emotional features were alone made responsible for the lamentable
recklessness in the market. We must first of all necessarily
acknowledge the tremendous powers of suggestion which the whole
American life and especially the stock market contains. The word
suggestion has become rather colourless in popular language, but for
the psychologist, it has a very definite meaning. Suggestion is always
a proposition for action, which is forced on the mind in such a way
that the impulse to opposite action becomes inhibited. Under ordinary
circumstances, when a proposition is made to do a certain thing
through the mechanism of the mind, the idea of the opposite action may
arise. If some one tells the normal man to go and do this or that, he
will at once think of the consequences, and in his mind perhaps the
idea awakes of the dangerousness or of the foolishness, of the
immorality or of the uselessness of such a deed, and any one of these
ideas would be a sufficient motive for ignoring the proposed line of
behaviour and for suppressing the desire to follow the poor advice.
But often this normal appearance of the opposite ideas fails. If they
arise at all, they are too faint or too powerless to offer resistance,
and often they may not even enter consciousness. They remain
suppressed, and the result is that the idea of action finds its way
unhindered, and breaks out into the deed which normally would have
been checked. If this is the case, the psychologist says that the mind
was in a state of increased suggestibility.
The degree of suggestibility, that is of willingness to yield to such
propositions for action and of inability to resist them, is indeed
different from man to man. We all know the stubborn persons who are
always inclined to resist whatever is proposed to them and who do not
believe what is told them, and we know the credulous ones who believe
everything that they see printed. But the degree of suggestibility
changes no less from hour to hour with the individual. In a state of
fatigue or under the influence of alcohol or under the influence of
strong emotions, in hope and fear, the suggestibility is reënforced.
The highest degree of suggestibility is that mental state which we
call hypnotism, in which the power to resist the proposed idea of
action is reduced to a minimum. But the chief factor in making us
suggestible is the method by which the idea of action is proposed, and
in psychology we speak of suggestion whenever an action is proposed by
methods which make the mind yielding. It certainly is not
objectionable to exert suggestive influence. Suggestions are the
leading factors in education, in art, and in religion. The
authoritative voice with which the teacher proposes the right thing
has a most valuable suggestive power to suppress in the child the
opposite misleading impulse. But surely suggestions can become
dangerous and destructive. If actions are proposed in a form which
paralyzes the power to become conscious of the opposite impulses, the
voice of reason and of conscience is silenced, and social and moral
ruin must be the result.
Everybody at once thinks of the endless variety of advertisements. An
announcement which merely gives information is of course no
suggestion. But if perhaps such an announcement takes the form of an
imperative, an element of suggestion creeps in. To be sure we are
accustomed to this trivial pattern, and no one completely loses his
power to resist if the proposition to buy comes in the grammatical
form of a command. If we had reached the highest degree of
suggestibility, as in hypnotism, we could not read "Cook with gas"
without at once putting a gas stove into our kitchen. Yet even such a
mild suggestion has its influence and tends slightly to weaken the
arguments which would lead to an opposite action. The advertisements,
however, which the brokers send to our house and which are spread
broadcast in the homes of the country to people who have no technical
knowledge of stock-buying are surely not confined to such child-like
and bland forms of suggestion. The whole grouping of figures, the
distribution of black and white in the picture of the market
situation, the glowing story of the probable successes with the
bewildering hints of special privileges, must increase the
suggestibility of the untrained mind and reënforce powerfully the
suggestive energy of the proposition to buy. The whole technique of
this procedure has nowhere been brought to such virtuosity as in our
country. The fact which we mentioned, that the new industrial and
mining enterprises can offer shares small enough to be accessible to
the man without means, has evidently been the chief reason for
developing a style of appeal which would be unthinkable in the
countries where the investors are essentially experienced business
men.
But the skill of the prospectus with its sometimes half fraudulent
features would, after all, not gain such influence if suggestion were
not produced from another side as well, namely, through the instinct
of imitation. The habit of making risky investments is so extremely
widespread that the individual buyer does not feel himself isolated,
and therefore dependent upon his own judgments and deliberations. He
feels himself as a member of a class, and the class easily becomes a
crowd, even a mob, a mob in which the logic of any mob reigns, and
that is the logic of doing unthinkingly what others do. It is well
known that every member of a crowd stands intellectually and morally
on a lower level than he would stand if left to his spontaneous
impulses and his own reflections. The crowd may fall into a panic and
rush blindly in any direction into which any one may have happened to
start and no one thinks about it, or it may go into exaltation and
exuberantly do what no one alone would dare to risk. This mass
consciousness is also surely a form of increased suggestibility. The
individual feels his own responsibility reduced because he relies
instinctively on the judgment of his neighbours, and with this
decreased responsibility the energy for resistance to dangerous
propositions disappears. Men buy their stocks because others are doing
it.
