If we cannot abolish and replace a social order of this kind, we must at least be able to change it. However, it has seemed throughout most of history, which has been the history of class society, that such an order cannot, or cannot yet, be abolished or replaced. The mere attempt to do so threatens to make the war over the basic terms of social life break out again.
If, however, we fail to transform the character of that order, we risk defeat in the most important effort: the effort to create meaning in a meaningless world. For if the attempt to sanctify the class or caste regime of society fails, if its sole basis remains its contestable practical use in the development of the productive capabilities of mankind and the coercive extraction of a surplus, turning the individual into the hapless instrument of a supposed advantage for the future race, then the inner line of defense against the meaninglessness of the world will be broken. The content of interdependence and mutual subjectivity will be determined by forces without meaning and value in the biographical time in which we must live our lives rather than in the historical time in which the human race advances. The sanctity of the personal will count for nothing and will be discredited by daily experience.
What matters most to the humanizers is that society offer a bulwark against nihilism, if by nihilism we mean the idea that the world and our lives within it are meaningless, that is to say without meaning in any terms that have weight within our discourse, the discourse of humanity. Humanism so conceived has as its precondition nihilism about the world—or rather about our ability to make sense of our situation in the world on terms that communicate with our concerns and commitments.
From this perspective, any attempt to ground the realm of human values in natural facts outside human life is self-defeating as well as futile: it makes humanity subservient to something inhuman. Nihilism about the world and the self-grounding of humanity are therefore not opposites; on the contrary, they are complements. Humanity snatches the crown away from the cosmos and puts it on itself.
The tragic aspect of this undertaking lies in the contradictions of the social order rather than in the shadow cast by nihilism. The individual is powerless to ensure the necessary self-grounding; only men and women in society can achieve it through collective action. They may fail. The building and reproduction of a social order can fall victim to forces that pervert interdependence and curtail social imagination, because they disrespect the sanctity of the personal. Then nihilism will have its day. To avoid that outcome is the aim of this orientation to existence.
Something, however, remains missing from this account: the centerpiece of the political and moral strategy by which this goal is to be achieved. To define this strategy is the work of the third part of this direction in the religious experience of mankind.
The ennoblement of our relations to one another
The third component of the humanization of the world is a view of what can and should be the basic structure of our relations to one another. The social division of labor is a system of social roles: the stereotypical, regulated positions that individuals occupy in society serve as platforms from which they deal with one another. If we are to humanize the social division of labor, and by extension the technical division of labor, we must ensure that the performance of such roles vindicate the sanctity of the personal. We must prevent people’s dependence on one another from serving as the occasion for a barely contained war over the basic terms of social life, in which only a self-interested reciprocity attenuates the harshness of endless struggle.
An ethic of roles, of what we owe one another by virtue of playing the parts that we do in society, is therefore the characteristic moral instrument of the project of humanization: the superior to the underling, the teacher to the student, the husband to the wife, the parent to the child, and, more generally, each according to his station or trade, his assumed responsibility in the larger life of society as well as in his immediate family and community. That public order is best which best creates the conditions most propitious to the adoption of such an ethic.
We can understand the supposed relation between this ethic of roles and the public order by analogy to the relation between the nineteenth-century doctrine of private law and its corresponding conception of public law. Private law defined the system of freedom, the scheme of ordered liberty, to be upheld against any contamination by the initiatives of a state bent on making this system serve the interests of particular groups (e.g., redistribution as the law-subverting capture of the state by class or factional interest). In such a view, the most important standard by which to judge a regime of public law was that it not corrupt, through politically directed redistribution, what was supposed to be the distributively neutral law of coordination among free and equal individuals: private law. At the same time, it was charged with creating a political space within which the system of private rights could flourish, for example, by providing for the public goods of security and education.
But what is the content of an ethic of roles? General ideas about the sanctity of the personal and the rescue of interdependence and reciprocal subjectivity from the continuation of war by other means remain powerless, all by themselves, to supply the answer to this question. The answer begins to become clear only against the background of the ways in which societies have actually been organized. A defining issue is whether we are to accept the established structure of society as the horizon within which to pursue the humanization project or to resist that structure as the chief obstacle to the implementation of this project. To bring this question into focus, consider two circumstances.
One circumstance has been characteristic of most societies and cultures in world history before the national and world revolutions of the last two hundred–odd years. It is the association of power, exchange, and sentiment in the same social relationships. Its characteristic formula is the sentimentalizing of unequal exchange—a relation between individuals in more powerful and less powerful roles, involving a trade of practical advantage, overlaid by reciprocal allegiance. The patron-client relation, so precious to the ancient Romans, provides a characteristic example. It was in such a circumstance that the most comprehensive statement of the ethic of roles—classical Confucianism—emerged.
Another circumstance is that of a nineteenth-century European society with its liberal ideology. Now the authoritative ideological formula proscribes what relations between patrons and clients require: the mixture of power, exchange, and allegiance. One of the consequences is to draw a distinction between the domestic sphere, in which the mixture of sentiment, power, and exchange continues to be tolerated or even cherished, and the workaday world, in which such a mixture has become anathema. In this world, exchange supposedly rules, and power is validated by consent, by the requirements of cooperation, and by the rights of property.
In such a setting, speculative thought may seek to base and to expound ethics in a discourse of universalistic rules and principles. However, this academic moral philosophy will bear little resemblance to the forms of moral thinking and argument deployed in much of social life. A discourse of role-based claims and responsibilities will continue to prevail in practice, although recast on the basis of the new assumptions. What chiefly replaces the amalgam of exchange, power, and allegiance is an ethic of professionalism: respect for the public duties pertaining to the specialized roles that the individual performs.
The role-based responsibilities may be owed to strangers, with whom the individual had no preexisting relation. As a result, it becomes impossible to accept the distinction, characteristic of societies at ease with the mixture of exchange, power, and allegiance, between a realm of high-trust relationships among insiders and of no-trust relationships among strangers. A modicum of trust, albeit of low trust, among strangers, must be universalized as the indispensable backdrop to an ethic of professional responsibility.
Instead of supposing that we owe everything to those to whom we have a connection that precedes or transcends the will and nothing to those with whom we have no such connection, we come by steps to think that we owe something to everyone, but that what exactly we owe is modulated by the roles we perform in society with respect to them. On the foundation of minimalist and universal trust among strangers, we superimpose the more stringent demands that attend the performance of our individual roles. The market economy itself can be represented as a form of simplified