Christian churches, and certainly Sunday motion-picture
theaters, wherever allowed, do injure the Christian Sabbath....
Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts of Washington, D. C., probably the greatest
authority on the Sabbath question in this country, says, "The
Sabbath-keeping nations are the strongest physically, mentally,
morally, _financially_, and politically." Joseph Cook said, "It
is no accident that the nations that keep the Sabbath most
carefully are those where there is the most political freedom."
_Sabbath-breaking nations gradually lose their political
freedom._
(5) Sunday Movie Theaters injure the Christian Sabbath and thus
injure the morals of the people. _Anything that injures the
morals of the people, injures the nation itself._ From a
_patriotic_ standpoint, we ought to stand for strict observance
of the Christian Sabbath, as past experience has shown and the
testimony of many witnesses proves that a disregard of the
Christian Sabbath produces crime and immorality and tends to
destroy the free institutions which have helped to make our
nation great....
Fundamentally, all such vicious laws are _unconstitutional_.
_Sunday Movie Theaters disregard the rights of labor_.... Canon
William Sheafe Chase has aptly said, "No man has the Christ
spirit who wants a better time on Sunday than he is willing to
give everyone else."...
Col. Fairbanks, the famous scale manufacturer, said: "I can tell
by watching the men at work Monday which spent Sunday in sport
and which at home, church, or Sabbath-school. The latter _do
more and better work_."
Superintendents of large factories in Milwaukee and elsewhere
have said, "When our men go on a Sunday excursion, some cannot
work Monday, and many who work cannot earn their wages, while
_those who had no sport Sunday do their best day's work
Monday_." (Italics mine.)
We need not be surprised to find that the closed ideational system which
in the first instance is a refuge from the real, becomes in turn a
device for imposing one's will upon his fellows. The believer's ego is
served in both instances. It is interesting to note also that this
self-feeling appears in crowd-thinking as its very opposite. _The
greatest enemy of personality is the crowd._ The crowd does not want
valuable men; it wants only useful men. Everyone must justify his
existence by appealing to the not-self. One may do nothing for his own
sake. He may not even strive for spiritual excellence for such a reason.
He must live for "principle," for "the great cause," for impersonal
abstractions--which is to say, he must live for his crowd, and so make
it easier for the other members to do the same with a good face.
The complex of ideas in which the crowd-mind as we have seen takes
refuge, being necessarily made up of abstract generalizations, serves
the crowd-will to social dominance through the very claim to
universality which such ideas exert. Grant that an idea is an absolute
truth, and it follows, of course, that it must be true on all occasions
and for everyone. The crowd is justified, therefore, in sacrificing
people to its ideal--itself. The idea is no longer an instrument of
living; it is an imperative. It is not yours to use the idea; the idea
is there to use you. You have ceased to be an end. Anything about you
that does not partake of the reality of this idea has no right to be,
any experience of yours which happens to be incommensurable with this
idea loses its right to be; for experience as such has now only a
"phenomenal existence." The crowd, by identifying its will to power
with this idea, becomes _itself absolute_. Your personal self, as an
end, is quite as unwelcome to the Absolute as to the crowd. There must
be no private property in thought or motive. By making everybody's
business my business, I have made my business everybody's business.
There may be only one standard--that of our crowd, which, because of its
very universal and impersonal character is really nobody's.
The absolutism of the crowd-mind with its consequent hostility to
conscious personality finds a perfect rationalization in the ethical
philosophy of Kant. The absolutism of the idea of Duty is less
skillfully elaborated in its popular crowd-manifestations, but in its
essentials it is always present, as propaganda everywhere when carefully
analyzed will show. We must not be deceived by Kant's assertion that the
individual is an end. This individual is not you or I, or anyone; it is
a mere logical abstraction. By declaring that everyone is equally an
end, Kant ignores all personal differences, and therefore the fact of
individuality as such. We are each an end in respect to those qualities
only in which we are identical--namely, in that we are "rational
beings." But this rational being is not a personal intelligence; it is a
fiction, a bundle of mental faculties assumed _a priori_ to exist, and
then treated as if it were universally and equally applicable to all
actually existing intelligences.
