Sayfadaki görseller
PDF
ePub

expression, of type, and even of the cut of clothes of my warmhearted, well-intentioned, hospitable hosts.

I have before me as I write the group photograph of one of the International Councils which govern the second or third largest body of the "Rotarian" type in America. These gentlemen, face for face, coat for coat, and badge for badge, might have all been turned out of the same mould.

I have gathered on my recent travels the organs of various business organizations which I have addressed. Paragraph for paragraph, phrase for phrase, these publications betray the same stereotyped standardized thought, the same mechanically moral expressions, the same "Babbittry". The real menace of the Babbitt to the community is not that he is good-natured and sentimental-it is that he is stereotyped himself and that he seeks to stereotype; all quite unconscious of what he is doing.

Throughout the East, Middle West, Far West and South I have listened along thousand of miles of railways to the conversations of the standardized type of American business man. His conversation, almost invariably, consists mainly of: (1) whether the train is "on time"; (2) some deal that he has or is about to 'put over"; and then (3) that reiterated "dollars, dollars, dollars," which comes like the beat of a pendulum.

His good-nature and anxiety to please and be pleased are obvious. He is packed with good intentions. He is an affectionate father and a law-abiding citizen. But he is stereotyped.

If the contention that standardization tends to destroy the power of individual thinking is accurate, then I believe we have the obvious explanation of the statement made to me by the Dean of a North-Western University where I had addressed an audience of some five thousand students upon a rather unusual subject. After I had left the platform, this gentleman, of national reputation, said to me: "How many of your audience do you think really grasped the thing behind your lecture?" To my reply that I hoped the majority had done so, he replied, sadly: "My experiences with audiences all over the United States is that not more than five per cent. really get the kernel of a lecture when it deals with anything outside their ordinary everyday life.

A

They like their thinking on the lines of their clothes and foodstandardized."

My own experience of some hundreds of lectures from East to West and North to South is that the American people are most eager lecture-goers, especially the women, for the men comparatively rarely attend the literary or philosophic lecture. But I am bound to confess that the questions after my lectures and the criticisms often betray a curious inelasticity of mind when faced with new problems, and a still more curious conservatism. There is a "stand-patness" about certain parts of modern America when faced with an unaccustomed subject or angle of thought which has struck scores of European lecturers, as they have told me.

On the other hand, there is a living vibrant minority to be found in every thought centre of the North American continent which equals the best European standards in its welcome of new ideas as in its criticism of those ideas. But this minority, again, is the implacable foe of American standardization, is beginning to challenge the domination of the machine mind, and will yet, I am assured, make history by the attempt to divert the present stream of machine-made thinking and "control".

Perhaps the most devastating side of "the new Prussianism" in the United States, to the outsider and friendly critic, is its blank unconsciousness. Thus, in the magazine of a leading body of the "Rotarian" type we read:

Did you ever stop to think that the Great War was after all fundamentally a Prussian war against the Teutonic idea? For this idea of free government

was really born in the forests of Germany. For a time it seemed to have a chance to develop there into the dominating principle of Teutonic government, but the exigencies of an age of war and the necessity for quick decision and centralized authority, and the influence if Roman imperialistic ideals soon forced the spirit of absolutism, and the spirit of Casar reigned supreme in the birthplace of free government.

The italics are my own. But might not these very words be written about much of the standardization of to-day's America? And this standardization, in its turn, has sprung largely from the very type of man who wrote the above.

A director of the telephone company which controls sixteen

million instruments in the United States, told me: "The whole tendency to-day in America is towards a control that becomes more and more absolute. This centralization of control, which, it is true, gives to the men who wield it a power undreamed of even by Cæsar or Napoleon, is in my opinion entirely justified. Frankly, we have to face the fact that it means standardization, and again standardization-but what of it if it brings success? At the same time, some of us are not blind to the fact that when the present wave of prosperity comes to an end, as it may do, in my judgment within, say, five years, there will come a reaction against this centralization. It may even be the battle of the future here in America."

Personally, the danger I see from the steady formation of the great Trusts in America is the standardization and stereotyping of individual genius which is their essential accompaniment. Anyone who has followed the remorselessly mechanical "lay-out" and control of great trusts in oil and meat must have been struck by the mechanical response and subservience of each tiny wheel in the great Trust Machine. The stereotyping of prices; the stereotyping of machine-parts; the stereotyping of the personal "service;" all this gives one furiously to think.

