Jane Addams and Woodrow Wilson

Community and Progressivism

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• In the Progressive Era the concept of community served as a reconciliation between perfect upper world and perfected social world as a condition and an environment of human progress.

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• Social science was considered as “a science of God’s image,” a moral philosophy whose task was an approximation of the ideal of social life contained in the Gospels.

• It was a reconciliation of scientific materialism and religious idealism.

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Charles Peirce• Individuals were “mere cells in the social organism,” and could gain real existence only by affirming their loyalty to the community of inquiry – all people who inquire after the truth.

• The community was the vehicle of truth and the only hope of communion with the cosmos.

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William James• The unhealthiness consists solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow countrymen remain entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other half.

• If only they could look beneath the “external situation” that divided them, each class would find its necessary fulfillment in the other.

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• Instead of opposing interests, they would discover their mutual need.

• ”The significance of a human life is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents, either of whom alone is barren.

• The means of reuniting labor and capital were to be found in the psychic interdependence of manly virtue and feminine ideal.”

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G. Stanley Hall• Hall’s evolutionary science focused on the relationship between the development of the individual child and the whole human race. • He based his model of community on the biological theory that the growth of an organism “repeats” the evolution of its species.

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• Hall’s ideal of community was the union of personal growth and social evolution.

• Adolescence was a passage from childhood to adulthood, a conversion through which the child came to identify with the race, when it evolves from the self-centered egotism to the social or “race” consciousness. 8

John Dewey• John Dewey viewed philosophy and psychology as practical responses to problems facing society as a whole, and thereby each of its members.

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• By the 1890s Dewey developed his neo-Hegelian ethics of self-realization.

• Like Hegel, he saw society as a moral organism. The individual freedom within this organic community was the freedom to make the best of oneself as a social being.

• Dewey was also captivated by the model of organic interdependence and functional coordination offered by Darwinism.

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• Dewey defined democracy as providing harmonious development of human nature.

• This was also the ideal of Plato and other aristocratic philosophers.

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• According to the aristocratic philosophy, however, most people were incapable of recognizing the correct relationship between their self-interest and the social good.

• Hence they were cut off from their own self-realization.

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• “the few best, the aristoi, are fitted for rule because they are able to rule not in their own interests but in that of society as a whole, and therefore, in that of every individual in society.”

• Unfortunately, “The practical consequence of giving the few wise and good power is that they cease to remain wise and good” (“Ethics of Democracy” 1888)

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• According to Dewey, the dialectical relationship between individuality and community, self-realization and social service, did not necessarily require conformity to the current practices of one’s community.

• Dewey viewed conflict as an inevitable and even functional aspect of social life.

• This distinguished Dewey from those reformers, such as his friend Jane Addams, who regarded conflict as unnecessary and utterly dysfunctional.

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Jane Addams• Addams saw social conflict as a rupture in the cultural system, a clash of different sets of values.

• What makes such a conflict tragic is the belief of both parties that their interests were genuinely opposed – that a gain for one must mean a loss for the other.

• But antagonism, for her, was only a misunderstanding,“ a tension in the

progress toward a common outcome.”

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• The dream of peaceful class reconciliation that was widely shared among the community of Chicago reformers centered its activities at Hull House, the settlement founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889.

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• Addams believed that antagonism was useless and harmful.

• Discussing with Dewey the railroad strike in Chicago in 1894, she insisted that the apparent differences, if left alone, would eventually grow into unity.

• “Historically, only evil had come from antagonisms… We freed the slaves by war and had now to free them all over again individually and pay the costs of the war and reckon with the bitterness of the Southerners besides.”

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• Addams made the connection between her ethical perspective and the events in Chicago in "A Modern Lear" based on an analogy between the relationships of King Lear and his daughter Cordelia and that of Pullman and his workers.

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• According to Addams, Lear failed the crucial test with Cordelia, the test of maintaining "the tenderness of the relation between father and child, after that relation had become one between adults."

• Likewise, Pullman failed to understand the need and the demand of his workers for justice and hence took their rejection of his benevolence as the “highest form of ingratitude.”

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• Pullman, Addams observed, "desired that his employees should possess the individual and family virtues, but did nothing to cherish in them those social virtues which his own age demanded."

• "Nothing will satisfy the aroused conscience of men short of the complete participation of the working classes in the spiritual, intellectual and material inheritance of the human race."

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• Addams urged workers as well to recognize the moral interest they shared with their employers.

• The doctrine of emancipation, she said, "must be strong enough in its fusing power to touch those who think they lose, as well as those who think they gain." 21

Josiah Royce• Royce argued that global community ought to arise by establishing a certain communicative framework of cooperation among the existing communities that will facilitate their mutual understanding.

• He called this framework a "community of interpretation."

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• Royce first articulated the idea of the community of interpretation in The Problem of Christianity, in 1913.

• He argued that the basic structure of the community of interpretation is a triadic relationship among three agents: an interpreter/mediator and two other parties called "dangerous pairs."

