Race prejudice, as we call the sentiments that support the racial taboos, is not, in America at least, an obscure phenomenon. But no one has yet succeeded in making it wholly intelligible. It is evident that there is in race prejudice, as distinguished from class and caste prejudice, an instinctive factor based on the fear of the unfamiliar and the uncomprehended. Color, or any other racial mark that emphasizes physical differences, becomes the symbol of moral divergences which perhaps do not exist. We at once fear and are fascinated by the stranger, and an individual of a different race always seems more of a stranger to us than one of our own. This naïve prejudice, unless it is re-enforced by other factors, is easily modified, as the intimate relations of the Negroes and white man in slavery show.
A more positive factor in racial antagonism is the conflict of cultures: the unwillingness of one race to enter into personal competition with a race of a different or inferior culture. This turns out, in the long run, to be the unwillingness of a people or a class occupying a superior status to compete on equal terms with a people of a lower status. Race conflicts like wars are fundamentally the struggles of racial groups for status. In this sense and from this point of view the struggles of the European nationalities and the so-called "subject peoples" for independence and self-determination are actually struggles for status in the family of nations.
Under the conditions of this struggle, racial or national consciousness as it manifests itself, for example, in Irish nationalism, Jewish Zionism, and Negro race consciousness, is the natural and obvious response to a conflict situation. The nationalistic movements in Europe, in India, and in Egypt are, like war, rivalry and more personal forms of conflict, mainly struggles for recognition—that is, honor, glory, and prestige.
II. MATERIALS
A. CONFLICT AS CONSCIOUS COMPETITION
1. The Natural History of Conflict[206]
All classes of society, and the two sexes to about the same degree, are deeply interested in all forms of contest involving skill and chance, especially where the danger or risk is great. Everybody will stop to watch a street fight, and the same persons would show an equal interest in a prize fight or a bull fight, if certain scruples did not stand in the way of their looking on. Our socially developed sympathy and pity may recoil from witnessing a scene where physical hurt is the object of the game, but the depth of our interest in the conflict type of activity is attested by the fascination which such a game as football has for the masses, where our instinctive emotional reaction to a conflict situation is gratified to an intense degree by a scene of the conflict pattern.
If we examine, in fact, our pleasures and pains, our moments of elation and depression, we find that they go back for the most part to instincts developed in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates. The structure of the organism has been built up gradually through the survival of the most efficient structures. Corresponding with a structure mechanically adapted to successful movements, there is developed on the psychic side an interest in the conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the structure itself. The emotional states are, indeed, organic preparations for action, corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or retreat; and a connection has even been made out between pleasurable states and the extensor muscles, and painful states and the flexor muscles. We can have no adequate idea of the time consumed and the experiments made in nature before the development of these types of structure and interest of the conflict pattern, but we know from the geological records that the time and experiments were long and many, and the competition so sharp that finally, not in man alone, but in all the higher classes of animals, body and mind, structure and interest, were working perfectly in motor actions of the violent type involved in a life of conflict, competition, and rivalry. There could not have been developed an organism depending on offensive and defensive movements for food and life without an interest in what we call a dangerous or precarious situation. A type without this interest would have been defective, and would have dropped out in the course of development.
The fact that our interests and enthusiasms are called out in situations of the conflict type is shown by a glance at the situations which arouse them most readily. War is simply an organized form of fight, and as such is most attractive, or, to say the least, arouses the interests powerfully. With the accumulation of property and the growth of sensibility and intelligence it becomes apparent that war is a wasteful and unsafe process, and public and personal interests lead us to avoid it as much as possible. But, however genuinely war may be deprecated, it is certainly an exciting game. The Rough Riders in this country recently, and more recently the young men of the aristocracy of England, went to war from motives of patriotism, no doubt, but there are unmistakable evidences that they also regarded it as the greatest sport they were likely to have a chance at in a lifetime. And there is evidence in plenty that the emotional attitude of women toward war is no less intense. Grey relates that half a dozen old women among the Australians will drive the men to war with a neighboring tribe over a fancied injury. The Jewish maidens went out with music and dancing and sang that Saul had slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands. The young women of Havana are alleged, during the late Spanish War, to have sent pieces of their wardrobe to young men of their acquaintance who hesitated to join the rebellion, with the suggestion that they wear these until they went to the war.
The feud is another mode of reaction of the violent, instinctive, and attractive type. The feud was originally of defensive value to the individual and to the tribe, since in the absence of criminal law the feeling that retaliation would follow was a deterrent from acts of aggression. But it was an expensive method of obtaining order in early society, since response to stimulus reinstated the stimulus, and every death called for another death; so, finally, after many experiments and devices, the state has forbidden the individual to take justice into his own hands. In out-of-the-way places, however, where governmental control is weak, men still settle their disputes personally, and one who is familiar with the course of a feud cannot avoid the conclusion that this practice is kept up, not because there is no law to resort to, but because the older mode is more immediate and fascinating. I mean simply that the emotional possibilities and actual emotional reactions in the feud are far more powerful than in due legal process.