"A person hostile to this country."

"A person against the government."

"A person who is on the opposite side."

"A native of an unfriendly country."

"A foreigner at war."

"A foreigner who tries to do harm to the country he is in."

"An enemy from a foreign land."

"A person against a country." etc....

Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact

than words like sovereignty, independence, national honor, rights,

defense, aggression, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, about which

we so readily take sides "for" or "against."

3

The power to dissociate superficial analogies, attend to differences

and appreciate variety is lucidity of mind. It is a relative faculty.

Yet the differences in lucidity are extensive, say as between a newly

born infant and a botanist examining a flower. To the infant there is

precious little difference between his own toes, his father's watch,

the lamp on the table, the moon in the sky, and a nice bright yellow

edition of Guy de Maupassant. To many a member of the Union League

Club there is no remarkable difference between a Democrat, a

Socialist, an anarchist, and a burglar, while to a highly

sophisticated anarchist there is a whole universe of difference

between Bakunin, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin. These examples show how

difficult it might be to secure a sound public opinion about de

Maupassant among babies, or about Democrats in the Union League Club.

A man who merely rides in other people's automobiles may not rise to

finer discrimination than between a Ford, a taxicab, and an

automobile. But let that same man own a car and drive it, let him, as

the psychoanalysts would say, project his libido upon automobiles, and

he will describe a difference in carburetors by looking at the rear

end of a car a city block away. That is why it is often such a relief

when the talk turns from "general topics" to a man's own hobby. It is

like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field

outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a

sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response to

his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen.

We easily identify, says Ferenczi, two only partially similar things:

[Footnote: Internat. Zeitschr, f. Arztl. Psychoanalyse, 1913.

Translated and republished by Dr. Ernest Jones in S. Ferenczi,

_Contributions to Psychoanalysis_, Ch. VIII, _Stages in the

Development of the Sense of Reality_.] the child more easily than

the adult, the primitive or arrested mind more readily than the

mature. As it first appears in the child, consciousness seems to be an

unmanageable mixture of sensations. The child has no sense of time,

and almost none of space, it reaches for the chandelier with the same

confidence that it reaches for its mother's breast, and at first with

almost the same expectation. Only very gradually does function define

itself. To complete inexperience this is a coherent and

undifferentiated world, in which, as someone has said of a school of

philosophers, all facts are born free and equal. Those facts which

belong together in the world have not yet been separated from those

which happen to lie side by side in the stream of consciousness.

At first, says Ferenczi, the baby gets some of the things it wants by

crying for them. This is "the period of magical hallucinatory

omnipotence." In its second phase the child points to the things it

wants, and they are given to it. "Omnipotence by the help of magic

gestures." Later, the child learns to talk, asks for what it wishes,

and is partially successful. "The period of magic thoughts and magic

words." Each phase may persist for certain situations, though overlaid

and only visible at times, as for example, in the little harmless

superstitions from which few of us are wholly free. In each phase,

partial success tends to confirm that way of acting, while failure

tends to stimulate the development of another. Many individuals,

parties, and even nations, rarely appear to transcend the magical

organization of experience. But in the more advanced sections of the

most advanced peoples, trial and error after repeated failure has led

to the invention of a new principle. The moon, they learn, is not

moved by baying at it. Crops are not raised from the soil by spring

festivals or Republican majorities, but by sunlight, moisture, seeds,

fertilizer, and cultivation. [Footnote: Ferenczi, being a pathologist,

does not describe this maturer period where experience is organized as

equations, the phase of realism on the basis of science.]

Allowing for the purely schematic value of Ferenczi's categories of

response, the quality which we note as critical is the power to

discriminate among crude perceptions and vague analogies. This power

has been studied under laboratory conditions. [Footnote: See, for

example, Diagnostische Assoziation Studien, conducted at the

Psychiatric University Clinic in Zurich under the direction of Dr. C.

G. Jung. These tests were carried on principally under the so-called

Krapelin-Aschaffenburg classification. They show reaction time,

classify response to the stimulant word as inner, outer, and clang,

show separate results for the first and second hundred words, for

reaction time and reaction quality when the subject is distracted by

holding an idea in mind, or when he replies while beating time with a

metronome. Some of the results are summarized in Jung, _Analytical

Psychology_, Ch. II, transl. by Dr. Constance E. Long.] The Zurich

Association Studies indicate clearly that slight mental fatigue, an

inner disturbance of attention or an external distraction, tend to

"flatten" the quality of the response. An example of the very "flat"

type is the clang association (cat-hat), a reaction to the sound and

not to the sense of the stimulant word. One test, for example, shows a

9% increase of clang in the second series of a hundred reactions. Now

the clang is almost a repetition, a very primitive form of analogy.

4

If the comparatively simple conditions of a laboratory can so readily

flatten out discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In

the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather

trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the subject's interest and

self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress

intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat

in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and

telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments

formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can

anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in

the general glare that does not flash like an electric sign? The life

of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are

noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant

sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms,

but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes

on in a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and

foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign

people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where

experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.

"The intolerable burden of thought" is a burden when the conditions

make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable.

It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of

the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that

helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the

citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst

possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the

movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air,

order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the

intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the

merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the

worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of

muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an

automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from

anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he

is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his

attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define

clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which

needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children,

raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating

ornament.

Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and

spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away

distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how

cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the

ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled

minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and

tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why

so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent

differences.

5

But this external disorder is complicated further by internal.

Experiment shows that the speed, the accuracy, and the intellectual

quality of association is deranged by what we are taught to call

emotional conflicts. Measured in fifths of a second, a series of a

hundred stimuli containing both neutral and hot words may show a

variation as between 5 and 32 or even a total failure to respond at

all. [Footnote: Jung, _Clark Lectures_.] Obviously our public

opinion is in intermittent contact with complexes of all sorts; with

ambition and economic interest, personal animosity, racial prejudice,

class feeling and what not. They distort our reading, our thinking,

our talking and our behavior in a great variety of ways.

And finally since opinions do not stop at the normal members of

society, since for the purposes of an election, a propaganda, a

following, numbers constitute power, the quality of attention is still

further depressed. The mass of absolutely illiterate, of

feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated

individuals, is very considerable, much more considerable there is

reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal

is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians,

people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose

vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has

comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion. The stream of

public opinion is stopped by them in little eddies of misunderstanding,

where it is discolored with prejudice and far fetched analogy.

A "broad appeal" takes account of the quality of association, and is

made to those susceptibilities which are widely distributed. A

"narrow" or a "special" appeal is one made to those susceptibilities

which are uncommon. But the same individual may respond with very

different quality to different stimuli, or to the same stimuli at

different times. Human susceptibilities are like an alpine country.

There are isolated peaks, there are extensive but separated plateaus,

and there are deeper strata which are quite continuous for nearly all

mankind. Thus the individuals whose susceptibilities reach the

rarefied atmosphere of those peaks where there exists an exquisitive

difference between Frege and Peano, or between Sassetta's earlier and

later periods, may be good stanch Republicans at another level of

appeal, and when they are starving and afraid, indistinguishable from

any other starving and frightened person. No wonder that the magazines

with the large circulations prefer the face of a pretty girl to any

other trade mark, a face, pretty enough to be alluring, but innocent

enough to be acceptable. For the "psychic level" on which the stimulus

acts determines whether the public is to be potentially a large or a

small one.

6

Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted

in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and

social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty

of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling,

by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our

access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity

of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception,

to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive

us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead.

PART III

STEREOTYPES

CHAPTER 6. STEREOTYPES

" 7. STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE

" 8. BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE

" 9. CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES

" 10. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES

CHAPTER VI

STEREOTYPES

1

Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface,

moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few

intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best

only a phase and an aspect. This is as true of the eminent insiders

who draft treaties, make laws, and issue orders, as it is of those who

have treaties framed for them, laws promulgated to them, orders given

at them. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach

of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe.

They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have

reported and what we can imagine.

