The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

CHAPTER XIV

INTRODUCTORY

In the first Part of this book we have reviewed the most general principles of collective mental life, beginning with the unorganised crowd as affording the simplest example, considering then an army as the simplest example of the profound modifications of collective mental life effected by organisation of the group. In the second Part we passed on to apply these principles to the understanding of the mind of the nation as the most important, complex, and interesting of all types of the group mind.

In the third Part I take up the consideration in a general way of the processes by which national mind and character are gradually built up and shaped in the long course of ages. For, just as we cannot understand individual minds, their peculiarities and differences, without studying their development, so we cannot hope to understand national mind and character and the peculiarities and differences of nations, without studying the slow processes through which they have been built up in the course of centuries.

In an earlier chapter, in connexion with the question of the importance of homogeneity of mental qualities as a condition of the existence of the national mind, I argued that race has really considerable influence in moulding the type of national mind. I recognized that differences of innate qualities between races, at any rate between allied subraces, are not great, and that they can be, and generally are, almost completely over-ridden and obscured in each individual by the moulding power of the social environment in which he grows up; but I urged that these racial qualities are very persistent, and that they exert a slight but constant pressure or bias upon the development of all that constitutes social environment, upon the forms of institutions, customs, traditions, and beliefs of every kind, so that the effect of such slight but constant bias accumulates from generation to generation, and in the long run exerts an immense influence.

One way of treating the part played by the racial mental qualities in the development of the national mind would be to attempt to define the racial or innate peculiarities of the peoples existing at the present time, and to assume that these peculiarities were produced in the remote past, before the formation of nations began, and that they have persisted unchanged throughout the period of the development of nations. Something of this sort was proposed by Walter Bagehot in his Physics and Politics. He distinguished in the development of peoples two great periods—on the one hand the race-making period, which roughly corresponds to the whole prehistoric period, and on the other hand the nation-making period, which roughly corresponds to the historic period. This distinction has undoubtedly a certain validity.

It seems probable that man was evolved from his prehuman ancestry as a single stock, probably a stock somewhat widely distributed in the heart of the Eurasian continent, or possibly in Africa according to the recent view of some authors, or in the area which is now the Indian Ocean. If this be true, it follows that the differentiation of the mental and physical qualities of the principal human races, the differentiation of the white and black and yellow and brown races, as well as of the chief subraces, such as the Semitic, the races of Europe—the Homo Europaeus, Alpinus and Mediterraneus—was the work of the immensely prolonged prehistoric period. For these races and subraces, as we now know them, seem to have been in existence and to have had recognisably and substantially the same leading qualities, both mental and physical, that they now have, before the beginning of the historic period.

The racial differentiation during the prehistoric period must have been much greater than during the historic period; and this was not only because the former period was immensely longer, but also because, in all probability, the rate of racial change has been on the whole slower in the historic period.

The differentiation of racial types in the prehistoric period must have been in the main the work of differences of physical environment, operating directly by way of selection, by way of the adaptation of each race to its environment through the extermination of the strains least suited to exist under those physical conditions. But this process, this direct moulding of racial types by physical environment, must have been well nigh arrested as soon as nations began to form. For the formation of nations implies the beginning of civilisation; and civilisation very largely consists in the capacity of a people to subdue their physical environment, or at least to adapt the physical environment to men’s needs to a degree that renders them far less the sport of it than was primitive man; it consists, in short, in replacing man’s natural environment by an artificial environment largely of his own choice and creation.

In a second and perhaps even more important way, the formation of nations with the development of civilisation modified and weakened the moulding influence of the physical environment; namely, it introduced social co-operation in an ever increasing degree, so that the perpetual struggle of individuals and of small family groups with one another and with nature was replaced by a co-operative struggle of large communities against the physical environment and with one another. And in this process those members of each community who, by reason of weakness, general incapacity, or other peculiarity, would have been liable to be eliminated under primitive conditions became shielded in an ever increasing degree by the powers of the stronger and more capable against the selective power of nature and against individual human forces. And, although within the community the rivalry of individuals and families still went on, it was no longer so much a direct struggle for existence, but rather became more and more a struggle for position in the social scale; and failure in the struggle no longer necessarily meant death, or even incapacity to leave an average number of descendants. That is to say, primitive man’s struggle for existence against the forces of nature and against his fellow men, which made for racial evolution and differentiation through survival of those fittest to cope with various environments, tended to be replaced by a struggle which no longer made for racial evolution towards a higher type, and which may even have made for race-deterioration, at the same time that civilisation and national organisation continued to progress.

