GROUPS IN CONTACT
1.
Theoretically, the individual might be independent of other individuals
and of groups as well. He might be his own alter, so that through the
active and reflective standpoints working on each other the individual
himself might constitute a group mind, and might produce many, if not
all, the characteristic products of the group.[31] But practically
in society, the exact opposite is invariably the case. According to
Baldwin’s dialectic of the individual development: [32]“The sense of
self always involves a sense of the other.” [33]“The real self is
always the bipolar self, the social self.” Empirically, not only are
civilization, history and government the products of social heredity;
the individual himself as we have him owes his mental content, many
of his feeling and motor responses, and his ultimate ideals, to the
group in which he was born and has developed. On this basis the ancient
conflict between the isolated individual and the group domination
becomes unimportant, if not meaningless from the empirical point of
view. As Joseph K. Hart remarks:
[34]Membership in the group establishes in the members a set of habits
which are the personal counterpart of the customs of the group; the
group is not outside and around him; it is inside him; what is custom
in the group has become habit in him.
Why, then, the eternal conflict between the individual and the group?
Why does a Schiller or an Ibsen proclaim, “The strongest man is he who
stands most alone”? Why do we have the group portrayed so often as
the oppressor, the individual as the hero, genius, and martyr to the
conventional ideas of the mass? Because the group has more fixed habits
than the individual, or at least than the exceptional individual;
because in most individuals the group factor is the dominant one by
preference, and the struggle against it is both rare and mild;
because, finally, the group mind does involve a sacrifice of the
individual purpose on many occasions, and these are the test cases
of the strength of the group itself. There are really two types
of individuals who stand out from the group—the genius, or social
discoverer; the criminal, or social rebel. Platt suggests that [35]“Man
has never become entirely socialized”; his biological heredity always
lags behind the social heredity of the group and leaves a residuum
of conflict. Baldwin gives a broader theory, which may include this:
[36]“The individual is the particularizing social force; society is
the generalizing social force.” That is, the individual produces
variations, which are then stamped out by social disapproval, or
generalized by social acceptance. The genius thinks for the race; the
mass of individuals have their thinking done for them by the prepared
reactions of the group. Without the social group the individual would
be as unformed mentally, as helpless ethically, as is the single bee
without the hive. In Baldwin’s words: [37]“A man is a social outcome
rather than a social unit.”
All this by the way; if I were to take up the problem of the individual
and group, it would occupy this entire study. I merely want to show its
bearing on the central thesis here brought forward, which concerns the
relation between group and group, rather than that between individual
and group.
2.
The problem of group and sub-group can be approached either
descriptively or genetically. If we take the former angle, we see every
large group divided indefinitely into small, conflicting, overlapping,
and infinitely various sub-groups. Much of the complexity of our
society consists in this overlapping, by which the individual belongs
to many groups at once, so that his mind cannot attain complete unity,
and none of his groups can possess him wholly. A man belongs to a
family, a city, a profession, a church, a school alumni body, a nation
and an international peace society. In addition, he may join a
labor union, a chamber of commerce, or a half dozen fraternal orders.
His mind is a perfect maze of group attitudes; he shifts from one group
to another as interests or contiguity impel him. In the same way, a
large group such as a political party includes members from different
sections of the country, different economic strata, different churches,
and so on. The group mind, as a category in this situation, is purely
a functional unity, which works in and through its individual members
and through its smaller groups of individuals in exactly the same way.
I quote Dr. Singer: [38]“My world is highly organized—groups within
groups, and groups within these,” for that is the scientific, realistic
view of the social world.
Various classifications of groups have been devised by students of the
problem, useful for their different purposes. Cooley speaks of primary
and secondary groups, those in which men and women are born and grow,
and the larger integrations into which the smaller, more natural groups
enter. Miller prefers [39]“Vertical and horizontal groups,” the former
being the natural divisions which include all classes, such as the
nation; the latter a caste or class grouping. Hayes calls them personal
and impersonal groups, apparently meaning much the same as Professor
Cooley by the terms primary and secondary. Probably the most useful
mode of classification is the genetic, beginning with the family, and
then expanding according to the particular situation in view—in the
primitive group to the clan, tribe and confederacy; in the civilized
to the school, the interest group, the religious affiliation, the
political nation, the international ideals and bonds of union.
