Notes on “The Humanization of the World” by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian politician and philosopher that I’ve had a perverse fascination with for the past month or so. Once I understand what he’s saying, I tend to agree with him regarding society’s usefulness, society’s limitations, and the individual’s relationship to society at large. He has some really great ideas, but insists on communicating them in lofty philosopher-speak.
I’ve been going through his “Beyond Nihilism” video series on Youtube, and I wanted to highlight this particular part, which can be found here. If I were to be quite honest, it’s painful to watch. I transcribed parts of it here (you’re welcome), because he’s a better writer and philosopher than a public speaker, and his argument is a lot more comfortable to read than to listen to. All emphases and errors are mine, because I transcribed it. I put some notes throughout to expand on my understanding of some of his ideas.
Also, you don’t have to read any of this. I’ve realized in the process of doing this that I have my own set of thoughts regarding our relationship to the world, which will be a separate piece. A friend helped me realized that I undertook this exercise largely to improve my own understanding and create some form of reference that you can dig through if you want to know what I’m reading and thinking.
My focus is our struggle with nihilism: the fear that our lives and the world itself may be meaningless. This fifth part [of the series] addresses the second of three major orientations in the spiritual history of humanity. Call it “the humanization of the world”:
What we have is one another. Solidarity [1] stands in the place of metaphysics. Nature is indifferent to our concerns. The sacred is our experience of personality, and of interpersonal encounter [2]. Our best hope is to build civilizations, established on the basis of the obligations that we owe one another, by virtue of the roles that we perform. The most important instance of “the humanization of the world” is the teaching of Confucius, and the tradition of Confucianism.
[1] He kind of just handwaves “solidarity” and expects you to know what he’s talking about, but I think it’s worth delving into. Throughout the piece, he ends up clarifying what he means by “solidarity”, which I think is easier to understand as solidarity-as-humanism, because I think they’re quite bound together, but not entirely.
The core assertion of humanism is that making the whole of humanity’s life better is what is morally good. This has been the dominant Western philosophy since the Enlightenment or so. You can contrast humanism with, say, monastic Christianity, which would argue that the foundation of morality is to obey God’s law. Another place you see this emphasis on “solidarity” is, as he says, in ancient Confucianism, which imposed rigid hierarchy and social immobility for the sake of harmony and societal benefit — that is, for the greater good of the society.
What he means by “solidarity”, however, is the idea that the way in which you serve humanity is by performing the social role you find yourself in. You subsume yourself and your goals into the greater good. Since it’s for the sake of the greater good, since it’s for the good of the society at large, I bundle this concept as solidarity-as-humanism. This is highly related to the middle-class ideology of “professionalism”, where one is morally obligated to perform a profession to the best of one’s ability (“don’t half-ass anything you do”, “be passionate about your job”, etc).
[2] By “interpersonal encounter”, he means relationships. One implication of humanism is that our relationships with each other become sacred.
Consider the metaphysical background to the “humanization of the world” — the orientation to life that it proposes, and its limits, particularly as they are revealed by the way in which it deals with the threat of nihilism. An antimetaphysical metaphysic [3] informs this approach to the world: “Society exists at the brink of an abyss of meaninglessness. Nature is alien to humanity [4], and the time of its evolution vastly disproportionate to the time in which we must live our lives. Nevertheless, in this meaningless world, we can create meaning.”
[3] “Antimetaphysical metaphysic” here is a prime example of where his concision begins to cut into reader comprehension. But in any case, it’s easier to understand if you remember that we’re talking about humanism here, which has a particular “metaphysical” outlook, as opposed to any specific religion. The metaphysical perspective of Christianity and Islam is of a flawed humanity and a perfect God, which naturally leads to the ideas of morality being obedience and submission to this God. The metaphysical perspective of Buddhism is of an unescapable cycle of reincarnation and suffering, which naturally leads to the ideas of acceptance of this suffering and breaking out of the cycle. The metaphysical outlook of humanism is that there is no source of meaning but humans. Therefore, it is anti-metaphysical, in the sense that it refutes any form of metaphysic, but in itself, is still a metaphysical outlook. Gross.
The main emphasis of “antimetaphysical metaphysic” is of the logical subsequent meaninglessness, and thus, the descent into nihilism. In contrast, the benefit of the religious metaphysical outlooks that I have caricatured above is that they form a seemingly firm foundation for a set of values, whereas humanism does not.
