Chapter IX: Conflict (2)

From this point of view we may see in war the preliminary process of rejuvenescence. International adjustments and compromises are made until they can be made no longer; a condition is brought about which in Europe has been termed the balance of power, until the situation becomes so complicated that each new adjustment has such wide ramifications that it threatens the whole structure. Finally, as the result of the accumulated structure of diplomatic relations and precedents, a situation arises to which adjustment, with the machinery that has been developed, is impossible and the whole house of cards collapses. The collapse is a process of dedifferentiation during which the old structures are destroyed, precedents are disavowed, new situations occur with bewildering rapidity, for dealing with which there is no recognized machinery available. Society reverts from a state in which a high grade of individual initiative and development was possible to a relatively communistic and paternalistic state, the slate is wiped clear, and a start can be made anew along lines of progress mapped out by the new conditions--rejuvenescence is possible.

War, from this point of view, is a precondition for development along new lines of necessity, and the dedifferentiation is the first stage of a constructive process. Old institutions have to be torn down before the bricks with which they were built can be made available for new structures. This accounts for the periodicity of war, which thus is the outward and evident aspect of the progress of the life-force which in human societies, as elsewhere, advances in cycles. It is only by such means that an _impasse_ can be overcome.

War is an example of ambivalency on the grandest scale. That is, it is at once potent for the greatest good and the greatest evil: in the very midst of death it calls for the most intense living; in the face of the greatest renunciation it offers the greatest premium; for the maximum of freedom it demands the utmost giving of one's self; in order to live at one's best it demands the giving of life itself. "No man has reached his ethical majority who would not die if the real interests of the community could thus be furthered. What would the world be without the values that have been bought at the price of death?" In this sense the great creative force, love, and the supreme negation, death, become one. That the larger life of the race should go forward to greater things, the smaller life of the individual must perish. In order that man shall be born again, he must first die.

Does all this necessarily mean that war, from time to time, in the process of readjustment, is essential? I think no one can doubt that it has been necessary in the past. Whether it will be in the future depends upon whether some sublimated form of procedure can adequately be substituted. We have succeeded to a large extent in dealing with our combative instincts by developing sports and the competition of business, and we have largely sublimated our hate instinct in dealing with various forms of anti-social conduct as exhibited in the so-called "criminal." It remains to be seen whether nations can unite to a similar end and perhaps, by the establishment of an international court, and by other means, deal in a similar way with infractions of international law.

2. War as a Form of Relaxation[210]

The fact is that it does not take a very careful reader of the human mind to see that all the utopias and all the socialistic schemes are based on a mistaken notion of the nature of this mind.

It is by no means sure that what man wants is peace and quiet and tranquillity. That is too close to ennui, which is his greatest dread. What man wants is not peace but a battle. He must pit his force against someone or something. Every language is most rich in synonyms for battle, war, contest, conflict, quarrel, combat, fight. German children play all day long with their toy soldiers. Our sports take the form of contests in football, baseball, and hundreds of others. Prize fights, dog fights, cock fights, have pleased in all ages. When Rome for a season was not engaged in real war, Claudius staged a sea fight for the delectation of an immense concourse, in which 19,000 gladiators were compelled to take a tragic part, so that the ships were broken to pieces and the waters of the lake were red with blood.

You may perhaps recall Professor James's astonishing picture of his visit to a Chautauqua. Here he found modern culture at its best, no poverty, no drunkenness, no zymotic diseases, no crime, no police, only polite and refined and harmless people. Here was a middle-class paradise, kindergarten and model schools, lectures and classes and music, bicycling and swimming, and culture and kindness and elysian peace. But at the end of a week he came out into the real world, and he said:

Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage,
even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the
balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture
too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human
drama, without a villain or a pang; this community so refined
that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to
the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid
lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things--I
cannot abide with them.

What men want, he says, is something more precipitous, something with more zest in it, with more adventure. Nearly all the Utopias paint the life of the future as a kind of giant Chautauqua, in which every man and woman is at work, all are well fed, satisfied, and cultivated. But as man is now constituted he would probably find such a life flat, stale, and unprofitable.

Man is not originally a working animal. Civilization has imposed work upon man, and if you work him too hard he will quit work and go to war. Nietzsche says man wants two things--danger and play. War represents danger.

It follows that all our social utopias are wrongly conceived. They are all based on a theory of pleasure economy. But history and evolution show that man has come up from the lower animals through a pain economy. He has struggled up--fought his way up through never-ceasing pain and effort and struggle and battle. The utopias picture a society in which man has ceased to struggle. He works his eight hours a day--everybody works--and he sleeps and enjoys himself the other hours. But man is not a working animal, he is a fighting animal. The utopias are ideal--but they are not psychological. The citizens for such an ideal social order are lacking. Human beings will not serve.

