The causes of intolerance rest, not in what men say but in what they do. The reasons alleged for dislike or suspicion of the Jew are valuable merely for showing a state of mind in the anti-Semite himself, not for revealing the actual reasons for his attitude. For that reason I shall disregard these reasons very largely in searching for the causes of anti-Semitism in America. Instead, I shall turn to the field of social study to find out how groups of men act toward one another, and why and under what circumstances intolerance is one of their by-products. I shall apply to the phenomena of group life the method of behaviorism, now being adopted by sociology from its original field of psychology, in such definitions as that of E. C. Lindeman:3 “Sociology is the science of collective behavior.”
1.
The prevailing view of students of society seems now to be that society is a natural phenomenon on the mental plane. Human society is not now regarded, as by Buckle, as a reflection of environment, even though the importance of physical background and racial constitution must be recognized. As Charles A. Ellwood says,4 “Society is a group of psychically interacting individuals.” “The essential element in the social process is the psychical element.”5 That is to say, mental material—instincts, emotions, feeling, and ideas—are the plane on which groups of individuals combine into social structures, operate in social functions, develop to social progress. Relations between individuals (except for the limited biological function) are mental relations, carried on through physical media such as postures, speech and writing.
These mental interactions of human beings are not an artificial construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or any other method. William MacDougall is almost alone in holding that the social sentiments are derived from the self-regarding ones through the operation of the tender emotion and the parental instinct. Hobhouse says:6 “The conception of a primitive egoism on which sociality is somehow overlaid is without foundation in either biology or psychology.” John Dewey puts this view most forcibly:
7The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual man, is already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social inheritance and references.... Education, language, and other means of communication are infinitely more important categories of knowledge than any of those exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the methodological battle of instrumentalism is won ... the two services that will stand to the credit of instrumentalism will be calling attention first to the connection of intelligence with a genuine future, and second, to the social constitution of personal, even of private experience, above all of any experience that has assumed the knowledge form.
And Ellwood adds—expressing here the general opinion of both sociologists and modern social philosophers—“All human consciousness is socially conditioned.... This is as true of the racially inherited aspects of consciousness—the feeling-instincts—as it is of the acquired traits.” Man is a social animal and his sociality is one of the few unescapable things about him. He is born in some kind of a social group; he gets the most of his ideas from his association with others; his whole development is a give-and-take in which the take is from the first, and often remains, the greater element.
But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one explanation of it. We do not need to accept the “consciousness of kind” of Giddings, the “herd instinct” of Trotter, or the “imitation” of Tarde,—in fact, we may very well consider that there is no one principle to explain so universal and complex a phenomenon; that these terms and others like them are in no sense explanations, but merely different words for the same fact, that man is a naturally gregarious or social being. We may rather turn to the more generalized modes of expressing this conception, the group mind or general will, as developed by Durkheim, Wundt and in our day by Baldwin, MacDougall, and others.
2.
Before attacking this problem directly, I must clear away several misconceptions of the “group mind,” which I cannot accept as a part of this theory. First, this thesis need not exclude the operation of physical and biological forces on social groups, any more than it excludes their operation on any individual, who is also a psychological unit. Society may well be a unit, just as the individual is, in a world of varying forces—climate, birth rates, and the like. Second, a theory of group mind may be empirical, and need not necessarily rest on an idealistic conception of the Volksgeist. By adopting the historical method, rather than the statistical, relying on values to indicate our problem rather than trying to express it in terms of natural science, we shall find ourselves treating the theory of the group in a realistic and empirical way, eschewing the dogmatism of applying a priori principles to human material, and the equal fallacy of considering minds in the same terms as chemical elements.8
Third, a modern social psychology need not be a literal transcription of Durkheim or Wundt, relying on an antiquated psychology for its analogies and its basic conceptions. A theory of group mind today must recognize that personality is not always a unity, that it is never a complete unity; the vast field of the unconscious in mental life has just been opened to view. Both of these conceptions apply to the mental life of men in great masses as truly as when alone. Neither the individual nor the group is something hard, fixed and static; neither can be summed up as a group of faculties or a system of ideas. Both individual and group must be conceived in process, to take the words of Lindemann,9 as “the total equipment with which man responds to his environment, all that enters into behavior from the side of human nature.”
