What we want is a related conscience, a conscience that is intimately related to the consciences of other men and to all the spiritual environment of our time, to all the progressive forces of our age. The particularistic tendency has had its day in law, in politics, in international relations and as a guiding tendency in our daily lives.
We have seen that a clearer conception today of the unity of the social process shows us: first, that we are not merely to follow but to create “right,” secondly, that there is no private conscience, and third, that my duty is never to “others” but to the whole. We no longer make a distinction between selfishness and altruism.18 An act done for our own benefit may be social and one done for another may not be. Some twenty or thirty years ago our “individual” system of ethics began to be widely condemned and we have been hearing a great deal of “social” ethics. But this so-called “social” ethics has meant only my duty to “others.” There is now emerging an idea of ethics entirely different from the altruistic school, based not on the duty of isolated beings to one another, but on integrated individuals acting as a whole, evolving whole-ideas, working for whole-ideals. The new consciousness is of a whole.
Purpose
As right appears with that interrelating, germinating activity which we call the social process, so purpose also is generated by the same process. The goal of evolution most obviously must evolve itself. How self-contradictory is the idea that evolution is the world-process and yet that some other power has made the goal for it to reach. The truth is that the same process which creates all else creates the very purpose. That purpose is involved in the process, not prior to process, has far wider reaching consequences than can be taken up here. The whole philosophy of cause and effect must be rewritten. If the infinite task is the evolution of the whole, if our finite tasks are wholes of varying degrees of scope and perfection, the notion of causality must have an entirely different place in our system of thought.
The question is often asked, “What is the proposed unity of European nations after the war to be for?” This question implies that the alliance will be a mere method of accomplishing certain purposes, whereas it is the union which is the important thing. With the union the purpose comes into being, and with its every step forward, the purpose changes. No one would say that the aims of the Allies today are the same as in 1914, or even as in April, 1917. As the alliance develops, the purpose steadily shapes itself.
Every teleological view will be given up when we see that purpose is not “preexistent,” but involved in the unifying act which is the life process. It is man’s part to create purpose and to actualize it. From the point of view of man we are just in the dawn of self-consciousness, and his purpose is dimly revealing itself to him. The life-force wells up in us for expression—to direct it is the privilege of self-consciousness.19
Loyalty
As this true purpose evolves itself, loyalty springs into being. Loyalty is awakened through and by the very process which creates the group. The same process which organizes the group energizes it. We cannot “will” to be loyal. Our task is not to “find” causes to awaken our loyalty, but to live our life fully and loyalty issues. A cause has no part in us or we in it if we have fortuitously to “find” it.
Thus we see that we do not love the Beloved Community because it is lovable—the same process which makes it lovable produces our love for it. Moreover it is not enough to love the Beloved Community, we must find out how to create it. It is not there for us to accept or reject—it exists only through us. Loyalty to a collective will which we have not created and of which we are, therefore, not an integral part, is slavery. We belong to our community just in so far as we are helping to make that community; then loyalty follows, then love follows. Loyalty means the consciousness of oneness, the full realization that we succeed or fail, live or die, are saved or damned together. The only unity or community is one we have made of ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves.20
Thus the social process is one all-inclusive, Self-sufficing process. The vital impulse which is produced by all the reciprocally interacting influences of the group is also itself the generating and the vivifying power. Social unity is not a sterile conception but an active force. It is a double process—the activity which goes to make the unity and the activity which flows from the unity. There is no better example of centripetal and centrifugal force. All the forces which are stored up in the unity flow forth eternally in activity. We create the common will and feel the spiritual energy which flows into us from the purpose