In arguing that "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also
will that my maxim should become a universal law," Kant may be easily
understood as justifying any crowd in seeking to make its peculiar
maxims universal laws. Who but a Rationalist or a crowd-man presumes to
have found the "universal law," who else would have the effrontery to
try to legislate for every conscience in existence? But this presumption
has its price. In thus universalizing my moral will, I wholly
depersonalize it. He says:
It is of extreme importance to remember that we must not allow
ourselves to think of deducing the reality of this principle
from the particular attributes of human nature. For duty is to
be a practical unconditional necessity of action; it must
therefore hold for all rational beings (to whom an imperative
can apply at all), and for this reason only be also a law for
all human wills. On the contrary, whatever it deduces from the
particular natural characteristics of humanity, from certain
feelings and propensions, nay, even if possible from any
particular tendency proper to human reason, and which need not
necessarily hold for the will of every rational being, this may
indeed supply us with a maxim but not with a law; with a
subjective principle on which we may have a propension or
inclination to act, but not with an objective principle on which
we should be _enjoined_ to act, _even though all our
propensions, inclinations, and natural dispositions were
opposed_ to it. In fact, the _sublimity and intrinsic dignity_
of the command in duty _are so much the more evident the less
subjective impulses favor it, and the more they oppose it_
[italics here are mine], without being able in the slightest
degree to weaken the obligation of the law or to diminish its
validity.
... An action done from duty derives its moral worth _not from
the purpose_ which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim
by which it is determined. It (this moral worth) cannot lie
anywhere but in the _principle of The Will_, without regard to
the ends which can be attained by such action.
This loss of the conscious self in the universal, this turning away from
the empirically known, this demand that an _a priori_ principle be
followed to its deadly practical conclusion _regardless of the ends_ to
which it leads, is of utmost importance for our study. It is precisely
what the paranoiac does after his own fashion. In crowd-thinking it is
often made the instrument of wholesale destruction and human slaughter.
The mob is ever motivated by this logic of negation, and of automatic
behavior. It is thus that compulsive thinking sways vast hordes of men
and women, impelling them, in the very name of truth or righteousness,
to actions of the most atrocious character. It is this which robs most
popular movements of their intelligent purposiveness, unleashes the
fanatic and the bigot, and leads men to die and to kill for a phrase.
This way of thinking points straight to Salem, Massachusetts, to the
torture-chamber, the pile of fagots and the mill pond at Rosmersholm.
The habit of thinking as a crowd is so widespread that it is impossible
to trace the influence of its rationalistic negations in the daily
mental habits of most of us. We play out our lives as if we were but
acting a part which some one had assigned to us. The fact that we are
ourselves realities, as inevitable as falling rain, and with the same
right to be as the rocks and hills, positively startles us. We feel that
we must plead extenuation, apologize for our existence, as if the end
and aim of living were to serve or vindicate a Good which, being
sufficient in itself and independent of us, can never be realized as
actually good for anybody. We behave as if we were unprofitable
servants, cringing before wrathful ideas which, though our own
creations, we permit to lord it over us. Our virtues we regard not as
expressions of ourselves or as habitual ways of reaching desirable
goods, but as if they were demanded of us unwillingly by something not
self. We should remind ourselves that these big words we idolize have no
eyes to see us and no hearts to care what we do, that they are but
symbols of ideas which we might find very useful if we dared to become
masters of them. The most common use we make of such ideas is to beat
one another and ourselves into line with them, or enforce upon
ourselves and others the collection of a debt which was contracted only
by our unconscious desire to cheat at cards in the game of civilization.
A conscious recognition of this desire and its more deliberate and
voluntary resistance in ourselves rather than in our neighbors, a candid
facing of the fact of what we really are and really want, and a mutual
readjustment of our relations on this recognized basis would doubtless
deliver us from the compulsion of crowd-thinking in somewhat the same
way that psychoanalysis is said to cure the neurotic by revealing to him
his unconscious wish.
That some such cure is an imperative social need is evident. To-day the
mob lurks just under the skin of most of us, both ignorant and educated.
The ever-increasing frequency of outbreaks of mob violence has its
source in the crowd-thinking which is everywhere encouraged. The mob
which may at any time engulf us is, after all, but the logical
conclusion and sudden ripening of thought processes which are commonly
regarded as highly respectable, idealistic, and moral.
VII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS
The crowd-mind is seen at its best and at its worst in revolution. To
many minds, revolution is so essentially a crowd phenomenon that the
terms revolution and crowd-rule are almost synonymous. "Hurrah, the mob
rules Russia," cried certain radicals in the spring of 1917--"Let the
people rule everywhere." Others, more conservative, saw in every
extravagant deed and atrocity alleged to have happened in Russia only
the thing logically to be expected where the mob rules. The idea of
revolution is itself so commonly a crowd-idea that the thinking--if
thinking it may be called--of most people on this subject depends
principally upon which crowd we happen to belong to, the crowd which
sustains the ego-feeling of its members by the hope of revolution, or
the crowd which, for similar reason, brands everything which opposes its
interests, real or imaginary, as "anarchy" and "Bolshevism."
