Anti-Semitism in the United States : $b Its history and causesLevinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
History
Anti-Semitism in the United States : $b Its history and causes
Levinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
Antisemitism -- United States; Jews -- United States
[11]There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not
a member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage
the enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to
kill him. This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity
of the horde, and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member
of the horde to destroy all possible enemies.... The feeling of the
fellowship in the horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the
tribe, to a recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood of
habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of
nations.
“He who is not with me is against me,”[12] said Jesus for the religious
group. How far we have proceeded from the horde in our civilized
nations, and how near we are to it still in the essential character of
the mind of the group!
3.
Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness, external to
the individuals composing it—that view has been discarded long ago. But
as a category which is needed to explain many phenomena, and which we
can then proceed to study and explain in greater detail, a term with
pragmatic value, such as “life” or “mind.” “Life” is no longer used as
a principle of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into
dead matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its effects
and study them. “Mind” is not something separate and distinct from
the body in which it dwells or from the world in which it acts, but
we know that mind is a useful and necessary category in which to
include a whole phase of living being, especially of human life. “Group
Mind” is the same sort of category as these. Just as mind inheres in
the neurones and is coincident with the chemical changes in them, and
yet cannot be summed up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in
the brains, of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and
acts, yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but as
the unified response of a group of persons at once.
Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any type of
group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social environment; he
holds that the group may have unity of content but not of process, of
ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd H. Allport speaks of “The group
fallacy,”[13] “the error of substituting the group as a whole as a
principle of explanation in place of the individuals in the group,” to
which Emory S. Bogardus replies in his discussion that [14]“if there is
a group fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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