We may, then, recognise a certain truth in Bagehot’s distinction of two great periods, the race-making and the nation-making periods. Nevertheless, it would not be satisfactory to follow the course suggested above and simply assume certain racial characters as given fixed data without further consideration. For, firstly, it is interesting and perhaps not altogether unprofitable to indulge in speculations on the race-making processes of the prehistoric period. Secondly, although it seems likely that racial changes have been in the main slower and on the whole relatively slight in the historic period, yet they have not been altogether lacking; and, in proportion to their magnitude, such changes as have occurred have been of great importance for national life; and changes of this kind are still playing their part in shaping the destinies of nations. Possible racial changes of mental qualities must therefore be considered, when we seek to give a general account of the conditions of the development of nations.

On the other hand, we must reject root and branch the crude idea, which has a certain popular currency, that the development of civilisation and of nations implies a parallel evolution of individual minds. That idea we have already touched upon and rejected in a previous chapter, where we arrived at the conclusion that there is no reason to suppose the present civilised peoples to be on the whole innately superior to their barbaric ancestors.

If we use the word ‘tradition’ in the widest possible sense to denote all the intellectual and moral gains of past generations, in so far as they are not innate but are handed on from one generation to another by the personal intercourse of the younger with the older generation, and if we allow the notion of tradition to include all the institutions and customs that are passed on from generation to generation, then we may class all the changes of a people that constitute the evolution of a national character under the two heads: evolution of innate qualities and evolution of traditions. Using the word ‘tradition’ in the wide sense just now indicated, the traditions of a people may be said to include the recognised social organisation of the whole people into classes, castes, clans, phratries, or groups of any kind, whose relations to one another and whose place in the national system are determined by law, custom and conventions of various kinds. This part of the total tradition is relatively independent of the rest, and we may usefully distinguish the development of such social organisation as social evolution—giving to the term this restricted and definite meaning—and we may set it alongside the other two conceptions as of co-ordinate value.

If we thus set apart for consideration under a distinct head the evolution of social organisation, the rest of the body of national traditions may be said to constitute the civilisation of a people. For the civilisation of a people at any time is essentially the sum of the moral and intellectual traditions that are living and operative among them at that particular time. We are apt in a loose way to consider the civilisation of a people to consist in its material evidences; but it is only in so far as these material evidences, the buildings, industries, arts, products, machinery, and so forth, are the expression and outcome of its mental state that they are in any degree a measure of its civilisation. We may realize this most clearly by considering the case of a people on which the material products of civilisation have been impressed from without. Thus the peasants of India live amongst, and make use of, and benefit materially by, the railways and irrigation works created by their British rulers, and are protected from invasion and from internal anarchy by the British military organisation and equipment; and they play a subordinate though essential part in the creation and maintenance of all these material evidences of civilisation. But these material evidences are not the expression of the mental state of the peoples of India, and form no true part of their civilisation; and, in fact, they affect their civilisation astonishingly little; although if these products of a higher civilisation should be maintained for a long period of time they would, no doubt, produce changes of their civilisation, probably tending in some degree to assimilate their mental state to that of Western Europe.

We may, then, with advantage distinguish between the social organisation and the civilisation of a people. In doing so we are of course making an effort of abstraction, which, though it results in an artificial separation of things intimately related, is nevertheless useful and therefore justifiable. In a similar way the progress of civilisation may be distinguished from social evolution. Social evolution is profoundly affected by the progress of civilisation, and in turn reacts powerfully upon it; for any given social organisation may greatly favour or obstruct the further progress of civilisation. There could have been no considerable advance of civilisation without the evolution of some social organisation; but that the two things are distinct is clear, when we reflect that there may be a very complex social organisation, implying a long course of social evolution, among a people that has hardly the rudiments of civilisation. Extreme instances of social organisation in the absence of civilisation are afforded by some animal societies—for example, societies of ants, bees, and wasps. Among peoples, the native tribes of Australia illustrate the fact most forcibly. They are at the very bottom of the scale of civilisation; yet it has been discovered that they have a complex and well-defined social organisation, which can only have been achieved by a long course of social evolution. These people are divided into totem clans, which clans are grouped in phratries, each individual being born, according to well recognised rules, into a clan of which he remains a life-long member; and his membership in the clan and phratry involves certain well-defined rights and obligations, and well-defined relations to other persons, especially as regards marriage; and these rights, obligations and relations are recognised and rigidly maintained throughout immense areas.

