struggling with the world 185intelligible and usable have never been fully developed. Th is fact helps
explain the failure to perceive, much less to combat and overcome, the
confl ict between the life that we are promised by this orientation to
existence and the way in which contemporary societies are in fact or ga-
nized, even in the countries that are freest and most equal. Even when
they rescue people from the extremes of poverty and oppression, these
societies fail to establish, in at least three major ways, a form of life re-
sponsive to the promises of this spiritual orientation.
Th e economic institutions of these societies are or ga nized to deny
the mass of ordinary men and women the means with which to live and
work as the context- transcending agents that they are. Th e hereditary
transmission of economic and educational advantage through the fam-
ily continues to reproduce the realities of a class society, inhibiting our
power to form strong life projects and to enact them. Wage labor,
viewed by the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century as an
inferior form of free labor and one that bears the taint of serfdom, is
now regarded as the natural and even necessary form of free labor.
What those liberals and socialists saw as the higher, more perfect ex-
pressions of free labor—self- employment and cooperation— remains,
or has become, its peripheral form.
Most people continue to do work that in principle could be per-
formed by machines. Th e value of a machine is to do for us everything
that we have learned how to repeat so that all our time can be preserved
for that which we have not yet learned how to repeat. In all these ways,
the practical experience of work and production negates our condition
as embodied spirit rather than affi rming it.
Our responsibility to strangers in the societies of the present is
largely reduced to money transfers or ga nized by the state through the
system of redistributive taxation and social entitlements. Money, how-
ever, supplies fragile social cement. It cannot replace direct engagement
with others beyond the boundaries of the family and the barriers of
family selfi shness. Th e lack of any practical expression of the principle
that every able- bodied adult should have some responsibility to care for
others outside his own family, as well as a place in the system of pro-
duction, deprives social solidarity of an adequate basis. Th e result is to
sharpen the contrast between the intimate realm of personal attach-
ment and a heartless world of dealings with strangers.