102 humanizing the world
higher meaning and value to a social division of labor with the charac-
teristics that I have enumerated. None was more striking in infl uence
and ambition than the grounding of the actual Indian caste system in a
scriptural caste order validated by the high Hindu doctrine of reincar-
nation of an indestructible soul.
Insight into the essential unity of mankind and into the shallowness
of the divisions within it, an idea central to the religious revolutions of
the past, made any such doctrine seem repellent and incredible. How
can we acknowledge the force of this insight into the shallow and
ephemeral character of our divisions and hierarchies while continuing
to tolerate a social and technical division of labor with such features?
If we cannot abolish and replace a social order of this kind, we must at
least be able to change it. However, it has seemed throughout most of his-
tory, which has been the history of class society, that such an order cannot,
or cannot yet, be abolished or replaced. Th e mere attempt to do so threat-
ens to make the war over the basic terms of social life break out again.
If, however, we fail to transform the character of that order, we risk
defeat in the most important eff ort: the eff ort to create meaning in a
meaningless world. For if the attempt to sanctify the class or caste re-
gime of society fails, if its sole basis remains its contestable practical
use in the development of the productive capabilities of mankind and
the coercive extraction of a surplus, turning the individual into the
hapless instrument of a supposed advantage for the future race, then
the inner line of defense against the meaninglessness of the world will
be broken. Th e content of interdependence and mutual subjectivity will
be determined by forces without meaning and value in the biographi-
cal time in which we must live our lives rather than in the historical
time in which the human race advances. Th e sanctity of the personal
will count for nothing and will be discredited by daily experience.
What matters most to the humanizers is that society off er a bulwark
against nihilism, if by nihilism we mean the idea that the world and
our lives within it are meaningless, that is to say without meaning in
any terms that have weight within our discourse, the discourse of
humanity. Humanism so conceived has as its precondition nihilism
about the world— or rather about our ability to make sense of our
situation in the world on terms that communicate with our concerns
and commitments.