Some views of group mind are vitiated for our present purpose by the narrow limits they impose, or by the one-sided way in which they arrive at their definitions. This applies especially to those who use the mob as the typical group and consider “crowd-mindedness” (to use Everett Dean Martin’s term) as a synonym of sociality. The crowd, the herd, the mob are various terms for an exceptional type of group of human beings, bound together by physical presence, transformed by a powerful emotion, launched finally into unified and often violent action. But as Baldwin says:10 “The mind of the crowd is essentially a temporary, unorganized, ineffective thing.... The mob is a by-product of society, it is the exaggeration of the normal.” Finally, the group mind need not be expressed entirely in terms of instinctive adaptation, any more than the mind of the individual; either may have many types, may be instinctive or impulsive or rational, may have a growing sense of rationality and a growing power of independent, deliberate action. In opposition to MacDougall, with his elaborate system of instincts and sentiments, we may place the vast majority of students of the problem, Cooley, Platt, Ellwood, Baldwin, and so on. Even when the members of a group all use reason to a very high degree, they still constitute a group if they have organization and some method of reaching a general decision, as in a congress, a national association of scientists, or a business corporation.
Obviously, human beings form many kinds of groups, and there would then, on an empirical basis, be many varieties of group minds. Individuals fall into many classes, as we all know, primitive and cultured, ignorant and educated, the infant, the child and the adult, the moron and the genius. So with the group. There are large and small groups, from families to nations; temporary and permanent ones, from the theatre audience to the church; simple and complex, from town meeting to a Federal union, comprising states, counties, cities and townships; unorganized and organized; groups founded on physical presence, like a baseball team, and international bodies of scientists or philosophers who may form “a school of thought” but may never hold a meeting. The study of these various types is not only interesting in itself; it may help us in formulating the principle of the mind of the group as a whole. To begin with the definition of the primitive group by Franz Boaz:
11There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not a member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage the enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to kill him. This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity of the horde, and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member of the horde to destroy all possible enemies.... The feeling of the fellowship in the horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the tribe, to a recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood of habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of nations.
“He who is not with me is against me,”12 said Jesus for the religious group. How far we have proceeded from the horde in our civilized nations, and how near we are to it still in the essential character of the mind of the group!
3.
Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness, external to the individuals composing it—that view has been discarded long ago. But as a category which is needed to explain many phenomena, and which we can then proceed to study and explain in greater detail, a term with pragmatic value, such as “life” or “mind.” “Life” is no longer used as a principle of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into dead matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its effects and study them. “Mind” is not something separate and distinct from the body in which it dwells or from the world in which it acts, but we know that mind is a useful and necessary category in which to include a whole phase of living being, especially of human life. “Group Mind” is the same sort of category as these. Just as mind inheres in the neurones and is coincident with the chemical changes in them, and yet cannot be summed up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in the brains, of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and acts, yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but as the unified response of a group of persons at once.
Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any type of group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social environment; he holds that the group may have unity of content but not of process, of ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd H. Allport speaks of “The group fallacy,” 13“the error of substituting the group as a whole as a principle of explanation in place of the individuals in the group,” to which Emory S. Bogardus replies in his discussion that 14“if there is a group fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.”
On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman remarks, 15“The group is a plurality of individuals, but what the group does is not plural but singular.” 16“From the purely descriptive point of view, the group becomes a new quality.” Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this way: 17“Millions of brain cells are co-ordinated to think as one brain. Psychology tries to tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate themselves and function in many ways as one brain. The how of that marvel is for sociology.” Giddings calls the group mind “the concert of thought, emotion and will” of individual minds. Cooley says: 18“The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in organization.” Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently:
19The only unity we have in society is a unity of process. The individual consciousness is unified both structurally and functionally.... There is a collective mental life, but no social mind in the same sense in which there is an individual mind.
Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social and Ethical Interpretations:
20Society is the form of natural organization which ethical personalities come into in their growth. Ethical personality is the form of natural development which individuals grow into who live in social relationships. The true analogy, then, is not that which likens it to a physiological organism, but rather that which likens it to a psychological organization.
And so, if this were primarily a historical study, I might go over many similar and differing theories, which consider the group as a unity on the mental plane, that is, in one sense or another, as a group mind.
The material is still being collected for this study, the essential points of view still being defined, and such important factors as instinct and intelligence are still being redefined with the rapid progress of science today. As several of the terms cited above suggest, the difference between the individual as a mind and the group of individuals as a mind is always given and must always be given in terms of structure. In the words of Lindeman:
21The individual may be viewed as an integration of functioning organs, and the group merely an integration of functions.... There can be nothing organic about society or a group; there can be only a series of relations, the results of specific responses to specific situations.
Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems general agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief, perhaps the only difference historically pointed out between the mind of one man and of a group of men is that the man has a brain and a nervous system, while the group has neither, but operates apparently through the brains and nervous systems of its members. But in their functioning, in their activities, the mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable.
Of course, this distinction depends, finally, on the definition of mind which we are prepared to accept. Dennes gives an adequate summary and criticism of Durkheim, for instance, who considered collective mind to consist of the collective ideas or representations of a society; and of Wundt, who considered mind an integration of processes, not of ideas, and therefore sought for the group mind in the collective results of group mental process, in speech, religion and custom. But Dennes himself seems confused by the need of defining mind without regard to bodily structure. He says: 22“Individual minds or persons have or produce bodies as well as objective mental products. But social groups are not minds and have no bodies. They are associations of minds.” MacDougall defines mind as 23“An organized system of mental or purposive forces,” and continues, “In the sense so defined, every highly organized human society may be properly said to possess a group mind.” While MacDougall’s definition seems circular in nature, it still recognizes that a functional definition of mind can make no distinction of structure, whether any particular mind is associated with one or many bodies. Lindeman calls mind 24“the total equipment with which man responds to his environment”, which seems more than one can accept, for “total equipment” would include hands and feet, as well as mind. A more precise statement of the same general tenor appears in Dr. Singer’s Mind as Behavior:
25Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior. Or, more accurately, our belief in consciousness is an expectation of probable behavior based on an observation of actual behavior, a belief to be confirmed or refuted by more observation, as any other belief in a fact is to be tried out.
Thus, any functional definition of mind that has no reference to brain or nervous system, must apply and does apply in the group of persons in exactly the same sense as to the single individual. If there is “unified behavior,” if there is “organized system of purposes,” if there is “response to environment,” then we have mind, whether the behavior, response, or purpose dwell in one or two or many bodies.
One question remains, and a most perplexing one. How can one distinguish between a group mind and a group purpose, or the accidental coincidence of many minds and many purposes? A flock of migrating birds has no group mind—each bird would travel south at the same time and the same rate of speed, were there no flock at all. Or still lower forms, such as unicellular organisms, may move simultaneously to warmer waters. On the other extreme, the hordes of Huns led by Attila had a group purpose in their migration; the leader gave the word, and the followers leaped together to their horses’ backs to ride from Asia into Europe. But when a half million negroes migrate from the southern to the northern states in a few years, coming family by family, as the opportunity affords, yet with a steady tendency of drift, is that a group mind or the accidental agreement of many individuals? Is it mind or minds? And the same problem is present in a declaration of war, or the victory of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of clothes. When does the group act and when the individual members? When do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each?