Our present society tends more and more in its outward form in time of peace toward the Chautauqua plan, but meanwhile striving and passion burn in the brain of the human units, till the time comes when they find this insipid life unendurable. They resort to amusement crazes, to narcotic drugs, to political strife, to epidemics of crime, and finally to war. The alcohol question well illustrates the tendencies we are pointing out. Science and hygiene have at last shown beyond all question that alcohol, whether in large or smaller doses, exerts a damaging effect upon both mind and body. It lessens physical and mental efficiency, shortens life, and encourages social disorder. In spite of this fact and, what is still more amazing, in spite of the colossal effort now being put forth to suppress by legislative means the traffic in liquor, the per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States increases from year to year. From a per capita consumption of four gallons in 1850, it has steadily risen to nearly twenty-five gallons in 1913.

Narcotic drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco, relieve in an artificial way the tension upon the brain by slightly paralyzing temporarily the higher and more recently developed brain centers. The increase in the use of these drugs is therefore both an index of the tension of modern life and at the same time a means of relieving it to some extent. Were the use of these drugs suddenly checked, no student of psychology or of history could doubt that there would be an immediate increase of social irritability, tending to social instability and social upheavals.

Psychology, therefore, forces upon us this conclusion. Neither war nor alcohol can be banished from the world by summary means nor direct suppressions. The mind of man must be made over. As the mind of man is constituted, he will never be content to be a mere laborer, a producer and a consumer. He loves adventure, self-sacrifice, heroism, relaxation.

These things must somehow be provided. And then there must be a system of education of our young differing widely from our present system. The new education will not look to efficiency merely and ever more efficiency, but to the production of a harmonized and balanced personality. We must cease our worship of American efficiency and German _Streberthum_ and go back to Aristotle and his teaching of "the mean."

3. The Fighting Animal and the Great Society[211]

We must agree that man as he has existed, so far as we can read the story of his development, has been, and as he exists today still is, a fighting animal--that is to say that he has in the past answered, and still answers, certain stimuli by the immediate reactions which constitute fighting.

We find evidence of the existence of this fighting instinct in the ordinary men around us. Remove but for a moment the restraints given in our civilized lands and this tendency is likely to become prominent upon the slightest stimulation. We see this exemplified in the lives of the pioneer and adventurer the world over: in that of the cowboy of the far West, in that of the rubber collector on the Amazon, in that of the ivory trader on the Congo.

Then, too, the prize fighter is still a prominent person in our community, taken as a whole, and even in our sports, as engaged in by "gentlemen amateurs," we find it necessary to make rigid rules to prevent the friendly contest from developing into a fierce struggle for individual physical dominance.

But man gained his pre-eminent position among the animals mainly through his ability to form co-operative groups working to common ends; and long before the times of which anthropological research give us any clear knowledge, man had turned his individualistic fighting instincts to the service of his group or clan. That is to say, he had become a warrior, giving his best strength to co-operative aggression in behalf of satisfactions that could not be won by him as an individual acting for himself.

Our earlier studies have taught us also that if man's instinctive tendencies could in any manner be inhibited or modified, so that he came to display other characteristics than those observed in the present expression of these inborn instincts, then the law of his nature would in that very fact be changed. We are thus led to ask whether the biologist finds evidence that an animal's instincts can be thus changed in mode of expression.

The biologist speaks to us somewhat as follows. Although new racial characteristics have very rarely, if ever, been gained by the obliteration of instincts, changes in racial characteristics have not infrequently occurred as the result of the control, rather than the loss, of these inherited instincts.

This control may become effective in either one of two ways: first, by the thwarting or inhibition of the expression of the instincts; or secondly, by the turning of its expression to other uses than that which originally resulted in its fixation.

As an example of the thwarting of the expression of an instinct we may take the functioning of the sexual instinct, which, as we see it in animals in general, has been inhibited in the human animal by the habits acquired by man as he has risen in the scale.

This mode of change--that of the mere chaining of the instinctive tendency--is subject to one great difficulty. The chain may by chance be broken; the inhibition may be removed; then the natural instinctive tendency at once shows itself. Remove the restraints of civilized society but a little, and manifestations of the sexual instinct of our race appear in forms that are not far removed from those observed in the animal. Place a man under conditions of starvation and he shows himself as greedy as the dog.

The second mode of change--that of the transference of functioning of the instincts into new channels--meets this special difficulty, for it does not depend upon the chaining of the instinct. It actually makes use of the instinct. And the more important to the race the newer reference of the instinct's functioning turns out to be, the more certain is it to replace the original reference. If the new mode of functioning brings marked advantage that is lost by reversion to the earlier manifestation of the instinct, so that such a reversion to this earlier manifestation is a detriment to the race, then the change is likely to become a permanent one.

No better example of this second mode of change of an instinct's functioning can be found than in the very existence of war itself. The basic instinct is one that led the savage man to fight to protect himself or to gain something for himself by aggressive attack. War has come into being as the result of a transfer of the functioning of this instinct, which at first had only an individualistic reference, so that it has come to have a clan or national reference. The early man found he could not have success as an individual unless he joined with his fellow-men in defense and aggression; and that meant war.

