ABSTRACT
It is a human predicament that we are neither altogether social animals, like bees, nor altogether solitary animals, like amoebas. A protracted infancy makes us dependent on others for our very existence. In maturity, sexuality and the division of labor makes us dependent on others for fulfillment of most of our needs. We are also individuals, cherishing autonomous personal identities. As a result of both of these sets of needs, we find it hard to live with others of our kind and also hard to live without them. In the tug of war between sociality and individuality, sociality usually wins out, though its victory may be temporary and partial. We form ourselves into groups. Attitude and action are largely shaped by group membership, which provides the themes on which the individual plays variations. Prejudice and discrimination are group phenomena. As such, they are pathologies, but of natural processes. That is why they are so hard to eradicate. The family is the primary human group, primary both in genesis and in importance. Lamentations over the decline of the family are misconceived. What is happening is not so much that the family is becoming less important than it was as that family patterns are changing. Institutions are commonly identified with their established forms, so that new forms are perceived as the end of the institution. Changes in law are seen as anarchy; in religion, as atheism; in manners, as savagery; in art, as barbarism; in economic arrangements, as communism. The family is not being replaced by test-tube assembly lines. Even in the commune and the kibbutz, parents and siblings are increasingly recognized as being far from wholly replaceable by communal nurseries. Kinship remains a fundamental bond uniting people into groups. The enlarged family has been a significant unit throughout human history and into our own day: the Indian tribes and the Twelve Tribes of Israel; the Hindu castes and the Scottish clans; the Arabic Hamoulah and the Jewish Mishpachah. Chinese tongs were an invention of the large-scale Chinese immigration into America in the nineteenth century, to replace the kinship support-systems from which the immigrants had been uprooted. A kinsman is everywhere presumed to be a friend and ally, however false the presumption might be in particular cases. In addition to the enlarged family are many other groups serving to attain shared goals. Some groups, like corporations and athletic teams, are deliberately organized to serve certain ends. Other groups, like national, religious or lan-
guage communities, have a largely unplanned growth, and serve a wide and only loosely bounded set of purposes. It is these latter groupings, together with those based on kinship, which chiefly figure in prejudice and discrimination. What is significant in these groups is not only the cooperation of group members but also their identification with one another. As the group manifests more solidarity and group loyalty, it is also more likely to be a target of prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory practices. Causation proceeds in the reverse direction as well, victimization producing a heightened consciousness of group membership. Much of the nationalism of our time is a response to victimization. It is a defensive group consciousness, focused on preserving a threatened identity and culture, with its distinctive language, religion and values. Where it has political aspiration, it seeks power chiefly as a protective device. Armenians, Basques, French-Canadians, Sikhs, Lithuanians and Ukrainians illustrate this defensive nationalism. Not all nationalism is divisive, just as not all affirmations of personal identity set individuals against one another. There is an important difference between what Hans Kohn has called “closed nationalism” and “open nationalism.”1 Closed nationalism expresses a mystique of racial purity and ancestral soil. It displays contempt for lesser breeds, and nurses hatreds recurrently expressed in violence. It sets out to destroy the demons by which it sees itself threatened: the great Satan America for Khomeini and Ahmanijedad; Trotskyites for Stalin; the Zionist imperialists for Arafat or Nasrallah. Internally, closed nationalism is authoritarian and totalitarian. This was the nationalism of Japanese, German and Slavic politics for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is found today among a small group of Jewish extremists, and among the ruling groups in Iran, Syria and North Korea. Open nationalism rests on self-respect rather than on hatred of the other. It pursues peace rather than extolling violence. Internally it is democratic. In relation to other nations it aims at equality, not triumphant superiority. It seeks selfdetermination so as to achieve freedom from oppression. Open nationalism aspires to survival without fear, diversity without hostility, independence without alienation. This was the nationalism of Washington, Bolivar, Garibaldi, and later of Gandhi, Ben Gurion and Martin Luther King. The Age of Reason viewed most human groupings – except the family and the corporation – as having an irrational foundation. Such groupings were therefore seen as indefensible, fated to vanish with the spread of enlightenment. Differences that set human beings against one another were confidently expected to diminish in importance and ultimately to disappear under the rule of reason. This Nationalist universalism was a reprise of the Stoic theme that a share in world reason makes us all citizens of the world. Both the ancient and the modern versions of rationalist universalism were replacing Prophetic universalism, which grounded the brotherhood of man in the common fatherhood of God, or at any rate in a shared faith – all castes, says Buddhism, unite in this religion as do the rivers in the sea. Our own day is giving urgency to Pragmatic universalism, that we are all fellow passengers on the planet Earth, facing a common doom or destiny. There is a compelling contemporary relevance to the words of Benjamin
Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that we must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately. The occasion was the birth of a new nation; many other new nations have come to birth since. Contrary to the rationalist expectations, group identities have multiplied both within and across national boundaries. Everywhere the questions confront us: how can we be what we are without fear of being different? How can we be with others without fear of losing our identities? The setting in which these questions arise is also that in which prejudice and discrimination flourish. That people differ from one another, and group themselves on the basis of shared differences, is a fundamental fact of social existence. It is a fact we find difficult to face. “There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed in your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people. Let it be decreed that they be destroyed,” said Haman of the Jews.2 To be different is still a punishable offence virtually everywhere in the world, whether the difference be one of religion, race, sex or political conviction. Because differences can be divisive, we overlook them or deny them, rather than coping with the dilemma of maintaining differences without divisiveness. During the periodic United Nations debate on the Middle East, a member of the American delegation is reported to have exclaimed, “Why can’t Israel and her Arab neighbors settle their differences like Christian gentlemen?” The report adds that a Buddhist, overhearing, remarked, “The trouble is, that’s just what they’re doing!” For the majority, it may be hard even to see how the minority differs. Bertrand Russell relates that during World War I, when he was being jailed as a pacifist and his personal data were being recorded, for “Religion” he said “Atheist!” to which the kindly but unschooled bailiff replied, “Oh, well, we all believe in the same God, anyhow!” A variation on this theme has a television announcer declare one December, “Let’s put religion back into Christmas: this Christmas, go to the church or synagogue of your choice!” Differences may be clearly seen but repudiated, as in the unisex style of dress and coiffure. Underlying the denial of difference is an illogic which confuses necessary and sufficient conditions. Eradication of differences is sufficient to put an end to discrimination, for then no one could be singled out to be discriminated against. Eradication of differences is not necessary, however, to put an end to discrimination, for the differences might be accepted, even cherished, and in any case dealt with fairly. “After all, they’re just like us” is a dubious basis for equality of rights, unless the premise is tautologically interpreted to mean likeness only in whatever confers the rights. This is something that does not depend on negating differences in sex, race, religion or ethnic identity. It transcends such differences, as does, say, membership in the community or in the human species. Equalitarian reluctance to acknowledge differences is largely responsible for the ill repute of ascriptions of national character. Such ascriptions have been made often by reputable anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir and others, though fewer among their present-day successors. The concept of a national character is no
more prejudicial in itself than is the concept of a national language, cuisine or costume. Differences are being conceived prejudicially when they are regarded as innate and unchangeable. American Blacks do not have the same verbal attainments as do other Americans; racism does not lie in acknowledging this fact but in taking it as supposed evidence that Blacks do not have the same verbal capacities. Capacity is not limited by attainment in specific circumstances. Opposing racism does not call for rejecting the premise of the inference but for rejecting the conclusion being inferred. What is to be denied is not the difference between Blacks and others but the notion that the difference cannot be eradicated. It is because racism produces and sustains such differences that it is damnable. The behavior of any group is affected by the character of the individuals in it. Conversely, group norms shape individual character. Family patterns and childrearing practices, for example, are important determinants of both character and culture. Anthropologists have spoken of the “modal personality” or the “basic personality” of a culture. What makes the notion of a “Jewish mother,” for instance, prejudicial is not that it ascribes a type, but that the type, defined by over-protectiveness and the manipulation of guilt, can as readily identify Greek, Italian or Mexican mothers, and many fathers too, for that matter. It is easy, and profitless, to dismiss all categories of character as “stereotypes.” The prejudicial ascription of national characters is aggravated in closed nationalism by a borrowing from nineteenth-century metaphysics, in which holistic entities like race and nation were conceived as concrete things with causal efficacy rather than as abstract ideas. It is not races and nations that set human beings against one another, but racists and nationalists. Groups do not take action; their members do, acting in concert and in the name of the group. Group names, in themselves, are no more prejudicial than other abstract categories, but they can be used prejudicially. Bigots sometimes appear to be interpreting national symbols literally. The prejudice is not in the use of symbols for human groups but in using them to impute traits which are atypical, irrelevant or produced by the imputation itself. At best, the symbols might be outworn except for their prejudicial use. Both John Bull and Uncle Sam have aged almost beyond recognition; La Belle France, incarnate as a neo-classic goddess of liberty, is decidedly out of date; whether the embrace of the Russian bear continues to be menacing is a political question.