But finally, may we not call it suggestion, too, if the individual
even tremblingly accepts the risks of perilous deals, because he feels
obliged to grasp for an unusually high income in order to live up to
the style of his set? Of course there is no objective standard of
living if we abstract from that where the income simply secures the
needs of bare existence. Above that, everything depends upon the
habits of those around us. If the community steadily screws up these
habits, makes life ostentatious for those of moderate means as well as
for the rich, hysterically emphasizes the material values, the will to
be satisfied with the income of safe investments has to fight against
tremendous odds. The truly strong mind will keep its power to resist,
but the slightly weak mind will find the suggestion of the surrounding
life more powerful than the fear of possible loss. If all the
neighbours in the village have automobiles, the man who would enjoy a
quiet book and a pleasant walk much more than a showy ride will yield,
and spend a thousand dollars for his motor car where fifty dollars for
books would have brought him far more intense satisfaction. In no
country have fashion and ostentatiousness taken such strong possession
of the masses, and the willingness to be satisfied with a moderate
income is therefore nowhere so little at home.
Yet neither gambling and taking risks, nor suggestibility and
imitation, are the whole of the story. We must not forget the
superficiality of thinking, the uncritical, loose, and flabby use of
the reasoning power which shows itself in so many spheres of American
mass life. It is sufficient to see the triviality of argument and the
cheapness of thought in those newspapers which seek and enjoy the
widest circulation. It is difficult not to believe that fundamentally
sins of education are to blame for it. The school may bring much to
the children, but no mere information can be a substitute for a
training in thorough thinking. Here lies the greatest defect of our
average schools. The looseness of the spelling and figuring draws its
consequences. Whoever becomes accustomed to inaccuracy in the elements
remains inaccurate in his thinking his life long. If the American
public loses a hundred million dollars a year by investments in
worthless undertakings, surely not the smallest cause is the lack of
concise reasoning. Wrong analogies control the thought of the masses.
Any copper stock must be worth buying because the stock of
Calumet-Hecla multiplied its value a hundredfold. But the irony of the
situation lies in the fact that, as experience shows, those who are
the clearest thinkers in their own fields are in the realm of
investments as easily trapped as the most superficial reasoners. It is
well known that college professors, school teachers, and ministers
figure prominently on the mailing lists of unscrupulous brokers, and
their hard-earned savings are especially often given for stocks which
soon are not worth the paper on which they are printed. Sometimes, to
be sure, this unpractical behaviour of the idealists really results
from an unreasonable indifference to commercial questions. The true
scholar, whose life is tuned to the conviction that he has more
important things to do in the world than to make money, readily falls
into a mood of carelessness with regard to the money which he does
chance to make. In this state of indifference he follows any advice
and may easily be misled.
But it seems probable that the more frequent case is the opposite one.
Just because the teacher and the pastor have small chance to save
anything, they give their fullest thought to the question how to
multiply their earnings, and their mistake springs rather from their
ignorance of the actual conditions. They think that they can figure it
out by mere logic and overlook the hard realities. They resemble
another group of victims who can be found in the midst of commercial
life, the over-clever people who rely on especially artificial
arguments. They feel sure that they see some points which no one else
has discovered, and while they may have noticed some small reasonable
points, they overlook important conditions which the simpler-minded
would have seen. They know everything better than their neighbours,
and whatever their friends buy or sell they at once have a brilliant
argument to prove that the step was wrong. They generally forget that
the listener must be suspicious of their wisdom, as they themselves
have never earned the fruit of their apparent wisdom. They all,
however, may find comfort in the well-known fact that hardly any great
financier has died, not even a Harriman or a Morgan, without there
being found in his possession large quantities of worthless stocks and
bonds. But the variety of intellectual types, the careless and the
uncritical, the over-clever and the illogical thinkers, could easily
protect themselves against the dangers of the shortcomings in their
mental mechanism if their minds had not another trait, which, too, is
more frequent in America than anywhere else in the world--the lack of
respect for the expert.
The average American is his own expert in every field. This is
certainly not a reproach. It supplies American public life with an
immense amount of energy and readiness to help. Above all,
historically, it was the necessary outcome of the political democracy.
In striking contrast to the European bureaucracy, any citizen could at
any time be called to be postmaster or mayor or governor or member of
the cabinet. A true American would find his way, however complex the
work before him. That was, and is, splendid. Yet the development of
the recent decades has clearly shown that the danger of this mental
attitude after all appears to the newer American generation alarmingly
great in many fields. Civil service has steadily grown, the influence
of the engineer and the expert in every technical and practical field
has more and more taken control of American life, because the
go-as-you-please methods of the amateur have shown increasingly their
ineffectiveness. Education has slowly been removed from the
dilettantic, unprepared school boards. The reign of the expert in
public life seems to have begun. But in private life such an attitude
is still a part of the mental equipment of millions. They ignore the
physician and cure themselves with patent medicines or mental healing:
they ignore the banker and broker and make their investments in
accordance with their own amateurish inspiration. They pick up a few
data, ask a few friends who are as little informed as themselves, but
do not think of asking the only group of men who make a serious,
persistent study of the market their lifework.