Yet even the eyewitness does not bring back a naéve picture of the

scene. [Footnote: _E. g. cf._ Edmond Locard, _L'Enquête Criminelle

et les Méthodes Scientifiques._ A great deal of interesting material has

been gathered in late years on the credibility of the witness, which

shows, as an able reviewer of Dr. Locard's book says in _The

Times_ (London) Literary Supplement (August 18, 1921), that

credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events,

and also as to type of perception. Thus, perceptions of touch, odor,

and taste have low evidential value. Our hearing is defective and

arbitrary when it judges the source and direction of sound, and in

listening to the talk of other people "words which are not heard will

be supplied by the witness in all good faith. He will have a theory of

the purport of the conversation, and will arrange the sounds he heard

to fit it." Even visual perceptions are liable to great error, as in

identification, recognition, judgment of distance, estimates of

numbers, for example, the size of a crowd. In the untrained observer,

the sense of time is highly variable. All these original weaknesses

are complicated by tricks of memory, and the incessant creative

quality of the imagination. _Cf_. also Sherrington, _The Integrative

Action of the Nervous System_, pp. 318-327.

The late Professor Hugo Münsterberg wrote a popular book on this

subject called _On the Witness Stand_.] For experience seems to

show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he

takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the

account of an event is really a transfiguration of it. Few facts in

consciousness seem to be merely given. Most facts in consciousness

seem to be partly made. A report is the joint product of the knower

and known, in which the role of the observer is always selective and

usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and

the habits of our eyes.

An unfamiliar scene is like the baby's world, "one great, blooming,

buzzing confusion." [Footnote: Wm. James, _Principles of

Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 488.] This is the way, says Mr. John Dewey,

[Footnote: John Dewey, _How We Think_, pg 121.] that any new

thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange.

"Foreign languages that we do not understand always seem jibberings,

babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut,

individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded street,

the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between

experts in a complicated game, are further instances. Put an

inexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a

meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look

alike to the visiting stranger. Only gross differences of size or

color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which

is perfectly individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an

indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not

understand. The problem of the acquisition of meaning by things, or

(stated in another way) of forming habits of simple apprehension, is

thus the problem of introducing (1) _definiteness_ and _distinction_

and (2) _consistency_ or _stability_ of meaning into what is

otherwise vague and wavering."

But the kind of definiteness and consistency introduced depends upon

who introduces them. In a later passage [Footnote: _op. cit._, p.

133.] Dewey gives an example of how differently an experienced layman

and a chemist might define the word metal. "Smoothness, hardness,

glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy weight for its size ... the

serviceable properties of capacity for being hammered and pulled

without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold, of

retaining the shape and form given, of resistance to pressure and

decay, would probably be included" in the layman's definition. But the

chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian

qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters

into combination with oxygen so as to form a base."

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define

first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the

outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us,

and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form

stereotyped for us by our culture. Of the great men who assembled at

Paris to settle the affairs of mankind, how many were there who were

able to see much of the Europe about them, rather than their

commitments about Europe? Could anyone have penetrated the mind of M.

Clemenceau, would he have found there images of the Europe of 1919, or

a great sediment of stereotyped ideas accumulated and hardened in a

long and pugnacious existence? Did he see the Germans of 1919, or the

German type as he had learned to see it since 1871? He saw the type,

and among the reports that came to him from Germany, he took to heart

those reports, and, it seems, those only, which fitted the type that

was in his mind. If a junker blustered, that was an authentic German;

if a labor leader confessed the guilt of the empire, he was not an

authentic German.

At a Congress of Psychology in Göttingen an interesting experiment was

made with a crowd of presumably trained observers. [Footnote: A. von

Gennep, _La formation des légendes_, pp. 158-159. Cited F. van

Langenhove, _The Growth of a Legend_, pp. 120-122.]

"Not far from the hall in which the Congress was sitting there was a

public fete with a masked ball. Suddenly the door of the hall was

thrown open and a clown rushed in madly pursued by a negro, revolver

in hand. They stopped in the middle of the room fighting; the clown

fell, the negro leapt upon him, fired, and then both rushed out of the

hall. The whole incident hardly lasted twenty seconds.

"The President asked those present to write immediately a report since

there was sure to be a judicial inquiry. Forty reports were sent in.

Only one had less than 20% of mistakes in regard to the principal

facts; fourteen had 20% to 40% of mistakes; twelve from 40% to 50%;

thirteen more than 50%. Moreover in twenty-four accounts 10% of the

details were pure inventions and this proportion was exceeded in ten

accounts and diminished in six. Briefly a quarter of the accounts were

false.

"It goes without saying that the whole scene had been arranged and

even photographed in advance. The ten false reports may then be

relegated to the category of tales and legends; twenty-four accounts

are half legendary, and six have a value approximating to exact

evidence."

Thus out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a

scene that had just happened before their eyes, more than a majority

saw a scene that had not taken place. What then did they see? One

would suppose it was easier to tell what had occurred, than to invent

something which had not occurred. They saw their stereotype of such a

brawl. All of them had in the course of their lives acquired a series

of images of brawls, and these images flickered before their eyes. In

one man these images displaced less than 20% of the actual scene, in

thirteen men more than half. In thirty-four out of the forty observers

the stereotypes preempted at least one-tenth of the scene.

A distinguished art critic has said [Footnote: Bernard Berenson,

_The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_, pp. 60, _et

seq_.] that "what with the almost numberless shapes assumed by an

object. ... What with our insensitiveness and inattention, things

scarcely would have for us features and outlines so determined and

clear that we could recall them at will, but for the stereotyped

shapes art has lent them." The truth is even broader than that, for

the stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, in

the sense of painting and sculpture and literature, but from our moral

codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations as

well. Substitute in the following passage of Mr. Berenson's the words

'politics,' 'business,' and 'society,' for the word 'art' and the

sentences will be no less true: "... unless years devoted to the study

of all schools of art have taught us also to see with our own eyes, we

soon fall into the habit of moulding whatever we look at into the

forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted. There is

our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors

which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms

and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to reproduce things

as we know they certainly are, or we accuse him of insincerity."

Mr. Berenson speaks of our displeasure when a painter "does not

visualize objects exactly as we do," and of the difficulty of

appreciating the art of the Middle Ages because since then "our manner

of visualizing forms has changed in a thousand ways." [Footnote:

_Cf._ also his comment on _Dante's Visual Images, and his Early

Illustrators_ in _The Study and Criticism of Italian Art_ (First

Series), p. 13. "_We_ cannot help dressing Virgil as a Roman,

and giving him a 'classical profile' and 'statuesque carriage,' but

Dante's visual image of Virgil was probably no less mediaeval, no

more based on a critical reconstruction of antiquity, than his entire

conception of the Roman poet. Fourteenth Century illustrators make

Virgil look like a mediaeval scholar, dressed in cap and gown, and

there is no reason why Dante's visual image of him should have been

other than this."] He goes on to show how in regard to the human

figure we have been taught to see what we do see. "Created by

Donatello and Masaccio, and sanctioned by the Humanists, the new canon

of the human figure, the new cast of features ... presented to the

ruling classes of that time the type of human being most likely to win

the day in the combat of human forces... Who had the power to break

through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things,

to select shapes more definitely expressive of reality than those

fixed by men of genius? No one had such power. People had perforce to

see things in that way and in no other, and to see only the shapes

depicted, to love only the ideals presented...." [Footnote: _The

Central Italian Painters_, pp. 66-67.]

2

If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know

what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to

appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal,

but the minds through which they have filtered it. For the accepted

types, the current patterns, the standard versions, intercept

information on its way to consciousness. Americanization, for example,

is superficially at least the substitution of American for European

stereotypes. Thus the peasant who might see his landlord as if he were

the lord of the manor, his employer as he saw the local magnate, is

taught by Americanization to see the landlord and employer according

to American standards. This constitutes a change of mind, which is, in

effect, when the inoculation succeeds, a change of vision. His eye

sees differently. One kindly gentlewoman has confessed that the

stereotypes are of such overweening importance, that when hers are not

indulged, she at least is unable to accept the brotherhood of man and

the fatherhood of God: "we are strangely affected by the clothes we

wear. Garments create a mental and social atmosphere. What can be

hoped for the Americanism of a man who insists on employing a London

tailor? One's very food affects his Americanism. What kind of American

consciousness can grow in the atmosphere of sauerkraut and Limburger

cheese? Or what can you expect of the Americanism of the man whose

breath always reeks of garlic?" [Footnote: Cited by Mr. Edward Hale

Bierstadt, _New Republic_, June 1 1921 p. 21.]

