Anti-Semitism in the United States

by Lee J. Levinger

The causes of intolerance rest, not in what men say but in what they do. The reasons alleged for dislike or suspicion of the Jew are valuable merely for showing a state of mind in the anti-Semite himself, not for revealing the actual reasons for his attitude. For that reason I shall disregard these reasons very largely in searching for the causes of anti-Semitism in America. Instead, I shall turn to the field of social study to find out how groups of men act toward one another, and why and under what circumstances intolerance is one of their by-products. I shall apply to the phenomena of group life the method of behaviorism, now being adopted by sociology from its original field of psychology, in such definitions as that of E. C. Lindeman:[3] “Sociology is the science of collective behavior.”

1.

The prevailing view of students of society seems now to be that society is a natural phenomenon on the mental plane. Human society is not now regarded, as by Buckle, as a reflection of environment, even though the importance of physical background and racial constitution must be recognized. As Charles A. Ellwood says,[4] “Society is a group of psychically interacting individuals.” “The essential element in the social process is the psychical element.”[5] That is to say, mental material—instincts, emotions, feeling, and ideas—are the plane on which groups of individuals combine into social structures, operate in social functions, develop to social progress. Relations between individuals (except for the limited biological function) are mental relations, carried on through physical media such as postures, speech and writing.

These mental interactions of human beings are not an artificial construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or any other method. William MacDougall is almost alone in holding that the social sentiments are derived from the self-regarding ones through the operation of the tender emotion and the parental instinct. Hobhouse says:[6] “The conception of a primitive egoism on which sociality is somehow overlaid is without foundation in either biology or psychology.” John Dewey puts this view most forcibly:

[7]The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual man, is already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social inheritance and references.... Education, language, and other means of communication are infinitely more important categories of knowledge than any of those exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the methodological battle of instrumentalism is won ... the two services that will stand to the credit of instrumentalism will be calling attention first to the connection of intelligence with a genuine future, and second, to the social constitution of personal, even of private experience, above all of any experience that has assumed the knowledge form.

And Ellwood adds—expressing here the general opinion of both sociologists and modern social philosophers—“All human consciousness is socially conditioned.... This is as true of the racially inherited aspects of consciousness—the feeling-instincts—as it is of the acquired traits.” Man is a social animal and his sociality is one of the few unescapable things about him. He is born in some kind of a social group; he gets the most of his ideas from his association with others; his whole development is a give-and-take in which the take is from the first, and often remains, the greater element.

But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one explanation of it. We do not need to accept the “consciousness of kind” of Giddings, the “herd instinct” of Trotter, or the “imitation” of Tarde,—in fact, we may very well consider that there is no one principle to explain so universal and complex a phenomenon; that these terms and others like them are in no sense explanations, but merely different words for the same fact, that man is a naturally gregarious or social being. We may rather turn to the more generalized modes of expressing this conception, the group mind or general will, as developed by Durkheim, Wundt and in our day by Baldwin, MacDougall, and others.

2.

Before attacking this problem directly, I must clear away several misconceptions of the “group mind,” which I cannot accept as a part of this theory. First, this thesis need not exclude the operation of physical and biological forces on social groups, any more than it excludes their operation on any individual, who is also a psychological unit. Society may well be a unit, just as the individual is, in a world of varying forces—climate, birth rates, and the like. Second, a theory of group mind may be empirical, and need not necessarily rest on an idealistic conception of the Volksgeist. By adopting the historical method, rather than the statistical, relying on values to indicate our problem rather than trying to express it in terms of natural science, we shall find ourselves treating the theory of the group in a realistic and empirical way, eschewing the dogmatism of applying a priori principles to human material, and the equal fallacy of considering minds in the same terms as chemical elements.[8]

Third, a modern social psychology need not be a literal transcription of Durkheim or Wundt, relying on an antiquated psychology for its analogies and its basic conceptions. A theory of group mind today must recognize that personality is not always a unity, that it is never a complete unity; the vast field of the unconscious in mental life has just been opened to view. Both of these conceptions apply to the mental life of men in great masses as truly as when alone. Neither the individual nor the group is something hard, fixed and static; neither can be summed up as a group of faculties or a system of ideas. Both individual and group must be conceived in process, to take the words of Lindemann,[9] as “the total equipment with which man responds to his environment, all that enters into behavior from the side of human nature.”