If the word "revolution" be taken to mean fundamental change in men's
habits of thought, and life, and the forms of their relations to one
another, then it may be said that great "revolutions may be and have
been achieved with a relatively small degree of crowd-thinking and mob
violence." Much of the normal development of civilization, for instance,
the great scientific advance of the nineteenth century, the spread of
culture, the creation of artistic values, the rise in the standard of
living, is change of this sort. Such change is, however, gradual. It is
brought about by countless concrete adaptations, by thinking always
toward realizable ends. New and often unforeseeable results are thus
reached; but they are reached, as in all organic growth and in all sound
thinking, by a series of successful adjustments within the real. True
progress is doubtless made up of changes of this sort. But for the
course of progress to run on uninterrupted and undefeated we should have
to be, both in our individual and social behavior, the reasonable beings
which certain nineteenth-century utilitarians mistook us for.
It is the fool thing, the insincere thing, that more commonly happens in
matters social and political. The adjustment reached is not often a
solution of a social problem worked out deliberately on the
"greatest-happiness" principle. It is commonly a _status quo_, or
balance of power among contending crowds, each inspired by the fiction
of its own importance, by self-idealization, and desire to rule. It is
an unstable equilibrium usually held in place for the time by a dominant
crowd. This dominant crowd may itself be composed of quarreling
factions, but these parties, so long as they share enough of the
supremacy to keep up their self-feeling, so long, in fact, as their
members may even be able to make themselves believe that they, too, are
in the upper set, or so long as they continue to hope for success in the
social game as now played, unite in repeating the catchwords which
justify their crowd in its supremacy. The dominant group identifies its
own interests with the general welfare. And in the sense that some sort
of order, or any at all, is to be preferred to social chaos, there is an
element of truth in this identification.
The fact remains, however, that the dominant crowd possesses always much
of the crowd-spirit which originally secured for it its enviable
position. Its ideas, like those of all crowds, are devices for
sustaining the self-feeling of its members, for protecting itself, for
keeping the group together, for justification. They are only
secondarily, if at all, instruments for dealing with new and perplexing
social situations. It cannot be denied that a certain set of opinions,
prejudices, mannerisms, ceremonies "go with" the social position which
corresponds to them. They are the ready-made habits of the "set" or
class. They are badges by which the "gentleman" is distinguished, the
evening clothes of the psyche, as it were. Many of these crowd-forms
represent true values of living, some of them are useful in our dealings
with reality; if this were not so, if such spiritual tattooings or
ceremonial forms were wholly harmful, the crowd which performed them
would be at such a disadvantage that it could not hold its own. But that
considerations of utility--other than the function which such
ceremonialism is known to have for the unconscious always--do not
directly govern these forms of thought and behavior is seen in the fact
that so many of them, as Sumner says of "folkways," are either harmful
or useless in dealing with matters of fact.
The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so far as it must remain a crowd
in order to secure its own position of supremacy, must strive to force
all social realities into the forms of its own conflicts and dilemmas.
Inevitably the self-feeling of a great many people, who are forced by
the dominant crowd to conform and labor with no compensation, is hurt.
They cannot but contrast their own lot with that of their more fortunate
neighbors. Of all things, people probably resist most the feeling of
inferiority. Any suggestion that the difference in social position is
due to a similar difference in personal worth or in ability is hotly
resented. The resentment is in no wise abated by the fact that in some
cases this suggestion may be true. Compensations are at once created by
the unconscious. In mediæval times "all men were brothers and were equal
before the altars of the Church and in heaven." Thus distinctions of
merit, other than those which prevailed in the social order, were set up
in the interest of the common man.
As the influence of the Renaissance directed general attention from the
realm of the spiritual to practical affairs of earth, these
compensations changed from thoughts of the future world to dreams of the
future of this world. The injured self-feeling dwells upon the economic
or political inequalities which flow from the dominance of the ruling
crowd. The injustices and acts of exploitation, which are certainly
neither new nor rare occurrences in human relations, are seized upon as
if it were these things, not the assumption to superiority, which were
the issue at stake.
At the time of the French Revolution the Third Estate, or Bourgeois,
which showed itself quite as capable of exploiting the poor as ever were
the older aristocrats, saw itself only as part of the wronged and
exploited "people." The sufferings of the poor, which it was frequently
even then profiting in quite as heartily, to say the least, as the
titled nobility, were represented as the grievance of all mankind
against the hated nobility. That the ideas of "liberty, equality, and
fraternity" which these good tradesmen preached may easily become the
sort of compensatory ideas we have been discussing is shown by the fact
of the genuine astonishment and indignation of the burghers when later
their employees made use of this same phrase in the struggles between
labor and capital. Sans-culottism had quite as many psychological
motives as economic behind it.