This lady might well have been the patron of a pageant which a friend

of mine once attended. It was called the Melting Pot, and it was given

on the Fourth of July in an automobile town where many foreign-born

workers are employed. In the center of the baseball park at second

base stood a huge wooden and canvas pot. There were flights of steps

up to the rim on two sides. After the audience had settled itself, and

the band had played, a procession came through an opening at one side

of the field. It was made up of men of all the foreign nationalities

employed in the factories. They wore their native costumes, they were

singing their national songs; they danced their folk dances, and

carried the banners of all Europe. The master of ceremonies was the

principal of the grade school dressed as Uncle Sam. He led them to the

pot. He directed them up the steps to the rim, and inside. He called

them out again on the other side. They came, dressed in derby hats,

coats, pants, vest, stiff collar and polka-dot tie, undoubtedly, said

my friend, each with an Eversharp pencil in his pocket, and all

singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

To the promoters of this pageant, and probably to most of the actors,

it seemed as if they had managed to express the most intimate

difficulty to friendly association between the older peoples of

America and the newer. The contradiction of their stereotypes

interfered with the full recognition of their common humanity. The

people who change their names know this. They mean to change

themselves, and the attitude of strangers toward them.

There is, of course, some connection between the scene outside and the

mind through which we watch it, just as there are some long-haired men

and short-haired women in radical gatherings. But to the hurried

observer a slight connection is enough. If there are two bobbed heads

and four beards in the audience, it will be a bobbed and bearded

audience to the reporter who knows beforehand that such gatherings are

composed of people with these tastes in the management of their hair.

There is a connection between our vision and the facts, but it is

often a strange connection. A man has rarely looked at a landscape,

let us say, except to examine its possibilities for division into

building lots, but he has seen a number of landscapes hanging in the

parlor. And from them he has learned to think of a landscape as a rosy

sunset, or as a country road with a church steeple and a silver moon.

One day he goes to the country, and for hours he does not see a single

landscape. Then the sun goes down looking rosy. At once he recognizes

a landscape and exclaims that it is beautiful. But two days later,

when he tries to recall what he saw, the odds are that he will

remember chiefly some landscape in a parlor.

Unless he has been drunk or dreaming or insane he did see a sunset,

but he saw in it, and above all remembers from it, more of what the

oil painting taught him to observe, than what an impressionist

painter, for example, or a cultivated Japanese would have seen and

taken away with him. And the Japanese and the painter in turn will

have seen and remembered more of the form they had learned, unless

they happen to be the very rare people who find fresh sight for

mankind. In untrained observation we pick recognizable signs out of

the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill

out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that

sunset; rather we notice that the thing is man or sunset, and then see

chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subjects.

3

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly

and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting,

and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In a circle of

friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is

no shortcut through, and no substitute for, an individualized

understanding. Those whom we love and admire most are the men and

women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than

with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we

might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel

intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not

necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association has

final dignity in which each does not take the other as an end in

himself. There is a taint on any contact between two people which does

not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both.

But modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical

distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other,

such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither

time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice a

trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the

picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is

an agitator. That much we notice, or are told. Well, an agitator is

this sort of person, and so _he_ is this sort of person. He is an

intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a "South

European." He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard Man. How different

from the statement: he is a Yale Man. He is a regular fellow. He is a

West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager:

what don't we know about him then, and about her? He is an

international banker. He is from Main Street.

The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences ere those which

create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about

the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we

experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made

us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They

mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the

difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar,

and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They are aroused by small

signs, which may vary from a true index to a vague analogy. Aroused,

they flood fresh vision with older images, and project into the world

what has been resurrected in memory. Were there no practical

uniformities in the environment, there would be no economy and only

error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there

are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing

attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes

for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human

life.

What matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility

with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon those

inclusive patterns which constitute our philosophy of life. If in that

philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code

which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going

on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us

that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence

catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas,

then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only

stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend,

also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where

they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful

history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what

fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play,

picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in

that mind.

4

Those who wish to censor art do not at least underestimate this

influence. They generally misunderstand it, and almost always they are

absurdly bent on preventing other people from discovering anything not

sanctioned by them. But at any rate, like Plato in his argument about

the poets, they feel vaguely that the types acquired through fiction

tend to be imposed on reality. Thus there can be little doubt that the

moving picture is steadily building up imagery which is then evoked by

the words people read in their newspapers. In the whole experience of

the race there has been no aid to visualization comparable to the

cinema. If a Florentine wished to visualize the saints, he could go to

the frescoes in his church, where he might see a vision of saints

standardized for his time by Giotto. If an Athenian wished to

visualize the gods he went to the temples. But the number of objects

which were pictured was not great. And in the East, where the spirit

of the second commandment was widely accepted, the portraiture of

concrete things was even more meager, and for that reason perhaps the

faculty of practical decision was by so much reduced. In the western

world, however, during the last few centuries there has been an

enormous increase in the volume and scope of secular description, the

word picture, the narrative, the illustrated narrative, and finally

the moving picture and, perhaps, the talking picture.

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which

the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They

seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human

meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind

conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture,

requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But

on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting,

and then imagining, has been accomplished for you. Without more

trouble than is needed to stay awake the result which your imagination

is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen. The shadowy idea

becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan,

thanks to Mr. Griffiths, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a

Nation. Historically it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a

pernicious shape, but it is a shape, and I doubt whether anyone who

has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than

Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those

white horsemen.

5

And so when we speak of the mind of a group of people, of the French

mind, the militarist mind, the bolshevik mind, we are liable to

serious confusion unless we agree to separate the instinctive

equipment from the stereotypes, the patterns, and the formulae which

play so decisive a part in building up the mental world to which the

native character is adapted and responds. Failure to make this

distinction accounts for oceans of loose talk about collective minds,

national souls, and race psychology. To be sure a stereotype may be so

consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from

parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact. In some

respects, we may indeed have become, as Mr. Wallas says, [Footnote:

Graham Wallas, _Our Social Heritage_, p. 17.] biologically

parasitic upon our social heritage. But certainly there is not the

least scientific evidence which would enable anyone to argue that men

are born with the political habits of the country in which they are

born. In so far as political habits are alike in a nation, the first

places to look for an explanation are the nursery, the school, the

church, not in that limbo inhabited by Group Minds and National Souls.

Until you have thoroughly failed to see tradition being handed on from

parents, teachers, priests, and uncles, it is a solecism of the worst

order to ascribe political differences to the germ plasm.

It is possible to generalize tentatively and with a decent humility

about comparative differences within the same category of education

and experience. Yet even this is a tricky enterprise. For almost no

two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the

same household. The older son never does have the experience of being

the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the

difference in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of

nature. As well judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their

yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether

they have been cultivated and enriched, exhausted, or allowed to run

wild.

CHAPTER VII

STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE

1

THERE is another reason, besides economy of effort, why we so often

hold to our stereotypes when we might pursue a more disinterested

vision. The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal

tradition, the defenses of our position in society.

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to

which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our

hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of

the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are

adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places,

and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We

are members. We know the way around. There we find the charm of the

familiar, the normal, the dependable; its grooves and shapes are where

we are accustomed to find them. And though we have abandoned much that

might have tempted us before we creased ourselves into that mould,

once we are firmly in, it fits as snugly as an old shoe.

No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an

attack upon the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the

foundations of _our_ universe, and, where big things are at

stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between

our universe and the universe. A world which turns out to be one in

which those we honor are unworthy, and those we despise are noble, is

nerve-racking. There is anarchy if our order of precedence is not the

only possible one. For if the meek should indeed inherit the earth, if

the first should be last, if those who are without sin alone may cast

a stone, if to Caesar you render only the things that are Caesar's,

then the foundations of self-respect would be shaken for those who

have arranged their lives as if these maxims were not true. A pattern

of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting

order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not

merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is

the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world

of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own

rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the

feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our

tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves

safe in the position we occupy.

2

When, for example, in the fourth century B. C., Aristotle wrote his

defense of slavery in the face of increasing skepticism, [Footnote:

Zimmern: _Greek Commonwealth_. See his footnote, p. 383.] the

Athenian slaves were in great part indistinguishable from free

citizens Mr. Zimmern quotes an amusing passage from the Old Oligarch

explaining the good treatment of the slaves. "Suppose it were legal

for a slave to be beaten by a citizen, it would frequently happen that

an Athenian might be mistaken for a slave or an alien and receive a

beating;--since the Athenian people is not better clothed than the

slave or alien, nor in personal appearance is there any superiority."

