humanizing the world 93of consciousness— forms part of the pro cess by which we complete
ourselves, affi rming and developing our humanity. Such imagination
must inform our per for mance of social roles.
What is sacrosanct is the person, together with the fi ne texture of
relations among individuals. All else in society and culture remains
subservient to the experience of personality and of personal encounter.
In a meaningless world, only personality and the relations among per-
sons are hallowed. We should recognize one another as instances of the
sacred— that is to say, of that which can create meaning. Everything
else in society is a means to an end.
Th e nourishment of personality and of personal encounter can alone
count as an end in itself: its value is not ancillary to the attainment of
any other purpose. To turn ourselves into beings who act in this spirit
because they understand one another and their situation in this way is
the overriding goal of social reform. Our success in this enterprise de-
termines whether we can make a practical success of life in society and
prevent it from degenerating into a nightmare of force and guile.
In conformity to this aim and in the ser vice of this goal, the division
of labor in society must be soft ened and spiritualized. It must become
the vehicle of our role- based practices of cooperation and of our slowly
developing capacity to imagine one another. Our cooperative practices,
anchored in the per for mance of social roles, must be both accommo-
dated and spiritualized, according to the demands and the resources of
each historical circumstance. Ravenous self- interest must be mastered
in the interest of such a humanization of social life. Some element of
hierarchy may be admitted, but only so long as it can be justifi ed by the
practical requirements of coordination (rather than by belief in the in-
trinsic qualities of diff erent classes and castes). Only to the extent that
we reform society in this way can we prevent its fall into a nightmare of
domination, and tame selfi shness.
Such a program affi rms its fi delity to the goals inspiring the past re-
ligious revolutions. It upholds, in practice as well as in doctrine, the
preeminence of our shared humanity over the divisions and hierar-
chies within humankind. It repudiates the heroic and martial ethic of
lordship and honor, and replaces it with a vision of the attenuation of
the contrast between the instrumental and the non- instrumental, the
brutal and the spiritualized, the prose and the poetry of social life.