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.
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