The brain is individual. However, the mind as consciousness is from the outset social. The means by which we develop a subjective life, from language to discourse, from ideas to practice, are all a common possession and shared construction. A central paradox of consciousness is that we can be both obscure to one another (in the enigmas of intention and experience) and entirely dependent, even for our self-awareness, on practices and powers, such as language, that must exist socially to exist at all. In a world that is meaningless, except by virtue of the meaning and value that human beings create within it, only the personal is sacred, sacred in the twofold sense of the ancient Indo-European civilizations: of what has commanding value as well as of what presents the greatest danger.
No philosophical vocabulary is wholly complete and adequate as a means with which to describe the sense of this sanctity. In one vocabulary, to recognize the sanctity of personality and of interpersonal relations is to see and to treat the person—both one self and the other—as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. In another vocabulary, it is the view that personality and the interpersonal represent our closest approach to the absolute: that which has value and meaning unconditionally and without limit, and therefore resists comparison, as infinite quantities are incomparable.
This absolute, unconditional good exists, however, only as manifest in the natural incidents of human life—beginning with the facts of birth, ascent, decline, and death, and the sequence of generations—as well as in the practical organization of society. The issue central to this second part of the humanization of the world is how we are to understand and to guide the relation between the facts of interdependence, intersubjectivity, and sanctity of the personal and the building of a real social order against the background of the natural circumstances of social life. There is a danger, and there is a remedy.
The risk is that interdependence, reciprocal subjectivity, and the sacred value of personality will be overwhelmed and degraded in the course of the events by which the social order is made and sustained. The order always has an accidental and violent history. It begins in a struggle, and then in the containment of the struggle: its partial and temporary interruption. The war, interrupted in the large, may continue in the small; the peace may be the continuation of the war in veiled and hamstrung form. Each individual will assume his place and play his part according to the distribution of winners and losers in the conflicts from which the order arose. Stability will result from exhaustion, impotence, and fear. The victorious will be as anxious as the defeated are resentful.
The exercise of oppression may over time be modulated by reciprocity. Subordinates as well as superiors may begin to find advantage in the acceptance of their respective lots. Exchange and power will combine in the same relationships. However, reciprocity will always remain a supervening and accessory influence, circumscribed by arrangements and assumptions that it did not create and cannot reconstruct.
In such a circumstance, interdependence will be shaped in the mold of the grinding hierarchies of power and advantage, transmitted and reproduced from generation to generation, to which the settlement of the struggle gave rise. Our understanding of other people’s experience will take the form of a shared surrender to beliefs that lend a patina of naturalness, necessity, and authority to that settlement. Awareness of the sanctity of the personal will be suppressed, or survive only as a residual hope, clinging to the familiar and to the intimate.
It is not the interpretation of interdependence and intersubjectivity from the perspective of the sanctity of the personal that will turn the social order into something more than the temporary resolution of an ongoing conflict; it is the practical imperative of the division of labor in society. Suppose that the economy has already attained a level in the development of its productive capabilities at which vast combinations of people, put to work in specialized tasks, under stark hierarchical supervision, can yield a large surplus over present consumption. Imagine, however, that society has not yet reached the point at which we have learned how to repeat most of the initiatives needed to produce such a surplus, to express the activities susceptible to repetition in formulas, and to embody the formulas in machines so that we can devote most of our time to the actions that we do not yet know how to repeat.
Such an intermediate situation has been the circumstance of the major historical civilizations, at least until very recently. It was in particular the circumstance of the agrarian-bureaucratic empires that represented, before the last two hundred years, the most important states in the world. The world religions characteristically emerged at the periphery, rather than at the center, of such states.
This situation favored a strongly defined social division of labor: the division of society among distinct classes, estates, or castes, reproduced through the hereditary transmission of advantage, and marked by distinct forms of life and of consciousness as well as by different degrees of access to the key society-making resources of economic wealth, political power, and spiritual authority. A particular way of organizing the social division of labor, and the distinct roles to which it gave rise, reduced the possible forms of cooperation to what the triumphant institutional and ideological settlement countenanced. The characteristic Indo-European distinction between the rulers and priests, the warriors, the merchants, and the workers represented a simplified and widespread instance of such a system.
It is not that this hierarchical ordering of society into hereditary classes was in any sense necessary, given these opportunities and limitations; a much more egalitarian and flexible regime of cooperation might, and sometimes did, face the limitations and seize the opportunities all the more effectively. It is rather that such a social division of labor provided a way of organizing cooperation that respected the preexisting distribution of advantage. Just as this distribution of advantage favored a class or caste order, the existence of the order supported a technical division of labor marked by extreme hierarchy and specialization.
The technical division of labor—the allocation of powers and responsibilities in the organization of work—was likely to assume, under such circumstances, its most hierarchical and specialized form: rigid contrasts between tasks of supervision or planning and tasks of execution, clear-cut contrasts among the jobs of execution themselves, unequivocal distinctions between the activities judged appropriate for cooperation and for competition. Industrial mass production—the production of standardized goods and services, with the help of rigid machines and production processes, reliance on semiskilled labor, and very specialized and hierarchical work relations—as it developed in the historical period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth was at once the latest and the most extreme example of this approach to the technical division of labor.
This scheme is no mere historical parable. It is a rudimentary account of a way of organizing social relations that prevailed, in one variant or another, in all the societies in which the religions of transcendence emerged. It served to entrench both the hierarchical organization of labor and the coercive extraction of an economic surplus over current consumption. This form of social organization exacted a high price in return for its uses as an instrument for the accumulation of an economic surplus as well as for the hierarchical direction of labor on a large scale. It drastically limited the range and varieties of cooperation: the extent to which the ways in which we organize cooperative work track the analytic and synthetic operations of practical reason. Any such scheme required those activities to conform to a script—the two-part script of the social and of the technical division of labor. The result severely limited the potential for cooperative effort.
It also generated second-order problems for this approach to life. Many attempts have been made in the history of civilization to give higher meaning and value to a social division of labor with the characteristics that I have enumerated. None was more striking in influence and ambition than the grounding of the actual Indian caste system in a scriptural caste order validated by the high Hindu doctrine of reincarnation of an indestructible soul.
Insight into the essential unity of mankind and into the shallowness of the divisions within it, an idea central to the religious revolutions of the past, made any such doctrine seem repellent and incredible. How can we acknowledge the force of this insight into the shallow and ephemeral character