And note that this transfer of reference of the expression of this fighting instinct soon became so important to the race that reversion to its primal individualistic reference had to be inhibited. Aggressive attack by an individual upon another of his own clan or nation necessarily tended to weaken the social unit and to reduce its strength in its protective and aggressive wars; and thus such attacks by individuals came to be discountenanced and finally in large measure repressed.

Here, it will be observed, the fighting instinct of the individual has not been obliterated; it has not even been bound with chains; but its modes of expression have been altered to have racial significance, and to have so great a significance in this new relation that reversion to its primary form of expression has become a serious obstacle to racial advance.

So it appears after all that, although instincts can rarely if ever be obliterated, their manifestations may be so altered as to give the animal quite new characteristics. And this means that if the characteristics which we describe as the expressions of man's fighting instincts could be so changed that these expressions were inhibited or turned into quite new channels, the man would no longer be describable as a fighting animal.

The first indication in our conscious life of any tendency to inhibit or modify the functioning of any instinct or habit must appear in the form of a dislike of, a revulsion from, the resultants of this functioning; and in the creation of an ideal of functioning that shall avoid the discomforts attendant upon this revulsion. And when such an ideal has once been gained, it is possible, as we have seen, that the characteristics of nature may be changed by our creative efficiency through the devising of means looking to the realization of the ideal.

We have the clearest evidence that this process is developing in connection with these special instincts that make for war; for we men and women in these later times are repelled by the results of the functioning of these fighting instincts, and we have created the ideal of peace, the conception of a condition that is not now realized in nature, but which we think of as possible of realization.

But the very existence of an ideal is indicative of a tendency, on the part of the man who entertains it, to modify his characteristic activities. Thus it appears that we have in the very existence of this ideal of peace the evidence that we may look for a change in man's nature, the result of which will be that we shall no longer be warranted in describing him as a fighting animal.

C. RIVALRY, CULTURAL CONFLICTS, AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

1. Animal Rivalry[212]

Among mammals the instinct of one and all is to lord it over the others, with the result that the one more powerful or domineering gets the mastery, to keep it thereafter as long as he can. The lower animals are, in this respect, very much like us; and in all kinds that are at all fierce-tempered the mastery of one over all, and of a few under him over the others, is most salutary; indeed, it is inconceivable that they should be able to exist together under any other system.

On cattle-breeding establishments on the pampas, where it is usual to keep a large number of fierce-tempered dogs, I have observed these animals a great deal and presume they are much like feral dogs and wolves in their habits. Their quarrels are incessant; but when a fight begins, the head of the pack as a rule rushes to the spot, whereupon the fighters separate and march off in different directions or else cast themselves down and deprecate their tyrant's wrath with abject gestures and whines. If the combatants are both strong and have worked themselves into a mad rage before their head puts in an appearance, it may go hard with him; they know him no longer and all he can do is to join in the fray; then if the fighters turn on him he may be so injured that his power is gone and the next best dog in the pack takes his place. The hottest contests are always between dogs that are well matched; neither will give place to the other and so they fight it out; but from the foremost in power down to the weakest there is a gradation of authority; each one knows just how far he can go, which companion he can bully when he is in a bad temper or wishes to assert himself, and to which he must humbly yield in his turn. In such a state the weakest one must yield to all the others and cast himself down, seeming to call himself a slave and worshiper of any other member of the pack that chances to snarl at him or command him to give up his bone with good grace.

This masterful or domineering temper, so common among social mammals, is the cause of the persecution of the sick and weakly. When an animal begins to ail he can no longer hold his own; he ceases to resent the occasional ill-natured attacks made on him; his non-combative condition is quickly discovered, and he at once drops down to a place below the lowest; it is common knowledge in the herd that he may be buffeted with impunity by all, even by those that have hitherto suffered buffets but have given none. But judging from my own observation, this persecution is not, as a rule, severe, and is seldom fatal.

2. The Rivalry of Social Groups[213]

Conflict, competition, and rivalry are the chief causes which force human beings into groups and largely determine what goes on within them. Conflicts, like wars, revolutions, riots, still persist, but possibly they may be thought of as gradually yielding to competitions which are chiefly economic. Many of these strivings seem almost wholly individual, but most of them on careful analysis turn out to be intimately related to group competition. A third form, rivalry, describes struggle for status, for social prestige, for the approval of inclusive publics which form the spectators for such contests. The nation is an arena of competition and rivalry.

Much of this emulation is of a concealed sort. Beneath the union services of churches there is an element, for the most part unconscious, of rivalry to secure the approval of a public which in these days demands brotherliness and good will rather than proselyting and polemics. Many public subscriptions for a common cause are based upon group rivalry or upon individual competition which is group-determined. The Rhodes scholarships are in one sense a means of furthering imperial interest. Christmas presents lavished upon children often have a bearing upon the ambition of the family to make an impression upon rival domestic groups. In the liberal policy of universities which by adding to the list of admission subjects desire to come into closer relations with the public schools, there is some trace of competition for students and popular applause. The interest which nations manifest in the Hague Tribunal is tinged with a desire to gain the good will of the international, peace-praising public. The professed eagerness of one or both parties in a labor dispute to have the differences settled by arbitration is a form of competition for the favor of the onlooking community. Thus in international relationships and in the life-process of each nation countless groups are in conflict, competition, or rivalry.

