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

We have found reason to believe that national character, as expressed in the collective mental life of any people, is only to be understood and explained when we take into account the native or racial mental qualities of the people; and we have seen reason to think that these racial qualities were in the main formed in the prehistoric or race-making period; we have noted some of the principal attempts to throw light on the prehistoric moulding of races. But these racial qualities, although very persistent, are not unalterable. We must, therefore, consider whether, and in what ways, the racial mental qualities of a people may have been changed during the nation-making or historic period. What are the factors which determine such changes? What is their influence on the destiny of nations?

The most diverse opinions are still held in regard to the question of the extent and nature of changes of innate mental qualities of peoples during the historic period, the period during which a people, or a branch of a people, attains political unity and becomes a nation.

There is no doubt that the moulding power of physical environment tends to become greatly diminished during this more settled period of the life of a people, and that, in so far as changes take place, they are determined principally by racial substitutions and by social selections within a people, rather than by the mere struggle for survival of individuals or of family groups against the inclemency of nature or against other individuals and groups.

The former of these two modes of change, substitution, has undoubtedly been effected on a large scale, producing in certain instances radical changes in the racial quality of the populations of some countries; that is to say, there has been more or less gradual substitution of one race for another, while the nation as a geographical and political entity, with its language and much of its laws, institutions, and customs, lives on without complete breach of continuity, and the people, although by blood radically changed, continues to regard itself as the same people, accepting as its own the traditions of those predecessors whom they mistakenly regard as their ancestors.

Perhaps the most striking and complete change of this sort in European history was the change of racial character of the Greek people. It is now pretty well established that the Greek population of the classical age was an incomplete blend of two of the three great European stocks, namely Homo Europaeus, the northern, fair, long-headed type of tall stature, and of H. Mediterraneus, the short dark long-headed type of the Mediterranean coast lands. The Pelasgians, who, as we now know, had achieved a civilisation of a type that was widely spread through southern Europe as long as three thousand years or more before our era, seem to have been of this Mediterranean race.

Rather more than a thousand years before our era, the Pelasgian population of Greece and the neighbouring regions began to be overrun and conquered by tribes of the fair Northern race which came in successive invasions, the Thracians, the Hellenes, the Achaeans, the Ionians, and later the Dorians. Just as, at a later period, men of the Northern race established themselves as a military aristocracy over the Celtic peoples of western Europe, so these invading tribes established themselves as a military aristocracy over the populations of Mediterranean race; and, as in the former case, so here, they intermarried largely with the people they conquered and formed an imperfectly blended population, in the upper social strata of which the fair type was predominant, in the lower strata the dark type.

From this happy blending of two races was formed the people which, under the favourable geographical and social conditions of that time and place, evolved the civilisation that culminated after six hundred years in the Athenian culture of the time of Pericles. And then, after a very short time, the whole of that splendid civilisation faded away, and the Greek people sank to a position of slight importance from which it has never again risen. After having displayed in several departments of the intellectual life a power and originality such as have never been approached by any other people, they became a people of very mediocre capacities, devoid of power of origination and purely imitative.

That this profound change in the mental qualities of the population of Greece was due to substitution of one racial stock by an inferior one is beyond question. That a great change of racial type was effected is sufficiently proved by the comparison of the physical type of the modern with that of the ancient Greeks. The modern are predominantly dark and round headed; the ancient were distinctly long headed, as shown by a sufficient number of skull measurements; and they were, as regards the dominant class at least, predominantly fair in colour. It has been supposed that the many references to the fair hair and complexion of heroes and gods were due to fair persons being very rare and hence an object of special admiration; but there is no ground for this. The way in which this racial substitution took place is also pretty clear; and the rapid, almost sudden, decline of the intellectual productivity of the Greek people coincided in time with the racial change.

The first and most important factor in the extermination of the best blood of ancient Greece was military selection. Military group selection in the prehistoric period had, no doubt, played a great part in bringing about the evolution of the superior mental qualities of the European peoples, especially of the fair northern race. So long as the peoples consisted of more or less wandering tribes of pure race, which waged a war of extermination upon one another, the peoples and tribes of superior mental and moral endowments must in the main have survived, while those of inferior endowments went under. But, so soon as the Nordic tribes became settled as aristocracies ruling over the Pelasgian populations, the effects of military selection tended to be reversed; instead of making for racial improvement, they made for deterioration. That racial deterioration occurs under these conditions seems to be an almost general law; it has been exemplified among many different peoples. The many small Greek states were almost perpetually at war with one another; and the result of the warfare was not so much the wholesale extermination of the people of any one state, as the killing off in large numbers of the younger men of the ruling caste, the free citizens of whom the armies were almost entirely composed.