humanizing the world 111Now the vital question that any such view must face is in what spirit
it will address the established social regime. A system of roles exhibits
a division of labor in society. It forms part of a scheme of social divi-
sion and hierarchy, including the class structure of society. Is this
scheme to be accepted and rendered more humane? Or is it to be defi ed
and reshaped?
In every real historical version of this orientation to existence, the
limit of reformist ambition has been to restrain class selfi shness and to
reshape class in the light of merit. Even the mixture of power, exchange,
and allegiance, characteristic of the agrarian- bureaucratic societies in
which the humanization of the world fi rst arose, has been ordinarily
accepted as the realistic alternative to endless struggle. Th ere is no vision
or energy here to inspire a program of radical reconstruction. Where
would such a vision and energy come from if not from view of the tran-
scending self, combined with an idea about our power to change the
character as well as the content of the established structures of life and
thought?
Th e abstract idea of society has no natural and necessary translation
into any par tic u lar way of or ga niz ing social life. Are we then to accept
the structure that history presents us with in a given society, with all
the hierarchies and divisions that it supports and the role of the dead
over the living that it embodies? Are the conformity of advantage to
merit (as assessed by some collective or governmental authority) and
the restraint of power by regard for others to serve as our sole reprieves
from these forces?
If there is no defi nitive structure, whether of society or of thought,
capable of accommodating all the experience that we have reason to
value, there can at least be a structure that strengthens the hand by
which we resist and revise the established structure in the light of expe-
rience. And there can be a path of cumulative structural change calcu-
lated to lighten the burden of the entrenched scheme of social division
and hierarchy weighing on the possibilities of cooperation. For such an
advance to occur, however, we need both another account of the self and
another conception of the structures and of their history. Under such
views, no role can be fully adequate to a human being. No set of institu-
tions and practices supplies an acceptable resting place for society.