§4

Mead on Cosmopolitanism, Sympathy, and War

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

When we say of someone who lives in our community that she is a good neighbor, we not only mean that she does us no harm. We imply that this person is willing to assist those in her community when they are in distress. And when we speak of the good Samaritan, we speak of a person who is willing to assist those in need, even if they are not members of her local community. The charitableness of this individual extends to those in distress, whether near or far. How are we to understand the moral psychology of persons whose benevolence transcends the provincial and extends to strangers? What leads individuals to a cosmopolitan perspective on the needs of others, while others remain solely committed to kith and kin? These questions can be addressed from a variety of vantage points: psychological, economic, cultural, and sociological. In this chapter I offer the outlines of a moral psychology that is indebted to George Herbert Mead. In doing so, I will discuss the relationship between sympathetic feelings, empathy (which involves taking the perspectives of others), cosmopolitanism, and a sense of obligation that is a condition for successfully alleviating distress. Mead’s views on war will also be examined, for they shed light on the relationship between nationalism, national self-determination, and cosmopolitanism, topics that will also be addressed in the next chapter.

George Herbert Mead should be viewed as a social constructionist or, perhaps better, as a social reconstructionist. As a political progressive in the heyday of the progressive movement in the United States, Mead was clearly committed to relieving the undeserved suffering of those in his own and in other lands.1 Mead endorses a version of cosmopolitanism that speaks to our obligations to those who suffer. Although this issue obviously does not exhaust the field of ethics, it does say a good deal about Mead as an ethicist and as a moral psychologist. Mead’s most sustained contributions were to social theory and social psychology. Although he was keenly interested in ethics, and he wrote and acted on these interests, those looking to Mead for a refined ethical system will be disappointed. Nevertheless, his insights are promising and worth developing.

If we are to follow Mead, and also those who are in Habermas’s camp, in addressing our obligations to those who suffer undeservedly, we will need to appeal to notions of reciprocity and perspectivism to assist us. For Mead, as we have seen in Chapter 3, taking the perspectives or roles of others is basic to the development of the self, and individuals can have multiple selves. As an object of cognition the self depends on the internalization of roles, which can be viewed as perspectives. It also depends on reflexivity and a capacity for self-consciousness, which are grounded for Mead in the pragmatics of language development and the exchange of roles.² If we find ourselves in circumstances that generate the taking of alternate perspectives in a sustained fashion, we can develop an “enlarged mentality,” to borrow and modify Kant’s phrase along Arendtian lines. In Arendt’s words, “In the Critique of Judgement ... Kant insisted upon a different way of thinking, for which it would not be enough to be in agreement with one’s own self, but which consisted of being able to ‘think in the place of everybody else’ and which he therefore called an ‘enlarged mentality’ (eine erweiterte Denkungsart ).”³

According to Mead, we do not simply share perspectives that are always already given. We continually encounter perspectives that are different and in varying degrees novel. When certain social conditions are present—for example, the absence of threats by others—these past and present perspectives aren’t dismissed but engaged, and the engagement helps to foster inclusiveness and an ability to step outside the local. I will refer to the ability to take the roles of others as “empathy.”⁴ On the one hand, Mead is convinced that the greater the number of perspectives that we share, the greater will become our sensitivity to others. Solidarity and inclusiveness will result. On the other hand, if we find ourselves mired in an unwillingness to grapple with new and different perspectives, we will grow less tolerant and more insensitive. We will become ever more exclusionary and parochial. By remaining open to the novel lives of others, we avoid effacing them with our own forms of life. As noted earlier, Buber reminds us that one of the characteristics of the person, the Thou, is his or her ability to surprise us, to present us with the new. So, remaining open to novel perspectives can be viewed as a way of seeking to avoid reducing others to our categories or to circumscribed narratives; that is, it can be seen as a form of respect. For Mead, as for Herder, this respect extends to other peoples.

