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.