Certainly there is group struggle; it is a natural tendency when two different groups come into contact; and it is a gross and obvious phenomenon which nobody can help noticing. But at the same time there goes on also a subtler but equally significant movement of group imitation. The white settlers fought the Indians in a way that everybody knew; many have missed the adoption by the whites of maize and tobacco, names of rivers and sites of cities; by the Indians of the horse, the rifle and the religion of the conquerors. Rome conquered Greece in war, and Rome imitated Greece in art and literature. Israel conquered Canaan and imposed the one God, destroying the high places where the earlier inhabitants had worshipped the powers of fertility in nature; but Israel incorporated the harvest festivals of the Canaanites into its own shepherd and nomad ritual. Group imitation takes its place beside group competition in the spread of culture elements about the earth, in the study of foreign languages and literature, in missionary effort, in the adoption of new inventions for warfare or for industry. These are as important and as omnipresent as business competitions or territorial rivalry, far more common than war.
The function of group conflict is to strengthen the separate groups and bring them to recognizable group mind. Loyalty is never so strong as when our group is under fire. War brings millions to an acute sense of national loyalty who have hardly felt they had a nation. The ancient loyalty of the Jew is largely due to the persecutors who constantly reminded him that he had no right to desert his people. There is definite survival value in this, which can easily be connected with the historic and prehistoric process which brought our present groups into being. As Dr. Miller says: [48]“Loyalty and patriotism are merely the emotional side of the group impulse. They measure the identity of the individual with his group.” Royce’s “Philosophy of Loyalty” is one long praise of these virtues of the loyal son of his group. His somewhat exaggerated discussion of the value of the “lost cause” for character development illustrates the overemphasis on group struggle which is typical of all those who long for group solidarity. For group struggle does bring solidarity and loyalty except in the limiting case, where the group is destroyed in the struggle and there is nothing left to which we can be loyal. And that is precisely the case envisaged by Gumplowitz, the case of the stronger group crushing and then absorbing the weaker one.
Dr. Miller has worked out a type of group pathology which attacks both victor and victim of a group struggle. He calls it the “Oppression Psychosis.” Its effects on the victor are found in such rationalizations as the “myth of superiority” and other defense complexes, leading to “cultocracy” or class rule, and finally if unchecked to the stagnation of caste. To quote:
[49]Hundred per cent. patriotism and confidence in Nordic superiority are the two most dangerous ideas in the world today, because they lead in exactly the opposite direction from that which civilization must take if it is to survive. The fundamental objections to these ideas are, first, that they have no basis in fact, and second that the emotions which they organize, have far-reaching and disruptive consequences.
The inferiority complex of the oppressed people has very different and still more disastrous consequences. Dr. Miller points out that what are usually considered Jewish traits may be found also among the Irish, the Poles, and the Negroes, all very different groups but all subject to oppression and therefore presenting a psychological reaction to oppression.
[50]What we have designated as Jewish characteristics are primarily based on the nervous reactions which have resulted from more varieties and longer oppression than those of any other group. The Jew is introspective, analytical, aggressive and conspicuous. The Negro also has many of the same characteristics, though he has not yet developed so many compensatory values, such as religious solidarity and business technique.... The most outstanding result of the oppression psychosis is to create a group solidarity which is far stronger than could have been created by any other means.
And he goes on to show the use of symbols as compensatory mechanism of the oppressed group, and thus to account for the ardent clinging of such groups to their language or religion as the real outlet of their self expression and of their will for resistance.
So far with conflict. Imitation of individuals has attracted much attention, especially through its exhaustive treatment by Gabriel Tarde, but group imitation has passed by with much less notice. However, we may fairly say that group imitation is as universal a by-product of group contact as are rivalry and conflict. The immigrant comes to America, and the result of that transference of a group into a new environment can be expressed in terms of either imitation or conflict, but can be summed up fully only by recognizing both processes at work at once. The children attend public schools, where they learn the English language, the salute to the flag, and some American group customs. The father learns English at his work; the mother copies American fashions in dress and household; both become naturalized citizens—that is what we call Americanization. But at the same time they speak their native tongue in the home, they read a foreign language newspaper, they keep up their correspondence with the relatives back in the Old Country, they belong to a patriotic or revolutionary society with its roots in the homeland. Often they even organize a school that their children may learn the language, religion and other essentials of their earlier group life. So the children often attend two schools, an American one to assimilate them to the group mind of America, a Polish or Russian or Jewish one to keep them in touch with the group mind of their parents’ allegiance. The hatreds of the central European peoples are transferred to America. The political issues between Czarist and Bolshevist, or between Fascismo and Socialism are perpetuated here. Sometimes the contrast between American and alien is emphasized, and takes the place of the old-world conflicts in the center of consciousness.
Conflict strengthens the fighting groups; imitation welds them together into an overgroup. The American process is one of forming a united people, an integrated, self-conscious group mind, out of the many diverse elements which enter this continent. And this goes on by conscious teaching and unconscious imitation, through social, political and economic motives, everywhere except when interrupted by the counter process of oppression and resistance. We speak nowadays of a Greco-Roman civilization, a direct recognition of the part that imitation played in the Roman empire with all its warlike power. We speak of modern European culture, recognizing that European culture is one, with local variations indeed, and that art, science, philosophy and religion are international, for every group imitates every other. The trend of such a tendency can only lead toward an eventual amalgamation, not by abolishing present languages and parliaments, but by the growth of every sort of international and supernational consciousness, beginning with schools of literature or art, and culminating in a World Court or a League of Nations.
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