Mead has a story to tell here. He thinks that the modern Western world has set the stage for an increased sensitivity to others, those both near and far. He locates an aspect of this sensibility in the romantic temper. He does not, and cannot, argue that a sensitivity to others is confined to the modern self. A claim of this sort would run contrary to his account of the ontogenesis of the self. As long as human beings have lived in nonmonolithic communities that possessed language, selves have existed and been dependent on others for their genesis. But historical conditions, which of course include material conditions, transform how selves are realized. In his Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Mead argues that romanticism revealed a fundamental shift in our relationship to the past, and this shift in turn was responsible for a transformation in the way in which the self came to be experienced.

What the Romantic period revealed, then, was not simply a past, but a past as the point of view from which to come back at the self. One has to grow into the attitude of the other, come back at the self, to realize the self; and we are discussing the means by which this was done. Here, then, we have the makings of a new philosophy, the Romantic philosophy.⁵

It was because people in Europe, at this time, put themselves back in the earlier attitude that they could come back upon themselves.... As a characteristic of the romantic attitude we find this assumption of rôles.⁶

For Mead, the romantic temper was uniquely suited to the development or the “expansion” of the self because it nurtured our capacity to see ourselves, “to come back at the self,” from the perspective of others. As the past became enlivened through the experience of taking the perspective of historical or fictional characters, new ways of relating to the self arose, which in turn generated new relationships to the past (and one’s own past). In other words, people organized or reorganized the past in relation to their current emerging selves and their selves in relation to emerging pasts.⁷ Selves are by nature reflexive, but romanticism made something of a fetish of this reflexivity, this “coming back at the self,” and exemplary romantics delighted in their ability to take the roles of others, both past and present.⁸ The upshot was that new narratives appeared that entailed taking the perspective of others in ways that “broadened” the self.⁹ This is, of course, not to say that selves did not exist before romanticism. And it is definitely not to claim that cosmopolitanism was a product of romanticism. (Mead certainly knew too much about history, literature, and philosophy to make a naïve claim of this sort.) Rather, it is to claim that the character of selves was altered by the ways in which people came to experience a multitude of others, those both living and dead.¹⁰

In short, romanticism generated inventive ways of engaging others through role-taking, which in turn led to the generation of “enlarged” selves. For Mead, the formation of selves that have an enhanced capacity for “growth” is crucial to moral development. When the self encounters problematic situations—for example, those of a moral nature—the way in which the self responds results in either its stagnation or its transformation and growth. There is an old self that maintains accepted values or a new one that integrates different values, but to integrate these values, it must move beyond both selfishness and self-sacrifice, which prove to be two sides of the same coin.

To leave the field to the values represented by the old self is exactly what we term selfishness. The justification for the term is found in the habitual character of conduct with reference to these values. Attention is not claimed by the object and shifts to the subjective field where the affective responses are identified with the old self. The result is that we state the other conflicting ends in subjective terms of other selves and the moral problem seems to take on the form of the sacrifice of the self or the others. Where, however, the problem is objectively considered, although the conflict is a social one, it should not resolve itself into a struggle between selves, but into such reconstruction of the situation that different and enlarged and more adequate personalities may emerge.¹¹

Old selves must be willing to give way to new selves to avoid what he terms “selfishness.” This will lead to an enlargement of the self, that is, a more cosmopolitan self, which is attuned to inclusion.

Mead thinks that one of the advantages of modernity is that it makes available a larger repertoire of potential selves. He is a cosmopolitan who sees the expansion of communication and contact with others as sources of growth, including moral growth, which in turn has the potential to help give birth to a more democratized world order less given to strife. With regard to the relationship of communication to cosmopolitanism, Mead’s position is akin to Arendt’s, as the following passage from her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy suggests (although Mead would take exception to the phrase “sheer fact of being human”).