This idea of the group seeking survival, mastery, aggrandizement, prestige, in its struggles with other groups is a valuable means of interpretation. Let us survey rapidly the conditions of success as a group carries on its life of strife and emulation. In order to survive or to succeed the group must organize, cozen, discipline, and stimulate its members. Fortunately it finds human nature in a great measure fashioned for control.

Collective pride or group egotism is an essential source of strength in conflict. Every efficient group cultivates this sense of honor, importance, superiority, by many devices of symbol, phrase, and legend, as well as by scorn and ridicule of rivals. The college fraternity's sublime self-esteem gives it strength in its competition for members and prestige. There is a chauvinism of "boom" towns and religious sects, as well as of nations. What pride and self-confidence are to the individual, ethnocentrism, patriotism, local loyalty are to social unities. Diffidence, humility, self-distrust, tolerance, are as dangerous to militant groups as to fighting men.

Then too the group works out types of personality, hero types to be emulated, traitor types to be execrated. These personality types merge into abstract ideals and standards. "Booster" and "knocker" bring up pictures of a struggling community which must preserve its hopefulness and self-esteem at all hazards. "Statesman" and "demagogue" recall the problem of selection which every self-governing community must face. "Defender of the faith" and "heretic" are eloquent of the Church's dilemma between rigid orthodoxy and flexible accommodation to a changing order.

With a shifting in the conflict or rivalry crises, types change in value or emphasis, or new types are created in adjustment to the new needs. The United Stated at war with Spain sought martial heroes. The economic and political ideals of personality, the captains of industry, the fascinating financiers, the party idols, were for the time retired to make way for generals and admirals, soldiers and sailors, the heroes of camp and battleship. The war once over, the displaced types reappeared along with others which are being created to meet new administrative, economic, and ethical problems. The competing church retires its militant and disputatious leaders in an age which gives its applause to apostles of concord, fraternal feeling, and co-operation. At a given time the heroes and traitors of a group reflect its competitions and rivalries with other groups.

Struggle forces upon the group the necessity of cozening, beguiling, managing its members. The vast majority of these fall into a broad zone of mediocrity which embodies group character and represents a general adjustment to life-conditions. From this medial area individuals vary, some in ways which aid the group in its competition, others in a fashion which imperils group success. It is the task of the group both to preserve the solidarity of the medial zone and to discriminate between the serviceable and the menacing variants. The latter must be coerced or suppressed, the former encouraged and given opportunity. In Plato's _Republic_ the guardians did this work of selection which in modern groups is cared for by processes which seem only slightly conscious and purposeful.

The competing group in seeking to insure acquiescence and loyalty elaborates a protective philosophy by which it creates within its members the belief that their lot is much to be preferred to that of other comradeships and associations. Western Americans take satisfaction in living in a free, progressive, hospitable way in "God's country." They try not to be pharisaical about the narrowness of the East, but they achieve a sincere scorn for the hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live upon a psychic, if not a geographic, frontier. The middle class have a philosophy with which they protect themselves against the insidious suggestions that come from the life of the conspicuous rich. These, on the other hand, half expecting that simplicity and domesticity may have some virtue, speak superciliously of middle-class smugness and the bourgeois "home." The less prosperous of the professional classes are prone to lay a good deal of stress upon their intellectual resources as compared with the presumptive spiritual poverty of the affluent. Country folk encourage themselves by asserting their fundamental value to society and by extolling their own simple straightforward virtues, which present so marked a contrast to the devious machinations of city-dwellers. Booker Washington's reiterated assertion that if he were to be born again he would choose to be a Negro because the Negro race is the only one which has a great problem contains a suggestion of this protective philosophy. This tendency of a group to fortify itself by a satisfying theory of its lot is obviously related to group egotism and is immediately connected with group rivalry.

The competing group derides many a dissenter into conformity. This derision may be spontaneous, or reflective and concerted. The loud guffaw which greets one who varies in dress or speech or idea may come instantly or there may be a planned and co-operative ridicule systematically applied to the recalcitrant. Derision is one of the most effective devices by which the group sifts and tests the variants.

Upon the small number of rebels who turn a deaf ear to epithets, ostracism is brought to bear. This may vary from the "cold shoulder" to the complete "boycott." Losing the friendship and approval of comrades, being cut off from social sympathy, is a familiar form of group pressure. Ridicule and derision are a kind of evanescent ostracism, a temporary exclusion from the comradeship. There are many degrees in the lowering of the social temperature: coolness, formality of intercourse, averted looks, "cutting dead," "sending to Coventry," form a progressive series. Economic pressure is more and more a resort of modern groups. Loss of employment, trade, or professional practice brings many a rebel to time. All coercion obviously increases as the group is hard pressed in its conflicts, competitions, and rivalries.