This absence of distinction would naturally tend to dissolve the

institution. If free men and slaves looked alike, what basis was there

for treating them so differently? It was this confusion which

Aristotle set himself to clear away in the first book of his Politics.

With unerring instinct he understood that to justify slavery he must

teach the Greeks a way of _seeing_ their slaves that comported

with the continuance of slavery.

So, said Aristotle, there are beings who are slaves by nature.

[Footnote: _Politics_, Bk. 1, Ch. 5.] "He then is by nature

formed a slave, who is fitted to become the chattel of another person,

_and on that account is so_." All this really says is that

whoever happens to be a slave is by nature intended to be one.

Logically the statement is worthless, but in fact it is not a

proposition at all, and logic has nothing to do with it. It is a

stereotype, or rather it is part of a stereotype. The rest follows

almost immediately. After asserting that slaves perceive reason, but

are not endowed with the use of it, Aristotle insists that "it is the

intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and free men

different from each other, that the one should be robust for their

necessary purposes, but the other erect; useless indeed for such

servile labours, but fit for civil life... It is clear then that some

men are free by nature, and others are slaves. ..."

If we ask ourselves what is the matter with Aristotle's argument, we

find that he has begun by erecting a great barrier between himself and

the facts. When he had said that those who are slaves are by nature

intended to be slaves, he at one stroke excluded the fatal question

whether those particular men who happened to be slaves were the

particular men intended by nature to be slaves. For that question

would have tainted each case of slavery with doubt. And since the fact

of being a slave was not evidence that a man was destined to be one,

no certain test would have remained. Aristotle, therefore, excluded

entirely that destructive doubt. Those who are slaves are intended to

be slaves. Each slave holder was to look upon his chattels as natural

slaves. When his eye had been trained to see them that way, he was to

note as confirmation of their servile character the fact that they

performed servile work, that they were competent to do servile work,

and that they had the muscles to do servile work.

This is the perfect stereotype. Its hallmark is that it precedes the

use of reason; is a form of perception, imposes a certain character on

the data of our senses before the data reach the intelligence. The

stereotype is like the lavender window-panes on Beacon Street, like

the door-keeper at a costume ball who judges whether the guest has an

appropriate masquerade. There is nothing so obdurate to education or

to criticism as the stereotype. It stamps itself upon the evidence in

the very act of securing the evidence. That is why the accounts of

returning travellers are often an interesting tale of what the

traveller carried abroad with him on his trip. If he carried chiefly

his appetite, a zeal for tiled bathrooms, a conviction that the

Pullman car is the acme of human comfort, and a belief that it is

proper to tip waiters, taxicab drivers, and barbers, but under no

circumstances station agents and ushers, then his Odyssey will be

replete with good meals and bad meals, bathing adventures,

compartment-train escapades, and voracious demands for money. Or if he

is a more serious soul he may while on tour have found himself at

celebrated spots. Having touched base, and cast one furtive glance at

the monument, he buried his head in Baedeker, read every word through,

and moved on to the next celebrated spot; and thus returned with a

compact and orderly impression of Europe, rated one star, or two.

In some measure, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are

printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes,

so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy

consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we

looked at red through blue glasses and saw green. If what we are

looking at corresponds successfully with what we anticipated, the

stereotype is reinforced for the future, as it is in a man who knows

in advance that the Japanese are cunning and has the bad luck to run

across two dishonest Japanese.

If the experience contradicts the stereotype, one of two things

happens. If the man is no longer plastic, or if some powerful interest

makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes, he pooh-

poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves the rule,

discredits the witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to forget

it. But if he is still curious and open-minded, the novelty is taken

into the picture, and allowed to modify it. Sometimes, if the incident

is striking enough, and if he has felt a general discomfort with his

established scheme, he may be shaken to such an extent as to distrust

all accepted ways of looking at life, and to expect that normally a

thing will not be what it is generally supposed to be. In the extreme

case, especially if he is literary, he may develop a passion for

inverting the moral canon by making Judas, Benedict Arnold, or Caesar

Borgia the hero of his tale.

3

The role played by the stereotype can be seen in the German tales

about Belgian snipers. Those tales curiously enough were first refuted

by an organization of German Catholic priests known as Pax. [Footnote:

Fernand van Langenhove, _The Growth of a Legend._ The author is a

Belgian sociologist.] The existence of atrocity stories is itself not

remarkable, nor that the German people gladly believed them. But it is

remarkable that a great conservative body of patriotic Germans should

have set out as early as August 16, 1914, to contradict a collection

of slanders on the enemy, even though such slanders were of the utmost

value in soothing the troubled conscience of their fellow countrymen.

Why should the Jesuit order in particular have set out to destroy a

fiction so important to the fighting morale of Germany?

I quote from M. van Langenhove's account:

"Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors

began to circulate. They spread from place to place, they were

reproduced by the press, and they soon permeated the whole of Germany.

It was said that the Belgian people, _instigated by the clergy,_

had intervened perfidiously in the hostilities; had attacked by

surprise isolated detachments; had indicated to the enemy the

positions occupied by the troops; that old men, and even children, had

been guilty of horrible atrocities upon wounded and defenseless German

soldiers, tearing out their eyes and cutting off fingers, nose or

ears; _that the priests from their pulpits had exhorted the people

to commit these crimes, promising them as a reward the kingdom of

heaven, and had even taken the lead in this barbarity._

"Public credulity accepted these stories. The highest powers in the

state welcomed them without hesitation and endorsed them with their

authority...

"In this way public opinion in Germany was disturbed and a lively

indignation manifested itself, _directed especially against the

priests_ who were held responsible for the barbarities attributed

to the Belgians... By a natural diversion _the anger_ to which

they were a prey _was directed_ by the Germans _against the

Catholic clergy generally._ Protestants allowed the old religious

hatred to be relighted in their minds and delivered themselves to

attacks against Catholics. A new _Kulturkampf_ was let loose.

"The Catholics did not delay in taking action against this hostile

attitude." (Italics mine) [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 5-7]

There may have been some sniping. It would be extraordinary if every

angry Belgian had rushed to the library, opened a manual of

international law, and had informed himself whether he had a right to

take potshot at the infernal nuisance tramping through his streets. It

would be no less extraordinary if an army that had never been under

fire, did not regard every bullet that came its way as unauthorized,

because it was inconvenient, and indeed as somehow a violation of the

rules of the Kriegspiel, which then constituted its only experience of

war. One can imagine the more sensitive bent on convincing themselves

that the people to whom they were doing such terrible things must be

terrible people. And so the legend may have been spun until it reached

the censors and propagandists, who, whether they believed it or not,

saw its value, and let it loose on the German civilians. They too were

not altogether sorry to find that the people they were outraging were

sub-human. And, above all, since the legend came from their heroes,

they were not only entitled to believe it, they were unpatriotic if

they did not.

But where so much is left to the imagination because the scene of

action is lost in the fog of war, there is no check and no control.

The legend of the ferocious Belgian priests soon tapped an old hatred.

For in the minds of most patriotic protestant Germans, especially of

the upper classes, the picture of Bismarck's victories included a long

quarrel with the Roman Catholics. By a process of association, Belgian

priests became priests, and hatred of Belgians a vent for all their

hatreds. These German protestants did what some Americans did when

under the stress of war they created a compound object of hatred out

of the enemy abroad and all their opponents at home. Against this

synthetic enemy, the Hun in Germany and the Hun within the Gate, they

launched all the animosity that was in them.

The Catholic resistance to the atrocity tales was, of course,

defensive. It was aimed at those particular fictions which aroused

animosity against all Catholics, rather than against Belgian Catholics

alone. The _Informations Pax_, says M. van Langenhove, had only

an ecclesiastical bearing and "confined their attention almost

exclusively to the reprehensible acts attributed to the priests." And

yet one cannot help wondering a little about what was set in motion in

the minds of German Catholics by this revelation of what Bismarck's

empire meant in relation to them; and also whether there was any

obscure connection between that knowledge and the fact that the

prominent German politician who was willing in the armistice to sign

the death warrant of the empire was Erzberger, [Footnote: Since this

was written, Erzberger has been assassinated.] the leader of the

Catholic Centre Party.