[4] “Nature is alien to humanity” is a quick shot against naturalism, which is the idea that we should to arrange ourselves as according to ‘nature’. You can see this worldview among groups of people such as social Darwinists, racial supremacists, those misogynists who think that women should stay at home and cook because men have more muscle mass and women can see more colors, and Paleo dieters. I’m being petty, and the refutation of naturalism probably should take more time, but I’m not going to do it here.
To this end, it is not enough to open a space within the cosmos for a civilization that bears the imprint of our concerns. It is also necessary to confront the savagery of society. Unreconstructed, any social order will represent the triumph of the strong over the weak, and hold the practices of cooperation hostage to the mechanisms of dominance and dependence. This anti-metaphysical metaphysic serves as the backdrop to an orientation to life.
Here he shifts gears a little bit, and begins to foreshadow his issue with solidarity-as-humanism. The fact that the default form of society is “the triumph of the strong over the weak” is, for Unger, a significant limitation to the idea of putting society first. He then switches over to explain in more detail the positive implications of humanism, and the good “orientation” that it produces:
At the center of this orientation lies a vision of what ultimately matters: The sacred is the personal and the interpersonal. Our experience of personality and of dealing with other people is the only element of our experience that has unconditional value [5]. To use Kant’s vocabulary, the personal is the only aspect of our experience that represents an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Together with this vision of what matters most, goes a method for the improvement of humanity and of society. This method is to rely on a dialectic between the forms, rituals, and conventions of society, and the development of our mindfulness of other people [6]. The social forms beat each of us out of the illusion that he is at the center of the world. They are however simply a vessel into which we must pour a spirit. The spirit is our capacity to imagine the otherness of other people, to enter their subjectivity, and to recognize their needs — especially their needs for us.
[5] The vision of humanism is that our relationships, both with others and ourselves, become the most valuable, “sacred” things in humanism. Relationships have “unconditional value.” Not a bad implication of humanism, I’d say.
[6] This “dialectic” is the use of the “forms, rituals, and conventions of society” to serve humanity. This is “solidarity”. A concrete example of this dialectic in action is the ethos of shareholder value maximization among business executives, famously espoused by Milton Friedman in the 1970s. What Friedman argued was that the role of a business was to maximize its share value, and by doing so, serve the public good, and benefit the society at large. We can argue all day about if this argument is legit or not, but what’s certain is that the Friedman Doctrine is at its core a humanist ethos, at least in Unger’s conception.
…The vision and the method become the twin foundations of a program of moral and social reconstruction. The core of this program is the reshaping of social life as a system of roles. In the performance of which, we sacrifice self-regard to solidarity, and create the practical conditions that enable us to enhance the sacred experience of personality.
Again, this humanist “vision” is that of value from relationships, which is achieved via the humanist “method”, i.e. adherence to the roles that each one of us play in the society at large. Unger now switches to the issues that this approach has.
Consider three related limits to this approach to the world. The first limit has to do with the relation of this program of moral and social reconstruction to the real structure of society. In every historical society, there has been up to now an entrenched scheme of social division and hierarchy, that weighs as a grid upon our relations to one another. In most historical societies, before the last few centuries of world revolution [7], the typical social relations combine within themselves power, exchange, and allegiance. Their characteristic formula was the sentimentalization of unequal exchange [8].
[7] “World revolution” began in earnest with the French Revolution, which spread the concepts of democracy and egalitarianism all over Europe and their colonies.
[8] “The sentimentalization of unequal exchange” is easiest to see in Confucianism, the posterboy of historical humanism. In Confucianism, everyone has their rigid position, and you give your resources and your allegiance to the one above you in the hierarchy/patriarchy. In exchange, you get… benevolent rule? Confucius himself “sentimentalizes” it by arguing that, in fact, this is an equal exchange, and that the Emperor at the very top of the hierarchy only rules via the Mandate of Heaven. But, if you want to feed a broad society, you’re going to have to extract more food from the peasants than they’d like. I think we all know that this is an unequal exchange. Can YOU point out incidences of unequal exchange in OUR society? How have these exchanges been “sentimentalized”?
Fill out your answer on the blanks below: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jokes aside, he continues to expound on the existing unjust structure of society as a limitation of solidarity-as-humanism:
These societies have been followed by others, in which the predominant formula has become the reproduction of class, attenuated by meritocracy. The question is whether the project of solidarity is simply an ornament or a softening of these real structures, or a point of departure for their subversion.
