Daily Inspiration Quote by Huston Smith

Huston Smith is doing something deceptively radical here: he drags “ethics” out of the private realm of personal virtue and drops it into the wiring of society itself. By calling social structures “not like laws of nature,” he’s targeting a familiar alibi: the claim that poverty, hierarchy, racism, exploitation, or exclusion are simply how the world works. Natural laws can’t be voted out, reorganized, repented of. Human systems can. That pivot turns resignation into culpability.

The intent is modernist, but not secular in the dismissive sense. Smith isn’t saying religion should surrender to politics; he’s saying religions can’t keep pretending that spirituality ends at the edge of the soul. “Adds social ethics” signals a widening of the religious agenda from personal salvation to collective accountability. The subtext is a critique of faith that stays safely inward: prayer without policy, compassion without structure, charity that patches wounds while leaving the machinery that causes them untouched.

Context matters: Smith wrote as a major interpreter of world religions in the postwar, post-civil-rights era, when institutions were being interrogated and “structural” explanations of injustice were entering mainstream moral language. His line also reads like a rebuke to religious quietism and to any tradition tempted to sanctify the status quo. By insisting “we are responsible,” he reframes social life as a moral artifact. If we built it, we can rebuild it - and if we refuse, that refusal is its own ethical decision.