CHAPTER VIII

BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE

1

I HAVE been speaking of stereotypes rather than ideals, because the

word ideal is usually reserved for what we consider the good, the true

and the beautiful. Thus it carries the hint that here is something to

be copied or attained. But our repertory of fixed impressions is wider

than that. It contains ideal swindlers, ideal Tammany politicians,

ideal jingoes, ideal agitators, ideal enemies. Our stereotyped world

is not necessarily the world we should like it to be. It is simply the

kind of world we expect it to be. If events correspond there is a

sense of familiarity, and we feel that we are moving with the movement

of events. Our slave must be a slave by nature, if we are Athenians

who wish to have no qualms. If we have told our friends that we do

eighteen holes of golf in 95, we tell them after doing the course in

110, that we are not ourselves to-day. That is to say, we are not

acquainted with the duffer who foozled fifteen strokes.

Most of us would deal with affairs through a rather haphazard and

shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each

generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing,

and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of

Political Economy, the Principles of Politics, and the like. Generally

when we write about culture, tradition, and the group mind, we are

thinking of these systems perfected by men of genius. Now there is no

disputing the necessity of constant study and criticism of these

idealized versions, but the historian of people, the politician, and

the publicity man cannot stop there. For what operates in history is

not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting

imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in

individual minds.

Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital,

but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be

the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of

Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of

America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and

the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and

administered, to which you have to go. For while there is a

reciprocating influence between the standard version and the current

versions, it is these current versions as distributed among men which

affect their behavior. [Footnote: But unfortunately it is ever so much

harder to know this actual culture than it is to summarize and to

comment upon the works of genius. The actual culture exists in people

far too busy to indulge in the strange trade of formulating their

beliefs. They record them only incidentally, and the student rarely

knows how typical are his data. Perhaps the best he can do is to

follow Lord Bryce's suggestion [_Modern Democracies_, Vol. i, p.

156] that he move freely "among all sorts and conditions of men," to

seek out the unbiassed persons in every neighborhood who have skill in

sizing up. "There is a _flair_ which long practise and 'sympathetic

touch' bestow. The trained observer learns how to profit by small

indications, as an old seaman discerns, sooner than the landsman,

the signs of coming storm." There is, in short, a vast amount of

guess work involved, and it is no wonder that scholars, who enjoy

precision, so often confine their attentions to the neater formulations

of other scholars.]

"The theory of Relativity," says a critic whose eyelids, like the Lady

Lisa's, are a little weary, "promises to develop into a principle as

adequate to universal application as was the theory of Evolution. This

latter theory, from being a technical biological hypothesis, became an

inspiring guide to workers in practically every branch of knowledge:

manners and customs, morals, religions, philosophies, arts, steam

engines, electric tramways--everything had 'evolved.' 'Evolution'

became a very general term; it also became imprecise until, in many

cases, the original, definite meaning of the word was lost, and the

theory it had been evoked to describe was misunderstood. We are hardy

enough to prophesy a similar career and fate for the theory of

Relativity. The technical physical theory, at present imperfectly

understood, will become still more vague and dim. History repeats

itself, and Relativity, like Evolution, after receiving a number of

intelligible but somewhat inaccurate popular expositions in its

scientific aspect, will be launched on a world-conquering career. We

suggest that, by that time, it will probably be called _Relativismus_.

Many of these larger applications will doubtless be justified; some will

be absurd and a considerable number will, we imagine, reduce to truisms.

And the physical theory, the mere seed of this mighty growth, will become

once more the purely technical concern of scientific men." [Footnote:

_The Times_ (London), _Literary Supplement_, June 2, 1921, p.

352. Professor Einstein said when he was in America in 1921 that

people tended to overestimate the influence of his theory, and to

under-estimate its certainty.]

But for such a world-conquering career an idea must correspond,

however imprecisely, to something. Professor Bury shows for how long a

time the idea of progress remained a speculative toy. "It is not

easy," he writes, [Footnote: J. B. Bury, _The Idea of Progress_,

p. 324.] "for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and

inform the general consciousness of a community until it has assumed

some external and concrete embodiment, or is recommended by some

striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these

conditions were fulfilled (in England) in the period 1820-1850." The

most striking evidence was furnished by the mechanical revolution.

"Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before

they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam

navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening

of the first railway." In the consciousness of the average householder

miracles like these formed the pattern of his belief in the

perfectibility of the human race.

Tennyson, who was in philosophical matters a fairly normal person,

tells us that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to

Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in grooves. Then he

wrote this line:

"Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of

change." [Footnote: 2 Tennyson, _Memoir by his Son_, Vol. I, p.

195. Cited by Bury, _op. cit_., p. 326.]

And so a notion more or less applicable to a journey between Liverpool

and Manchester was generalized into a pattern of the universe "for

ever." This pattern, taken up by others, reinforced by dazzling

inventions, imposed an optimistic turn upon the theory of evolution.

That theory, of course, is, as Professor Bury says, neutral between

pessimism and optimism. But it promised continual change, and the

changes visible in the world marked such extraordinary conquests of

nature, that the popular mind made a blend of the two. Evolution first

in Darwin himself, and then more elaborately in Herbert Spencer, was a

"progress towards perfection."

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 country 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 a 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 a maker of wristwatches or

microscopes 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 feel to be ample satisfaction in work, mating and

play, and the rush of their victory over mountains, wildernesses,

distance, and human competition has even done duty for that 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 a very partial and inadequate way of

representing the world. The habit of thinking about progress as

"development" has meant that 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 expansion of 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 the unassimilated immigration. They

expanded industry furiously at reckless cost to their natural

resources; they built 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 their 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 the evil influence of the American

stereotype was plainly visible. The idea that the war could be won by

recruiting unlimited armies, raising unlimited credits, building an

unlimited number of ships, producing unlimited munitions, and

concentrating without limit on these alone, fitted the traditional

stereotype, and resulted in something like a physical miracle.

[Footnote: I have in mind the transportation and supply of two million

troops overseas. Prof. Wesley Mitchell points out that the total

production of goods after our entrance into the war did not greatly

increase in volume over that of the year 1916; but that production for

war purposes did increase.] 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 an

annihilating victory in the field. In peace time you did not ask what

the fastest motor car was 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 on endlessly supplanting small things with

big ones, and big ones with bigger ones; in war when you have won

absolute victory, you cannot go on to a more absolute victory. You

have to do something on an 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 images 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 a people tolerant by

habit, the stereotype, instead of economizing effort, and focussing

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

Uncritically held, the stereotype not only censors out much that needs

to be taken into account, but when the day of reckoning comes, and the

stereotype is shattered, likely as not that which it did wisely take

into account is ship-wrecked with it. That is the punishment assessed

by Mr. Bernard Shaw against Free Trade, Free Contract, Free

Competition, Natural Liberty, Laissez-faire, and Darwinism. A hundred

years ago, when he would surely have been one of the tartest advocates

of these doctrines, he would not have seen them as he sees them

to-day, in the Infidel Half Century, [Footnote: _Back to

Methuselah_. Preface.] to be excuses for "'doing the other fellow

down' with impunity, all interference by a guiding government, all

organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud

against fisticuffs, all attempt to introduce human purpose and design

and forethought into the industrial welter being 'contrary to the laws

of political economy'" He would have seen, then, as one of the

pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven [Footnote: _The

Quintessence of Ibsenism_] that, of the kind of human purpose and

design and forethought to be found in a government like that of Queen

Victoria's uncles, the less the better. He would have seen, not the

strong doing the weak down, but the foolish doing the strong down. He

would have seen purposes, designs and forethoughts at work,

obstructing invention, obstructing enterprise, obstructing what he

would infallibly have recognized as the next move of Creative

Evolution.

Even now Mr. Shaw is none too eager for the guidance of any guiding

government he knows, but in theory he has turned a full loop against

laissez-faire. Most advanced thinking before the war had made the same

turn against the established notion that if you unloosed everything,

wisdom would bubble up, and establish harmony. Since the war, with its

definite demonstration of guiding governments, assisted by censors,

propagandists, and spies, Roebuck Ramsden and Natural Liberty have

been readmitted to the company of serious thinkers.

One thing is common to these cycles. There is in each set of

stereotypes a point where effort ceases and things happen of their own

accord, as you would like them to. The progressive stereotype,

powerful to incite work, almost completely obliterates the attempt to

decide what work and why that work. Laissez-faire, a blessed release

from stupid officialdom, assumes that men will move by spontaneous

combustion towards a pre-established harmony. Collectivism, an

antidote to ruthless selfishness, seems, in the Marxian mind, to

suppose an economic determinism towards efficiency and wisdom on the

part of socialist officials. Strong government, imperialism at home

and abroad, at its best deeply conscious of the price of disorder,

relies at last on the notion that all that matters to the governed

will be known by the governors. In each theory there is a spot of

blind automatism.

