The Beloved Community

The previous post showed that the basic choice that determines our life is not egoism vs altruism or individualism vs collectivism Rather we become free, creative, unique individuals only in and through our participation in community.

Josiah Royce taught that we can achieve the highest potential for ourselves, for other individuals and for our society only by practicing a thorough-going devotion to a fully integrated community. Ethics requires us each to strive to create a self who devotes his or her life to a chosen cause that contributes in a unique individual way to the ultimate human integration that Royce called “The Beloved Community.”

A better understanding of the meaning of the “Universal Beloved Community” requires a grasp of Royce’s notion of any community. A mere crowd or collection of people does not constitute a community. There are several conditions for a genuine community, the kind of community that is necessary for developing unique and free individuals. A community comes about as a temporal process involving interpretation so that the individuals understand the meaning of the community and their place within it. Since communities develop in time, a community must have a past. It must have a more or less conscious history, real or ideal, and this history is part of its very essence.

 Secondly, it must have a future that consists of shared hopes and expectations. The community consists of a number of distinct individuals, each with a distinctive past and set of aspirations, who engage in mutual communication among themselves. The extended pasts and futures of members include some events that are identical, and each member has a loyal love of the community.

The term “beloved community” refers to the community that rescues the individual from alienation. It comes to individuals as a free gift, a grace, and saves them from desolation. Of course, small groups such as gangs or cults can give the isolated individual the sense of belonging and being saved. But tendencies toward disintegration persist. Antagonisms arise among individuals, between individuals and the community, and among warring communities. Individuals struggling with conflicting loyalties may be thrown back on to conflicting motives within themselves. In order to achieve genuine integrity of self the individual needs loyalty to a community that overcomes all divisions. We do not find such a community in the visible world, but we can know the ideal and integrate our lives by loyally working toward it.

The Beloved Community is the ideal unity of all humans in a Universal Community. Every act that Royce, following Peirce, calls “interpretation” brings two divided ideas together and unites them into a higher unity. As this process goes on in our finite world, it moves us toward the universal beloved community. In our natural dealing with other people, we have feelings of hate as well as love for individuals and for the communities of which we are a part. This ambiguity holds even for our own lives. We may love our life and yet feel a sense of discontent and disappointment toward it. For us to develop a permanent steady unbroken love for our community we need to receive the love as a gift from something higher. Royce explains that, in Christian terminology, this would be expressed as a grace from God. While Royce sees historical Christianity as an example of this gift of community, he contends that the idea is larger than Christianity or any historical religion and expresses a universal human doctrine of life. Whatever name we give to the higher being, or if we leave it nameless, we can still experience the senses of love for the community as a gift.

            In developing this idea, Royce uses the startling phrase “falling in love with the universe.” This term connotes that reality consists of something worthy of our love and devotion as opposed to being just dead matter. The notion of a lovable universe means that we can interpret our own attempts at harmony within our individual selves, within our communities of history and hope, and among all communities, as working parts of a universal beloved community. Such an outlook allows for the greatest possibility of fulfilling the ethical task of creating an integrated self.

Freedom and Creativity

             We can exercise freedom only if the possible futures outnumber the eventual outcomes. If there are two choices as when we come to a fork in the road or find ourselves torn between two career paths or two job offers, we have a degree of freedom. But freedom can sometimes be much richer than merely choosing among the given options. We can sometimes view the future as malleable and we can imagine real possibilities that had not previously occurred to us. Such a view greatly expands our freedom. We can, to some degree, shape our reality. Of course reality does not yield to all of our desires and ideas, but it might yield to some. We can see the malleability of reality by looking at the work of creative people from artists and scientists to business founders and nation builders.  We can find the limits of our own creativity only by testing them.

            The creative potential of each human person presents a source of hope and even exhilaration, but also imposes a moral duty. We have the psychological and moral need to take part in meaningful work that carries on the process of creation. Failure to do so constitutes what traditional moral writers called “sloth” or laziness.  More recently, psychiatrist and spiritual writer Scott Peck called laziness the “original sin” because it prevents us from achieving our purpose in life.

            American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839 – 1914) described creation as the process by which the world becomes more reasonable, by which he meant more orderly and integrated. He provided an empowering view of the creation of the world and the part that we humans play:

The creation of the universe, which did not take place during a certain busy week in 4004 B. C., but is going on today and never will be done, is this very development of reason…Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to exercise our little function in the operation of creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is up to us.

This insight of Peirce, on taking a role in creation as the ideal of conduct, presents a leading ethical idea for us.

            Josiah Royce, following Peirce, offers a very fertile ground for creative thinking in the process of interpretation.  Interpretation consists of a mind revealing the meaning of a sign to another mind. A sign can be anything that has meaning, for example, a traffic signal, a spoken or written sentence, a painting, a facial expression, or a cloud formation. We find the prototype and most common expression of interpretation in a language translator. The translator reveals the meaning of, say, a Russian novel to an English speaking reader. The English translation becomes a new sign, which a literature professor interprets for her students. The professor’s lecture becomes a new sign and the process can go on indefinitely. The two minds need not be two separate people. For example, a student of language may be using his new skill and knowledge to interpret a foreign phrase to his old monolingual self.                

