identical to the expression of transcendence in the Semitic religions of salvation nor entirely foreign to that expression. In those religions, the narrative of transactions between God and humanity represents a deepening and a reevaluation, rather than a cancelling out, of our experience of personality and of personal encounter. God himself is represented in the category of personality; the dangers of anthropomorphism stand balanced against the stratagems of the analogical imagination.
That is a sketch of the humanization of the world as a long-standing option within the religious history of humanity, presented in its core beliefs and without regard to the varieties and specificities of its evolution.
The most comprehensive and influential example of this orientation is the