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 of our divisions and hierarchies while continuing to tolerate a social and technical division of labor with such features?
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
