Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

A

CHAPTER LVI

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALIZATION

СНАР.

LVI

Spread

of Lump

S little societies coalesce into a big society; as tribal and local cultures vanish before the spread of a general culture; as men are drawn into organizations and more departments of hu- of the man life are regulated, less play is given to individuality. All of the same group or class are lumped together, the differences among ing them being ignored. Industry, manners, morals, laws, policies are fitted not to the individual, but to the average. Since most men vary appreciably from the average, most men experience a certain discomfort under the social régime. It is as if all had to wear clothes of the same size and cut.

tory

the Work

Compare individual labor with collective labor. In handicraft The Facindustry the artisan works with his own tools in his own shop at Locksteps his own pace, beginning and ending the day to suit himself. r When he feels like it, he can knock off a bit to stretch himself or smoke a pipe. To-day he may be up with the lark in order to quit early; to-morrow he may sleep late and make up for it by working into the night. Factory industry, however, subjects the workers to an impersonal régime. The speed of the machine regulates the pace of work. Length of the working day, time of beginning and ending, rests, holidays-all are accommodated to the average workman or else to the stronger. Aside from the companionship, labor under such circumstances will be more irksome than an equal amount of go-as-you-please labor. Since this is so and since machine production is here to stay, the machine tender's workday should be short in order that he may individualize along cultural lines.

The Ma-
Product

chine

Made Not

for the

Impersonal, too, is the product of the machine. In olden days the carpenter made a chest for the silversmith one day, the silversmith a cup for the carpenter on another and they wrought in sympathy. The knowledge of human necessities and the con- but for sciousness of human good will entered into their work and thus the men were linked together. But to-day the factory operative

Public

CHAP.
LVI

Machine-
Made
Drama

The

Army
Machine

makes only a bit of a thing and has no thoughts about the man who will use the thing he helps make; while this thing is not made for any particular person but for "the public." If you are suited by some one of the types turned out by the machine, well and good; if not, it is almost impossible to obtain the kind of thing you really want. Artists agree that machine production for the market is without the interest excited by hand production for an individual and the products are neither significant nor beautiful.

Nor is impersonalization confined to the satisfaction of the lower wants. When the art economy was dominant the people acted their own "mystery" plays in the churches. Each parish chose its "mystery," the parts were assigned to the best actors in the parish, and the representation was the result of the creative personal effort of the community. Oberammergau long harbored a survival of this drama. Nowadays, when the machine economy is dominant, a motion-picture syndicate decides what shall be filmed. Each film must be suited to the average audience, for it will be shown all over the country. The local manager has no option as to the films he shall present in his theatre. The films are dispatched from one town to another in their strict turn and an exception made for one town would derange the whole centralized distribution. Hence the photo-plays fall into wellmarked types the Far West play, the ante-bellum Old South play, the detective play, the drama of the big-city underworld, the historical pageant type, the play with the child-woman heroine, etc. Who can detect in these productions the personality of the maker? Yet that personality gives the stamp of true art. No wonder they all die a natural death in a few months!

Before the day of the motion film the theater bade fair to go in this same direction. But the organization for making and presenting plays was never so tight and close that gleams of personality could not show through, while there were always some independent actor-managers who fitted into no centralized machine economy.

The military régime takes little account of personal differentiæ. Since in warfare joint action triumphs over individual action, the tyranny of the average is well-nigh absolute. Little consideration is given to the exceptional man, or to the flow and ebb of energy and feeling in the individual. Barracks and camp

are the places of sacrifice of myriads of innocent personal desires. Compare the pleasure from a beautiful stroll with that from marching with a platoon over the same route. The chief points in the soldier's day are fixed, the chief processes standardized. His golden moments are when "on leave" he can lay off this irksome harness and indulge in an orgy of self-prompted actions.

CHAP.

LVI

ernmental

Imperial governments, being without check from the governed, The Gov. over-ride national, local and individual differences. The later Machine Roman Empire became a cumbrous mechanism which bore cruelly upon the hearts and lives of men. In the words of Cooley: "A centralized bureaucratic structure left the individual and the local group no sphere of self-reliant development. Public spirit and political leadership were suppressed, and the habit of organized self-expression died out, leaving the people without group vitality and as helpless as children."