Whatever be the more or less arbitrary mode of classification, we see
that, except for the supposititious primitive horde, groups are never
single nor simple. They resemble rather the physical organism or the
mind of the individual, either of which is necessarily complex. Group
minds exist and grow by progressive integration of the lesser into the
greater, from the individual up to the greatest possible bodies of
human beings.
The group mind comes into being only through contact with other
groups. We may go so far as to conclude that there must be two groups
in order that there may be one group. If an isolated island possessed
a few people so unorganized that they felt no difference of groupings
among themselves, then there would be no sense of a total group,
either. Under those circumstances that would be attained only in case
of an invasion by people from without the land, or a rebellion within,
when group unity of the islanders would at once appear. If my previous
identification of mind in the individual and the group is exact, not
merely an analogy, then this follows from Baldwin’s genetic study of
the individual. The mind of the individual grows by constant reference
to the alter—for in the thought of the child the ego and alter are
one—and even in the highest reaches of moral judgment there remains an
element of social approval, of what would be the judgment of the ideal
group or the ideal comrade. [40]“We do right by habitually imitating
a larger self whose injunctions run counter to the tendencies of our
particular selves.”
To quote a few applications of this viewpoint to particular problems:
Sumner applies it to the primitive horde:
[41]The relationship of comradeship and peace in the we-group and
that of hostility and war toward others-group are correlative. War
and peace have reacted on each other and developed each other, one
within the group, the other in the inter-group relation. Loyalty
to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders,
brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common
products of the same situation.
In Ellwoods’s words:
[42]While the stimuli afforded by the struggle with the physical
environment are conceivably sufficient to bring about the highest
degree of coordination, unity and solidarity in the larger human
social groups, yet historically they have not done so. Rather, it has
been the stimuli arising from the conflict and competition of one
human group with another which has chiefly developed conscious social
solidarity in the larger human group.
Dr. George E. Vincent wrote:
[43]Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring
human beings into groups, and largely determine what goes on within
them.
[44]It is in conflict or competition with other nations that a country
becomes a vivid unity to the members of its constituent groups.
It is rivalry which brings out the sense of team work, the social
consciousness.
“Races, Nations and Classes,” a recent work by Dr. Herbert A. Miller,
presents a series of studies of social relations in terms of group
conflicts, group oppression and group revolt, as these exist in various
crucial situations today.
Most of the treatments of the subject calmly assume that the other
group with which contact is established must necessarily be parallel
and competing with the first group. But in empirical situations that is
not always, perhaps not often the case. We may become conscious of our
American unity in war with an external foe, but we may become equally
conscious of it in inter-state relations; because an inter-state
conflict may bring us to the superior federal power; or in the division
of powers between state and nation, or in the strong hand of the
federal government reaching out to detect groups of law-breakers within
the constituent states. That is, the two groups need not be parallel
and exclusive; they may overlap, or one may enclose the other entirely.
I can become conscious of my international Jewish loyalty in contrast
to the Christian church, which also is international; or I may become
conscious of it through the overlapping with my American citizenship;
or even through contrast with a family loyalty, which might conceivably
be enhanced by disregarding the membership in the Jewish people, with
its frequent disabilities. The first is a case of two separate groups;
the second, two overlapping ones; the third, where one is a sub-group
of the other. In this sense it is conceivable, though not usual, for
the individual with his own “group mind” to serve as a contrast to the
group in which he is included. For in every one of these instances
there has been actual or potential relinquishment of purpose into the
larger group which includes the smaller, or into the one which overlaps
and conflicts with the other; and in the case of two parallel
groups there is a conflict and contrast of purposes, hence of group
mind itself.
3.
The mode of group contacts has practically always been viewed in terms
of conflict and competition. In contrast to this, I present the view
that there are two modes of group contact—competition and imitation.
