Дел III
СТЕРЕОТИПИ
Поглавје VIII
Слепите точки и нивната вредност
2.
The stereotype represented by such words as “progress” and
“perfection” was composed fundamentally of mechanical inventions. And
mechanical it has remained, on the whole, to this day. In America more
than anywhere else, the spectacle of mechanical progress has made so deep an
impression, that it has suffused the whole moral code. An American will endure
almost any insult except the charge that he is not progressive. Be he of long native
ancestry, or a recent immigrant, the aspect that has always struck his eye is
the immense physical growth of American civilization. That constitutes a
fundamental stereotype through which he views the world: the county village will
become the great metropolis, the modest building a skyscraper, what is small
shall be big; what is slow shall be fast; what is poor shall be rich; what is
few shall be many; whatever is shall be more so.
Not every American, of course, sees the world this way.
Henry Adams didn’t, and William Allen White doesn’t. But those men do, who in
the magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of America.
They mean just about that when they preach evolution, progress, prosperity,
being constructive, the American way of doing things. It is easy to laugh, but
in fact, they are using a very great pattern of human endeavor. For one thing
it adopts an impersonal criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion;
for third it is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the ideal
confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature with
contraption. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever actuated any
moral code, or ever will. The desire for the biggest, the fastest, the highest,
or if you are the maker of wristwatches or microscope the smallest; the love in
short of the superlative and the “peerless” is in essence and possibility a
noble passion.
Certainly the American version of progress has fitted an
extraordinary range of facts in the economic situation and in human nature. It
turned an unusual amount of pugnacity,
acquisitiveness and lust of power into productive work. Nor has it, until more
recently perhaps, seriously frustrated the active nature of the active members
of the community. They have made a civilization which provides them who made it
with what they fill to be ample satisfaction in work, mating and play, and the
rush of their victory over mountains, wilderness, distance, and human
competition has ever done duty for the part of religious feeling which is a
sense of communion with the purpose of the universe. The pattern has been a
success so nearly perfect in the sequence of ideals, practice, and results,
that any challenge to it is called un-American.
And yet, this pattern is very partial and inadequate way of
representing the world. The habit of thinking about progress as a “development”
has meant for many aspects of the environment were simply neglected. With the
stereotype of “progress” before their eyes, Americans have in the mass seen
little that did not accord with that progress. They saw the expansions of the
cities, but not the accretion of slums; they cheered the census statistics, but
refused to consider overcrowding; they pointed with pride to their growth, but
would not see the drift from the land, or unassimilated migration. They
expanded their industry furiously at reckless cost to their natural resources; they
build up gigantic corporations without arranging for industrial relations. They
grew to be one of the most powerful nations on earth without preparing their
institutions or their minds for the ending of isolation. They stumbled into the
World War morally and physically unready, and they stumbled out again, much
disillusioned, but hardly more experienced.
In the World War the good and evil influence of the American
stereotype was plainly visible. The idea that war could be won by recruiting
unlimited armies, raising unlimited credits, building unlimited number of
ships, producing unlimited munitions, and concentrating without limits on these
alone, fitted the traditional stereotype, and resulted in something like
physical miracle. (…) But among those most affected by the stereotype, there
was no place for the consideration of what the fruits of victory were, or how
they were to be attained. Therefore, aims were ignored, or regarded as
automatic, and victory was conceived, because the stereotype demanded it, as
nothing but annihilating victory in the field. In peace time you did not ask
what the fastest motor car for, and in war you did not ask what the completest
victory was for. Yet in Paris
the pattern did not fit the facts. In peace you can go endlessly supplanting
small things with big ones; in war when you have won absolute victory, you
cannot go for more absolute victory. You have to do something on entirely
different pattern. And if you lack such a pattern, the end of the war is to you
what it was to so many good people, an anticlimax in a dreary and savorless
world.
This marks the point where the stereotype and the facts,
that cannot be ignored, definitely part company. There is always such a point,
because our image of how things behave are simpler and more fixed than the ebb
and flow of affairs. There comes a time,
therefore, when the blind spots come from the edge of vision into the center.
Then unless there are critics who have the courage to sound an alarm, and
leaders capable of understanding the change, and people tolerant by habit, the
stereotype, instead of economizing effort, and focusing energy as it did in
1917 and 1918, may frustrate effort and waste men’s energy by blinding them, as
it did for those people who cried for a Carthaginian peace in 1919 and deplored
the Treaty of Versailles in 1921.
3.
…
(Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1921)
No comments:
Post a Comment