One can communicate only if one is able to think from the other person’s standpoint; otherwise one will never meet him, never speak in such a way that he understands.... Finally, the larger the scope of those to whom one can communicate, the greater is the worth of the object.... One judges always as a member of a community, guided by one’s community sense, one’s sensus communis. But in the last analysis, one is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one’s “cosmopolitan existence.”¹²

For the sake of argument, let us suppose that Mead’s account is accurate, that is, following on the heels of romanticism, and the growing complexity of modern society, the tendency to take alternative perspectives in the modern Western world increased.¹³ But why should we assume that taking alternative perspectives, understood as empathetic responses, leads to sympathy, that is, to compassion for others? Quantitative change does not necessarily produce qualitative transformation, or at least qualitative transformation worthy of endorsement. Perhaps engaging in perspective-taking is best understood as a form of entertainment, so that we do not arrive at a morally informed or enlarged self but at something more akin to a theatrical self or perhaps the aesthete in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. What is it about taking alternative perspectives, as well as a willingness to accept novelty, that leads to compassion and moral growth as opposed to, say, some sort of hedonistic self-indulgence or the manipulation of others for selfish ends?

There is, however, a reason why Mead believes that moral development—at least in terms of compassion, that is, a sensitization to the suffering and needs of others—is a likely, although by no means a necessary, outcome of the expansion of perspectives. Mead is led to this conclusion in part because of the influence of the Scottish sympathy theorists, and this can be seen, for example, in his basic assumption about a biological predisposition to compassion. Mead claims, “Back of the obligation of the donor lies the human impulse to help those in distress. It is an impulse which we can trace back to animals lower than man.... The kindliness that expresses itself in charity is as fundamental an element in human nature as are any in our original endowment. The man without a generous impulse is abnormal and abhorrent.”¹⁴

Mead seeks to combine a natural disposition for sympathy, compassion, with the capacity for taking the perspective of others, to yield a morally informed, enlarged or cosmopolitan mentality. In this regard Mead and Adam Smith can be seen as fellow travelers. However, in spite of their similarities, Mead would find Smith and other theorists of moral sentiment limited in their understanding of how role-taking and empathy develop; for example, there is no self-and-other dialectic in this tradition, at least not one that would satisfy the neo-Hegelian in Mead. In synthesizing a sentiment for sympathy with a dialectic of self and other that entails empathy, Mead provides a plausible route for avoiding the reduction of perspective-taking to the merely strategic or aesthetic, one that I want to explore further by addressing his notion of obligation, which will in turn help to illuminate the place of sympathy in his cosmopolitanism.

As important as sympathy and empathy are for Mead’s account of cosmopolitan benevolence, they cannot in themselves generate an adequate ethical response to the suffering of others. They are but two legs of the proverbial three-legged stool. To adequately respond to others, we must also possess a sense of obligation.

The sympathetic identification with the individual in distress ... calls out in us the incipient reactions of warding off, of defense, which the distress arouses in the sufferer, and these reactions become dominant in the response of the one who assists. He places himself in the service of the other. We speak of this attitude as that of unselfishness or self-effacement of the charitable individual. But even this attitude of devotion to the interest of the other is not that of obligation.... The earliest appearance of the feel of obligation is found in the appraisal of the relief to the distressed person in terms of the donor’s effort and expenditure.¹⁵

Mead is too sophisticated a social theorist not to be sensitive to the social and historical dimensions of the experience of sympathy, yet as we have seen, he argues that there is a biological impulse to compassion. Mead even suggests that the social component of the self stands to impulses as form does to matter for Aristotle.¹⁶ However, obligation is not located in the sympathetic feeling itself, nor even in visceral urges and reactions to assist, as important as these may be as necessary conditions for obligation, but in reflection on the circumstances of the distress and in a commitment to alleviate it, that is, in the “effort and expenditure” we are prepared to make in response to our sympathetic feelings. As a pragmatist he can no more be satisfied with sympathetic feelings than he can be with good intentions. The “effort and expenditure” (especially if successful) will typically involve reflecting on various courses of action and anticipating their consequences, capacities that were addressed earlier.

For a pragmatist the point is to transform the conditions that create distress, and here is where the notion of obligation comes into its own for Mead. The latter occurs when we recognize that a concerted effort on our part is required to alleviate suffering. But why after an initial reaction to and an acknowledgment of distress are some individuals motivated to move beyond their feelings of sympathy or compassion to a sense of obligation? Before answering this question, I want to interject a caveat. I have not been speaking of justice or injustice when discussing Mead’s position, not because he does not address justice but because for Mead justice involves a form of identification with others in terms of rights, as opposed to kindly and charitable impulses, and it entails a form of self-assertion. Although he speaks of rights, Mead’s understanding of cosmopolitanism is best approached through moral categories such as benevolence, which are more readily linked to his social psychology.