These crises and conflicts of a competing group present problems which must be solved--problems of organization, of inventions of many kinds, of new ideas and philosophies, of methods of adjustment. The conditions of competition or rivalry upset an equilibrium of habit and custom, and a process of problem-solving ensues. A typhoid epidemic forces the village to protect itself against the competition of a more healthful rival. The resourceful labor union facing a corporation which offers profit-sharing and retiring allowances must formulate a protective theory and practice. A society clique too closely imitated by a lower stratum must regain its distinction and supremacy. A nation must be constantly alert to adjust itself to the changing conditions of international trade and to the war equipment and training of its rivals.

The theory of group rivalry throws light upon the individual. The person has as many selves as there are groups to which he belongs. He is simple or complex as his groups are few and harmonious or many and conflicting. What skilful management is required to keep business and moral selves from looking each other in the eye, to prevent scientific and theological selves from falling into discussion! Most men of many groups learn, like tactful hosts, to invite at a given time only congenial companies of selves. A few brave souls resolve to set their house in order and to entertain only such selves as can live together with good will and mutual respect. With these earnest folk their groups have to reckon. The conflicts of conscience are group conflicts.

Tolerance is a sign that once vital issues within the group are losing their significance, or that the group feels secure, or that it is slowly, even unconsciously, merging into a wider grouping. Theological liberality affords a case in point. In the earlier days of sectarian struggle tolerance was a danger both to group loyalty and to the militant spirit. Cynicism for other reasons is also a menace. It means loss of faith in the collective ego, in the traditions, shibboleths, symbols, and destiny of the group. Fighting groups cannot be tolerant; nor can they harbor cynics. Tolerance and cynicism are at once causes and results of group decay. They portend dissolution or they foreshadow new groupings for struggle over other issues on another plane. Evangelical churches are drawing together with mutual tolerance to present a united front against modern skepticism and cynicism which are directed against the older faiths and moralities.

The subjective side of group rivalry offers an important study. The reflection of the process of control in personal consciousness is full of interest. The means by which the rebellious variant protects himself against the coercion of his comrades have been already suggested in the description of ridicule and epithet. These protective methods resolve themselves into setting one group against another in the mind of the derided or stigmatized individual.

A national group is to be thought of as an inclusive unity with a fundamental character, upon the basis of which a multitude of groups compete with and rival each other. It is the task of the nation to control and to utilize this group struggle, to keep it on as high a plane as possible, to turn it to the common account. Government gets its chief meaning from the rivalry of groups to grasp political power in their own interests. Aristocracy and democracy may be interpreted in terms of group antagonism, the specialized few versus the undifferentiated many. The ideal merges the two elements of efficiency and solidarity in one larger group within which mutual confidence and emulation take the place of conflict. Just as persons must be disciplined into serving their groups, groups must be subordinated to the welfare of the nation. It is in conflict or competition with other nations that a country becomes a vivid unity to the members of constituent groups. It is rivalry which brings out the sense of team work, the social consciousness.

3. Cultural Conflicts and the Organization of Sects[214]

It is assumed, I suppose, that contradictions among ideas and beliefs are of various degrees and of various modes besides that specific one which we call logical incompatibility. A perception, for example, may be pictorially inconsistent or tonically discordant with another perception; a mere faith unsupported by objective evidence may be emotionally antagonistic to another mere faith, as truly as a judgment may be logically irreconcilable with another judgment. And this wide possibility of contradiction is particularly to be recognized when the differing ideas or beliefs have arisen not within the same individual mind but in different minds, and are therefore colored by personal or partisan interest and warped by idiosyncrasy of mental constitution. The contradictions of, or rather _among_, ideas and beliefs, with which we are now concerned, are more extensive and more varied than mere logical duels; they are also less definite, less precise. In reality they are culture conflicts in which the opposing forces, so far from being specific ideas only or pristine beliefs only, are in fact more or less bewildering complexes of ideas, beliefs, prejudices, sympathies, antipathies, and personal interests.

It is assumed also, I suppose, that any idea or group of ideas, any belief or group of beliefs, may happen to be or may become a common interest, shared by a small or a large number of individuals. It may draw and hold them together in bonds of acquaintance, of association, even of co-operation. It thus may play a group-making rôle. Contradictory ideas or beliefs, therefore, may play a group-making rôle in a double sense. Each draws into association the individual minds that entertain it or find it attractive. Each also repels those minds to whom it is repugnant, and drives them toward the group which is being formed about the contradictory idea or belief. Contradictions among ideas and beliefs, then, it may be assumed, tend on the whole to sharpen the lines of demarcation between group and group.

These assumptions are, I suppose, so fully justified by the everyday observation of mankind and so confirmed by history that it is unnecessary now to discuss them or in any way to dwell upon them. The question before us therefore becomes specific: "Are contradictions among ideas and beliefs likely to play an _important_ group-making rôle in the future?" I shall interpret the word important as connoting quality as well as quantity. I shall, in fact, attempt to answer the question set for me by translating it into this inquiry, namely: What kind or type of groups are the inevitable contradictions among ideas and beliefs most likely to create and to maintain within the progressive populations of the world from this time forth?

