CHAPTER II.GROUPS IN CONTACT

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.31But 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:

34Membership 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 that35“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.

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 nationand 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 prefers39“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:

41The 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:

42While 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:

43Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring human beings into groups, and largely determine what goes on within them.44It 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.

43Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring human beings into groups, and largely determine what goes on within them.

44It 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 andconflicts with the other; and in the case of two parallel groups there is a conflict and contrast of purposes, hence of group mind itself.

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:

45History 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.46Every greater ethnic or social element strives to subdue to its purposes every weaker group which lies within its sphere of influence or near it.

45History 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.

46Every 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 toescape 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 identityof 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:

49Hundred 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.

50What 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 groupmind, 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.

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 oppositionto 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”:

51Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.52We 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 activelyconflict 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 normalmode 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.

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