To answer why some individuals develop a greater sense of obligation than others, we might take an easy path and say that the normative content of generalized others, or the systemic organizations of attitudes of particular groups or communities, directs individuals to act in specific circumstances. People simply follow internalized group norms, and some group norms focus on addressing the needs of others. But as important as group norms may be, surely in themselves they cannot totally explain why some individuals are more motivated than others to move beyond feelings of sympathy to a sense of obligation, for those who are members of the same group or community may respond quite differently to suffering.¹⁷

An alternative, yet complementary, explanation begins with a truism based on experience, namely, there are differences between individuals regarding the intensity of their responses to the suffering of others. Some people are more prepared to sympathize with others, either because of individual constitution or developmental factors. In traditional empiricist terms we can say that these individuals experience distress and suffering with greater force and vivacity than others, which in this case means that they experience the suffering of others as in some sense their own. As Adam Smith remarks, “For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness [sic] of the conception.”¹⁸

When individuals experience the distress of others in a lively manner, they are more prepared to stand or remain standing in the others’ shoes (that is, perspective) because of the intensity of their own experience. This in turn can lead to a desire and a willingness to act to alleviate the distress, because the experience of the other—or better, the character and intensity of the other’s experience—is in some sense their own experience. There are no guarantees here, for of course we can imagine sadistic or masochistic types who refrain from acting, and do so for opposing reasons. And at times fear or selfish ends get the better of us. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable hypothesis that those who are deeply attuned to the distress of others are more inclined to act to remove the distress, and there is empirical evidence to support this claim.¹⁹

However, the relationship between sympathy, empathy, and obligation is more complex than was just suggested. We do not necessarily move directly from the intensity of sympathy through increased empathy to obligation. For example, how readily we can empathize with others, take their perspectives, may be a factor in whether we are capable of sustaining for a stretch of time an initial (prereflective) sympathetic response. Further, if we have learned how to move in and out of perspectives with relative ease, we are more likely to transform an initial sympathetic feeling into a sense of obligation. How so? Through engaging alternative points of view, perspectives, we develop our capacity to evaluate courses of action that may help alleviate suffering. In other words, knowledge of what may be possible makes us more likely agents of change, ready to see the world in terms of obligations, because we gain a purchase on how we may be able to make a difference. And here it is worth emphasizing that a developed capacity for taking new and different perspectives is not determined by biological impulses but is the result of practice and habit. The taking of perspectives tends to build on itself, both for individuals and collectives. It is a form of praxis. We become habituated to experiencing the experience of the other.²⁰ And this in turn enhances our capacity for envisioning alternative courses of action.

Yet isn’t there a danger in linking sympathy and obligation? If the force and vivacity of feelings play a significant role in motivating us, wouldn’t sympathy incline us to be moved by those who are closest to us, kin and countrymen, to the exclusion of strangers, to be good (local) neighbors but not good Samaritans? Has Mead simply succumbed to the seduction of venerating sentiments? Doesn’t an appeal to feelings simply return us to a pre-Critical vantage point that can’t comprehend the need for duty and the moral law? Where are we to locate the impartial spectator, who prompts us to transcend the parochial, who calls on us to consider the stranger, who moves us to become more cosmopolitan?²¹

Impartiality is related to the facts that individuals are members of different types of communities and communities operate at different levels of abstraction. For Mead, we take the perspective not only of singular others but of generalized others. Groups and communities have generalized others—that is, systemic organizations of attitudes—and these generalized others function at different levels of abstraction. So, for Mead, “concrete social classes or subgroups, such as political parties, clubs, corporations, which are all actually functional social units,” can be said to have generalized others, as can a family. And so can “abstract social classes or subgroups, such as the class of debtors and the class of creditors,” whose members are related indirectly.²² According to Mead, selves as objects of cognition arise that correspond to these more abstract communities. But the process does not stop here. Through the practice of taking different perspectives and utilizing symbols that are more abstract, we develop a capacity to extend our horizons to communities that are tied together by increasingly abstract commitments, for example, a commitment to certain kinds of rights (which I mention only in passing since we are not examining rights).²³ “The very universality and impersonality of thought and reason [are] from the behavioristic standpoint the result of the given individual taking the attitudes of others toward himself, and of his finally crystallizing all these particular attitudes into a single attitude or standpoint which may be called that of the ‘generalized other.’”²⁴

