The Religion of the Future. Roberto Mangabeira Unger

the criticism of its fidelity to the spirit of transcendence is the first objection to be made to the humanization of the world, as a response to the concerns motivating the religious revolutions of the past, the second objection is that it offers too limited a justification for the effort to devalue or to overturn the social divisions within mankind.

      The chief civilizing device of the humanization of the world, already clearly stated in the Analects of Confucius, is the dialectic between the roles, rules, and rituals of society and the development of our other-oriented dispositions. Our induction into roles, rules, and rituals teaches us to abandon our primitive self-centeredness. It begins to form, in each of us, a nature turned to the experience and the aspirations of others. Slowly, this now socialized nature of ours is elevated and even transfigured by the development of our ability to imagine other people. Eventually, if we persist in this trajectory of moral ascent, that which was conditioned by ritual and rule becomes spontaneous. Our obligations begin to converge with our inclinations; or, rather, our inclinations discern, within and outside the rituals and rules, the path of service to others and of self-mastery.

      “At 15, I set my heart on learning; at 30, I took a stand; at 40, I had no illusions; at 50, I knew the Mandate of Heaven; at 60, my ear was attuned to the truth; at 70, I followed my heart’s desire without overstepping the bounds of right.” It is the specifically Confucian form of an idea that two thousand years later, in the context not only of a different time but also of another vision, appears in the writings of, for example, Émile Durkheim. For the spiritual orientations that I here discuss are not simply evanescent tendencies of thought, confined to isolated moral teachers; they are lasting options in the spiritual experience of humanity, and they reappear in countless forms.

      The principal setting of the dialectic between individual consciousness and social form is the system of social roles. By assuming a role and performing it according to its customary dictates, we continue our passage from self-centeredness to society and reciprocity. By infusing the performance of the role with the imagination of otherness and with the spirit of humanity, formed in reverence of the personal, we enter, by steps, into the possession of ourselves. Rules and rituals become a ladder that we can kick away.

      Now the vital question that any such view must face is in what spirit it will address the established social regime. A system of roles exhibits a division of labor in society. It forms part of a scheme of social division and hierarchy, including the class structure of society. Is this scheme to be accepted and rendered more humane? Or is it to be defied and reshaped?

      In every real historical version of this orientation to existence, the limit of reformist ambition has been to restrain class selfishness and to reshape class in the light of merit. Even the mixture of power, exchange, and allegiance, characteristic of the agrarian-bureaucratic societies in which the humanization of the world first arose, has been ordinarily accepted as the realistic alternative to endless struggle. There is no vision or energy here to inspire a program of radical reconstruction. Where would such a vision and energy come from if not from view of the transcending self, combined with an idea about our power to change the character as well as the content of the established structures of life and thought?

      The abstract idea of society has no natural and necessary translation into any particular way of organizing social life. Are we then to accept the structure that history presents us with in a given society, with all the hierarchies and divisions that it supports and the role of the dead over the living that it embodies? Are the conformity of advantage to merit (as assessed by some collective or governmental authority) and the restraint of power by regard for others to serve as our sole reprieves from these forces?

      If there is no definitive structure, whether of society or of thought, capable of accommodating all the experience that we have reason to value, there can at least be a structure that strengthens the hand by which we resist and revise the established structure in the light of experience. And there can be a path of cumulative structural change calculated to lighten the burden of the entrenched scheme of social division and hierarchy weighing on the possibilities of cooperation. For such an advance to occur, however, we need both another account of the self and another conception of the structures and of their history. Under such views, no role can be fully adequate to a human being. No set of institutions and practices supplies an acceptable resting place for society.

      The absence of any natural ordering of society reveals the link between the political and the metaphysical limits to the humanization of the world. Because there is no such natural ordering of our relations to one another—or no ordering that we have reason definitively to accept as the framework for our efforts to come to terms with one another—the struggle over the organization of society must and will go on. It may be temporarily contained and interrupted. However, it will not long be suppressed.

      The advancement of all our interests and ideals, as we understand them at any given time, requires that we criticize and change pieces of the structural background of social life. There is, however, always more than one defensible understanding of the direction of change that our ideals and interests require. As we progress in the work of reconstruction, the disharmonies in the content of the interests and ideals that guided us in the first place become apparent, and provide further occasions for conflict.

      The perennial nature of this struggle over the terms of social life exposes the limitations of this approach to life. It also casts doubt on the metaphysical conception informing the humanization of the world. The assumptions of the humanizing campaign become patent in the effort to establish a meaningful order, within a meaningless cosmos: a clearing that bears the imprint of our concerns within a dark and inhospitable universe.

      Ongoing struggle over the terms of social life, made possible by the indefeasible contestability of every social order, ends up tearing down some of the barriers of social division within humanity even as it erects others. Whether it undermines or creates such divisions, it reveals, by its continuance, their contingency, and thus invites further practical and visionary strife.

      It is not just the walls within society that end up, in this way, coming down or being moved around. It is also the walls around society: the clarity of the distinction between the social order, constructed on our scale and to the specification of our concerns, and the great stage of nature, vastly disproportionate and indifferent to our desires. Any regime of social life remains forever contestable. Its contestability is made manifest by persistent conflict over the terms of social life. As a result, we cannot expect any such regime to bear the full weight of our desire to establish a social order that remains untainted by the alienness of nature and casts back to us our own reflection.