THE MOVIE’S NEW SIGNIFICANCE
WITH striking unanimity contemporary writers dealing with the problems
vexing humanity to-day express amazement at the fact that the race has
learned so little from its variegated past, that age after age it
commits, under new conditions and with changes in terminology, ancient
blunders resulting, as they did aforetime, in the tragedies of war,
revolution, famine, epidemics and poverty. As of old, the four horsemen
of the Apocalypse periodically sally forth, to have their evil way with
men; more potent, through long practice, in their iconoclasm, as they
have proved in recent years, than they were in the days of our
ancestors. The individual, unless he be a moron, learns lessons from
experience, avoids committing errors that marred his past and may
become, eventually, worthy the name of a civilized, even a highly
civilized, being. But there are many experts in mob psychology who
despondently assert that, while the individual may demonstrate his
well-nigh infinite superiority to his jungle progenitors, the seeming
progress of the race as a whole has been merely illusory, that mankind
is inherently as savage to-day as it was countless centuries ago.
But why should not the race at large follow the course pursued by the
average individual and derive from its past errors a mandatory
enlightenment enabling it to avoid those recurrent retrogressions that
furnish the cynic with arguments against the proposition that mankind is
gradually ascending to a higher plane of civilization? Various answers
may be given to this query, but the one to which this chapter calls
attention is to the effect that to the vast majority of the human race
the story of mankind’s struggles and failures, triumphs and defeats,
attainment of high civilizations only to lose them again, is a sealed
book. The individual man can recall every detail of his experience of
life and can pursue a course of safety by aid of the lighthouse of his
past. If this prerogative of the individual could be magnified to
include all mankind might not the time come presently when no generation
would repeat the costly errors of preceding generations? Would not the
mass learn and profit by experience, as does the unit?
Now, is there any possible method whereby the human race can be induced
to go to school to its recorded past, to the end that our posterity may
establish eventually a civilization permanently safe from the internal
and external forces of disintegration that have destroyed so many mighty
civilizations founded by our forefathers? Is there any way by which men
in the mass may employ mass history in the same advantageous manner
adopted by individuals who use their “dead selves as stepping-stones to
higher things?” Lothrop Stoddard’s recent book, in which he demonstrates
most ably the disquieting fact that contemporary civilization is menaced
by many and grave perils, presents to a public that habitually resents
disturbance of its self-complacent optimism an array of startling data
making the above queries, to put it mildly, extremely pertinent. “Of the
countless tribes of men,” says Stoddard, “many have perished utterly
while others have stopped by the wayside, apparently incapable of going
forward, and have either vegetated or sunk into decadence. Man’s trail
is littered with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted with the
graves of promising peoples stricken by an untimely end.”
But wrecks, whether they be of former civilizations or of vessels lost
upon fatal rocks and reefs, have their value for succeeding nations and
mariners. They serve to point warning fingers away from the shoals of
destruction toward the far-flung deeps where progress and safety are to
be found. It was with this thought in mind, we have no doubt, that Wells
and Van Loon gave to the reading public recently their absorbingly
interesting volumes dealing with the rise of man from the amœba to his
present status as lord of the earth. Both these authors have been
shocked and horrified by the race’s manifestation in recent years of its
tendency to revert at times to the murderous practices of its cave-man
progenitors. That an antidote against periodical returns upon mankind’s
part to the evil practices of the past might be found in the
popularization of histories telling a coherent story of our race’s ups
and downs was a thought that must have come to both Wells and Van Loon
when they essayed the stupendous tasks that they have so worthily
accomplished. But while the basic idea underlying their activities as
historians is sound—for mankind must take cognizance of its past errors
if it is to indulge in hope for the future—the depressing fact confronts
us that the printed book, no matter how great may be its apparent vogue,
reaches but a very small percentage of even the highly intelligent
public. No. If the evils afflicting mankind were to have been cured
through books the race would be free to-day from the major disorders
that threaten the health, if not the life, of existing civilization.
Upon this point, Frederick Palmer, in his interesting and inspiring
book, “The Folly of Nations,” says:
Our increasing library shelves are heavy with the records of all
human activities, colossal accumulations of historical and
scientific researches and the literature of imagination and
philosophy—but one who seeks works on how to keep the peace
finds that he has meagre references.... I have before me a list
of the books and pamphlets the Carnegie Endowment of
International Peace has published. If I have found little new in
them, or in any books on the subject, it is _because it may be
needless for me to search among their details for the great
truths I have seen in the vividness of gun flashes on the field
of battle_....