Somewhat more than three hundred years ago, Protestantism and geographical discovery had combined to create conditions extraordinarily favorable to the formation of groups or associations about various conflicting ideas and beliefs functioning as nuclei; and for nearly three hundred years the world has been observing a remarkable multiplication of culture groups of two fundamentally different types. One type is a sect, or denomination, having no restricted local habitation but winning adherents here and there in various communes, provinces, or nations, and having, therefore, a membership either locally concentrated or more or less widely dispersed; either regularly or most irregularly distributed. The culture group of the other type, or kind, is a self-sufficing community. It may be a village, a colony, a state, or a nation. Its membership is concentrated, its habitat is defined.

To a very great extent, as everybody knows, American colonization proceeded through the formation of religious communities. Such were the Pilgrim and the Puritan commonwealths. Such were the Quaker groups of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Such were the localized societies of the Dunkards, the Moravians, and the Mennonites.

As late as the middle of the nineteenth century the American people witnessed the birth and growth of one of the most remarkable religious communities known in history. The Mormon community of Utah, which, originating in 1830 as a band of relatives and acquaintances, clustered by an idea that quickly became a dogma, had become in fifty years a commonwealth _de facto_, defying the authority _de jure_ of the United States.

We are not likely, however, again to witness a phenomenon of this kind in the civilized world. Recently we have seen the rise and the astonishingly rapid spread of another American religion, namely, the Christian Science faith. But it has created no community group. It has created only a dispersed sect. It is obvious to any intelligent observer, however untrained in sociological discrimination he may be, that the forces of Protestantism, still dividing and differentiating as they are, no longer to any great extent create new self-sufficing communities. They create only associations of irregular geographical dispersion, of more or less unstable or shifting membership. In a word, the conflicting-idea forces, which in our colonial days tended to create community groups as well as sects, tend now to create sectarian bodies only--mere denominational or partisan associations.

A similar contrast between an earlier and a later stage of culture group-making may be observed if we go back to centuries before the Protestant Reformation, there to survey a wider field and a longer series of historical periods.

It is a commonplace of historical knowledge that in all of the earliest civilizations there was an approximate identification of religion with ethnic consciousness and of political consciousness with both religious and race feeling. Each people had its own tribal or national gods, who were inventoried as national assets at valuations quite as high as those attached to tribal or national territory.

When, however, Roman imperial rule had been extended over the civilized world, the culture conflicts that then arose expended their group-creating force in simply bringing together like believers in sectarian association. Christianity, appealing to all bloods, in some measure to all economic classes, and spreading into all sections of the eastern Mediterranean region, did not to any great extent create communities. And what was true of Christianity was in like manner true of the Mithras cult, widely diffused in the second Christian century. Even Mohammedanism, a faith seemingly well calculated to create autonomous states, in contact with a world prepared by Roman organization could not completely identify itself with definite political boundaries.

The proximate causes of these contrasts are not obscure. We must suppose that a self-sufficing community might at one time, as well as at another, be drawn together by formative beliefs. But that it may take root somewhere and, by protecting itself against destructive external influences, succeed for a relatively long time in maintaining its integrity and its solidarity, it must enjoy a relative isolation. In a literal sense it must be beyond easy reach of those antagonistic forces which constitute for it the outer world of unbelief and darkness.

Such isolation is easily and often possible, however, only in the early stages of political integration. It is always difficult and unusual in those advanced stages wherein nations are combined in world-empires. It is becoming well-nigh impossible, now that all the continents have been brought under the sovereignty of the so-called civilized peoples, while these peoples themselves, freely communicating and intermingling, maintain with one another that good understanding which constitutes them, in a certain broad sense of the term, a world-society. The proximate effects also of the contrast that has been sketched are generally recognized.

So long as blood sympathy, religious faith, and political consciousness are approximately coterminous, the groups that they form, whether local communities or nations, must necessarily be rather sharply delimited. They must be characterized also by internal solidarity. Their membership is stable because to break the bond of blood is not only to make one's self an outcast but is also to be unfaithful to the ancestral gods; to change one's religion is not only to be impious but is also to commit treason; to expatriate one's self is not only to commit treason but is also to blaspheme against high heaven.

But when associations of believers or of persons holding in common any philosophy or doctrine whatsoever are no longer self-sufficing communities, and when nations composite in blood have become compound in structure, all social groups, clusters, or organizations, not only the cultural ones drawn together by formative ideas, but also the economic and the political ones, become in some degree plastic. Their membership then becomes to some extent shifting and renewable. Under these circumstances any given association of men, let it be a village, a religious group, a trade union, a corporation, or a political party, not only takes into itself new members from time to time; it also permits old members to depart. Men come and men go, yet the association or the group itself persists. As group or as organization it remains unimpaired.