(Psst! He’s talking about US!!) “The reproduction of class, attenuated by meritocracy” is a pretty good characterization of our modern-day Western, liberal, capitalist democracies. It is undeniable that capitalism and democracy are both preferable to mercantilism and hereditary aristocracy, and produce far better results in terms of getting power to people who ‘deserve’ it, and hence are genuinely more meritocratic. However, we’ve managed to reproduce aristocracy-like forms of “class”, where mobility between income quintiles between generations is at an all-time low, and the difference in life experience between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% is increasingly stark. Thus, the problem of class is only attenuated by meritocracy, and is not solved.
The “project of solidarity” in this case, is, again, the adherence to our social roles in the name of the greater good. In this case, our social roles have evolved to that of the “meritocracy”. After all, the successful business executive worked 100 hour weeks for decades to get where he is — doesn’t he deserve it? His question, as he’s posing it, is essentially the question of where this line of thinking leads us. Does continuing to adhere to these roles only “soften” the very real inequality and hierarchy of society slightly, allowing the occasional Elon Musk to make it to the top while 100 potential Elon Musks languish in the ghetto? Or does adherence to the project of meritocracy actually become the beginning of the end of inequality and class?
We cannot respect one another and develop our mindfulness of the other people within the enslaving restraints of these schemes of social division and hierarchy. To recognize one another as the context-transcending agents, as the originals, that we all know ourselves to be, we must disrespect the structures. We must challenge and change them. And thus there begins an unavoidable dialectic between solidarity and conflict for the sake of transformation.
The next sentence is Unger’s answer. He believes the former — that all solidarity does is to “soften” the real social inequality that we experience. We cannot be satisfied with obedience.
Unger’s conception of humanity is not simply that of obedience to existing roles for the sake of the greater good (“solidarity”). Instead, Unger’s thesis about the way humans should behave is that we should transcend the contexts that we were taught, to originate new structures that are better than the previous ones. Of course, we can’t just throw everything out and start from scratch — that would be anarchy. Thus, he wants us to only “disrespect” the existing structures, and to hold obedience and originality in tension: a “dialectic”. He then continues to the second limitation of humanism:
A second limit to the humanization of the world has to do with the inadequacy of any role and of any system of roles. A social role is, at best, a mutilated expression of humanity. And a system of roles exists always to reproduce a flawed social order. No role is adequate to a human being. And no existing system of roles serves a transformative task. The task comes first. The role needed to implement it has to be invented later. The practical implication is that we can never surrender to the role singlemindedly and wholeheartedly. We must perform the roles that are available ambivalently, and we must use them incongruously to ends for which they were not designed.
The second limitation is on the relationship of us as humans to the social roles that could possibly exist in the world. Unger firmly believes that if we were to acknowledge our full human capacity, no role could contain us — we are bigger than the finite roles society can prescribe. Furthermore, taking a page out of the Richard Dawkins meme book, every system of roles is trying to reproduce itself, and therefore, reproduce a flawed social order. The assertion that “no existing system of roles serves a transformative task” is harder to defend, but I think there’s something there. Arguably, what Unger is trying to do in his work is precisely to create a system of roles that can serve transform itself.
A third limit to the humanization of the world has to do with the implications of the contingency and the contestability of any particular social order. There is never a single, natural, necessary and authoritative translation of the abstract idea of society, cooperation, or solidarity, into a particular way of organizing social life. Any institutional and ideological settlement temporarily interrupts and partly contains the conflict over the terms of social life [9]. But the conflict is not completely suppressed. It only simmers. As the conflict goes on in history, we discover the truth about society — the flawed and replaceable character of our social and cultural constructions. The divisions within humanity are undermined, and the walls that protect society from the experience of the meaningless void outside crumble.
So here he doesn’t just stomp on the current structure of society we have today, which is rather easy to do. Anyone can do that. Unger stomps on all possible orientations of society, and states that they are all insufficient. He doesn’t want to hear any dreams of anarcho-syndicalist utopias, or how Venezuela’s not real Communism, or all that jazz. Another implication of this is that perhaps America’s representational democracy as enshrined in Constitution might not be the perfect system that our society seems to believe it is.
[9] A concept he goes deeper into in other works is that every society’s encoded laws and values are a frozen compromise to an underlying conflict in that society, and are never true resolutions to this conflict.
You can see this clearly in the history of rights of black Americans in the US. First, you have the three-fifths compromise. As anti-slavery sentiment grows, eventually you have the Civil War. Even after the Civil War, there’s a backlash against Reconstruction, and Jim Crow laws are enacted and stay in effect until the 1960s. You can see how this societal war over the role of black people in America was never solved, never resolved, and every societal arrangement was simply a compromise until tensions boiled over once again.
