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244 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1946)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0244 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD EVERYONE agrees that technological development has outstripped the moral and political development of mankind. Unlike the race between the hare and the tortoise, technological development never falls asleep so that the tortoise of moral and political progress may catch up. On the contrary, the atom-ward dash of technology leaves us shivering with dread lest human solidarity prove too feeble to control the forces that hu- man ingenuity has unleashed. Our failure to achieve sufficient hu- man solidarity to make the co-operative control of technology possible is largely due to a primary weakness in human nature. This weakness is usually re- ferred to as group prejudice. Though the phenomenon is far too complex to characterize briefly, its chief feature seems to consist of the tendency of most people to personify evil, to ascribe evil to groups or categories of persons rather than to impersonal forces, or to single erring individuals. After using the Jew as his scapegoat throughout his nefarious career, Hitler, with sub- lime irrelevancy, was still inclined (in his Last Will and Testament) to ascribe his final downfall to international Jewry. Pacific coast newspapers con- trived to find in a handful of defense- less Japanese-Americans a plausible cause for the dreads and anxieties that succeeded Pearl Harbor. And instead of discovering in themselves, or in their surrounding social structure, the true cause of their malaise, the Puritans projected their sense of evil upon the pathetic witches of old Salem. Although fallacious personification of evil in the form of human scapegoats has always been an outstanding trait of human nature, it does not follow that the tendency cannot be diminished, or at least controlled. All evidence points to the fact that the human infant and preschool child are entirely free from prejudice until such time as they begin to mirror the misconceptions of their culture. The tendency to personify evil (in persons having dark skin, odd cus- toms, or belonging to an economic class higher or lower than one's own) is in- deed a weakness in human nature, but one due ultimately to the surround- ing culture that so largely fashions our behavior. It is not an easy task, however, to re- direct the social forces that constitute culture. Controlling group prejudice calls for a united attack by every re- sponsible agency and every responsible scientist. As this number of THE AN- NALS shows, the assignment is shared by moralists, industrialists, educators, housing authorities, legislators; by civil service, the cinema, the stage, the radio; by newspapers, the police; by commu- nity leaders, psychopathologists, social scientists; and by philanthropic and educational foundations. An editor of a volume should not praise its content. Yet I venture to predict that the reader will agree with me that the separate articles are both authoritative and illuminating, and that taken together they constitute as defin- itive and as comprehensive a survey of the subject as the state of present-day knowledge permits. The sincerity and objectivity of the authors are apparent, and the thread of common conviction and purpose that runs through their many-sided presentations of the prob- lem weaves more than customary strength and social value into the fabric of the whole. Teachers will mark the merit of this volume as a potential text- book in the field of group prejudice and conflict. Someone has trenchantly said, There seems to be a remedy for every human vii

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