While Mead does not invoke the notion of an ideal communication community of the Habermasian sort, one that depends on a quasitranscendental foundation, he does suggest that we can develop a critical distance from localized claims by invoking more abstract and relatively universal communities. For Mead, universals are first and foremost shared symbols, and a symbol, as a functional universal, can be called a universal even if it is shared by just two individuals. In this respect some symbols are more universal than others in being more widely shared, and there is a correlation between the potential for a symbol to be shared and its degree of abstractness. In an analogous manner, some communities or groups—for example, a scientific community—are more universal than others. Mead claims that “group solidarity, especially in its uniform restrictions, gives him [the child and the individual] the unity of universality. This I take to be the sole source of the universal. It quickly passes the bounds of the specific group.... Education and varied experience refine out of it what is provincial, and leave ‘what is true for all men at all times.’”²⁵ Mead places scare quotes around the phrase “what is true for all men at all times,” for he isn’t naïvely ahistorical. While Mead shares in the Enlightenment’s attraction to universalism, his thought is also attuned to romanticism’s inclination to particularity.²⁶

Mead, then, is advocating what might be called a contingent universalism, that is, the claim that individuals can move beyond the immediacy of local concerns by engaging others at different levels of abstraction. It is our capacity to distance ourselves from the local, to transcend the local, that provides a counterweight to the danger of moral myopia due to a preoccupation with localized sympathetic attachments. One of Mead’s rather down-to-earth ways of expressing this is to say, “The only way in which we can react against the disapproval of the entire community is by setting up a higher sort of community which in a certain sense out-votes the one we find.”²⁷ We might even speculate that our sense of obligation, insofar as it requires a mediated response to suffering as opposed to the immediately visceral, is nurtured by the detachment afforded by the abstractions of generalized others. And this tendency toward universality can be linked to Mead’s account of the way in which a heightened degree of reflexivity and role-taking has developed in the modern world. We are simply more likely to inhabit various communities in the modern world, and our participation in them, as well as our movement between them, generates a tendency toward abstraction from the local.²⁸ This abstraction from the local helps to generate the “impartial spectator” that assists us in making moral decisions by transcending the provincial.²⁹ It should be noted that Mead doesn’t equate tendencies toward universality (and “impartiality”) solely with modernity.³⁰

But if sympathy helps motivate us to act, what happens if we see ourselves first and foremost as members of relatively abstract communities? Isn’t there a danger that these abstractions might displace or take priority over feelings, leading to diminished motivation to assist others? Isn’t there a risk that sympathy will be displaced by an eviscerated universalism, one that cannot supply a sense of involvement and interest that leads to action? In other words, if we depend on abstractions to give strangers their due, don’t we run the risk of turning agents into unemotional and unmotivated cosmopolitans? Are we not now facing a version of the struggle between the universal and particular, between a “bloodless” benevolent cosmopolitan and an “energized” sympathetic local agent?

For a pragmatist such as Mead, these oppositions may prove to be more conceptual or artificial than actual. The important questions for a pragmatist are the following: In practice, in actual situations, can and do individuals bring together elements of the universal and the particular? Can we join the particularity of sympathy with a more universally minded sense of obligation (via empathy)? Have people been able to reconcile these seeming opposites in their practices? Perhaps an example would best show how these “opposites” might be joined together in practice. The example I have in mind is the catastrophic loss of life, homelessness, and serious injury that resulted from the earthquakes and tsunamis in the Indian Ocean late in 2004 and early 2005.