That spot covers up some fact, which if it were taken into account,

would check the vital movement that the stereotype provokes. If the

progressive had to ask himself, like the Chinaman in the joke, what he

wanted to do with the time he saved by breaking the record, if the

advocate of laissez-faire had to contemplate not only free and

exuberant energies of men, but what some people call their human

nature, if the collectivist let the center of his attention be

occupied with the problem of how he is to secure his officials, if the

imperialist dared to doubt his own inspiration, you would find more

Hamlet and less Henry the Fifth. For these blind spots keep away

distracting images, which with their attendant emotions, might cause

hesitation and infirmity of purpose. Consequently the stereotype not

only saves time in a busy life and is a defense of our position in

society, but tends to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of

trying to see the world steadily and see it whole.

CHAPTER IX

CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES

ANYONE who has stood at the end of a railroad platform waiting for a

friend, will recall what queer people he mistook for him. The shape of

a hat, a slightly characteristic gait, evoked the vivid picture in his

mind's eye. In sleep a tinkle may sound like the pealing of a great

bell; the distant stroke of a hammer like a thunderclap. For our

constellations of imagery will vibrate to a stimulus that is perhaps

but vaguely similar to some aspect of them. They may, in

hallucination, flood the whole consciousness. They may enter very

little into perception, though I am inclined to think that such an

experience is extremely rare and highly sophisticated, as when we gaze

blankly at a familiar word or object, and it gradually ceases to be

familiar. Certainly for the most part, the way we see things is a

combination of what is there and of what we expected to find. The

heavens are not the same to an astronomer as to a pair of lovers; a

page of Kant will start a different train of thought in a Kantian and

in a radical empiricist; the Tahitian belle is a better looking person

to her Tahitian suitor than to the readers of the _National

Geographic Magazine_.

Expertness in any subject is, in fact, a multiplication of the number

of aspects we are prepared to discover, plus the habit of discounting

our expectations. Where to the ignoramus all things look alike, and

life is just one thing after another, to the specialist things are

highly individual. For a chauffeur, an epicure, a connoisseur, a

member of the President's cabinet, or a professor's wife, there are

evident distinctions and qualities, not at all evident to the casual

person who discusses automobiles, wines, old masters, Republicans, and

college faculties.

But in our public opinions few can be expert, while life is, as Mr.

Bernard Shaw has made plain, so short. Those who are expert are so on

only a few topics. Even among the expert soldiers, as we learned

during the war, expert cavalrymen were not necessarily brilliant with

trench-warfare and tanks. Indeed, sometimes a little expertness on a

small topic may simply exaggerate our normal human habit of trying to

squeeze into our stereotypes all that can be squeezed, and of casting

into outer darkness that which does not fit.

Whatever we recognize as familiar we tend, if we are not very careful,

to visualize with the aid of images already in our mind. Thus in the

American view of Progress and Success there is a definite picture of

human nature and of society. It is the kind of human nature and the

kind of society which logically produce the kind of progress that is

regarded as ideal. And then, when we seek to describe or explain

actually successful men, and events that have really happened, we read

back into them the qualities that are presupposed in the stereotypes.

These qualities were standardized rather innocently by the older

economists. They set out to describe the social system under which

they lived, and found it too complicated for words. So they

constructed what they sincerely hoped was a simplified diagram, not so

different in principle and in veracity from the parallelogram with

legs and head in a child's drawing of a complicated cow. The scheme

consisted of a capitalist who had diligently saved capital from his

labor, an entrepreneur who conceived a socially useful demand and

organized a factory, a collection of workmen who freely contracted,

take it or leave it, for their labor, a landlord, and a group of

consumers who bought in the cheapest market those goods which by the

ready use of the pleasure-pain calculus they knew would give them the

most pleasure. The model worked. The kind of people, which the model

assumed, living in the sort of world the model assumed, invariably

coöperated harmoniously in the books where the model was described.

With modification and embroidery, this pure fiction, used by

economists to simplify their thinking, was retailed and popularized

until for large sections of the population it prevailed as the

economic mythology of the day. It supplied a standard version of

capitalist, promoter, worker and consumer in a society that was

naturally more bent on achieving success than on explaining it. The

buildings which rose, and the bank accounts which accumulated, were

evidence that the stereotype of how the thing had been done was

accurate. And those who benefited most by success came to believe they

were the kind of men they were supposed to be. No wonder that the

candid friends of successful men, when they read the official

biography and the obituary, have to restrain themselves from asking

whether this is indeed their friend.

2

To the vanquished and the victims, the official portraiture was, of

course, unrecognizable. For while those who exemplified progress did

not often pause to inquire whether they had arrived according to the

route laid down by the economists, or by some other just as

creditable, the unsuccessful people did inquire. "No one," says

William James, [Footnote: _The Letters of William James,_ Vol. I,

p.65] "sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of

detail extends." The captains of industry saw in the great trusts

monuments of (their) success; their defeated competitors saw the

monuments of (their) failure. So the captains expounded the economies

and virtues of big business, asked to be let alone, said they were the

agents of prosperity, and the developers of trade. The vanquished

insisted upon the wastes and brutalities of the trusts, and called

loudly upon the Department of Justice to free business from

conspiracies. In the same situation one side saw progress, economy,

and a splendid development; the other, reaction, extravagance, and a

restraint of trade. Volumes of statistics, anecdotes about the real

truth and the inside truth, the deeper and the larger truth, were

published to prove both sides of the argument.

For when a system of stereotypes is well fixed, our attention is

called to those facts which support it, and diverted from those which

contradict. So perhaps it is because they are attuned to find it, that

kindly people discover so much reason for kindness, malicious people

so much malice. We speak quite accurately of seeing through

rose-colored spectacles, or with a jaundiced eye. If, as Philip

Littell once wrote of a distinguished professor, we see life as

through a class darkly, our stereotypes of what the best people and

the lower classes are like will not be contaminated by understanding.

What is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon

unseeing eyes. We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take

into account. Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we

are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.

3

This philosophy is a more or less organized series of images for

describing the unseen world. But not only for describing it. For

judging it as well. And, therefore, the stereotypes are loaded with

preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears,

lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope. Whatever invokes the stereotype is

judged with the appropriate sentiment. Except where we deliberately

keep prejudice in suspense, we do not study a man and judge him to be

bad. We see a bad man. We see a dewy morn, a blushing maiden, a

sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree

bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile

Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100% American. In the workaday world that is

often the real judgment, long in advance of the evidence, and it

contains within itself the conclusion which the evidence is pretty

certain to confirm. Neither justice, nor mercy, nor truth, enter into

such a judgment, for the judgment has preceded the evidence. Yet a

people without prejudices, a people with altogether neutral vision, is

so unthinkable in any civilization of which it is useful to think,

that no scheme of education could be based upon that ideal. Prejudice

can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men

must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a

vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them,

and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will

depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other

people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of what is felt to be

positively good, rather than hatred of what is not contained in their

version of the good.

Morality, good taste and good form first standardize and then

emphasize certain of these underlying prejudices. As we adjust

ourselves to our code, we adjust the facts we see to that code.

Rationally, the facts are neutral to all our views of right and wrong.

Actually, our canons determine greatly what we shall perceive and how.

For a moral code is a scheme of conduct applied to a number of typical

instances. To behave as the code directs is to serve whatever purpose

the code pursues. It may be God's will, or the king's, individual

salvation in a good, solid, three dimensional paradise, success on

earth, or the service of mankind. In any event the makers of the code

fix upon certain typical situations, and then by some form of

reasoning or intuition, deduce the kind of behavior which would

produce the aim they acknowledge. The rules apply where they apply.

But in daily living how does a man know whether his predicament is the

one the law-giver had in mind? He is told not to kill. But if his

children are attacked, may he kill to stop a killing? The Ten

Commandments are silent on the point. Therefore, around every code

there is a cloud of interpreters who deduce more specific cases.

Suppose, then, that the doctors of the law decide that he may kill in

self-defense. For the next man the doubt is almost as great; how does

he know that he is defining self-defense correctly, or that he has not

misjudged the facts, imagined the attack, and is really the aggressor?