How pompous, hateful, and snobbish were those titled folk with their
powdered wigs, carriages, fine clothes, and their exclusive social
gatherings to which honest citizens, often quite as wealthy as
themselves, were not invited. If the "people"--that is, the burghers
themselves--only had a chance they would be just as fine ladies and
gentlemen as those who merely inherited their superiority. Down with the
aristocrats! All men were equal and always had been. There must be
fraternity and the _carier ouvert les talents_, in other words,
brotherhood and free competition.
I am sure, from all I have ever seen or read of social revolt and
unrest, that this injured self-feeling, or defense against the sense of
personal inferiority, while not the only motive, is the most powerful
one at work. It crops out everywhere, in the layman's hatred of the
clergy during the Reformation, in that curious complex of ideas whereby
the uneducated often look upon a college diploma as something little
short of magical, and defend their ego against this ridiculously
exaggerated mark of distinction and accompanying feeling of
self-reproach by a slur at "high-brows." Few people realize how general
this feeling is; the trick of making fun of the educated is one of the
commonest forms of crowd-humor in America, both in vaudeville and in
popular oratory. I have previously pointed out the fact that the
religious revival in our day is to a great extent characterized by a
popular resistance to scholars. No one can read Mr. Sunday's sermons and
deny this fact. The City of New York gave the largest majority in its
history to the candidate for the office of mayor who made opposition to
"experts" the main issue in his campaign. Scores of times I have heard
popular speakers resort to this trick to gain favor with their
audiences, and I cannot remember ever having known such sentiments to
fail to gain applause--I am not speaking now of strictly academic
groups, but of general gatherings.
The point of interest here is that these same people have a most
extravagant notion of the value of the academic training which they
encourage the crowd speaker in ridiculing. I have made it a practice of
talking with a great many people personally and drawing them out on this
point, and I have found that this is almost uniformly the case. F. B., a
cigar maker by trade, says, "Oh, if I had only had sense enough to go on
to school when I had the opportunity!" E. L., a mechanic, says, "I might
have been somebody, if I had been given any chance to get an education."
R., a sort of jack-of-all-trades, says, "If I only had N.'s education,
I'd be a millionaire." B., a farmer with limited intellectual interests,
says, "I tell you, my boys are not going to be like me; they have got to
go to college." G., a waiter, says, "I don't know much," and then
proceeds to impress me with the latest bit of academic information which
he has picked up. C., a printer, who has been moderately successful,
says: "I'd give ten thousand dollars right this minute if I knew Greek;
now there is ---- and there is ----, neighbors of mine, they're highly
educated. When I'm with them I'm ashamed and feel like a dub."
When, on such occasions, I repeatedly say that the average academic
student really learns hardly anything at all of the classic languages,
and cite the small fruits of my own years of tedious study as an
example, the effect produced is invariably comforting--until I add that
one need not attend a university seven years or even four to become
educated, but that nearly everyone with ability to learn and with
genuine intellectual interests may achieve a remarkable degree of
learning. The answer of the perplexed person is then often an
extenuation. "Well, you see, a busy person or a working man is so tired
after the day's work that he has no energy left for study," or it is,
"Wait till the working class have more leisure, then they, too, can be
cultivated." Passing over this extenuation, which ignores the fact that
some of the best informed and clearest thinking people one meets are
working people, while the average university graduate leads anything but
an intellectual life, it can hardly be denied, I think, that our crowd
cult of anti-"highbrowism" is really a defense mechanism against an
inner feeling of inferiority. Now the interesting thing about this
feeling of inferiority is the exaggerated notion of the superiority of
the college-trained, which is entertained chiefly by the uneducated
themselves. What appears here is in fact nothing other than a cheapening
of the idea of superiority. Personal excellence is something which
anyone may attain; it is not something congenital, but something to be
added on; one "gets an education," possesses something of advantage,
merely by a few years of conventional study of books. Anyone might do
that, therefore. "I, too, if I only cared to, or had been given
opportunity, might now be famous." "The difference between myself and
the world's greatest genius is not a spiritual chasm which I could not
myself, at least hypothetically, cross." "It is rather an 'acquired
character,' a mere fruit of special opportunity--which in a few cases it
doubtless may be--but it is something external; at bottom we are all
equal."
Many facts may be advanced to corroborate the results of our analysis
here. The crowd always resents the Carlyle, William James, Nietzsche,
Goethe theory of genius. Genius is not congenital superiority. It is the
result of hard work. The genius is not a unique personal fact, he is a
"representative man." He says just what his age is thinking. The
inarticulate message of his contemporaries simply becomes articulate in
some one, and behold a genius. In other words, I suppose, all Vienna,
messenger boys and bootblacks especially, were suddenly fascinated by
Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and went about whistling improvised musical
renderings of the theme of this poem, till the deaf Beethoven heard and
wrote these whistlings down in the form of the Ninth Symphony.