Estimates have suggested that more than 150,000 people died, 500,000 were seriously injured, and 5 million were left homeless.³¹ Nations responded to this catastrophe by offering various forms of assistance, including large sums of money, even appearing to compete with one another regarding the scope of their assistance. There were geopolitical reasons for this assistance, for example, concern about fragile and war-torn regimes in the region and a desire to appear altruistic toward Islamic cultures for propaganda purposes. But there also appeared to be a genuine aspiration to alleviate suffering, reflected not only in the actions of governments, which seemed to be supported by many of their citizens, but in the contributions made by individuals throughout the world. Of course, people felt different degrees of sympathy for the victims for various reasons, and there were those whose racism may have prevented them from seeing the humanity of those who suffered. Nevertheless, sympathy for the victims of the tsunamis appeared to be widespread.³²

If we look at the world’s response to this disaster, we can discern components of a moral psychology that is sensitive to the suffering of strangers, which I have been developing in light of Mead’s work. First, many of those exposed to the images of death and destruction had an immediate, prereflective, sympathetic response to the distress of others, in spite of their physical and cultural distance. Second, for some, perhaps many, this immediate response set the stage for a more self-conscious taking of the perspective of those who suffered serious injury and/or the loss of loved ones. People began to see themselves as if they were the other (or perhaps it would be better to say, they began to step inside the shoes of the other). Third, the normative standards of generalized others came into play, bringing to bear “local” norms about dealing with those in distress, as well as more abstract perspectives that allowed the victims to be viewed as members of more “universal” communities, for example, those that encompassed both victims and the empathic individuals. Fourth, the sympathetic impulse, the taking of the perspective of others, and the normative dimension of generalized others helped to generate a sense of obligation, which entailed an appraisal of the effort that was needed to alleviate the suffering. Finally, this sense of obligation was acted on in various ways, for example, through monetary contributions or directly by those expending time and effort to help alleviate the suffering.

This said, it’s important to note that not all, or even most, moral responses to suffering must begin with a visceral “feeling” for the other. We behave morally for various reasons. Abstract norms often guide our behavior. Our motives are often mixed. The pragmatist seeks to circumvent thinking that requires placing sympathy (feelings) and genuine morality at odds, such as one finds in Kant’s or Levinas’s ethics. The reality is that sympathy can play an important and salutary role in our ethical life, as can empathy, if at times only as necessary conditions for the obligatory. People are motivated to act in virtuous ways for various good reasons. The conceptual morass of the universal and particular need not block the path to goods that can be realized in practice.

Mead worried a great deal about war’s role in undermining ethical behavior in the modern world. The psychology that helps lead to war can be viewed as the inverse of the psychology that nurtures acts of cosmopolitan benevolence. We have seen that Mead assumes that biological impulses play an important role in our sympathetic responses to others. For Mead, there are also impulses that play a role in the origin of war.³³ By exploring his views on war, and its relationship to nationalism, we can further clarify Mead’s ideas on cosmopolitanism.

Mead thought that war was becoming an impossible course of action in the modern world. Following in Kant’s footsteps, he argues that war is becoming increasingly and unacceptably dangerous.³⁴ Writing between the two world wars, he states, “Every war if allowed to go the accustomed way of wars will become a world war, and every war pursued uncompromisingly and intelligently must take as its objective the destruction not of hostile forces but of enemy nations in their entirety.”³⁵ What has this to do with claims that Mead makes about sympathy? Mead is not only willing to posit a modifiable biological urge toward sympathizing with the plight of others but is also willing to claim that there are other impulses, including a hostile impulse. Human selves arise through the molding of these impulses by language, social interaction, and societal organization. “We are born with our fundamental impulses.... This primal stuff of which we are made up is not under our direct control. The primitive sexual, parental, hostile, and cooperative impulses out of which our social selves are built up are few—but they get an almost infinite field of varied application in society, and with every development of means of intercourse, with every invention they find new opportunities of expression.”³⁶