Perhaps he has provoked the attack. But what is a provocation? Exactly

these confusions infected the minds of most Germans in August, 1914.

Far more serious in the modern world than any difference of moral code

is the difference in the assumptions about facts to which the code is

applied. Religious, moral and political formulae are nothing like so

far apart as the facts assumed by their votaries. Useful discussion,

then, instead of comparing ideals, reexamines the visions of the

facts. Thus the rule that you should do unto others as you would have

them do unto you rests on the belief that human nature is uniform. Mr.

Bernard Shaw's statement that you should not do unto others what you

would have them do unto you, because their tastes may be different,

rests on the belief that human nature is not uniform. The maxim that

competition is the life of trade consists of a whole tome of

assumptions about economic motives, industrial relations, and the

working of a particular commercial system. The claim that America will

never have a merchant marine, unless it is privately owned and

managed, assumes a certain proved connection between a certain kind of

profit-making and incentive. The justification by the bolshevik

propagandist of the dictatorship, espionage, and the terror, because

"every state is an apparatus of violence" [Footnote: See _Two Years

of Conflict on the Internal Front_, published by the Russian

Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Moscow, 1920. Translated by

Malcolm W. Davis for the _New York Evening Post_, January 15,

1921.] is an historical judgment, the truth of which is by no means

self-evident to a non-communist.

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a

map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the

sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history

(so understood), the rules of the code apply. So far as the facts of

personality, of the environment and of memory are different, by so far

the rules of the code are difficult to apply with success. Now every

moral code has to conceive human psychology, the material world, and

tradition some way or other. But in the codes that are under the

influence of science, the conception is known to be an hypothesis,

whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the past or bubble up

from the caverns of the mind, the conception is not taken as an

hypothesis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted

without question. In the one case, man is humble about his beliefs,

because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is

dogmatic, because his belief is a completed myth. The moralist who

submits to the scientific discipline knows that though he does not

know everything, he is in the way of knowing something; the dogmatist,

using a myth, believes himself to share part of the insight of

omniscience, though he lacks the criteria by which to tell truth from

error. For the distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error,

fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of

credibility.

The myth is, then, not necessarily false. It might happen to be wholly

true. It may happen to be partly true. If it has affected human

conduct a long time, it is almost certain to contain much that is

profoundly and importantly true. What a myth never contains is the

critical power to separate its truths from its errors. For that power

comes only by realizing that no human opinion, whatever its supposed

origin, is too exalted for the test of evidence, that every opinion is

only somebody's opinion. And if you ask why the test of evidence is

preferable to any other, there is no answer unless you are willing to

use the test in order to test it.

4

The statement is, I think, susceptible of overwhelming proof, that

moral codes assume a particular view of the facts. Under the term

moral codes I include all kinds: personal, family, economic,

professional, legal, patriotic, international. At the center of each

there is a pattern of stereotypes about psychology, sociology, and

history. The same view of human nature, institutions or tradition

rarely persists through all our codes. Compare, for example, the

economic and the patriotic codes. There is a war supposed to affect

all alike. Two men are partners in business. One enlists, the other

takes a war contract. The soldier sacrifices everything, perhaps even

his life. He is paid a dollar a day, and no one says, no one believes,

that you could make a better soldier out of him by any form of

economic incentive. That motive disappears out of his human nature.

The contractor sacrifices very little, is paid a handsome profit over

costs, and few say or believe that he would produce the munitions if

there were no economic incentive. That may be unfair to him. The point

is that the accepted patriotic code assumes one kind of human nature,

the commercial code another. And the codes are probably founded on

true expectations to this extent, that when a man adopts a certain

code he tends to exhibit the kind of human nature which the code

demands.

That is one reason why it is so dangerous to generalize about human

nature. A loving father can be a sour boss, an earnest municipal

reformer, and a rapacious jingo abroad. His family life, his business

career, his politics, and his foreign policy rest on totally different

versions of what others are like and of how he should act. These

versions differ by codes in the same person, the codes differ somewhat

among persons in the same social set, differ widely as between social

sets, and between two nations, or two colors, may differ to the point

where there is no common assumption whatever. That is why people

professing the same stock of religious beliefs can go to war. The

element of their belief which determines conduct is that view of the

facts which they assume.

That is where codes enter so subtly and so pervasively into the making

of public opinion. The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion

constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am

suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public

opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I

am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes

largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light

we shall see them. That is why, with the best will in the world, the

news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a

capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature,

literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other

aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse,

when the real difference between them is a difference of perception.

That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist

and socialist pattern of stereotypes. "There are no classes in

America," writes an American editor. "The history of all hitherto

existing society is the history of class struggles," says the

Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor's pattern in your mind,

you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and

ineffectively those that contradict. If you have the communist

pattern, you will not only look for different things, but you will see

with a totally different emphasis what you and the editor happen to

see in common.

5

And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts,

he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is

to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The

opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we

ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an

explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own

assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole. It is

only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial

experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant

of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of

our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all

opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two

sides to a "question," they do not believe that there are two sides to

what they regard as a "fact." And they never do believe it until after

long critical education, they are fully conscious of how second-hand

and subjective is their apprehension of their social data.

So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive

their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for

them to credit each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their

experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an

interpretation. They look upon it as "reality." It may not resemble

the reality, except that it culminates in a conclusion which fits a

real experience. I may represent my trip from New York to Boston by a

straight line on a map, just as a man may regard his triumph as the

end of a straight and narrow path. The road by which I actually went

to Boston may have involved many detours, much turning and twisting,

just as his road may have involved much besides pure enterprise, labor

and thrift. But provided I reach Boston and he succeeds, the airline

and the straight path will serve as ready made charts. Only when

somebody tries to follow them, and does not arrive, do we have to

answer objections. If we insist on our charts, and he insists on

rejecting them, we soon tend to regard him as a dangerous fool, and he

to regard us as liars and hypocrites. Thus we gradually paint

portraits of each other. For the opponent presents himself as the man

who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit

into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that

scheme is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by

irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme.

Rarely in politics or industrial disputes is a place made for him by

the simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality and seen

another aspect of it. That would shake the whole scheme.

Thus to the Italians in Paris Fiume was Italian It was not merely a

city that it would be desirable to include within the Italian kingdom.

It was Italian. They fixed their whole mind upon the Italian majority

within the legal boundaries of the city itself. The American

delegates, having seen more Italians in New York than there are in

Fiume, without regarding New York as Italian, fixed their eyes on

Fiume as a central European port of entry. They saw vividly the

Jugoslavs in the suburbs and the non-Italian hinterland. Some of the

Italians in Paris were therefore in need of a convincing explanation

of the American perversity. They found it in a rumor which started, no

one knows where, that an influential American diplomat was in the

snares of a Jugoslav mistress. She had been seen.... He had been

seen.... At Versailles just off the boulevard. ... The villa with the

large trees.

This is a rather common way of explaining away opposition. In their

more libelous form such charges rarely reach the printed page, and a

Roosevelt may have to wait years, or a Harding months, before he can

force an issue, and end a whispering campaign that has reached into

every circle of talk. Public men have to endure a fearful amount of

poisonous clubroom, dinner table, boudoir slander, repeated,

elaborated, chuckled over, and regarded as delicious. While this sort

of thing is, I believe, less prevalent in America than in Europe, yet

rare is the American official about whom somebody is not repeating a

scandal.

Out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies. If prices go

up unmercifully the profiteers have conspired; if the newspapers

misrepresent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too

rich, they have been stealing; if a closely fought election is lost,

the electorate was corrupted; if a statesman does something of which

you disapprove, he has been bought or influenced by some discreditable

person. If workingmen are restless, they are the victims of agitators;

if they are restless over wide areas, there is a conspiracy on foot.

If you do not produce enough aeroplanes, it is the work of spies; if

there is trouble in Ireland, it is German or Bolshevik "gold." And if

you go stark, staring mad looking for plots, you see all strikes, the

Plumb plan, Irish rebellion, Mohammedan unrest, the restoration of

King Constantine, the League of Nations, Mexican disorder, the

movement to reduce armaments, Sunday movies, short skirts, evasion of

the liquor laws, Negro self-assertion, as sub-plots under some

grandiose plot engineered either by Moscow, Rome, the Free Masons, the

Japanese, or the Elders of Zion.

