V

I take it that among the assurances that men desire, as the most general resolution of their quandaries, are order and

certainty. Well, comparativism surely descries forms of order: in descent systems, institutions of government, mystical undertakings, and much else. But the fair success so far achieved poses all the more sharply the problem of accounting for the order.

In some instances it can be argued that forms of order among social facts are the unintended products of logical possibilities and constraints. In other instances it can plausibly be suggested that the order results from cerebrational vectors, that is, predispositions of thought and imagination which reflect normal operations of the brain. And in yet other instances it may be that the order ascribed to the flux of social experience is an artifact of our need for order; that is, that the conscious desire corresponds to an unconscious condition of comprehension. There are thus various grounds on which comparativism can proffer some understanding of the orderly aspect of social life, though whether such demonstrations could alleviate the existential discontent that is our subject must be another matter.

So also with the desideratum of certainty, that is, the sense of sureness permitting decision. The gains in substantive knowledge that have been made in recent decades are encouraging, and our increasing facility in recognizing and correlating social forms makes possible a firmer professional confidence in the analysis of social facts. But this is a long way from procuring the sense of certainty that would respond to the deep unease of men about the sense of human life. Part of the reason for this insufficiency is the sheer philosophical difficulty, acutely expounded by Wittgenstein, in determining what can serve as criteria of certainty. In part also the reason is the relativism which has come to mark modern styles of thought, whether in physics or morals or art, and which militates corrosively against even

the expectation of certainty. The succession of intellectual fashions, such as existentialism or structuralism, indicates the recurrent impulsion towards new sources of authority in the interpretation of human experience; but the very succession and the fact that such doctrines can so readily be regarded as fashions are evidences of repeated failures of conviction.

Underlying these particular considerations, with regard to order and certainty, there is moreover a deeper concern. Men have always sought purpose in the design of the world, and many require a sense of purpose if they are to direct their lives aright. Much of the power of religious ideas has stemmed traditionally from their capacity to interpret the purposes of gods to men; and typically men have found that wars and revolutions confer on their lives a direct and ultimate purpose which otherwise they lack. But the transcendental and the cataclysmic need not be the only sources of purpose; and our present interest is to see if the more level scrutiny of comparativism can, by virtue of its universal purview, detect any purposive principles in the forms of human social life.

It would be easy enough to contend that the scale of the comparison has nothing to do with the issue, and in some respects this objection might be hard to confute; but we need not be tied to a prior conception of principle either, and in the straits where we find ourselves we may take nothing for granted. The least we can do is also the most we can do: to consider man as mankind, not merely in this or that form of civilization, and to look and see if any advantage is then to be had from this most comprehensive examination. The special advantage that is looked for in the end is that of being able to ascribe some teleological meaning to the forms of human experience.

The response to so great a question, and in this narrow compass, must be largely impressionistic. The grounds of the impressions could be justified empirically, however, and in a longer reply, and it is on this premise that I venture to say anything at all on the matter. It seems to me, then, that the evidences of comparativism point fairly consistently in one direction. The institutions that frame men's lives exhibit clear regularities around the world, and they are not purposive. Whenever we can account for the form or structure of an institution, the terms of the analysis make no place for human intention or foresight. This is so whether we are dealing with prescriptive systems or informal logic or complementary governance, with shamanism or sacrifice or myth. The social facts were not deliberately contrived by acts of will; nor, in the ways that they regularly change, do they respond to concerted purposes. That they tend to satisfy human needs is nothing to the point, for any kind of social organization can do that; and of course if the conditions of physical survival were not met there would be neither human beings nor social forms, so the consideration of needs is vacuous.

The essential is that many institutions exhibit such regularity as to appear as though they were evidences of design, whereas the further our comparative analyses extend the less is it possible to admit any purposive factor behind the regularity. Admitted, both dictators and democratic assemblies introduce changes in the constitution of society, but a lesson of history as well as of comparativism is that their ability to effect radical changes is very limited. One reason is that to plan change it is necessary first to form ideas about the present, and these ideas themselves are in the main social artifacts. They are so much the vehicles and moulds of our thought that we speak of the social construction of reality

itself, and their impress extends to conscience, imagination, and self-awareness. Lichtenberg once wrote that just as things happen outside us without our intervention, so also the ideas of them can occur in us without any help from us; indeed, he concludes, we too have become what we are without our aid.

it is on such grounds that it can be maintained, as Lichtenberg further asserted, that we are parts of this world and that the thought which moves and lives in us also belongs to it. In the world of social forms, to the extent that comparativism can demonstrate characteristic features of human conduct, there is no incontrovertible evidence of design or of any general purpose which might tell us what it is all about. If comparativism can establish what can be called an architectonics of significance, as has been suggested, the emphasis falls not on any integral meaning discerned but on the social instruments by which various meanings are traditionally ascribed to human experience.

A consistent interpretation of these social facts is that, over and above the immediacy of our concerns, human existence has no significance of a kind to still the heart's unrest.