The effect upon the man is never considered by the standardizer. He thinks only of "prices and costs." He does not seek to vary his pattern and to develop beauty of line in the machine that he makes he thinks only of "utility", that most abused of all words. For true utility also includes beauty and phantasy and imagination. The day that the gospel of utilitarianism and "cheapness" dominates the policy of the American business man will be a disastrous day for America.

Mechanical standardization has now been cranked to such a point upon the American continent that large portions of the American people are beginning to be affected by mental rickets. We all know what happens to the child who is persistently fed upon "peptonized pap". His bones become soft and rickety. "Prussianism" is in the long run just "peptonized pap".

Now if all this over-organization and standardization “got results," one might be disposed to make excuses for it. But it does not and as time goes on, with a steady decrease in the power

of independent thought, we are likely to see a steady fall in “efficiency". One may go further. If the "peptonizing" of the American people continues, it is likely that there will be little left to measure by those famous "questionnaires", themselves the last thing in standardization!

And so there rises before one the nightmare of an automatic America. Automatic, standardized, sterilized conversation. Automatic cafeteria with automatic service. Automatic "Ten Cent stores" with everything standardized to a hair. Automatic standardized humor, with the same two men hitting each other on the nose and falling down through miles of American newspapers for ever and for ever. Automatic clothes, Automatic clothes, "ready to wear" and turned out by automatons, part of the machines they tend. Automatic traffic regulation with perhaps automatic autos stopping and starting of their own accord upon automatic signal. Automatic recording machines and talking machines and writing machines. Armies of automata gradually being controlled by the Machine by which they are gradually being assimilated. Automatic Robots! A nightmare, you will say. Yes, but a nightmare that is already materializing the nightmare of a standardized continent.

That is one side of the picture of to-day's America. Now for the other.

The writer is one of those who believe that the present standardization of man and machine is but a phase-the materialist phase that the East Indian passed through hundreds of years before the Christian Era, only to react, in despair, to a mystical Brahmanism. He believes that the future of White Civilization will ultimately rest in the hands of the United States-man, and that the United States-man, because he is young and has a virility denied to the European, will yet win through. He believes that a way will yet be found for the American to control the Machine instead of the Machine controlling the American, and so avoid that stark reaction to machineless metaphysics which marked one stage at least of the evolution of the Indian Continent.

The truth would seem to lie in the golden via media between over-organization and under-organization-between standardization and anarchy. The present confusion of "standardiza

[ocr errors]

tion with "organization" will pass, and it will one day be recognized that excessive standardization is "the easy way out" of the mechanical thinker, and that, in its place, must come a minimum of standardization accompanied by a maximum fluidity of thought.

Sooner or later, I believe that the Fathers of America will be compelled by force of the circumstances outlined above to replace centralized bureaucratic standardization and control by what one may term "a fluidic decentralization". It would seem from various phenomena on the American continent that the apex of centralized machine-control has been reached, and that the day is passing when it is possible to attempt to secure through one hundred millions of people an automatic systole and diastole to the impulse of a centralized intelligence.

The whole story of human evolution is that of the ascending spiral. To quote from my book on Citizenship:

The citizen in his progress through the ages has been following the same course as a traveler who has been climbing a spiral path round and round a mountain from the base to the summit, a path with many drops in it, and many pitfalls. Such a traveler finds himself constantly returning over the same point, but on a higher level. It is the path of the ascending spiral.

In other words, the citizen in his development returns again and yet again to the same principle, but with a newer and, on the whole, usually a better application of that principle.

The experiment in standardization of modern America is one that was made in a lesser degree by Imperial Rome two thousand years ago, and, in our day, in a freer and better form by Imperial England, which accounts for the greater permanence of the British Empire. America is but repeating an age-old experiment, but one which has always ultimately broken down through its disintegration of the individual will and of thought.

That she will ultimately abandon that experiment, I, for one, believe to be inevitable. She will abandon it because she will find that it leads to inefficiency; she will abandon it, if for no other reason, because underneath she has a passionate individualism and the fundamental hatred of standardization that belongs to youth.

SHAW DESMOND.

« ÖncekiDevam »