Competition strengthens and unites each competing group. Imitation
brings the different groups together into an overgroup. The two
together constitute the social process (if we allow for the element of
individual initiative and leadership, which hardly comes within the
special topic of this study).
The classic presentation of group struggle is by Gumplowitz, in
his “Rassenkampf,” where he took Gobineau’s rather crude theory of
races and applied it to history and sociology, including also groups
smaller and of different origin than the races themselves. To present
Gumplowitz’s view in his own words:
[45] History and the present day present us with a picture of almost
unbroken warfare of tribe against tribe, people against people, state
against state, nation against nation.
[46] Every greater ethnic or social element strives to subdue to its
purposes every weaker group which lies within its sphere of influence
or near it.
This is his “social law of nature,” which he compares to the law of
gravitation in its certainty. War is therefore necessary for civilized
as for primitive societies, and any talk of ideals or of peace is but
self-deception, if it be not deliberate masking of warlike intentions.
The race theory of Gobineau has gone on until it is one of the
important factors in American group oppositions today. And surprisingly
enough, the conflict theory of Gumplowitz comes back also from time to
time. In “Survival or Extinction,” a new work by Elisha M. Friedman, I
find this sentence: [47]“The absorption of a scattered minority people
is the inexorable law of History. Can the Jews hope to escape it?”
This on the basis of Gumplowitz, whose treatment of the Jewish problem
is very different; he criticized the Jews bitterly for being the one
exception to his “inexorable law,” and said they should have obeyed
it and been absorbed among the nations, as were the Phoenicians two
thousand years ago.
Certainly there is group struggle; it is a natural tendency when two
different groups come into contact; and it is a gross and obvious
phenomenon which nobody can help noticing. But at the same time
there goes on also a subtler but equally significant movement of
group imitation. The white settlers fought the Indians in a way that
everybody knew; many have missed the adoption by the whites of maize
and tobacco, names of rivers and sites of cities; by the Indians of the
horse, the rifle and the religion of the conquerors. Rome conquered
Greece in war, and Rome imitated Greece in art and literature. Israel
conquered Canaan and imposed the one God, destroying the high places
where the earlier inhabitants had worshipped the powers of fertility in
nature; but Israel incorporated the harvest festivals of the Canaanites
into its own shepherd and nomad ritual. Group imitation takes its place
beside group competition in the spread of culture elements about the
earth, in the study of foreign languages and literature, in missionary
effort, in the adoption of new inventions for warfare or for industry.
These are as important and as omnipresent as business competitions or
territorial rivalry, far more common than war.
The function of group conflict is to strengthen the separate groups and
bring them to recognizable group mind. Loyalty is never so strong as
when our group is under fire. War brings millions to an acute sense of
national loyalty who have hardly felt they had a nation. The ancient
loyalty of the Jew is largely due to the persecutors who constantly
reminded him that he had no right to desert his people. There is
definite survival value in this, which can easily be connected with
the historic and prehistoric process which brought our present groups
into being. As Dr. Miller says: [48]“Loyalty and patriotism are merely
the emotional side of the group impulse. They measure the identity
of the individual with his group.” Royce’s “Philosophy of Loyalty”
is one long praise of these virtues of the loyal son of his group. His
somewhat exaggerated discussion of the value of the “lost cause” for
character development illustrates the overemphasis on group struggle
which is typical of all those who long for group solidarity. For group
struggle does bring solidarity and loyalty except in the limiting case,
where the group is destroyed in the struggle and there is nothing left
to which we can be loyal. And that is precisely the case envisaged by
Gumplowitz, the case of the stronger group crushing and then absorbing
the weaker one.
Dr. Miller has worked out a type of group pathology which attacks
both victor and victim of a group struggle. He calls it the
“Oppression Psychosis.” Its effects on the victor are found in such
rationalizations as the “myth of superiority” and other defense
complexes, leading to “cultocracy” or class rule, and finally if
unchecked to the stagnation of caste. To quote:
[49]Hundred per cent. patriotism and confidence in Nordic superiority
are the two most dangerous ideas in the world today, because they
lead in exactly the opposite direction from that which civilization
must take if it is to survive. The fundamental objections to these
ideas are, first, that they have no basis in fact, and second that
the emotions which they organize, have far-reaching and disruptive
consequences.
