2.
The study of intolerance takes us at once out of the field of individual psychology into the newer and less cultivated field of social psychology, the mind of the group. For intolerance is characteristically an attribute of groups. Intolerance is the white against the black; the Christian against the Jew, the Frenchman against the German—always one group lined up against another. Intolerance nestles in the individual mind simply because every individual of us is a member of a nation, a religion, a race, and has the typical prejudices of his own people. I may think myself better than you, but that is merely egotism. If I think my family better than your family and refuse to associate with you, that becomes intolerance. And if I join an organization of people with similar opinions to my own, and we decide to keep you and all your kind from doing business or holding public office or otherwise prospering and succeeding in a country which we both inhabit, then intolerance has attained its growth and come to flower. Always one body of people against another, animated by prejudice, and the reasons do not matter. For prejudice, literally, means prejudgment, opinion before the facts come in, and the facts are then selected to give us reasons for our attitude.
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. The foreign language always is gibberish to us, not because it is inferior, but simply because we do not understand it. The uneducated man always looks on a foreigner as somehow an imbecile, because he cannot understand a simple, natural tongue like English! The ancient Greeks spoke of such old, magnificent civilizations as those of Egypt and Persia as barbarians, even though Greece was their pupil in every art from war to letters. The Mohammedan calls others unbelievers, even though they may be fire-worshippers, or Buddhists, or Christians; these people are not unbelievers, but merely different-believers. And the Christian calls the Mohammedan, in turn, infidel, which means the same thing. In the Merchant of Venice, the Jew is referred to as a pagan, which is exactly the thing which the Jew is not historically, for Christianity represents a combination of Jewish and pagan elements. No matter—everyone thinks that his people are right and other peoples wrong. “My country, right or wrong,” represents a concession to modernism, blatant as it is. The universal feeling has always been, up to the threshold of our own age, “My own country, or tribe, or people, is always right.”
Intolerance, then, is not based on reasons, whether good or bad. It grows out of the nature of groups of people. It means merely that the other fellow is different, not at all that he is wrong. Everett Dean Martin points out in his studies of the crowd that the crowd is always dogmatic and egocentric. 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. At that point the scientist seems to be animated by a very unscientific intolerance. When a student of society points out ways in which the Chinese culture is worthy of our imitation, then I will feel that he is truly scientific and not at all prejudiced. For who says that our occidental culture is superior to the Chinese? We say so. Who says the Chinese is superior? The Chinese do, of course. But they are prejudiced? Certainly, and so are we! The most that can be said with certainty is that the two cultures are different, and these differences can then be studied in detail.
Prejudice is often racial because people of different appearances stand out clearly as very different from us indeed. But they need not be inferior. The current prejudice against the Negro says that he is lazy, unintelligent, immoral—but the same intolerance operates against the many members of the colored race who are more diligent, more intelligent, and quite as moral as the average white. In all these characteristics the races overlap; the most that can be said statistically is that the whites have the larger percentage of the higher intellectual persons. Unfortunately, much of that may be due to training rather than to heredity, for in the army tests the northern negroes actually averaged higher than the southern whites. 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.
But weighty reasons of racial character are quite unnecessary in establishing prejudice. Probably no two peoples in Europe are more closely related in race than the Germans and the English. A hundred years ago or more they were closest allies against Napoleon; during the World War, when political and economic conditions ranged them on opposite sides, each tried to show that it was a superior race, with no connection at all with the other, so far beneath it. Religious prejudice may be based on genuine differences, as between Jew and Christian, or on comparatively trivial matters as between Methodists and Baptists. The shifting nature of these prejudices and their purely personal application appears distinctly in the latest slogan of intolerance—“White, Protestant, Gentile, American.” All others, not conforming to this criterion, cannot be one hundred per centers. This excludes the Negro, as well as the Indian, who is certainly American but is not white. It eliminates the Jew, who is not a gentile; and the Catholic who is not a Protestant. And it excludes a white Protestant gentile of English or German birth, who may be everything else but is not American-born. Obviously, there is no logic in this, for classes are excluded for exactly opposite reasons. There is nothing in it except the one fact which always animates every kind of intolerance—the fact of difference.
Walter Lippman in his “Public Opinion” presents a point which no discussion of prejudice can ignore—[55]“that the way we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find.” He works out the process of the “mental stereotype,” by which we have a preconception of the labor agitator, the alien, the Harvard man, and see the individual always in the light of the group to which we may attribute him. [56]“One factor, the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response.” [57]“The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”
[58]On some natures, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green.... If the experience contradicts the stereotype, one of two things happens. If the man is no longer plastic, or if some powerful interest makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes, he pooh-poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves the rule, discredits the witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to forget it. But if he still is curious and openminded, the novelty is taken into the picture and allowed to modify it.
Thus acquaintance of one group with another is not enough in itself to break down prejudice, for the white man may see the Negro, or the Christian the Jew, not as the other really is but as he thinks the other group ought to be. Only escape from group thinking, the use of the individual intelligence about an individual, can possibly make any difference in our pre-conceived notions of other peoples.
Moreover it is true, as Professor Shailer of Harvard pointed out long ago in his book, “The Neighbor,” that this fact of difference operates most strongly when the two different groups come into contact with each other. Prejudice is always strongest on the frontier. The Nebraskan does not have the active prejudice against Mexico that animates the Texan, nor against Japan that we find in California, nor against the Negro as in the solid south. Not that Nebraska is a land favored peculiarly by justice, but that it has no direct contact with large numbers of these different races. Naturally, this contact often opens the way to real acquaintance, before which intolerance grows faint and may even vanish. American soldiers in the occupied districts of Germany brought enough German brides to show how quickly prejudice breaks down on personal acquaintance. Christian scholars of the time of Humanism learned Hebrew from Jews whom their medieval predecessors would have avoided as the plague, and a new respect for Judaism began to spread. But as long as the contact of the two peoples is a frontier contact only, a group contact, of class with class, directed by their different status in the world, such contact merely ministers to the intolerance which individual knowledge and friendship would break down.