While we certainly would not want to confuse Mead with the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents—he never posits overarching metapsychological and cosmological principles such as Eros and Thanatos, for example—for those used to a sanitized version of the American pragmatist tradition, one that avoids the “darker sides” of human nature, it is perhaps somewhat surprising to hear that Mead is quite prepared to say that there is an impulse to hostility. However, an impulse to hostility is only one factor in explaining war. For Mead, war is not simply a result of hostile impulses or power politics but depends on a desire for unity. “Society is unity in diversity. However there is always present the danger of its miscarriage. There are the two sources of its unity—the unity arising from the interconnection of all of the different selves in their self-conscious diversity and that arising from the identity of common impulses.”³⁷

Paradoxically, the source of hope in the modern world—the ability of human beings to abstract from the local and see themselves from everwidening vantage points, thereby becoming participants in communities of increasing scope—can backfire if the promise of unity, community, remains unfulfilled. In this circumstance the impulse to unity, to affiliation, is not modified in the direction of intelligently guided social interaction and organization; rather, it is hijacked by social forces that prey upon primal needs for inclusion, which can lead to war. We then have identification and bonding with those we view as members of our community at the price of opposing those who are viewed as outsiders, as not members of our “club.” There is no older story, but in the modern world we face an especially pernicious version of it.

There is something profoundly pathetic in the situation of great peoples, that have been struggling up through long centuries of fighting and its attendant miseries, coming closer and closer to each other in their daily lives, fashioning unwittingly larger racial, lingual, liturgical, confessional, political, and economic communities, and realizing only intermittently the spiritual life which this larger community confers upon them, and realizing it only when they could fight for it. The pathos comes out most vividly in the nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These nationalisms have meant the sudden realization that men belonged to communities that transcended their groups, families, and clans.... The pathos lies in the inability to feel the new unity with the nation except in the union of arms. It is not that men love fighting for its own sake, but they undergo its rigors for the sake of conjunction with all those who are fighting in the same cause.³⁸

On the one hand, Mead advocates enlarging the social circles in which we engage in taking the perspectives of others, but on the other, he alerts us to forces that can turn this perspective-taking against others, that is, by limiting its scope to a given unit, say, a tribe or a nation, so that others are deemed as outside “our” community. If our sense of stability and community feel threatened, we may take such a turn. Given the destructive power available to us in the modern world, we must find a way to feel united with others in a peaceful, or at least a nonwarlike, fashion.

There is only one solution for the problem [of war] and that is in finding the intelligible common objects, the objects of industry and commerce, the common values in literature, art, and science, the common human interests which political mechanisms define and protect and foster.... Within our communities the process of civilization is the discovery of these common ends which are the bases of social organizations. In social organization they come to mean not opposition but diverse occupations and activities. Difference of function takes the place of hostility of interest.³⁹

These common interests are to be pursued within states and between states. Mead’s thesis, in part, is that until there is a sense of unity in particular societies, developed through common ends and organizations that permit functional differentiation, there will be a temptation to war. This vision is certainly consistent with his view that unalienated integration into groups, the existence of different sorts of groups, and movement between them have the potential to nurture a kind of cosmopolitanism that will lessen hostility to “outsiders.” One can immediately argue that Mead was simply naïve about political forces in the modern world and that functional differentiation can breed alienation as well as integration. I would, however, like to pass over a critique at this point in order to bring the discussion back to Mead’s views on the psychology of sympathy. Certainly the mere reorientation of the psychology of individual actors will not prevent war, but I want to make a more modest claim that Mead’s social-psychological approach has something interesting to say regarding what disposes individual actors to become responsive to the plight of others, which in turn can have consequences regarding how readily they take up arms. First, a caveat: Mead was well aware of the importance of institutional and legal safeguards, especially on the international plane. He was, after all, a booster of the League of Nations. This is not to say that he had a sufficiently robust theory of the procedural for dealing with domestic or international affairs. It is to say that he was not naïve enough to believe that efforts based on social-psychological insight alone are sufficient to address the problem of war.