To this crucial problem I must present one qualification and one answer. The qualification is: the group never acts except through its constituent individuals, any more than the mind acts without its brain cells and bodily organs. The difference between the act of all and the act of each is not a complete disjunction but a difference of emphasis, of interpretation, of purpose. When the army marches, every soldier goes ahead; when the nation elects its president, the millions of voters cast their ballots; when the church adopts a creed or reforms its ritual, the many believers experience a change in their faith and their hope. Not that group opinion need be unanimous; it is rather a mode of general consent by which unified action can arise out of conflicting opinions, by which many individuals are absorbed into a group mind. Thus in many, perhaps in most cases we cannot say definitely: this is group mind, not personal preference, or this is individual action, and the group has nothing to do with it. The problem is much like that which faced Kant in defining moral action, when the demands of the universal law may often coincide with personal preference, perhaps even with the greatest and most appealing happiness.
And our answer may be similar to his. Kant turned to the test case. We know we have morality, said he, when duty and pleasure are opposed, and the man obeys the voice of duty. Similarly, we can say: we know that we have group mind and purpose when the pleasure of the individual is opposed to the will of the group, and the individual gives up his purpose for that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier or the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor, then we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is acting only as a member of the greater whole. Lindeman, whose study is based on observation of farmers’ co-operative societies, presents a contrary view:
26It was formerly asserted that the chief significance of a group consisted in the fact that the individuals comprising it had sacrificed certain individual prerogatives, rights, privileges, etc., in order to achieve the larger collective end. But it could not be discovered that the farmers who became members of the co-operative associations had done anything of the sort. On the contrary, they were chiefly interested in enhancing their own individual interests; they desired a larger income from the sale of their products and the co-operative movement promised exactly this.
If this were true, these associations would constitute merely a set of books, not a group of persons. But we see further on in the same book that the co-operative associations demanded loyalty even at the cost of whim or momentary interest; they enforced their contracts with the farmer by which he agreed to sell only through the association. If he got tired of waiting for his money, or if a dealer placed a financial premium on disloyalty, still he was expected to be loyal to the group. Finally, the group had to take cognizance of other aspects of the human life of its members besides the sale of their cotton or tobacco; it built up personal and social groupings for the entire family; it became a truly unified group mind, through the slow process of integration of individuals and of local groups, resting on a basis of personal friendship. Thus, even in an interest group, a true group mind is developed through participation and sacrifice.
4.
We are now ready to define group mind in the sense in which it will be understood in this essay. A group mind is the common purpose of two or more persons, which they accept as their own purpose. The mode of this acceptance or identification is in behavior, which includes the reasons given by the individuals—their rationalizations—as well as their overt acts. The test of this in any particular case is the test of sacrifice, whether the man acts as a self-preserving being, an individual pacifist, or as a citizen and soldier, a member of a group at war; whether the church member acts as an individual thinker, or subordinates his judgment to the interpretation and the practice of the church; whether the son acts as a loyal son, a member of the family, to his own hurt, or goes off to marry against his parents’ will, leaving them perhaps to suffer want. I have purposely taken examples where opinion may be divided, as it is not my purpose to attach moral right or wrong to either group loyalty or individual freedom; either may be right under given circumstances, or judged by certain standards.
The group mind may be conscious, as a deliberative assembly; or instinctive and unconscious, as the racial group or the partly hypnotized mob. The ancient Israelite identified himself with his people; he did not even expect personal immortality, but desired sons to carry on his name so that his family and his people might be immortal. Parents are willing sacrifices for their children, but sacrifices nevertheless. The patriot volunteers for dangerous duty consciously, or leaps over the parapet in the blind enthusiasm of a charge; whether conscious or unconscious of the meaning of his act, he acts as a soldier, not a self-seeking person. The varieties of the group mind are almost innumerable. The group mind may be as instinctive and unorganized as a religious revival, as natural as a nation with its bonds of language, land, custom and government, as artificial as a military company without even a name, with only a number, and yet with a definite morale, a tradition, a personality of its own. The theater audience has a group mind, while the restaurant crowd has not; for it is an axiom in the theater that each audience has a character of its own, that only a full house really abandons itself at a comedy, while even a smaller crowd may be carried away by a tragedy, and so on; the individual abandons his own judgment and his inhibitions at least in part, to react to the performance as a member of the group.