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• A dangerous pair relationship involves at least two individuals or groups who approach one another as adversaries with "mutually clashing interests.”

• Under such conditions, cooperation for mutual benefit is unlikely between the dangerous pairs because the parties essentially perceive their relationship as a zero-sum game.

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• Royce introduces into this situation the idea of an interpreter whose responsibility is to reduce the hostility between the dangerous pairs by interpreting the plans, the purposes, or the ideas of one of his two fellows to the other.

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• The interpreter alters the conditions of the interaction so that Instead of a zero-sum game, the relationship becomes the conversation in which parties try to arrive at an interpretive consensus.

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• This interpretive consensus need not necessarily be an agreement between the dangerous pairs.

• Rather, the dangerous pairs are brought to an understanding of their differences, as well as their areas of overlapping concern.

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The Problem of Christianity: The Will to Interpret

• Man is an animal that interprets.

• Therefore man lives in communities and depends upon them for insight and for salvation.

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• If you are ready to accept me as interpreter, you possess the will to be interpreted.

• And if there exists the one to whom I can interpret you, he also wills that you should be interpreted to him, and that I should be the interpreter.

• We three constitute a Community. Let us call it a Community of Interpretation.

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• We shall be many selves with a common ideal future event at which we aim.

• Without essentially altering the nature of our community, our perspective offices can be interchanged.

• You, or my other neighbor, can at any moment assume the function of interpreter; while I can pass to a new position in the new community (315)

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• My interpretation of your mind that I offer to our common neighbor will of course be an idea of my own, - precisely that “third” idea which I contribute to our community as my interpretation of you.

• And no doubt I shall desire to make sure that this idea of mine “works.”

• I want my interpretation of you to our neighbor to be such as you would accept and also such as our neighbor would comprehend.

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• Evolution of such a community passes from simpler to higher stages.

• It is indeed true that communities can exist, at any time, in the most various grades of development of self-consciousness and of ideality.

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• The communities of interpretation which exist in the market places of the present social world, or that lie at the basis of the diplomatic intercourse of modern nations,

• are communities whose ideal goal is seldom present to the minds of their members;

• and it is not love which often seems to be their consciously ruling motive.

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• Yet… it is interpretation which is the great humanizing factor and which makes the purest forms of love for communities possible.

• Loyalty to a community of interpretation enters into all the other forms of true loyalty.

• No one who loves mankind can find a worthier way to express his love than by increasing and expressing among men the Will to Interpret.

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• When Christianity teaches us to hope for the community of all mankind, we can readily see that the Beloved Community will be a Community of Interpretation.

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• If we aim to conceive the divine nature, how better can we conceive it than in the form of the Community of Interpretation, and above all in the form of the Interpreter, who interprets all to all, and each individual to the world, and the world of spirits to each individual.

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Woodrow WilsonWilson’s ideals for both national and international affairs were based on the general principles of Christian morality, such as justice and fair play.

W. Wilson1856-1924

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• His views of history also embraced Darwinian evolutionary theory and Hegelian idealism.

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• The Christian battle and the final victory of good over evil coincide with Hegel’s idea of historical progress “as the unfolding of the divine idea.

• American history was the story of a slow but inevitable unfolding of its civilizational destiny.” The good on Earth was to be established in the form of the ideal – that is, democratic – state.

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• The best example of Wilson’s concept of historicity is his presentation of American policy toward Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in “The Ideals of America.”

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• Wilson reminds Americans of how they achieved self-government.

• He argues that the Americans didn’t acquire self-government by simply declaring their independence.

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• The democratic government in America developed gradually through history over more than 100 years;

• This is what distinguished democracy in America from attempts at democracy in France.

• Wilson uses this contrast to warn those who were trying to impose the American model on the Philippines.

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• On the one side of the sea, in America, an ordered government, a people busy with the tasks of mart and home, institutions sealed and confirmed by debate and the suffrages of free men, but not by the pouring out of blood in civil strife;

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On the other, in France, a nation which poured its best blood out in a vain sacrifice, which cried ofliberty and self-government and yetran straight to anarchy,to give itself at last to the masterfultyranny of a soldier.

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• The English people as a whole – including the Americans – had been prepared by history for self-government.

• The Americans fought their Revolutionary war to preserve the tradition of self-government, which was for them a familiar thing, something they already had and wanted to keep against the Crown’s attempts to take it away.

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• This understanding of American history served as the foundation for the policy Wilson advocated toward Cuba and the Philippines.

• Both nations deserved American assistance in developing self-government, when “they are ready.”

• The Filipinos had to undertake the slow process of historical development before America could grant them self-government.

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• “They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.”

• Being further along in the process of democracy’s development, America would wait for the historical evolution of the Philippines.

• “Isn’t self-government gained, earned, graduated into from the hard school of life?”

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• As Wilson explained in his writings on state theory, there are advanced peoples and there are those who are further behind in the march of progress.

• And as he explained in his commentary on Cuba and the Philippines, the American people – and the English race generally – were on the forefront of historical development.

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“Keep the island so it won’t get lost!”49