This pattern, the contingent and temporary nature of the codes of our society, is universally true. There is not a single element of our society, of our values, that will withstand the test of time. When we realize this, does it render our values meaningless? Are there any absolute “good”s on which we can form a foundation for life?
This transformation arouses in our hearts the desire for the absolute, for the infinite [14], which then penetrates and transforms our attitude to the structures of society and of culture, as well as our relations to one another. It prompts the search for structures that become diaphanous [15], that enable us to split the difference between being insiders and outsiders, that allow us to engage in them without surrendering to them.
At this point, Unger is detailing what he thinks the solution to the problem of “humanization of the world”, or what I call solidarity-as-humanism, is. He’s describing here what a more just, transformed human society would look like, and what we as individuals are feeling to motivate this transformed human society.
[14] The “transformation” he refers to is the loss of faith in the adequacy of our institutions. In the naive case, it then prompts a search for a “more eternal” ideological answer. For example, both conservatives and progressives feel our current institutions are wholly insufficient, but have naively chosen new concepts of what the “eternal” that should replace it should be. Conservatives have reified the free market and the Constitution, and progressives have reified a central benevolent government. More broadly, once you recognize that ALL institutions are “contingent”, and thus the search for the “eternal” utopian institution is doomed to fail, you’re left with two choices — either withdraw into your role and abandon the capacity for transcendence, or find a different unconditional source of meaning. Unger argues that the replacement for the “infinite” is not a utopian institution, but a focus on “personal love” as the “organizing principle of the moral life.”
[15] I had to look up “diaphanous”. It means “light, delicate, and translucent.” This is important in reference to “insider” and “outsider” — the structure is what determines who is on the inside and who is on the outside. How rigid, or how opaque it is, dictates the difference in how insiders and outsiders are treated, and how easy it is to move between being an insider and being an outsider. Insider and outsider status can be understood to be similar in concept to ‘privilege’, where those on the inside are conferred benefits, and those on the outside are not. A lot of the injustice that we perceive in our society is at its core an injustice of how these insiders are selected, or how different insiders and outsiders are treated. This is what he means by “[prompting] the search for structures that are diaphanous.” A representative democracy, for example, is more “diaphanous” than a monarchy or a dictatorship. Meritocracies are more porous than patrimonial systems, in that one can achieve insider status, instead of simply being born into it.
In other words, Unger is advocating for a more translucent societal structure, a more equitable structure where one can straddle “insider” and “outsider” status, that encourage us to leave space for transformation of it and of ourselves, rather than demanding that we surrender to it.
And it leads us to affirm that personal love, rather than a detached benevolence offered from on high, is the organizing principle of the moral life. The love by which we demand from the others an assurance that there is an unconditional place for each of us in the world, the love that becomes a grounding with which to respond to our experience of groundlessness. This change, corrosive of the presuppositions of the humanization of the world, takes place under the shadow of our struggle with nihilism, that either refines or destroys our faith — not in God, but in ourselves. Sweetness becomes the halo of submission, unless it is combined with both longing for the absolute and resistance to the established structure. We cannot be fully human unless we try to be great as well as sweet.
Unger’s humanistic conception of the absolute good, his resolution to the problem of “the humanization of the world,” becomes “personal love.” This is definitely true on an individual level — each of us needs to prioritize the personal relationships in our lives. We don’t have much else. However, he has departed from societal criticism.
The reason why solidarity-as-humanism emphasizes fidelity to societal roles rather than fidelity to the personal is because fidelity to the personal produces predictable results of tribalism and patrimonial favor networks. The fact that these networks produce such poor results for all of the outsiders and all the least powerful members in society was the initial impetus for Confucius to codify the roles that he saw as necessary for society to run. Arguably, the assembly of large and complex societies requires rejection of the personal in favor of the abstract — to deny a job position to your nephew, instead choosing to hire the best candidate.
You could argue that this “personal love” extends to these least-privileged individuals, but that is unrealistic. Each of us has a biological limit of the number of individuals that we can conceive as genuine individuals, to feel empathy for. When we think of doing the greatest good for “society as a whole”, we are dealing in abstractions, applying an abstract value. In that way, we cannot expect personal love to carry us to a more comprehensive morality, or to a genuinely “diaphanous” societal structure.
But as a conception of morality, a conception of individual values, I don’t think he’s wrong at all. To be human, we cannot merely surrender to the roles that society has laid out for us. We need to find our roots in the relationships we have, in the personal love we have for one another.
