humanizing the world 99tions is to see and to treat the person— both one self and the other— as
an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. In another vocabu-
lary, it is the view that personality and the interpersonal represent our
closest approach to the absolute: that which has value and meaning
unconditionally and without limit, and therefore resists comparison, as
infi nite quantities are incomparable.
Th is absolute, unconditional good exists, however, only as manifest
in the natural incidents of human life— beginning with the facts of
birth, ascent, decline, and death, and the sequence of generations— as
well as in the practical or ga ni za tion of society. Th e issue central to this
second part of the humanization of the world is how we are to under-
stand and to guide the relation between the facts of interdependence,
intersubjectivity, and sanctity of the personal and the building of a real
social order against the background of the natural circumstances of
social life. Th ere is a danger, and there is a remedy.
Th e risk is that interdependence, reciprocal subjectivity, and the sa-
cred value of personality will be overwhelmed and degraded in the
course of the events by which the social order is made and sustained.
Th e order always has an accidental and violent history. It begins in a
struggle, and then in the containment of the struggle: its partial and
temporary interruption. Th e war, interrupted in the large, may con-
tinue in the small; the peace may be the continuation of the war in
veiled and hamstrung form. Each individual will assume his place and
play his part according to the distribution of winners and losers in the
confl icts from which the order arose. Stability will result from exhaus-
tion, impotence, and fear. Th e victorious will be as anxious as the de-
feated are resentful.
Th e exercise of oppression may over time be modulated by reciproc-
ity. Subordinates as well as superiors may begin to fi nd advantage in the
ac cep tance of their respective lots. Exchange and power will combine
in the same relationships. However, reciprocity will always remain a
supervening and accessory infl uence, circumscribed by arrangements
and assumptions that it did not create and cannot reconstruct.
In such a circumstance, interdependence will be shaped in the mold
of the grinding hierarchies of power and advantage, transmitted and
reproduced from generation to generation, to which the settlement of
the struggle gave rise. Our understanding of other people’s experience