They call this independence, and it cannot be denied that some
features of our home and school education may have fostered this
tendency not to submit to the judgment of those who know better. They
have grown up in schools in which the kindergarten method never
stopped, in which they were permitted to select the studies which they
liked, and to learn just what pleased them; they were brought up in
homes in which they were begged and persuaded, but never forced to do
the unwelcome; in short, they have never learned to submit their will
to authority. It cannot be surprising that they fancy that it is the
right kind of mental setting to feel one's self the ultimate authority
in every field, and it would be harmless indeed if the patent
medicines would really cure as well as the prescriptions of the
physician, and if the wildcat schemes would really yield the same safe
income as those investments recommended by the reliable banker. It is
then, after all, no chance that this commercially clever American
nation wastes more in anti-economic fancies than any other people on
the globe. It is the outcome of psychological traits which are rooted
in significant conditions of our educational and social life. Yet as
soon as these connections are recognized and these reasons for waste
are understood, it ought not to be difficult fundamentally to change
all this and to make the savings of the nation everywhere really
sources of national income.
IX
SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
The story of the dance is the history of human civilization, of its
progress and regress. To be sure, as the human mind remains ultimately
the same, mankind has often unintentionally returned again to the old
forms. The pirouette, which the artists of the ballet invented a
hundred years ago, and which was applauded as the wonder of its time,
as we now know, was danced by old Egyptians. Not seldom the same outer
forms referred to very different mental motives. We learn that many
people danced half naked as an expression of humility. Who would claim
that the lack of costume in the ballet of to-day is a symbol of
humility, too? Moreover, the right perspective can hardly be gained as
long as we take the narrow view and think only of those few forms of
dance which we saw yesterday in the ballroom and the day before
yesterday on the stage of the theatre. The dance has not meant to
mankind only social pleasure and artistic spectacle, it originally
accompanied the social life and surrounded the individual in every
important function.
Dancing certainly began as a religious cult. It was the form in which
every increase of emotion expressed itself, grief as well as joy, awe
as much as enthusiasm. The primitive peoples danced and in many places
still dance when the seasons change or when the fields are to be
cultivated, when they start on the hunt or go to war, when health is
asked for the sick, and when the gods are to be called upon. The
Iroquois Indians have thirty-two chief types of dances, and even among
civilized nations, for instance the Bohemians, a hundred and
thirty-six dances may be discriminated. Moreover, at first, the dance
is really one with the song; music and dancing were only slowly torn
asunder. And if we look over the whole world of dance, it almost
appears as if what is left to us is after all merely a poor remnant.
Yet in these very days much seems to suggest that the dance is to come
to its own again. At least, he who observes the life along Broadway
may indeed suspect that dancing is now to be intertwined again with
every business of life, and surely with every meal of life. No longer
can any hostelry in New York be found without dancing, and wider still
than the dance sweeps the discussion about it. The dance seems once
more the centre of public interest; it is cultivated from luncheon to
breakfast; it is debated in every newspaper and every pulpit.
But is not all this merely a new demonstration that the story of the
dance is the story of civilization? Can we deny that this recent craze
which, like a dancing mania, has whirled over the country, is a
significant expression of deep cultural changes which have come to
America? Only ten years ago such a dancing fever would have been
impossible. People danced, but they did not take it seriously. It was
set off from life and not allowed to penetrate it. It had still
essentially the rôle which belonged to it in a puritanic, hardworking
society. But the last decade has rapidly swept away that New England
temper which was so averse to the sensuous enjoyment of life, and
which long kept an invisible control over the spirit of the whole
nation. Symptoms of the change abound: how it came about is another
question. Certainly the increase and the wide distribution of wealth
with its comforts and luxuries were responsible, as well as the
practical completion of the pioneer days of the people, the rich
blossoming of science and art, and above all the tremendous influx of
warm-blooded, sensual peoples who came in millions from southern and
eastern Europe, and who altered the tendencies of the cool-blooded,
Teutonic races in the land. They have changed the old American Sunday,
they have revolutionized the inner life, they have brought the operas
to every large city, and the kinometograph to every village, and have
at last played the music to a nation-wide dance. Yet the problem which
faces every one is not how this dancing craze arose, but rather where
it may lead, how far it is healthy and how far unsound, how far we
ought to yield to it or further it, and how far we ought to resist. To
answer this question, it is not enough to watch the outside spectacle,
but we must inquire into the mental motives and mental consequences.
Exactly this is our true problem.