According to this definition, the individual also may have a group mind, as his diverse purposes are summed up in one supreme purpose, or as he has inner conflicts, the far-sighted against the narrow view, the better ideal against the worse. The reasons or motives which animate the various members of a group mind need not always be the same; they may range from deliberate choice to compulsion by public opinion or the blind following of herd instinct, the desire to “run with the crowd,” to “be on the band wagon.” There is always a margin of unassimilated purpose in either the individual or the group; neither mind ever quite attains perfect unity. Durkheim makes the pregnant suggestion, (not without its critics, it is true,) that the most unified mind was that of the primitive horde, where unity was achieved by identity; while developed societies achieve unity through organization and division of function, thus including the most diverse elements in a genuine unity of co-operation and purpose.
The group mind, then, is an empirical fact, which can be perceived in many practical ways. The intellectual content, the emotional coloring, group habits which we call custom, group ideas which we call tradition, group organization by which a consensus of opinion is ascertained for the purpose of unified action—all are characteristics of the group mind, just as the parallel factors of ideas, emotion, and will are the phases into which we analyze the mind of the individual. There is a difference in every one of these factors between the group mind of America and of China, between that of ancient Greece and of medieval Italy. And the difference lies not only in factors such as language, religion and history, which are constitutive to the group, but external to the individual. It lies also in subtler matters of opinion, of emotions, which seem to be within the individual and yet must be absorbed from the environment, because they differ so strikingly from group to group. I shall go carefully into the reasons further on which impel me to consider that the Jewish people possess a group mind, even though they have no common government, language or land, and have even many divisions on questions of faith and religious practice. Here it is sufficient to note that the Jewish people act as one under attack; that a pogrom in Russia arouses the very different Jews of France, England and America to a feeling of unity and acts of relief and of defense. Labor and capital are becoming “class conscious” in opposition to each other; that is, group minds are in process of formation. The group mind appears in the behavior of the group through its constituent individuals, whether the group be a static one, dominated by the fixed habits of custom, or a dynamic one, with a great wave of progress; for behavior includes both custom and progress.
One more point comes properly under the definition of the group mind—the wide-spread conception of a general will, or more precisely a common will. According to the viewpoint of this study, the general will is no mystical entity, overpowering the wills of the individuals; nor is it an arithmetical average, in which personal opinions cancel each other out. Neither of these theories covers a willing mind. The group will is a resultant, not an average; one element in it is tradition, another is leadership, a third is the interaction of the various sub-groups. In the final result, the negative element is often actually erased, the wavering members accept the winning opinion as a whole, and the consequent group action is a unity, almost a unanimity of response. After war is declared the peace party practically disappears. In less clear-cut issues, we see the workings of compromise, which again appears in the behavior of the group as a whole.
Group consciousness exists when the individuals identify themselves with the group, not merely accepting its purpose but losing their own purposes in it. Consciousness implies also intelligence, as it does in the individual; it may co-exist with a high emotional tone but must have a rational element as well. MacDougall utters a view in consonance with that held here when he says:
27It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each member to the group as a whole that binds the group together and renders it a collective individual capable of collective volition.
But when he holds 28that groups are self-conscious according to the degree that the idea of them is present in the minds of the individuals composing them, then we must agree with Dennes that:
29to say that a group mind possesses self-consciousness in the sense that its nature is consciously apprehended, by individual minds distinct from it, is the utterance of a contradiction.
It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we posit individual consciousness, not distributively but collectively. We have group mind and group will when the group acts as one or behaves as one; but we have group consciousness when the group thinks as one. Not that this action can possibly take place outside of the individual minds; MacDougall is undoubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker: 30“There is no group mind existing apart from the minds of the members of the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its members. But nevertheless it exists.” Yet the group mind must include the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they relinquish their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose ideas are their ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent at least, their consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary speech, to recognize that a man acts now personally, again as a churchman, a citizen, or a committee member, it should be possible to accept this fact as a part of our theory and to embody it as one phase of the theory itself. The individual and the group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists without the other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much as the individual is a part of the group mind.