[Footnote 2: Invictus.]
In the same way as the emotions fear, anger, and hate, and their variations and degrees, may be aroused by attack or threat against the self, so help and encouragement of an individual's selfhood arouse love, affection, and gratitude. Even our affection for our parents, though in part instinctive, is undoubtedly increased by the care and persistence with which they have fostered our own life and hopes, have educated us, and made possible for us a career. The same motives play a part in our affection for teachers who have beneficently influenced our lives, for other older people who "give us a start," advice and encouragement or financial aid. Even the love of God has in religious ritual been colored with gratitude for God's mercies and benevolences.
The individuality of groups. Groups may display the same individuality and sense of selfhood as is exhibited by individuals. And the members of the group may come to regard the group life as something quite as important and inalienable as their own personalities and possessions. Indeed in defense of the integrity of the group life, as in the case, for example, of national honor, the individual life and possession may come to be reckoned as naught. Man's gregariousness and his instinctive sympathy with his own kind make it easy for the individual to identify his own life with that of the group. What threatens or endangers the group will in consequence arouse in him the same emotions as are aroused by threats or dangers that concern his own personality. An insult to the flag may send a thrill of danger through the millions who read about it, just as would an insult to themselves or their families.
Group feeling may exist on various levels. It may be nothing more momentous than local pride, having the tallest tower, the finest amusement park, the best baseball team, or being the "sixth largest city." It may be a belligerent imperialism, a "desire for a place in the sun." It may be a desire for independence and an autonomous group life, manifested so strikingly recently by such small nationalities as Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and influential in keeping Switzerland alive as a nationality through hundreds of years, though surrounded by powerful neighbors.[1] While a group does not exist save as an abstraction, looked at as a whole it may exhibit the same outstanding traits, or the same types of selfhood as an individual. It may be fiercely belligerent and dogmatic; it may, like literary exponents of the German ideal, desire to spread its own conception of Kultur throughout the world.[2] It may be insistent on its own position, or its own possessions or its own glory. It may be fanatic in aggrandizement. It may be interested in the welfare of other groups, as in the case of large nationalities championing and protecting the causes of small or oppressed ones, such an ideal as was expressed, for example, by President Wilson in his address to Congress on the entrance of America into the Great War:
[Footnote 1: Group feeling may be displayed under the most disadvantageous conditions, as in the strong sentiment for nationalism current among the Jews, even through all the centuries of dispersion.]
[Footnote 2: Thorstein Veblen has pointed out how the "common man" comes to identify his interest with that of the group: "The common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain from the increase of renown that comes to his sovereign, his language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God. There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of self-complacency are indeed to be rated as grounds of high-minded patriotism without afterthought." (The Nature of Peace, p. 56.)]
... We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.[3]
[Footnote 3: Woodrow Wilson: Address to Congress, April 2, 1917.]
The selfhood displayed by various groups varies with the degree and integration of the individual within the group. In extreme cases, such as that of Germany under the imperial régime, the group individuality may completely overshadow and engulf that of the individual. This ideal was not infrequently expressed by German political writers:
To us the state is the most indispensable as well as highest requisite of our earthly existence.... All individualistic endeavor must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim.... The state eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of the individuals within its jurisdiction. This conception of the state which is as much a part of our life as the blood in our veins, is nowhere to be found in the English constitution, and is quite foreign to English thought, and to that of America as well.[1]