As noted, Mead’s position entails biological proclivities to sympathy and unity, whose origins are perhaps best understood in terms of natural selection; for example, human beings are relatively fragile biological organisms uniquely dependent on others of their kind for survival. We might also speculate that this fragility can in part account for the fear that people feel when they experience instability, social unrest, and alienation. Impulses or proclivities are molded, shaped, and informed by the way in which the self develops through linguistic interaction, role-taking, and the internalization of generalized others. However, while the reciprocity of social interaction is basic for Mead, it is not enough to guarantee unity. There must also be goals in common, which can be found in organizations whose functional distinctions permit the social integration of the actors. Without common goals and intelligent integration of social functions, Mead fears that war will result. Why? As we have seen, Mead argues that there is an organic drive for unity or social cohesion, which can be primed and activated by specific social conditions and sated by uniting with others in acts of war. Yet war, modern war in particular, is unacceptable to Mead. I want to offer a hypothesis, which Mead does not directly develop, but which should shed some light on how his cosmopolitanism and opposition to war are related.

If we take Mead’s account of perspective-taking and sympathy seriously, one of the conditions that contributes to initiating and sustaining war is an inability to view others as those who can suffer undeservedly. This is surely a time-honored observation: war is made possible and sustained through the dehumanization of the enemy. Mead, however, is offering an account of the kinds of human capacities that have to be short-circuited if this is to occur. For example, if the so-called enemy were viewed as victims of a natural disaster, the sympathetic impulse, as well as our capacity to take their perspective, would diminish the urge to war. This is all the more true when pictures and videos of the human suffering involved in war are readily available. For individuals to stay motivated to carry out a war under these circumstances, they must be convinced that there is a genuine threat from an adversary or that the adversary deserves to suffer. Why did so many Americans mistakenly believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were responsible for 9/11? One might say that this misperception was due to effective propaganda. And one might also say that without this belief it would have been hard to justify the suffering that ensued. Undeserved suffering must become deserved suffering, which is viewed as deserved or acceptable because of what “they” did to us. Because of what they did to us, they cannot be like us, for if they were like us, they would not have acted as they did. They would have had sympathy for our suffering. Therefore, they must be inhuman.

Of course, “they” don’t typically decide to do anything to us. “They” were not involved in the decisions of those who committed them to war, yet they undeservedly suffer from its consequences. For many, if not most, war should be viewed as a form of natural disaster. It arrives as a tidal force: dark, uncontrollable, and lethal. Yes, a populace can be stirred into a war frenzy, but this sort of mass hysteria only supports the view that people often have little control over the forces that give rise to war.

For Mead, prereflective sympathy and a capacity for taking the perspective of others are insufficient hedges against war, especially in the modern world. We need to become ever more cosmopolitan. We need to feel and know that others are capable of suffering as we do and that suffering is typically undeserved. And we need to develop a sense of obligation toward those who suffer. We need to transcend the local; but this will not be possible if nations and peoples are themselves divided, if alienation and (economic) instability are the rule, if political and economic situations undermine self-respect.

What I am seeking to bring out is that the chief difficulty in attaining international-mindedness does not lie in the clash of international interests but in the deep-seated need which nations feel of being ready to fight, not for ostensible ends but for the sake of the sense of national unity, of self-determination, of national self-respect that they can achieve in no other way so easily as in the readiness to fight. National-mindedness and international-mindedness are inextricably involved in each other. Stable nations do not feel the need in any such degree as those that are seeking stability.⁴⁰

If Mead’s analysis is even partially on target, then he can be said to have understood factors working against the realization of his own cosmopolitan “vision,” that is, thwarted expressivist sensibilities lodged in movements of national self-determination. Mead was never simply an adherent of the Radical Enlightenment’s notion of universality. There was too much understanding of the romantic temper in his thought. Hence, national identity and self-determination need to be achieved before cosmopolitanism can come into its own. So once again we see an interweaving of the universal and particular for Mead. Perhaps the best that he could hope for in his lifetime was that tendencies to universality in the modern world would be nurtured and institutionalized—for example, through international organizations and agencies—while expectations for national and collective self-identity would be met in nonmilitaristic and nondestructive ways.

Mead’s views on nationalism and war may seem old hat, a set of concerns from a time and place rapidly drifting into the past, especially as globalization in its myriad forms presses in around us. Or perhaps not. Du Bois, as we shall see in the next chapter, would have appreciated Mead’s insights into the importance of self-determination and self-respect for different peoples.