George Herbert Mead and the Good Society

           As a social or political activist, George Herbert Mead is ignored. That is tragic because his work offers two tools essential for serious social change: A passion to challenge the status quo and a conceptual apparatus that is as liberating as anything offered by Sociology and the other social sciences.

     Start with the status quo. In a 1929 essay entitled "National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness" Mead sought to find a replacement for the extraordinary social cohesiveness generated by war, hatred, and in our time, conflicting religions. Was a dreaded enemy the only way to unite a society? Or, was there another road to "discovering unity in the midst of the diversity of individual concerns"?

    Mead never offered a blueprint of what he called "the good society". Instead he stressed that instead of relying "upon our diaphragms and the visceral responses which a fight sets in motion", we needed to find unity in the only available spot: In our minds, in the power of men and women to change societies if they used the marvelous gift of reflection. Unlike any other animal on earth, people could consciously analyze their past and thus move into the future on the basis of a corrected consensus about the goals of the "good society".

   To prove his point, Mead devised the concepts of the "I" and the "Me", two tools that are indispensible for anyone seeking "International-Mindedness" in the 21st century. The "me" refers to the attitudes of others which one assumes. Thus, as a child sent to Catholic schools in the 1950's the nuns taught me that Jewish people killed God and that Protestants would receive a hotter seat in hell because they had a chance to be Catholics but refused the invitation.

       The "I" is the response of the individual to the attitudes of others. I can say yes, no, let me think about it, or be indifferent to what they (the nuns, my parents, Osama Bin Laden) tell me.

     As a youngster, we were told to only associate with Catholics. The absence of alternative attitudes of others  moved me to embrace what the nuns told me. In fact, I then walked with eternal confidence and arrogance because I knew that I would sit at God's right hand when I and my Catholic friends died.

   The beauty of Mead's work is that, as a young adult or a senior citizen, I can reflect on what they told me and on how I responded to what they told me. In my case the "Me" and "I" meshed because I eagerly accepted as truth what they taught me in school. Change occurred when, exposed in college to the attitudes and beliefs of alternative others, I needed to make sense of what so many conflicting others were telling me.

   Jump from the level of the individual to the good society, especially to a society free of the prejudices generated by America's division of the entire world into white, black and nonwhite people. Say, like President Obama, I accepted what they told me. My skin is tan but I am black. My mother is white but I am black. South Asians are often darker than blacks but they are nonwhite. White is a color but not a color when it comes to prejudice because they taught me -and I accepted- that only blacks and nonwhites are people of color.

   To achieve serious social change we could use Mead's concepts to ask a series of potentially revolutionary questions: Who taught me that my mother was irrelevant when it came to skin color?  Were my teachers some of the worst representatives of America's past? Did they convince me to accept the hideous one drop rule? Did I buy into that poison and am I passing it on to my children? And, if I accept that I am black and that Indians and Pakistanis are nonwhite have I learned to define Americans by what divides Americans?

   Equally important, when it comes to "International Mindedness" can we as Americans ever create a sense of worldwide unity if we divide close to seven billion people into whites, blacks and nonwhites?

     Mead offers us an alternative. I can reflect on what they told me. I can consciously and confidently decide that what they taught me is stupid, ugly and divisive; and I could even use the bully pulpit of the Presidency to create new and just international attitudes of others. For example, we can prove that the idea of "races" is a fiction. There is one race, the human race and if we could achieve an international consensus about that fact, teachers would tell me - in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Bagdad and Mumbai - that I am indissolubly linked  to everyone on earth. They might even tell me that, instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences -skin color, eyes, hair-, are actually delightful and diverse manifestations of the indissoluble unity of everyone on earth. I would thus find somatic differences to be appealing rather than, for the seriously prejudiced, repulsive.

  A pessimist or his close relative the realist would call this utopian. Mead would say nonsense. Do teachers somehow set great store in intelligence but refuse to use our intelligence to reflect on the nonsense they taught me?

    I and we can produce serious social change whenever we wish. We only need to follow Mead; eagerly challenge the status quo and to do it by consciously and courageously asking if what they taught about me -especially about "race" and ethnicity- is nothing more than a huge pile of  putrid cow dung.