Let us first examine the psychological debit account. No one can doubt
that true dangers are near wherever the dancing habit is prominent.
The dance is a bodily movement which aims at no practical purpose and
is thus not bound by outer necessities. It is simply self-expression:
and this gives to the dancing impulse the liberty which easily becomes
licentiousness. Two mental conditions help in that direction; the mere
movement as such produces increased excitement, and the excitement
reënforces the movement, and so the dance has in itself the tendency
to become quicker and wilder and more and more unrestrained. When gay
Vienna began its waltzing craze in the last century, it waltzed to the
charming melodies of Lanner in a rhythm which did not demand more than
about one hundred and sixty movements in a minute; but soon came
Johann Strauss the father, and the average waltzing rhythm was two
hundred and thirty a minute, and finally the king of the waltz, Johann
Strauss the younger, and Vienna danced at the rhythm of three hundred
movements. But another mental effect is still more significant than
the impulse to increase rapidity. The uniformity of the movements, and
especially of the revolving movement, produces a state of half
dizziness and half numbness with ecstatic elements. We know the almost
hypnotic state of the whirling dervishes and the raptures in the
savage war dances; all this in milder form is involved in every
passionate dance. But nothing is more characteristic of such
half-hypnotic states than that the individual loses control of his
will. He behaves like a drunken man who becomes the slave of his
excitement and of every suggestion from without. No doubt many seek
the dancing excitement as a kind of substitute for the alcoholic
exaltation.
The social injury which must be feared if the social community
indulges in such habits of undisciplined, passionate expression needs
no explaining. The mind is a unit: it cannot be without self-control
in one department and under the desirable self-discipline of the will
in another. A period in which the mad rush of dancing stirs social
life must be unfavourable to the development of thorough training and
earnest endeavour. The fate of imperial Rome ought to be the eternal
warning to imperial Manhattan. Italy, like America, took its art and
science from over the sea, but gave to them abundant wealth. Instead
of true art, it cultivated the virtuosi, and in Rome, which paid three
thousand dancers, the dance was its glory until it began ingloriously
to sink.
Not without inner relation to the inebriety, and yet distinctly
different, is the erotic character of the dance. Lovemaking is the
most central, underlying motive of all the mimic dances all over the
globe. Among many primitive peoples the dance is a real pantomimic
presentation of the whole story from the first tender awaking of a
sweet desire through the warmer and warmer courtship to the raptures
of sensual delight. Civilized society has more or less covered the
naked passion, but from the graceful play of the minuet to the
graceless movements of the turkey trot the sensual, not to say the
sexual, element can easily be recognized by the sociologist. Here
again cause and effect move in a circle. Love excitement expresses
itself in dance, and the dance heightens the love excitement. This
erotic appeal to the senses is the chief reason why the church has
generally taken a hostile attitude. For a long while the dance was
denounced as irreligious and sinful on account of Salome's blasphemous
dancing. Certainly the rigid guardians of morality always look askance
on the contact of the sexes in the ballroom. To be sure, the standards
are relative. What appeared to one period the climax of immorality may
be considered quite natural and harmless in another. In earlier
centuries it was quite usual in the best society for the young man to
invite the girl to a dance by a kiss, and in some times it was the
polite thing for the gentleman after the dance to sit in the lap of
the girl. The shifting of opinion comes to most striking expression,
if we compare our present day acquiescence to the waltz with the moral
indignation of our great-grandmothers. No accusers of the tango to-day
can find more heated words against this Argentine importation than the
conservatives of a hundred years ago chose in their hatred of the
waltz. Good society had confined its dancing to those forms of contact
in which only the hands touched each other, leaving to the peasants
the crude, rustic forms, and now suddenly every mother has to see her
daughter clasped about the waist by any strange man. Even the dancing
masters cried out against the intruder and claimed that it was
illogical for a man to be allowed to press a girl to his bosom at the
sound of music, while no one would dare to do it between the dances.
Thus the immorality of our most recent dances may be hardly worse than
the dancing surprises of earlier fashions, but who will doubt that
these sensual elements of the new social gayeties are to-day
especially dangerous? The whole American atmosphere is filled with
erotic thought to a degree which has been unknown throughout the
history of the republic. The newspapers are filled with intra- and
extra-matrimonial scandals, the playhouses commercialize the sexual
instinct in lurid melodramas, sex problems are the centre of public
discussion, all the old barriers which the traditional policy of
silence had erected are being broken down, the whole nation is
gossiping about erotics. In such inflammable surroundings where the
sparks of the dance are recklessly kindled, the danger is imminent. If
a nation focuses its attention on sensuality, its virile energy must
naturally suffer. There is a well-known antagonism between sex and
sport. Perhaps the very best which may be said about sport is that it
keeps boyhood away from the swamps of sexuality. The dance keeps
boyhood away from the martial field of athletics.