Realism and idealism should be combined in striking for a world order. Skeletal ideals of universal human brotherhood have been in the world a long time and we are further from tribal savagery and its tribalism because of these ideals. But they are but partial expressions of what we hope to make them mean and what today’s world crisis demands.
Loyalty to corporate unity is a necessary loyalty to something larger than the individual in order to unite men. However, the traditional ideas and values associated with human group loyalties are now hopelessly inadequate as a foundation for a larger society and impose limitations on a more comprehensive human society. In the transformation of these values we need something bigger and more understanding.
These basic corporate ideas concern (1) the nation as a political corporate idea, (2) the race as a cultural corporate idea, and (3) the sect as a spiritual corporate idea. These larger loyalties, however, are and have been seeds of conflict and division among men everywhere—loyalties that were originally meant to bring people together. How can we give them up? One great and fundamental way of giving up something that is vital is to find a way to transform or enlarge it.
Nationality now means irresponsible national sovereignty. We must give up some of this arbitrary sovereignty in order to prevent war, to get fellowship among nations, to erase conflict boundaries which are potential battlelines. We must work for enlargement of all our loyalties, but most particularly this one,—of the sovereign self-judging politically expansive nation.
This process of evolution by progressive enlargement of values can be illustrated by the stages reported Biblically when sacrifice to God meant the sacrifice of a human being. This was changed to the substitution of an animal in the place of a man. Fundamentalists must have said if we give this up, that will be the end of sacrifices; but instead, there was more meaning to the act and then the next stage took sacrifice to the still more meaningful level of “an offering of a pure and contrite heart.”
We must consider race not in the fascist, blood-clan sense, which also is tribal and fetishist, but consider race as a common culture and brotherhood. Cultural superiority of one race is only an expression of arbitrary loyalty to that which is our own. Confraternity of culture will have to be put forward as what race can mean, and as an ideal of the parity of races and cultures.
We must in the third place consider religion as having many ways leading to salvation. The idea that there is only one true way of salvation with all other ways leading to damnation is a tragic limitation to the Christianity, which professes the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. How foolish in the eyes of foreigners are our competitive blind, sectarian missionaries! If the Confucian expression of a Commandment means the same as the Christian expression, then it is the truth also and should so be recognized. It is in this way alone that Christianity or any other enlightened religion can vindicate its claims to Universality; and so bring about moral and spiritual brotherhood.
The moral imperatives of a new world order are an internationally limited idea of national sovereignty, a non-monopolistic and culturally tolerant concept of race and religious loyalties freed of sectarian bigotry.