Lee J. Levinger

“ The nation is formed by a synthesis of its sub-groups; and the nation, in turn, enters into a wider synthesis to form the nascent but still growing conception of mankind. The mind of the many groups of Americans yield up their purposes, when called upon, for the greater unity—greater not only in size, but in richness, variety and tradition—that constitutes the mind of America. The future will mark the growing unity in diversity of the American group mind ”

“ Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert, energetic, loyal and reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by primal instinct a Jew, indelibly marked by persecution, with no deep national attachment, a stranger to the emotion of patriotism as the Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no quarrel with him, no hatred of him, no thought of persecuting him. As Protestants are unavailable for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews are unavailable for membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every nation has some crowd characteristics, is interested in its own welfare, not in that of its colonies, or its competitors, or the human race. Patriotism is as dogmatic as is religion. Every state, every city has its local loyalty, which magnifies its advantages and conceals its disadvantages, and especially cries down its rival state or city. Even the scientist, the student of social conditions, is apt to speak of higher and lower cultures, or higher and lower races—meaning always that his culture is higher and the Chinese lower, or the Anglo-Saxon is higher and the Italian lower. ”

“ If these general principles of intolerance are true, we can apply them at once to the peculiar situation of the Jew—everywhere at home, yet everywhere the creature of prejudice; not so very different from the other white nations among whom he lives, yet always distinct from them and always the target of intolerance. Every movement of bigotry, aristocracy, militarism, junkerism in every land makes anti-semitism one of its cardinal shouting-cries, from the emigrés of Russia to the royalist anti-Dreyfusards of France. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It has driven the Jew into intolerance in his turn. His intolerance has never expressed itself in terms of persecution or violence, very seldom in terms of hatred. The intolerance of the Jew became, in self-defense, a pride in the Chosen People of God, in his ancient lineage, in his family loyalty, in his glorious tradition. He then emphasized the fact of difference from other peoples, just as they did, and the Jew looked down on the rude, ignorant heathens just as the Christian despised the uncouth alien Jew. Intolerance has one virtue—it makes for loyalty to your own. ”

“ 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 Jew has a distinct religion, a peculiar tradition and appearance which can sometimes be distinguished—he is different from other people. And the extreme bitterness of this anti-Semitism, more than of any other anti-party the world over, is simply because everywhere the Jew lives on a frontier, in direct group contact with the intolerant of other peoples. Every Jew lives on a Franco-German frontier, or a Mexican-American one. Even in the United States of America, with its proud tradition of tolerance written into the Federal Constitution, there is now a movement of anti-Semitism. ”

“ To the person who knows Jewish life, broken into so many conflicting theories and different cultural and economic groups, the whole viewpoint is too ridiculous to require disproof. It is merely another sign that the modern conception of social and economic process is very new indeed and has made little headway into the group mind. Every world process from the World War to the fall of the German mark, from immodest clothing to vapid popular songs, must be blamed on a person or race. ”

“ First of all, we must realize that intolerance is the typical and natural human attitude. From the beginning of history it was so deeply intrenched in every race and tribe that it seems to have begun with the life of the race, and has its roots perhaps in the pre-human life, among those wolves or bees that drive a stranger out of the pack or hive and leave him to die alone. For that happened times without number in the early human packs of human hives. Every group of people knows that it is the one proper, human group, and that all others are imitations and second-rate. ”

“ But even if this intolerance toward the black race were justified by facts after we whites entertained it on natural instinctive grounds, why then should we give directly opposite reasons for our dislike of the Japanese? For the Japanese is called by his very enemies shrewd, industrious and saving. If the lazy negro is our inferior, then the hustling Japanese should be our superior. The fact is that neither race is inferior in a way that can be proved—but both are different, and every group is naturally intolerant of the group that is different from itself. ”

“ And in the same way loyalty to the cause of humanity need not mean, cannot mean disloyalty to the cause of the nation, which is so great and important a part of the human race. But, on the other hand, the patriotic American does not hate Illinois because he has moved to Indiana. Love of one’s own state persists without the hatred and intolerance of the other state, just because the two are members of the American nation, and the inclusive loyalty makes the other loyalties less bitter and less contentious against each other. ”

“ It was equally important for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come. Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was the product of the birth and development of the group mind of the nation. It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state laws, of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group, even those who were themselves refugees from persecution) , and the adoption of a national standard to which every state, every church and every sect should bring its sacrifice. ”

“ 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 [29] of its own. ”

“ Many of them become radicals in economics, religion and politics as a reaction against their former experience of oppression; some of them were pro-German during the World War to oppose their former Russian tyrants; for all of them the problem is doubly difficult because it involves not only a personal adjustment to new economic and social conditions, but also the group adjustment into the life of the United States. Many of them in their new-found freedom become super-patriots, take America to their hearts, and are thus doubly disappointed when America also repulses them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I suggest that actual contrasts exist which may make it possible for a world-wide group mind to grow through the normal [44] 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. ”

“ Tolerance is the one thing that can possibly wipe out the evils of hatred, warfare, and confusion, the age-old enemies of the progress of the race. When men and women learn tolerance for each other’s race, nationality, religion, and general attitudes, then they will be able to understand one another, and eventually to work with one another, even to love one another. Without that tolerance, we can never understand people of different race or religion or nationality, because we never even stop to look at them fairly and honestly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These reasons seem hardly better than those of the anti-Semites themselves—for the Jew today is not a Semite; Dr. Shailer compared him with the rather repressed New Englander at Harvard, not with the Aryan of Germany or Italy or Russia; since he wrote seven Jews have received the Nobel prize for scientific distinction; and finally, the challenge to the superior race (of Dr. Friedman) is simply the fact of difference. No characterization of the Jew accounts for anti-Semitism, whether it be formulated by friend or foe; the only genuine causes are those that can be found in the group mind itself. ”

“ The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United States of America since the World War is a paradox that attracts attention at once. The most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and tolerance. How can such a movement exist in such a nation? The apparent contradiction leads us at once into the many contradictions of the psychology of large groups of human beings, which both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their constituent individuals. ”