humanizing the world 119containing more power and possibility than such regimes can ever ac-
commodate, is the most important premise of this idea. It ceases to be
a philosophical or theological dogma and becomes an actionable con-
jecture when it informs views of what to do next in politics and in mor-
als. It is because its votaries, spread throughout the world, no longer
know what to do next, in the pursuit of this vision, that it appears to us
as both strong and weak. It is strong on account of its unrivaled author-
ity. It is weak because the path to its po liti cal and moral realization has
ceased to be clear.
Th e humanization of the world does not share this pursuit. Its ruling
ambition is to achieve harmony in society and in the self. It wants to
foster the development of a life in society that puts responsibility to
others, informed by imagination and self- possession, in command. Its
program is to combine the enhancement of our collective powers with
the diminishment of our cruelty to one another. Its prescription for the
attainment of this goal is for each of us to do his part, in the station that
fate and merit have allotted to him, even as he cultivates his powers of
imaginative empathy.
For the institutionally conservative or skeptical social demo crats
who now pass for progressives in much of the world, such a program
may seem to be the best for which we can reasonably hope. For the theo-
reticians of a rationalizing altruism who have long prevailed in moral
philosophy (whether under the form of Benthamite, Kantian, or social-
contract doctrines), the practical perfectionism of the humanizers of
the world can readily be translated into their preferred philosophical
vocabulary. For the educated classes of contemporary societies, who
understand moral life largely in the language of roles and of role- based
obligations, there is nothing in the teachings of the humanization of
the world, other than its context- specifi c expression in the writings of
an ancient thinker, that appears foreign, novel, or even controversial. In
many ways, the humanization of the world may seem to be the unoffi -
cial teaching of a culture that has grown impatient and distrustful of all
large transformative endeavors, and that is happy to settle for the im-
provement and soft ening of what it judges, in the proximate future, to
be inevitable.
However, the very facts that bring this approach to existence closer
to present consciousness and practice make it unsuited to serve as an