The economic advantage secured by this plasticity and renewableness is beyond calculation enormous. It permits and facilitates the drafting of men at any moment from points where they are least needed, for concentration upon points where they are needed most. The spiritual or idealistic advantage is not less great. The concentration of attention and of enthusiasm upon strategic points gives ever-increasing impetus to progressive movements.

Let us turn now from these merely proximate causes and effects of group formation to take note of certain developmental processes which lie farther back in the evolutionary sequence and which also have significance for our inquiry, since, when we understand them, they may aid us in our attempt to answer the question, What kind of group-making is likely to be accomplished by cultural conflicts from this time forth?

The most readily perceived, because the most pictorial, of the conflicts arising between one belief and another are those that are waged between beliefs that have been localized and then through geographical expansion have come into competition throughout wide frontier areas. Of all such conflicts, that upon which the world has now fully entered between occidental and oriental ideas is not merely the most extensive; it is also by far the most interesting and picturesque.

Less picturesque but often more dramatic are the conflicts that arise within each geographical region, within each nation, between old beliefs and new--the conflicts of sequent, in distinction from coexistent, ideas; the conflicts in time, in distinction from the conflicts in space. A new knowledge is attained which compels us to question old dogmas. A new faith arises which would displace the ancient traditions. As the new waxes strong in some region favorable to it, it begins there, within local limits, to supersede the old. Only then, when the conflict between the old as old and the new as new is practically over, does the triumphant new begin to go forth spatially as a conquering influence from the home of its youth into regions outlying and remote.

Whatever the form, however, that the culture conflict assumes, whether serial and dramatic or geographical and picturesque, its antecedent psychological conditions are in certain great essentials the same. Men array themselves in hostile camps on questions of theory and belief, not merely because they are variously and conflictingly informed, but far more because they are mentally unlike, their minds having been prepared by structural differentiation to seize upon different views and to cherish opposing convictions. That is to say, some minds have become rational, critical, plastic, open, outlooking, above all, intuitive of objective facts and relations. Others in their fundamental constitution have remained dogmatic, intuitive only of personal attitudes or of subjective moods, temperamentally conservative and instinctive. Minds of the one kind welcome the new and wider knowledge; they go forth to embrace it. Minds of the other kind resist it.

In the segregation thus arising, there is usually discoverable a certain tendency toward grouping by sex.

Whether the mental and moral traits of women are inherent and therefore permanent, or whether they are but passing effects of circumscribed experience and therefore possibly destined to be modified, is immaterial for my present purpose. It is not certain that either the biologist or the psychologist is prepared to answer the question. It is certain that the sociologist is not. It is enough for the analysis that I am making now if we can say that, as a merely descriptive fact, women thus far in the history of the race have generally been more instinctive, more intuitive of subjective states, more emotional, more conservative than men; and that men, more generally than women, have been intuitive of objective relations, inclined therefore to break with instinct and to rely on the later-developed reasoning processes of the brain, and willing, consequently, to take chances, to experiment, and to innovate.

If so much be granted, we may perhaps say that it is because of these mental differences that in conflicts between new and old ideas, between new knowledge and old traditions, it usually happens that a large majority of all women are found in the camp of the old, and that the camp of the new is composed mainly of men.

In the camp of the new, however, are always to be found women of alert intelligence, who happen also to be temperamentally radical; women in whom the reasoning habit has asserted sway over instinct, and in whom intuition has become the true scientific power to discern objective relations. And in the camp of the old, together with a majority of all women, are to be found most of the men of conservative instinct, and most of those also whose intuitive and reasoning powers are unequal to the effort of thinking about the world or anything in it in terms of impersonal causation. Associated with all of these elements, both male and female, may usually be discovered, finally, a contingent of priestly personalities; not necessarily religious priests, but men who love to assert spiritual dominion, to wield authority, to be reverenced and obeyed, and who naturally look for a following among the non-skeptical and easily impressed.

Such, very broadly and rudely sketched, is the psychological background of culture conflict. It is, however, a background only, a certain persistent grouping of forces and conditions; it is not the cause from which culture conflicts proceed.

D. RACIAL CONFLICTS

1. Social Contacts and Race Conflict[215]

There is a conviction, widespread in America at the present time, that among the most fruitful sources of international wars are racial prejudice and national egotism. This conviction is the nerve of much present-day pacifism. It has been the inspiration of such unofficial diplomacy, for example, as that of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in its effort to bring about a better understanding between the Japanese and America. This book, _The Japanese Invasion_, by Jesse F. Steiner, is an attempt to study this phenomenon of race prejudice and national egotism, so far as it reveals itself in the relations of the Japanese and the Americans in this country, and to estimate the rôle it is likely to play in the future relations of the two countries.

So far as I know, an investigation of precisely this nature has not hitherto been made. One reason for this is, perhaps, that not until very recent times did the problem present itself in precisely this form. So long as the nations lived in practical isolation, carrying on their intercourse through the medium of professional diplomats, and knowing each other mainly through the products they exchanged, census reports, and the discreet observations of polite travelers, racial prejudice did not disturb international relations. With the extension of international commerce, the increase of immigration, and the interpenetration of peoples, the scene changes. The railway, the steamship, and the telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the peoples of the earth. The nations are coming out of their isolation, and distances which separated the different races are rapidly giving way before the extension of communication.

