And our answer may be similar to his. Kant turned to the test case. We know we have morality, said he, when duty and pleasure are opposed, and the man obeys the voice of duty. Similarly, we can say: we know that we have group mind and purpose when the pleasure of the individual is opposed to the will of the group, and the individual gives up his purpose for that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier or the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor, then we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is acting only as a member of the greater whole. Lindeman, whose study is based on observation of farmers’ co-operative societies, presents a contrary view:
[26]It was formerly asserted that the chief significance of a group consisted in the fact that the individuals comprising it had sacrificed certain individual prerogatives, rights, privileges, etc., in order to achieve the larger collective end. But it could not be discovered that the farmers who became members of the co-operative associations had done anything of the sort. On the contrary, they were chiefly interested in enhancing their own individual interests; they desired a larger income from the sale of their products and the co-operative movement promised exactly this.
If this were true, these associations would constitute merely a set of books, not a group of persons. But we see further on in the same book that the co-operative associations demanded loyalty even at the cost of whim or momentary interest; they enforced their contracts with the farmer by which he agreed to sell only through the association. If he got tired of waiting for his money, or if a dealer placed a financial premium on disloyalty, still he was expected to be loyal to the group. Finally, the group had to take cognizance of other aspects of the human life of its members besides the sale of their cotton or tobacco; it built up personal and social groupings for the entire family; it became a truly unified group mind, through the slow process of integration of individuals and of local groups, resting on a basis of personal friendship. Thus, even in an interest group, a true group mind is developed through participation and sacrifice.
4.
We are now ready to define group mind in the sense in which it will be understood in this essay. A group mind is the common purpose of two or more persons, which they accept as their own purpose. The mode of this acceptance or identification is in behavior, which includes the reasons given by the individuals—their rationalizations—as well as their overt acts. The test of this in any particular case is the test of sacrifice, whether the man acts as a self-preserving being, an individual pacifist, or as a citizen and soldier, a member of a group at war; whether the church member acts as an individual thinker, or subordinates his judgment to the interpretation and the practice of the church; whether the son acts as a loyal son, a member of the family, to his own hurt, or goes off to marry against his parents’ will, leaving them perhaps to suffer want. I have purposely taken examples where opinion may be divided, as it is not my purpose to attach moral right or wrong to either group loyalty or individual freedom; either may be right under given circumstances, or judged by certain standards.
The group mind may be conscious, as a deliberative assembly; or instinctive and unconscious, as the racial group or the partly hypnotized mob. The ancient Israelite identified himself with his people; he did not even expect personal immortality, but desired sons to carry on his name so that his family and his people might be immortal. Parents are willing sacrifices for their children, but sacrifices nevertheless. The patriot volunteers for dangerous duty consciously, or leaps over the parapet in the blind enthusiasm of a charge; whether conscious or unconscious of the meaning of his act, he acts as a soldier, not a self-seeking person. The varieties of the group mind are almost innumerable. The group mind may be as instinctive and unorganized as a religious revival, as natural as a nation with its bonds of language, land, custom and government, as artificial as a military company without even a name, with only a number, and yet with a definite morale, a tradition, a personality of its own. The theater audience has a group mind, while the restaurant crowd has not; for it is an axiom in the theater that each audience has a character of its own, that only a full house really abandons itself at a comedy, while even a smaller crowd may be carried away by a tragedy, and so on; the individual abandons his own judgment and his inhibitions at least in part, to react to the performance as a member of the group.
According to this definition, the individual also may have a group mind, as his diverse purposes are summed up in one supreme purpose, or as he has inner conflicts, the far-sighted against the narrow view, the better ideal against the worse. The reasons or motives which animate the various members of a group mind need not always be the same; they may range from deliberate choice to compulsion by public opinion or the blind following of herd instinct, the desire to “run with the crowd,” to “be on the band wagon.” There is always a margin of unassimilated purpose in either the individual or the group; neither mind ever quite attains perfect unity. Durkheim makes the pregnant suggestion, (not without its critics, it is true,) that the most unified mind was that of the primitive horde, where unity was achieved by identity; while developed societies achieve unity through organization and division of function, thus including the most diverse elements in a genuine unity of co-operation and purpose.
The group mind, then, is an empirical fact, which can be perceived in many practical ways. The intellectual content, the emotional coloring, group habits which we call custom, group ideas which we call tradition, group organization by which a consensus of opinion is ascertained for the purpose of unified action—all are characteristics of the group mind, just as the parallel factors of ideas, emotion, and will are the phases into which we analyze the mind of the individual. There is a difference in every one of these factors between the group mind of America and of China, between that of ancient Greece and of medieval Italy. And the difference lies not only in factors such as language, religion and history, which are constitutive to the group, but external to the individual. It lies also in subtler matters of opinion, of emotions, which seem to be within the individual and yet must be absorbed from the environment, because they differ so strikingly from group to group. I shall go carefully into the reasons further on which impel me to consider that the Jewish people possess a group mind, even though they have no common government, language or land, and have even many divisions on questions of faith and religious practice. Here it is sufficient to note that the Jewish people act as one under attack; that a pogrom in Russia arouses the very different Jews of France, England and America to a feeling of unity and acts of relief and of defense. Labor and capital are becoming “class conscious” in opposition to each other; that is, group minds are in process of formation. The group mind appears in the behavior of the group through its constituent individuals, whether the group be a static one, dominated by the fixed habits of custom, or a dynamic one, with a great wave of progress; for behavior includes both custom and progress.
One more point comes properly under the definition of the group mind—the wide-spread conception of a general will, or more precisely a common will. According to the viewpoint of this study, the general will is no mystical entity, overpowering the wills of the individuals; nor is it an arithmetical average, in which personal opinions cancel each other out. Neither of these theories covers a willing mind. The group will is a resultant, not an average; one element in it is tradition, another is leadership, a third is the interaction of the various sub-groups. In the final result, the negative element is often actually erased, the wavering members accept the winning opinion as a whole, and the consequent group action is a unity, almost a unanimity of response. After war is declared the peace party practically disappears. In less clear-cut issues, we see the workings of compromise, which again appears in the behavior of the group as a whole.
Group consciousness exists when the individuals identify themselves with the group, not merely accepting its purpose but losing their own purposes in it. Consciousness implies also intelligence, as it does in the individual; it may co-exist with a high emotional tone but must have a rational element as well. MacDougall utters a view in consonance with that held here when he says: