The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

Having seen the importance for national life of the idea of the nation, the diffusion of which through the minds of the people constitutes national self-consciousness, let us glance for a moment at the way other ideas may play leading rôles in national life. Such are ideas which became national ideals, that is to say, ideas of some end to be realised by the nation which became widely entertained and the objects of strong sentiments and of collective emotion and desire and which, therefore, determine collective action.

I shall not attempt to deal separately with various classes of such ideas, or ideals—the political, the religious, the economic; but shall only note the fact that they have played and may yet play great parts in the history of the world.

Men are not swayed exclusively by considerations of material self-interest, as the older school of economists generally assumed; nor even by spiritual self-interest, as too much of the religious teaching of the past has assumed; nor even by consideration of the welfare of the social groups of which they are members. Many of the great events of history have been determined by ideas that have had no relation to individual welfare, but have inspired a collective enthusiasm for collective action, for national effort, of a disinterested kind; and the lives of some nations have been dominated by some one or two such ideas. These ideas are first conceived and taught by some great man, or by a few men who have acquired prestige and influence; they then become generally accepted by suggestion and imitation, accepted more or less uncritically and established beyond the reach of argument and reasoning.

No matter what the character of the idea, its collective acceptance by a people enhances for the time the homogeneity of mind among them, renders the people more intimately a unity, and serves also to mark it off more sharply from other peoples among whom other ideas prevail.

But, besides thus binding together at any period of its history the people that entertains it the generally accepted idea, if it endures, may produce further effects by becoming incorporated in the national organisation; in so far as it determines the form of activity of the people, it moulds their institutions and customs into harmony with itself, until they become in some measure its embodiment and expression; and in any vigorous nation there are usually one or two dominant ideas at work in this way.

It is a favourite dogma with some writers (for example M. le Bon) that ideas, before they can exert great effects in the life of a nation, must first become unconscious ideas, incorporated as they say in the unconscious soul of a people. This is an obscure confused doctrine, which, if it is meant to be taken literally, we can only reject. If it is to have any real meaning, it must be taken in the sense that the long prevalence of the ideal moulds the institutions and customs and the executive organisation of a people, so that national action towards the ideal end becomes more or less automatic or routine.

If the ideal so accepted and incorporated in the organised structure of the national mind, is one that makes for strength and at the same time permits of progress, it lives on; in other cases it may destroy the nation, or petrify it, arresting all progress.

Consider one or two examples of ideas that have played dominant rôles in the lives of nations. They are mostly political, or religious, or, most powerful of all, politico-religious. The idea of world-conquest has dominated and has destroyed several great nations, of which the latest example is the German Empire. The idea of conversion by the sword, accepted with enthusiasm by the Arab nation, gave it for a time tremendous energy, but contained no potency of permanent power or of progress. The idea of immortality, or desire of continued existence after death, seems to have dominated the minds of the ancient Egyptian people; the idea of escape from the evils of this world, those who have fully accepted Buddhism, like the Burmans[98]. The idea of caste as an eternal and impassable barrier has largely determined the history of India.

All these are ideas which have proved ineffective to sustain national vigour or to promote social evolution. It would not be strictly true to say that the fall, or the unprogressive condition, of the peoples that have entertained these ideas is the result of those ideas; because the general acceptance of them proves that they were in harmony with the type of mind of the people. Yet the formulation of the ideas by the leading minds who impressed them on the peoples must have accentuated those tendencies with which they harmonised; and in each case, if the idea had never been formulated, or if others had been effectively impressed on the mind of the people, the course of its history would have been changed. Of ideas less adverse to national life take the idea of ancestor worship, and the idea of personal loyalty to the ruler, ideas which commonly go together and have played an immense part in the life of some peoples, notably in Japan; they have served as effective national bonds in periods of transition through which despotically ruled populations have progressed to true nationhood. The idea of the divine right of kings played for a time a similar rôle in Europe.