The inferiority complex of the oppressed people has very different and
still more disastrous consequences. Dr. Miller points out that what are
usually considered Jewish traits may be found also among the Irish,
the Poles, and the Negroes, all very different groups but all subject
to oppression and therefore presenting a psychological reaction to
oppression.
[50]What we have designated as Jewish characteristics are primarily
based on the nervous reactions which have resulted from more varieties
and longer oppression than those of any other group. The Jew is
introspective, analytical, aggressive and conspicuous. The Negro also
has many of the same characteristics, though he has not yet developed
so many compensatory values, such as religious solidarity and business
technique.... The most outstanding result of the oppression psychosis
is to create a group solidarity which is far stronger than could have
been created by any other means.
And he goes on to show the use of symbols as compensatory mechanism
of the oppressed group, and thus to account for the ardent clinging of
such groups to their language or religion as the real outlet of their
self expression and of their will for resistance.
So far with conflict. Imitation of individuals has attracted much
attention, especially through its exhaustive treatment by Gabriel
Tarde, but group imitation has passed by with much less notice.
However, we may fairly say that group imitation is as universal a
by-product of group contact as are rivalry and conflict. The immigrant
comes to America, and the result of that transference of a group
into a new environment can be expressed in terms of either imitation
or conflict, but can be summed up fully only by recognizing both
processes at work at once. The children attend public schools, where
they learn the English language, the salute to the flag, and some
American group customs. The father learns English at his work; the
mother copies American fashions in dress and household; both become
naturalized citizens—that is what we call Americanization. But at
the same time they speak their native tongue in the home, they read
a foreign language newspaper, they keep up their correspondence with
the relatives back in the Old Country, they belong to a patriotic or
revolutionary society with its roots in the homeland. Often they even
organize a school that their children may learn the language, religion
and other essentials of their earlier group life. So the children often
attend two schools, an American one to assimilate them to the group
mind of America, a Polish or Russian or Jewish one to keep them in
touch with the group mind of their parents’ allegiance. The hatreds of
the central European peoples are transferred to America. The political
issues between Czarist and Bolshevist, or between Fascismo and
Socialism are perpetuated here. Sometimes the contrast between American
and alien is emphasized, and takes the place of the old-world conflicts
in the center of consciousness.
Conflict strengthens the fighting groups; imitation welds them
together into an overgroup. The American process is one of forming a
united people, an integrated, self-conscious group mind, out of
the many diverse elements which enter this continent. And this goes
on by conscious teaching and unconscious imitation, through social,
political and economic motives, everywhere except when interrupted by
the counter process of oppression and resistance. We speak nowadays
of a Greco-Roman civilization, a direct recognition of the part that
imitation played in the Roman empire with all its warlike power. We
speak of modern European culture, recognizing that European culture is
one, with local variations indeed, and that art, science, philosophy
and religion are international, for every group imitates every
other. The trend of such a tendency can only lead toward an eventual
amalgamation, not by abolishing present languages and parliaments,
but by the growth of every sort of international and supernational
consciousness, beginning with schools of literature or art, and
culminating in a World Court or a League of Nations.
4.
This suggests the ideal of society which is implicit in our minds
as we study its development by means of conflicting, imitating and
overlapping group minds. The desirable qualities which this process
evokes are heterogeneity and progress. We thus steer midway between
the equal dangers of uniformity and standardization, on the one hand,
and the isolation of castes, on the other. The caste system of India
provides plenty of heterogeneity, but because the groups are isolated
from each other physically and mentally, because of the influence
of “untouchability,” the mind of the group has never unified, never
presented the possibility of change. The modern movement in India under
Ghandi is precisely of this type, to unify India and introduce the
concept of progress by a double process, by abolishing “untouchability”
within and bringing the caste groups to imitate and emulate each other;
by strengthening loyalty through united opposition to the common
oppressor. It is a most significant example of the development of the
group mind through union of sub-groups and by contrast to another
hostile group. On the other hand, the beginning of modernity in Europe
meant a radical opposition to the levelling influence of the Church
universal, the rise of vernacular tongues, of national governments,
of national churches—that is, the dissociation of the medieval mind,
which was European, into the sub-groups, which are primarily national.
That the reverse movement is now taking place is significant, for this
reverse movement is a natural one by imitation and common interests,
not forced by the union of the Inquisition and the secular arm. As
Bernard Shaw remarks in the preface to “Saint Joan”:
[51]Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is
founded on tolerance. [52]We must persecute, even to the death; and
all that we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first,
to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind
that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people,
and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality
and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a
repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with
extravagant and probably destructive violence.
We must then, conceive modern society, not as a simple unity but as an
integration of group minds, from that of the individual, the family,
the clique, up to that of the nation, with a dawning international
mind now in process. These group minds struggle for domination and
for existence; they learn from each other at the same time. The
double process constantly in evidence is group conflict, resulting
in the mind of the sub-group, and group imitation, resulting in the
integration of the sub-groups into a larger and more inclusive mental
entity. In addition, the various groups are not all parallel, but very
largely crossing each other; one individual or sub-group may belong
to several of them. Economic classes cross national boundaries, for
both capital and labor are international. Most conspicuous of all,
religious groupings are international and interracial, so that a man
belongs to a church as well as a nation. In peace times the national
will to dominate and the church ideal of peace are kept carefully as
far apart in his mind as possible; the one coming into the center
of consciousness on Sundays, the other on election day or similar
occasions. In time of war, the two actively conflict within the
group mind, and thus within the individual minds which belong to the
group.
The accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of reason are
accompanied by a progressive widening of the circle of the group
mind, to include an ever larger number and variety of sub-groups. Dr.
Baldwin suggests this process: [53]“Group selection gives rise to
what may be called the law of the widening unit, that as the circle
of co-operation widens the unit of survival, the group, taken as a
whole, becomes larger.” The other side of the same process is the
increasing complexity of the mind of the individual and the sub-group
because of the richer world in which they exist—in Dr. Vincent’s words,
[54]“The person has as many selves as there are groups to which he
belongs. He is simple or complex as his groups are few and harmonious
or many and conflicting.” The actual growth of an international mind
today is evident, through scientific, religious, artistic and economic
influences; through the great alliances of the World War; through
the ease of communication and the spread of news and propaganda. A
world-wide group mind, if such is possible, cannot and should not
eliminate its sub-groups, but include them in a wider synthesis; even
enriching the complexity of the sub-groups by its further ramifications
and their further imitations.
But the easy and natural way for such an international group mind is
by conflict with a still different outside group. The white races
would easily attain unity if there were a real race conflict against
the colored races of the world; differences between French and German,
between Russian and American, would be swallowed up in a day. Unity
of the entire human race would come instantly if we were invaded from
Mars. The slogans of our earth-wide unity would be the defense of our
beloved planet and the common descent of all human beings. In default
of such a threat from without, is the international mind an impossible
hypothesis?
I suggest that actual contrasts exist which may make it possible for
a world-wide group mind to grow through the normal mode of group
conflict and group imitation and co-operation. Perhaps we can attain
race unity by envisaging the forces of nature as the rival group,
conceiving the inroads of the insect world as the threat against human
domination which must make us spring to arms in a sense of our common
unity and our common nature. Perhaps we can conceive the national group
as the contrasting element, and the international group mind as, not
its enemy, but its synthesis. Finally, one all-inclusive mind actually
does exist in the faith of most of the race—the ideal self of the group
to which we give the name of God. The God-idea of the group is not
the group itself, but is its outgrowth, its ideal self. Perhaps the
future unity of mankind may come at last through a summation of its
highest ideals and the rational toleration of diverse interpretations,
different personalities, and widely contrasting group customs and
manners. At present, however, an outstanding phenomenon of the group
mind is intolerance, and through a study of intolerance we can perceive
much of group nature and of the actual life of human societies.