Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

Introduction to Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems

introduction to race questions, provincialism, and other american problems Scott L. Pratt  In May 1915, a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania . More than 1,100 passengers and crew died, among them 123 Americans. The respected Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce had remained publicly neutral on the issue of the war in Europe. Yet he responded to the attack on the Lusitania with a public letter of outrage that reasserted the ‘‘doctrine about life’’ that he named ‘‘loyalty’’ and that he had earlier applied to situations of social conflict in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, which he had published in 1908. Royce had long admired German culture and philosophy and had seen them as a source both of wisdom and of practical social and economic development that could serve as a model for the world. With Germany’s declaration of war in 1914, Royce ‘‘dutifully preserv [ed] a deliberate reticence in the classroom,’’ a practice consistent My thanks to Mathew Foust for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. {  }  introduction with his understanding of his role as a philosopher. In his 1902 address about philosophers teaching religion, Royce concluded that ‘‘clearness of thought, and the judicial spirit [in comparison of views], are the philosopher’s peculiar tasks.’’1 After the Lusitania was torpedoed and the German government expressed approval of the action , Royce declared that ‘‘I am no longer neutral, even in form.’’2 The action of destroying the Lusitania and ‘‘the appeal that Germany now makes to all humanity . . . [express] utter contempt for everything which makes the common life of humanity tolerable or possible .’’3 If this appeal were accepted, he continued, ‘‘whatever makes home or country or family or friends or any form of loyalty worthily dear, is made an object of perfectly deliberate and merciless assault.’’4 His former loyalties were set aside in favor of a larger loyalty to ‘‘the cause of true peace,’’ even if he must set aside the neutrality demanded by his loyalty to the practice of philosophy. Royce had introduced the idea of loyalty as the central moral principle in his 1908 volume The Philosophy of Loyalty. Loyalty, ‘‘the willing and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause,’’5 marks a complex relationship. On one hand, it is the relation of individuals to causes and groups that provide purpose for their activities. Teachers are loyal to the cause of education, doctors to medicine, scientists to science. In each case, an individual’s activities are understood and evaluated in relation to the larger cause of being a teacher, or a doctor , or a scientist. A teacher’s work is not simply an individual activity done for its own sake, but rather something that gets its character and purpose at least in part through a teacher’s commitment to a cause shared by others. ‘‘[A] cause,’’ Royce held, is ‘‘something which seems to the loyal person to be larger than his private self, [and] in the second place, unites him with other persons by some social tie.’’6 Such loyalty is not loyalty to oneself. Even when a person’s cause includes herself, as when a person is loyal to her country, the cause ‘‘is still much larger.’’ Loyalty, in Royce’s sense, means that the person believes her cause would keep its ‘‘essential value’’ even if her ‘‘private interests were left out of account.’’7 scott l. pratt  On the other hand, for a loyal person, the cause does not prescribe exactly what ought to be done in service of the cause one has taken up. People choose causes and give or bring to them things unique to the individual, literally ‘‘devotions.’’ In this sense, loyalty provides a context for meaning for individuals (in which, for example a teacher is a teacher) and a means by which individuals are made distinct (the devotion of a particular teacher adds something to the cause and in so doing allows the teacher to stand out as an individual). As a result, loyalty marks both a defining relation and an activity that goes beyond the relation given. In this way, causes are sustained and constantly transformed by loyal action. In notes prepared for an ethics course offered near the end of his life, Royce wrote: Loyalty, if it is anything, is or ought to be in all of us a growing doctrine about life, and a...