On the other hand, although no people has attained any considerable degree of civilisation without considerable social organisation, nevertheless we can at least imagine a people continuing to enjoy a high civilisation, practising and enjoying much of the arts, sciences, philosophy, and literature, which we regard as the essentials of civilisation, yet retaining a bare minimum of social organisation. And this state of affairs is not only conceivable, but is held up as a practicable ideal by philosophical anarchists such as Tolstoi and Kropotkin; and it is, I think, true to say that the American nation presents an approximation to this condition.

Again, a very high state of civilisation may co-exist with a relatively primitive social organisation. Thus the civilisation of Athens in the classical age was equal to, or even superior to, our own in many respects; yet the social organisation was very much less highly evolved. It had hardly emerged from the barbaric patriarchal condition, and had at its foundation a cruel system of slavery[105]; and it had also another great point of inferiority—namely, the very restricted number of persons included in the social system. These deficiencies, this rudimentary character, of its social organisation was the principal cause of the instability and brief endurance of that brilliant civilisation.

We have so far distinguished three principal factors or groups of factors in the evolution of national mind and character: (1) Evolution of innate or racial qualities: (2) Development of civilisation: (3) Social evolution, or the development of social organisation.

Now the first two of these we may with advantage divide under two parallel heads, the heads of intellectual and moral development. No doubt, the intellectual and the moral endowment of a people continually react on each other; and many of the manifestations of the national mind are jointly determined by the intelligence and the morality of a people; especially perhaps is this true of their religion and their art. Nevertheless, it is clear that we can distinguish pretty sharply between the intellectual and the moral traditions of a people; and that these may vary independently of one another to a great extent. A rich and full intellectual tradition may go with a moral tradition of very low level, as in the Italian civilisation of the renascence; and a very high moral tradition with a relative poverty of the intellectual, as in the early days of the puritan settlements of New England.

The same distinction between the intellectual and the moral level is harder to draw in the case of the racial qualities of a people, but it undoubtedly exists and is valid in principle, no matter how difficult in practice to deal with.

We have, then, to distinguish five classes of factors, five heads under which all the factors which determine the evolution of national character may be distributed. They are

(1) Innate moral disposition	} racial qualities.
(2) Innate intellectual capacities
(3) Moral tradition	} national civilisation.
(4) Intellectual tradition
(5) Social organisation.

Every nation that has advanced from a low level to a higher level of national life has done so in virtue of development or progress in one or more of these respects. And a principal part of our task, in considering the evolution of national mind and character, is to assign to each of these its due importance and its proper place in the whole complex development.

The distinction between the racial and the traditional level of a people is too often ignored; chiefly, perhaps, for the reason that it has usually been assumed that whatever is traditional becomes innate and racial through use. Since in recent years it has been shown that this assumption is very questionable, a number of authors have recognised the importance of the distinction as regards the intellectual qualities of a people; but, as regards the moral qualities, the distinction is still very generally overlooked.

The neglect of these distinctions between the innate and the traditional has in great measure vitiated much of the keen dispute that has been waged over the question whether the progress of civilisation depends primarily on intellectual or on moral advance. For example, T. H. Buckle and Benjamin Kidd agreed in recognising clearly the distinction between the innate and the traditional intellectual status of a people; and they agreed in maintaining that we have no reason to believe that in the historic period any people has made any considerable advance in innate intellectual capacity; and that any such advance, if there has been any, has not been a principal factor in the progress of civilisation. But they differed extremely in that Buckle maintained that the primary cause of all progress of national life is the improvement of its intellectual tradition, that is, increase in the quantity and the worth of its stock of knowledge and accepted beliefs, and improvements in methods of intellectual operation; and he held that improvements of morals and of social organisation have been secondary results of these intellectual gains. Kidd, on the other hand[106], maintained that the progress of European civilisation has been primarily due to an improvement of the morality of peoples; that this has led to improvement of social organisation; and that this in turn has been the essential condition of the progress of the intellectual tradition, because it has secured a stable social environment, a security of life, a free field for the exercise of intellectual powers; in the absence of which conditions the intellectual powers of a nation cannot effectively organise themselves and apply themselves to the understanding of man and nature, or to securing the traditional perpetuation of the gains which they may sporadically achieve. We have to examine these views and try to determine what truth they contain, and to show that they are not wholly opposed but can in some measure be combined.

I propose to make first a very brief critical survey of some of the most notable attempts that have been made to account for racial qualities, and I shall try to supplement and harmonise these as far as possible. We may with advantage consider at the outset the race-making period, and afterwards go on to consider changes of racial qualities in the historic period. This Part of the book is necessarily somewhat speculative, but its interest and importance for our main topic may justify its inclusion.

---