            Royce sees interpretation as the key to great world-changing creativity in science, religion, and art. But creativity through interpretation applies not only to the world-changing works of prophets, artists and scientists, but also to the growth and development of each person.

As stated in a previous post, we begin life, not as a unified self, but as a meeting ground of many, often conflicting, drives, desires, and ideas.

             For example, young person may hold a strong sense of self and desire to flourish in her personal and professional life. At the same time, she may have a nagging sense of social responsibility and feel the need to help others. The dichotomy between egoism and altruism looms before her. But the “third idea,” in this case, is loyalty. The loyal person is not selfless but rather has a strong sense of self. The more self she has, the more she can contribute to her cause. Her work in promoting the cause in turn strengthens her personal development. Royce summarizes the relation between our individual and social sense in his answer to the question of whether we have duties to our selves:

“Yes, precisely in so far as I have the duty to be actively loyal at all. For loyalty needs not only a willing, but also an active servant. My duty to myself is, then, the duty to provide my cause with one who is strong enough and skillful enough to be effective according to my own natural powers. 

Royce includes among these powers, the care of health, self-cultivation, self-control, and spiritual power. His exemplar of the loyal person was Ida Lewis, the light-house keeper whose strength and boating skill saved many shipwrecked sailor from drowning.

            The relationship between a strong individual and well-developed sense of social responsibility applies to any man or woman in business, health-care, education, politics, science, art, or any profession.  To cite some examples, you cannot become a better teacher, physical therapist, or home-construction tradesman without enhancing the good of students, clients, or home owners. Persons who are loyal to the purpose of their professions may see them as causes and not merely jobs. The loyal person flourishes personally and contributes to the common good. Becoming a fully integrated person requires the creative act of bringing opposing forces of self-development and social concern into harmony.         

            Human creativity carries several important ethical ramifications, all of which can be enhanced by a clear understanding of interpretation. One of the key aspects of creativity that life presents to all of us is “moral imagination.” Life often presents dilemmas in which we have to choose between two goods or between two evils. Ordinary thought may direct us to choose the greater good or the lesser evil. Or there may be a clear choice between right and wrong, but the “right” choice leads to a lot of harm or sacrifices a lot of good. Sometimes reality limits us to one of two choices. But there are also time when our moral imagination may happily reveal three, four, or many possible paths. Moral imagination should permeate the discussion of every ethical issue. For example, suppose a child commits an infraction of his parents’ rules shortly before an important opportunity, such as a field trip or a summer camp that means a lot to the child. A parent may feel trapped between ignoring the infraction and taking away a good learning opportunity for the child. It might not occur to the distressed parent, caught up in the situation, that there are ways to teach the child that his infraction was a bad decision without taking away a good life experience. A satisfactory study of ethics will encourage each of to look for ways not only to choose the better of two decisions, but also to exercise moral imagination to enhance the good.

             Royce’s notions of interpretation and loyalty provide a way to train moral imagination. Interpretation always involves the mediation of a third term that bridges the gap between two terms, as a translator is the third term who bridges the gap between a language and person who does not know the language. In the example given above, of the offending child and the offended parent, the parent himself can be the mediator between his own offended self and the child. If he is able to step back and take the position of mediator, he will take care to correct the offending behavior in a way that benefits the child and does not damage the parent-child relationship. The same dynamic applies to any relationship between unequal parties such as employer-employee, or teacher-student, or between equal partners such as spouses, friends, or adult siblings. In each case loyalty to the good of the family, the educational process, the workplace, or the friendship enables a person to overcome the dangerous and destructive relationship of two angry or hurt individuals.

Taking the role of mediator both requires and trains moral imagination whether the mediator is one of the two parties stepping back and taking the role of a third person, or an actual third person such as a mutual friend or a counselor. Imagination, which Royce saw as one of the leading teachers of loyalty, enables the third person to see what the relationship could be, a vision that is likely to be blurred if not erased in the heat of the immediate conflict. Closely allied to imagination as a teacher of loyalty is sorrow for the loss of what had been. Remembering the love, the friendship, the good times, can reignite the awareness of what could be. If the loss is irreversible, sorrow can motivate a person to re-configure relationships to avoid or at least minimize future harm.

Loyalty to loyalty evokes the duty to seek mediation in every conflict. An attitude of respect for people with whom we disagree, enhanced by recognition of their loyalty to a cause, enriches our own understanding of the good as teleological harmony. Such respect may enable us to see the good in the other’s cause to which we might have been blind. Increased insight may also awaken us to a weakness in our own perception of reality. For example, the task of ethics involves interpreting the pro-life position on abortion, and euthanasia to a pro-choice person, and the pro-choice position to a pro-life person. A pro-life advocate might be insensitive to the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies, and a pro-choice person can fail to appreciate the reality of pre-natal life. Although the two sides may never agree on the morality of abortion, a softening of positions may lead each to care about the mother and the unborn child in ways that are more conducive to a better life for each.

