92 humanizing the world
fragments of an intelligible and defensible plan for cooperation. Conse-
quently, they will be incapable of being translated into laws that can be
interpreted, elaborated, and applied in the mutable and varied settings
of social life.
Will society amount to the enslavement of the many by the few un-
der disguise? Will its principle be the exhaustion and despair of the
enslaved and the anxious vigilance of their masters? Will the disguise
be culture? Will the possibilities of cooperation and the claims of soli-
darity be held hostage to the requirements of a scheme of subjugation,
tolerated as the sole remaining alternative to continued violence and
insecurity and sanctifi ed by the hopelessness of both its manifest vic-
tims and its supposed benefi ciaries?
If all these evils come to pass, the order of society and culture will
take on the attributes of meaningless nature. Th e inner line of defense
will be broken. We shall have to retreat into what Max Weber called
“the pianissimo of personal life.” In that domain of intimacy, we may
hope to sustain what remains of a life that speaks to our most intimate
concerns.
It is not enough to describe the modifi cation of social life necessary
to avoid such a result in negative terms. It has an affi rmative content.
Th e overriding goal is to reshape our relations to other people accord-
ing to a vision of what we owe one another by virtue of occupying cer-
tain roles: friend and friend, husband and wife, parent and child,
teacher and student, ruler and ruled, boss and worker. In this saving
exercise, we shall be guided not only by the practical imperatives of the
division of labor in society but also and above all by a sense of the rela-
tivity of these roles with respect to our common humanity.
Fate has cast us in diff erent roles. Th e centrality of roles to the or ga-
ni za tion of society reveals our dependence on one another. Th is depen-
dence is a mark, rather than a denial, of our humanity. It reveals our
strength as well as our weakness. Cooperation, or ga nized through the
per for mance of roles and the observance of social conventions, is not
only a requirement for the advancement of our practical interests; it is
also an expression of a basic fact about our humanity. Incomplete in
ourselves, we complete ourselves through ser vice to others. To serve
them, we must understand them. Th us, the development of our imagi-
nation of the otherness of other people— the perception of their states