The present government of India, although conscientious and well-intentioned, is felt by the more sensitive natives to be something alien and soulless. Eloquently the Indian poet Tagore characterizes it as "untouched by human hand" and likens it to "a hydraulic press whose pressure is impersonal and on that account effective." It is "a mere abstract force in which the whole population of a distant country has lost its human personality." The subjects feel themselves bound by "iron chains of organization which are the most relentless and unbreakable that have ever been manufactured in the whole history of man." The perfection of its espionage and intelligence service appalls one. Its "tireless vigilance being the vigilance of a machine has not the human power to overlook or to discriminate. At the least pressing of its button the monster organization becomes all eyes whose ugly stare of inquisitiveness cannot be avoided by a single person among the immense multitude of the ruled. At the least turn of its screw, by the fraction of an inch, the grip is tightened to the point of suffocation around every man, woman and child of a vast population."

The Eccle

The religious bigot eager to make one form of religion prevail and to suppress by force all variants is victim of the lumping Machine fallacy. Individuals differ in the demands their natures make upon religion. They will be happier if they may choose freely

1 Social Organization, p. 114.

СНАР.
LVI

The Educational Machine

among several types with unlike emphasis upon dogma and rite, upon thought and emotion.

How personal one's religion ought to be is brought out by William James:

You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion; the pluralistic form with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities will not seem to afford you security enough.

But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.

A like liberation comes from looking upon truth as a personal relation so that truth for you is not necessarily truth for me. As William James puts it, "Ideas (which themselves are. but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience." Such a doctrine simultaneously justifies an immense variety of different beliefs in different people.

The educator has been an arch-sinner against human diversity. One would suppose that from the beginning teachers would adapt mental pabulum to immature minds. Yet for thousands of years the content of children's education has been the religious and literary classics. The idea of starting the child with simple matter adapted to its comprehension is scarcely three centuries old. In religious instruction the idea of graded material has hardly even yet won the day. The rigid curriculum of study has been a Moloch to which personal tastes and needs have been ruthlessly sacrificed. Another insatiate idol is the examination system. Some intellects above the normal cannot "stand and deliver" under this system. In excusing his daughter William James remarked, "No James ever could pass an examination." To rate ability and proficiency by the answers made to given questions in a given time is something that would occur only to un

imaginative minds; yet in England it is said to be a common practice to give a man a university position on his performance in the examination room.

In the little ungraded school the child progresses according to its capacity. Then a system grows up which impounds the child with thirty-nine others in a class the pace of which is adapted to the powers of the average member. All forty move. in lockstep. The bright children are bored and demoralized; the dull learn next to nothing. No one would insist that they should all wear clothes of the same size; yet we lace them in an educational strait-jacket, because we cannot see the grotesque misfits which result.

In dealing with the poor the besetting vice is lumping them together. One social philosopher looks upon them simply as the unfit. Another regards them as the unadapted. To a third they are by-products of our industrial system. To a fourth they are victims of social injustice. Thrift, temperance, godliness, hygiene, education, single tax on land values, socialism and communism — each has been offered as a sure cure for poverty. A hundred schemes have been broached for relieving the poor by wholesale treatment. But close acquaintance with the dependent discloses a great variety of characters and causes. No social worker expects poverty to disappear save by the co-operation of many agencies and policies. The only method followed in modern charity is the "case" method. Just as nostrums have been discredited and no physician thinks of treating disease save after study and diagnosis of the individual patient, so the social worker insists on full knowledge of the case and adapts his form of help to that particular family.

СНАР.

LVI

The Ma
Charitable

chine of

Relief

The Ma chine of

Justice

There is a stage at which impersonal treatment of the wrong- Criminal doer seems very splendid. We expect officials to depersonalize their relations to the public, to act "without fear or favor." We praise the editor who is impersonal in printing the news, who publishes impartially the disgrace of his best friend and the triumph of his worst enemy. We call for a clergyman who shall be "no respecter of persons." He must denounce the misconduct of his trustee or "pillar " as he denounces that of his humblest parishioner. The bandage over the eyes of Justice symbolizes that Justice knows not whether the suitor is lord or hind.

Out of this horror of partiality comes, however, the classical

« ForrigeFortsæt »