CHAPTER X

THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES

1

Skilled diplomatists, compelled to talk out loud to the warring

peoples, learned how to use a large repertory of stereotypes. They

were dealing with a precarious alliance of powers, each of which was

maintaining its war unity only by the most careful leadership. The

ordinary soldier and his wife, heroic and selfless beyond anything in

the chronicles of courage, were still not heroic enough to face death

gladly for all the ideas which were said by the foreign offices of

foreign powers to be essential to the future of civilization. There

were ports, and mines, rocky mountain passes, and villages that few

soldiers would willingly have crossed No Man's Land to obtain for

their allies.

Now it happened in one nation that the war party which was in control

of the foreign office, the high command, and most of the press, had

claims on the territory of several of its neighbors. These claims were

called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded

Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent

Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So

holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet

laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to

divide and conquer. They divided the claim into sectors. For each

piece they invoked that stereotype which some one or more of their

allies found it difficult to resist, because that ally had claims for

which it hoped to find approval by the use of this same stereotype.

The first sector happened to be a mountainous region inhabited by

alien peasants. Ruritania demanded it to complete her natural

geographical frontier. If you fixed your attention long enough on the

ineffable value of what is natural, those alien peasants just

dissolved into fog, and only the slope of the mountains was visible.

The next sector was inhabited by Ruritanians, and on the principle

that no people ought to live under alien rule, they were re-annexed.

Then came a city of considerable commercial importance, not inhabited

by Ruritanians. But until the Eighteenth Century it had been part of

Ruritania, and on the principle of Historic Right it was annexed.

Farther on there was a splendid mineral deposit owned by aliens and

worked by aliens. On the principle of reparation for damage it was

annexed. Beyond this there was a territory inhabited 97% by aliens,

constituting the natural geographical frontier of another nation,

never historically a part of Ruritania. But one of the provinces which

had been federated into Ruritania had formerly traded in those

markets, and the upper class culture was Ruritanian. On the principle

of cultural superiority and the necessity of defending civilization,

the lands were claimed. Finally, there was a port wholly disconnected

from Ruritania geographically, ethnically, economically, historically,

traditionally. It was demanded on the ground that it was needed for

national defense.

In the treaties that concluded the Great War you can multiply examples

of this kind. Now I do not wish to imply that I think it was possible

to resettle Europe consistently on any one of these principles. I am

certain that it was not. The very use of these principles, so

pretentious and so absolute, meant that the spirit of accommodation

did not prevail and that, therefore, the substance of peace was not

there. For the moment you start to discuss factories, mines,

mountains, or even political authority, as perfect examples of some

eternal principle or other, you are not arguing, you are fighting.

That eternal principle censors out all the objections, isolates the

issue from its background and its context, and sets going in you some

strong emotion, appropriate enough to the principle, highly

inappropriate to the docks, warehouses, and real estate. And having

started in that mood you cannot stop. A real danger exists. To meet it

you have to invoke more absolute principles in order to defend what is

open to attack. Then you have to defend the defenses, erect buffers,

and buffers for the buffers, until the whole affair is so scrambled

that it seems less dangerous to fight than to keep on talking.

There are certain clues which often help in detecting the false

absolutism of a stereotype. In the case of the Ruritanian propaganda

the principles blanketed each other so rapidly that one could readily

see how the argument had been constructed. The series of

contradictions showed that for each sector that stereotype was

employed which would obliterate all the facts that interfered with the

claim. Contradiction of this sort is often a good clue.

2

Inability to take account of space is another. In the spring of 1918,

for example, large numbers of people, appalled by the withdrawal of

Russia, demanded the "reestablishment of an Eastern Front." The war,

as they had conceived it, was on two fronts, and when one of them

disappeared there was an instant demand that it be recreated. The

unemployed Japanese army was to man the front, substituting for the

Russian. But there was one insuperable obstacle. Between Vladivostok

and the eastern battleline there were five thousand miles of country,

spanned by one broken down railway. Yet those five thousand miles

would not stay in the minds of the enthusiasts. So overwhelming was

their conviction that an eastern front was needed, and so great their

confidence in the valor of the Japanese army, that, mentally, they had

projected that army from Vladivostok to Poland on a magic carpet. In

vain our military authorities argued that to land troops on the rim of

Siberia had as little to do with reaching the Germans, as climbing

from the cellar to the roof of the Woolworth building had to do with

reaching the moon.

The stereotype in this instance was the war on two fronts. Ever since

men had begun to imagine the Great War they had conceived Germany held

between France and Russia. One generation of strategists, and perhaps

two, had lived with that visual image as the starting point of all

their calculations. For nearly four years every battle-map they saw

had deepened the impression that this was the war. When affairs took a

new turn, it was not easy to see them as they were then. They were

seen through the stereotype, and facts which conflicted with it, such

as the distance from Japan to Poland, were incapable of coming vividly

into consciousness.

It is interesting to note that the American authorities dealt with the

new facts more realistically than the French. In part, this was

because (previous to 1914) they had no preconception of a war upon the

continent; in part because the Americans, engrossed in the

mobilization of their forces, had a vision of the western front which

was itself a stereotype that excluded from _their_ consciousness

any very vivid sense of the other theatres of war. In the spring of

1918 this American view could not compete with the traditional French

view, because while the Americans believed enormously in their own

powers, the French at that time (before Cantigny and the Second Marne)

had the gravest doubts. The American confidence suffused the American

stereotype, gave it that power to possess consciousness, that

liveliness and sensible pungency, that stimulating effect upon the

will, that emotional interest as an object of desire, that congruity

with the activity in hand, which James notes as characteristic of what

we regard as "real." [Footnote: _Principles of Psychology_, Vol.

II, p. 300.] The French in despair remained fixed on their accepted

image. And when facts, gross geographical facts, would not fit with

the preconception, they were either censored out of mind, or the facts

were themselves stretched out of shape. Thus the difficulty of the

Japanese reaching the Germans five thousand miles away was, in

measure, overcome by bringing the Germans more than half way to meet

them. Between March and June 1918, there was supposed to be a German

army operating in Eastern Siberia. This phantom army consisted of some

German prisoners actually seen, more German prisoners thought about,

and chiefly of the delusion that those five thousand intervening miles

did not really exist. [Footnote: See in this connection Mr. Charles

Grasty's interview with Marshal Foch, _New York Times_, February

26, 1918. "Germany is walking through Russia. America and Japan, who

are in a position to do so, should go to meet her in Siberia." See

also the resolution by Senator King of Utah, June 10, 1918, and Mr.

Taft's statement in the _New York Times_, June 11, 1918, and the

appeal to America on May 5, 1918, by Mr. A. J. Sack, Director of the

Russian Information Bureau: "If Germany were in the Allied place...

she would have 3,000,000 fighting on the East front within a year."]

3

A true conception of space is not a simple matter. If I draw a

straight line on a map between Bombay and Hong Kong and measure the

distance, I have learned nothing whatever about the distance I should

have to cover on a voyage. And even if I measure the actual distance

that I must traverse, I still know very little until I know what ships

are in the service, when they run, how fast they go, whether I can

secure accommodation and afford to pay for it. In practical life space

is a matter of available transportation, not of geometrical planes, as

the old railroad magnate knew when he threatened to make grass grow in

the streets of a city that had offended him. If I am motoring and ask

how far it is to my destination, I curse as an unmitigated booby the

man who tells me it is three miles, and does not mention a six mile

detour. It does me no good to be told that it is three miles if you

walk. I might as well be told it is one mile as the crow flies. I do

not fly like a crow, and I am not walking either. I must know that it

is nine miles for a motor car, and also, if that is the case, that six

of them are ruts and puddles. I call the pedestrian a nuisance who

tells me it is three miles and think evil of the aviator who told me

it was one mile. Both of them are talking about the space they have to

cover, not the space I must cover.

In the drawing of boundary lines absurd complications have arisen

through failure to conceive the practical geography of a region. Under

some general formula like self-determination statesmen have at various

times drawn lines on maps, which, when surveyed on the spot, ran

through the middle of a factory, down the center of a village street,

diagonally across the nave of a church, or between the kitchen and

bedroom of a peasant's cottage. There have been frontiers in a grazing

country which separated pasture from water, pasture from market, and

in an industrial country, railheads from railroad. On the colored

ethnic map the line was ethnically just, that is to say, just in the

world of that ethnic map.

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