Other conflicts that interpretation can help to heal are between environmental and industrial interests, and between libertarians and social justice advocates. All of the social divisions that we face on issues such as capital punishment, immigration, the environment, the economy, and health care, can be alleviated through mediation rather than by politicians posturing with winner–take-all stances. Mediation may not solve the problems or end the divisions, but it will move our understanding forward better than the ethical doctrines that see their own side as right and the other as wrong.   

Potential as the key to ethical understanding

Potential as the Key to Ethical Understanding

While each of us is a work-in-progress, we are not blank slates. Some empiricist philosophers described the mind as tabula rasa, or blank slate. This makes a poor metaphor because reality does not write ideas on passive minds. Rather, we actively develop ideas as we interact with our environment. For example, the fifteen-month-old toddler approaching a step down may create the idea that she is less likely to fall if she turns backward and crawls down. The complex idea of turning around and crawling was not written on her mind by experience; she had to conceive the idea to prevent the unpleasant experience from ever happening. The same dynamic takes place in the most sophisticated adult thinking in science, business, health-care, education, or anything else. The potentiality of our mind does not imply blankness and passivity but rather a specific power. "Potential" stems from the Latin word for power, potentia. The Greek word used by Aristotle, dynamis, provides such English words as dynamo and dynamite. We can learn to make better decisions on what we make of our lives, by looking at our capabilities, our potential.

What can we know about the potential of each human person and specifically the person that we call our “self?” The answer to this question requires that we find out what we can know about human beings in general, and the more difficult question of what we can each know about our particular selves.  Each of us is unique, but the following beliefs about the human nature have developed over time and express general truths.  

            Human nature includes those characteristics that we share with all animals. Ancient and medieval philosophers defined us as rational animals. While the notion of what this means has changed over time, the reality of our animal nature has certain constancies, especially our mortality. Because we are going to die, our life is precarious and limited. Awareness of vulnerability can awaken us to the obligation to treat ourselves and all others with the utmost respect. Our time and our life are precious. We can learn to see that time quickly slips away and that missed opportunities constitute moral problems. In dealing with other people, we would treat them with greater care if we thought they were going to die.  In fact, they are going to die. This awareness increases our moral burden but also releases our moral energy.

            Awareness of personal mortality underlies the human need for loyalty. Those who live for their own individual pleasure or power inevitably meet defeat as death takes away their perceived goods. In contrast to the individualists whose insatiable desire for pleasure or power meets frustration, Royce depicts the meaning of mortality for the loyal:

They, too, are indeed subject to fortune; their loyalty, also, is an insatiable passion to serve their cause; they also know what it is to meet with tasks that are too vast for mortals to accomplish. Only their very loyalty, since it is a willing surrender of the self to the cause, is no hopeless warfare with this fate but is a joyous acceptance in advance of the inevitable destiny of every individual human being.

The person who lives loyally for a cause can live and die in the hope that the cause endures.

            In addition to mortality, our animal nature requires that we obtain food and other necessities, that we watch out for our health and safety and that of our neighbor, and that we reproduce sexually and take care of our young. In later posts I will look at each of these human needs with suggestion how they may be met in a way that nourishing the good.

            While we humans have much in common with other animals, reason is our defining characteristic. The classical definition of humans as rational animals does not depict us as mere animals but rather emphasizes the qualification of rational animal. Writers and teachers often make reference to reason without stopping to say what it is. Reason may be something so familiar to us that it needs no introduction. But since the term is so often used and misused, readers have the right to know what each writer means by reason. Reason consists of the ability to form concepts so that we can be aware of things that are not present to our senses. It goes beyond memory and imagination in that we are not limited to pictures of things, but may also form logical and mathematical connections by which we unite things into greater and greater generalizations. Our rationality provides us with a desire to learn and to find or create meaning in our world. We need to find a way to connect the rich variety of experiences into a whole, or at least into a manageable number of parts. Without such connections or meanings, experience would overwhelm us. In the words of William James it would be a “big, buzzing, blooming, confusion.”

            Royce defines reason as “...the power to see widely, and steadily, and connectedly.” He illustrates the meaning of reason by showing the distinction between a reasonable and an unreasonable person. In ordinary language, when we consider a person to be unreasonable we usually mean that the person sees only one side of an issue or one aspect of a problem. Or if the unreasonable person sees several things, he does not see the connections between them or does not think consistently. Such a person might have one set of standards for him or herself and another set for everyone else. The reasonable man or woman sees as many sides of an issue as possible and sees them as a whole and how they develop over time. By rationally connecting our experiences, we can form ideas about how to live our lives personally and in cooperation with other people. Reason gives us the desire and the ability to deliberately seek goals and to find ways to live with others justly and beneficially.

            Our nature as rational animals connotes mortality and rationality. But other qualities that spring from our nature endow us with a sense of community, freedom, creativity, and the potential to be something more. First, we can depict ourselves and our neighbors as social animals. Like many animals we like to live together. But our rationality expands our sociality beyond our immediate tribe. We belong to many interlocking communities ultimately including the human race and, in fact, the whole biosphere. We depend on these communities and they depend on us. This awareness provides us with moral guidance on how we play our many roles to the benefit of ourselves and our community.

            The next post will explore the human potential to be free and creative, and the ethical implication of these potentials.