106 humanizing the worldour individual roles. Th e market economy itself can be represented as
a form of simplifi ed cooperation among strangers, unnecessary when
there is high trust and impossible, given the ineradicable incomplete-
ness of contracts, when there is no trust.
Gradually, the levels of both generalized trust and specialized re-
sponsibility can rise. Th eir joint ascent will, in this new circumstance,
signal the advance of the project of humanization. Th e individual,
however, may continue to live in two worlds: the public world of work
and of dealings among strangers, given over to the new moral dispen-
sation, and the domestic world in which, uncomfortably and under
pressure, the ancient marriage of exchange, power, and allegiance
survives.
Th is second world may be more than a residue of the old, now for-
bidden combination. It may also be the seat of a prophecy of a higher
form of life. Its guiding aspiration may cease to be the superimposition
of allegiance and sentiment on the harsh realities of power and ex-
change and become instead the soft ening of the tension between spirit
and structure, love and routine, with regard to the possibilities of rec-
onciliation between two individual beings. Th e life plan of each be-
comes part of the other one’s plan. Here, however, we reach the limits of
a role- oriented mode of moral thinking and confront problems and
possibilities with which such a form of thought is unable to deal.
Criticism: betrayal of the past
I now apply to the humanization of the world the same method of criti-
cism applied earlier to the overcoming of the world: its power to realize
the goals that were common to these three orientations to existence, its
prospect of conforming human nature to its view of the good, and its
relation to the concerns that may or should be central to the next revo-
lution in the history of religion.
Th ere are two crucial respects in which the humanization of the
world, as exemplifi ed by the teachings of Confucius, comes up short by
the standard of its fi delity to the aspirations shared by the religious
revolutions of the past. Th e fi rst respect concerns its relation to the dia-
lectic between transcendence and immanence: the most important