[126]This conception which identifies the Jewish people with its cultural and spiritual aspirations comes very close to the view that nationality is essentially a psychological force. [127]The “Community” theory would make the history of the ethnic group, its aesthetic, cultural and religious inheritance, its national self-consciousness the basic factor. [128]The “Community” theory endeavors to meet all the justifiable considerations presented in each of the other proposals. It seeks especially to avoid such a scheme of adjustment as would tend to force the individual to accept one solution as against another. It leaves all the forces working; they are to decide what the future is to be.
Professor Dewey put the matter similarly:
[129]The way to deal with hyphenism is to welcome it, but to welcome it with the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so that it shall surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience what it especially has to contribute. All of these surrenders and contributions taken together create the national spirit of America. The dangerous thing is for each factor to isolate itself, to try to live off its past, and then to attempt to impose itself upon other elements, or at least, to keep itself intact and thus refuse to accept what other cultures have to offer, so as thereby to be transmuted into authentic Americanism.
Dr. Drachsler represents the same point of view:
[130]To hope for a rich, composite civilization in America through biological fusion merely is to chase a will-o’-the-wisp. Nothing short of conscious social control of the transmission of the cultural heritage will achieve the result. [131]The function of the cultural groups would be to foster through voluntary cultural community organization their cultural uniqueness, while the function of the State would embrace the harmonization of these cultural differences, the unification of distinctive contributions into a rich and variegated whole. [132]America with her unique experience of multiform contacts of races and peoples is in a position to invest the concept of democracy with a broader and richer meaning than any nation has done thus far. She can, if she will, develop the principle of tolerance as no people has yet dared to do. She can, if she will, encourage the search for the unique and the distinctive in social life, side by side with a strong emphasis on the basic human interests.
But, many will say, does this theory erect conflicting loyalties? Can they be reconciled? The answer to this is in terms of proportional loyalties. I quote Professor Miller’s summary:
[133]The real problem of society is the living together of individuals and groups in such a way that both the individual and the group can attain the highest degree of self-realization. [134]One of the greatest obstacles to truth and progress is the preaching of one hundred per cent. Americanism.... Reality demands that we begin to advocate ten to twenty-five per cent. patriotism. This proportion will account for the peculiarly provincial values that our particular fatherland has contributed to our development.... The seventy-five to ninety per cent. of loyalty that is left belongs to values in our lives that are international rather than national.
Among these international values he finds the religious, economic and cultural ones, all of which transcend the nation, either by being wider or narrower, belonging to a sub-group or to humanity.
4.
This integration of groups need not stop at the nation as at present constituted, as is hinted in the last citation. The nation is itself an integration of groups, and can enter into other integrations, which include it or which cross it with different lines of interest and of grouping. In the words of U. G. Weatherly: