[43]Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring human beings into groups, and largely determine what goes on within them.
[44]It 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 and conflicts with the other; and in the case of two parallel groups there is a conflict and contrast of purposes, hence of group mind itself.
3.
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:
[45] History 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.
[46] Every 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 to escape 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.