The same human motives which have led men to spread a network of trade-communication over the whole earth in order to bring about an exchange of commodities are now bringing about a new distribution of populations. When these populations become as mobile as the commodities of commerce, there will be practically no limits--except those artificial barriers, like the customs and immigration restrictions, maintained by individual states--to a world-wide economic and personal competition. Furthermore when the natural barriers are broken down, artificial barriers will be maintained with increasing difficulty.

Some conception of the extent of the changes which are taking place in the world under the influence of these forces may be gathered from the fact that in 1870 the cost of transporting a bushel of grain in Europe was so great as to prohibit its sale beyond a radius of two hundred miles from a primary market. By 1883 the importation of grains from the virgin soil of the western prairies in the United States had brought about an agricultural crisis in every country in western Europe.

One may illustrate, but it is scarcely possible to estimate, the economic changes which have been brought about by the enormous increase in ocean transportation. In 1840 the first Cunard liner, of 740 horse-power with a speed of 8.5 knots per hour, was launched. In 1907, when the Lusitania was built, ocean-going vessels had attained a speed of 25 knots an hour and were drawn by engines of 70,000 horse-power.

It is difficult to estimate the economic changes which have been brought about by the changes in ocean transportation represented by these figures. It is still less possible to predict the political effects of the steadily increasing mobility of the peoples of the earth. At the present time this mobility has already reached a point at which it is often easier and cheaper to transport the world's population to the source of raw materials than to carry the world's manufactures to the established seats of population.

With the progressive rapidity, ease, and security of transportation, and the increase in communication, there follows an increasing detachment of the population from the soil and a concurrent concentration in great cities. These cities in time become the centers of vast numbers of uprooted individuals, casual and seasonal laborers, tenement and apartment-house dwellers, sophisticated and emancipated urbanites, who are bound together neither by local attachment nor by ties of family, clan, religion, or nationality. Under such conditions it is reasonable to expect that the same economic motive which leads every trader to sell in the highest market and to buy in the lowest will steadily increase and intensify the tendency, which has already reached enormous proportions of the population in overcrowded regions with diminished resources, to seek their fortunes, either permanently or temporarily, in the new countries of undeveloped resources.

Already the extension of commerce and the increase of immigration have brought about an international and inter-racial situation that has strained the inherited political order of the United States. It is this same expansive movement of population and of commerce, together with the racial and national rivalries that have sprung from them, which first destroyed the traditional balance of power in Europe and then broke up the scheme of international control which rested on it. Whatever may have been the immediate causes of the world-war, the more remote sources of the conflict must undoubtedly be sought in the great cosmic forces which have broken down the barriers which formerly separated the races and nationalities of the world, and forced them into new intimacies and new forms of competition, rivalry, and conflict.

Since 1870 the conditions which I have attempted to sketch have steadily forced upon America and the nations of Europe the problem of assimilating their heterogeneous populations. What we call the race problem is at once an incident of this process of assimilation and an evidence of its failure.

The present volume, _The Japanese Invasion: A Study in the Psychology of Inter-racial Contact_, touches but does not deal with the general situation which I have briefly sketched. It is, as its title suggests, a study in "racial contacts," and is an attempt to distinguish and trace to their sources the attitudes and the sentiments--that is to say, mutual prejudices--which have been and still are a source of mutual irritation and misunderstanding between the Japanese and American peoples.

Fundamentally, prejudice against the Japanese in the United States is merely the prejudice which attaches to every alien and immigrant people. The immigrant from Europe, like the immigrant from Asia, comes to this country because he finds here a freedom of individual action and an economic opportunity which he did not find at home. It is an instance of the general tendency of populations to move from an area of relatively closed, to one of relatively open, resources. The movement is as inevitable and, in the long run, as resistless as that which draws water from its mountain sources to the sea. It is one way of redressing the economic balance and bringing about an economic equilibrium.

The very circumstances under which this modern movement of population has arisen implies then that the standard of living, if not the cultural level, of the immigrant is lower than that of the native population. The consequence is that immigration brings with it a new and disturbing form of competition, the competition, namely, of peoples of a lower and of a higher standard of living. The effect of this competition, where it is free and unrestricted, is either to lower the living standards of the native population; to expel them from the vocations in which the immigrants are able or permitted to compete; or what may, perhaps, be regarded as a more sinister consequence, to induce such a restriction of the birth rate of the native population as to insure its ultimate extinction. The latter is, in fact, what seems to be happening in the New England manufacturing towns where the birth rate in the native population for some years past has fallen below the death rate, so that the native stock has long since ceased to reproduce itself. The foreign peoples, on the other hand, are rapidly replacing the native stocks, not merely by the influence of new immigration, but because of a relatively high excess of births over deaths.