The sentence in italics above, in which Palmer asserts that the great
truths that have been revealed to him have come to him not from books
but from the vividness of gun flashes on the field of battle, brings us
to the crux of our argument, and will be used presently as a point of
departure for what may prove to be a constructive suggestion of some
value. If mankind is to be taught to follow the method employed by the
individual in using the errors of the past to ensure a better future
_the race must be enabled to visualize its past_. If it refuses to gain
enlightenment through books some other medium for making history the
savior of posterity must be found. And it has been found. The great
truths that were revealed by gun flashes to Frederick Palmer can find
their way to the hearts and minds of the masses of men if we are wise
and far-sighted enough to make full and intelligent use of a new medium
through which Man may gaze upon the mistakes and shortcomings of his
past, and, forewarned, avoid them in the future.
The race has found at last its universal language, its Esperanto not of
the ear and tongue but of the eye. The evolution of the motion picture,
developing in a few years from a toy kinetoscope to a Griffith
wonder-worker, has made possible, for the first time in the history of
humanity, an appeal to the heart and mind and soul of man that overcomes
the ancient handicap of the confusion of tongues. After many centuries
the check to human progress given at the Tower of Babel has come to an
end at the entrance to the motion-picture palace. It has been made
possible at last for history to reveal its secrets, and vouchsafe its
warnings, not to the comparatively few who read scholarly books, but to
the millions who, as democracy conquers the earth, have become masters
of the destiny of nations.
In a brilliant and impressive address delivered last July by Will H.
Hays at Boston, Mass., before the National Education Association, the
speaker presented facts and figures demonstrating the marvellous
progress made of late by the motion picture as a medium for instruction
in both schools and colleges. He said:
To reflect on the possibilities of the motion picture in
education is to regret that one’s school days were spent before
this great invention came to us as a poultice to heal the blows
of ignorance, but there is consolation in the fact that since
the advent of pictures the whole world, regardless of age, can
go to school.
“Regardless of age”—yes, and, also, regardless of race, language,
inherited or acquired prejudices, and the hot passions that result in
man’s inhumanity to man. In other words, the human race may now sit
before a screen and learn through the universal medium of the eye those
great truths that have been revealed to Frederick Palmer by the vivid
flashes of the battle-field.
Dreams, you say? Generalities? A vision that begets nothing but vain
hopes? Suppose, then, that we make a concrete suggestion that, should it
arouse interest and create discussion, might result eventually in giving
to what you call “airy nothings” a “local habitation and a name.” The
insuperable obstacle that has prevented heretofore the establishment
somewhere upon earth of a university designed for the educational needs
of the race at large has been linguistic. In a polyglot world a great
central station for the dissemination of knowledge was impossible so
long as that knowledge could be inculcated only by means of the written
or spoken word. But to-day, as Mr. Hays points out in the address quoted
above, instruction is given, from our primary schools up to our
universities, through the method of visualization; and, furthermore,
repeated tests have shown that students prepared for examinations by aid
of pictures obtain higher marks than examinees whose coaching was
confined to the media of books and lectures. It is almost impossible to
exaggerate the significance of the above in connection with the dream we
have taken the liberty to dream. A world university, a fountain of all
acquired knowledge for the race at large, became practicable the moment
the linguistic problem was solved by the Esperanto of the Eye. No longer
was the vision of a race finding, as do individuals, strength and wisdom
for meeting the perils of the future by contemplating the mistakes of
the past a vague, shadowy mockery, destined to vanish with a return to
common-sense. On the contrary, common-sense had become suddenly
associated with a project that had left the realm of the abstract to
enter the domain of the concrete. For what, in the name of common-sense,
could make so impressive an appeal to the practical man of affairs as
the perfecting of a method whereby the recurrent set-backs to progress
that peoples, and mankind at large, inflict upon themselves can be
reduced to a minimum or, perhaps, rendered permanently obsolete?
Let us suppose that what we will call, tentatively, our Lighthouse of
the Past had found its Rockefeller or Carnegie, that several hundred
million dollars were available for the establishment of a world centre
of enlightenment wherein all the peoples of the earth could study what
man has done in his dual character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is it not
certain that the evil influence of the latter would lose its grip
eventually upon a race that is so strangely compounded of the god-like
and the diabolical? Seeing is believing. Show mankind both the glories
and the horrors of the past, let each tribe, nation, race ponder its own
achievements and its own failures, reveal to the pilgrim students
flocking to our lighthouse from every corner of the earth both the
microscopic and the telescopic aspects of history, to the end that they
may return to their respective native lands inspired and eloquent
advocates of a better world, and, lo, the problems seemingly insoluble
to us to-day will be solved through a mass enlightenment that, before
the advent of the screen, was beyond the wildest dreams of the most
optimistic visionaries.
And where, you ask, shall our Mecca for the pilgrims of progress be
located? For many reasons, there is but one country to-day available for
the project briefly outlined above, and that is the United States.
Geographical, historical, diplomatic, financial, educational and racial
factors interwoven in the enterprise combine to make ours the only land
in which this Lighthouse of the Past, this university of universities,
could stand a fair chance of functioning successfully. Somewhere in our
country there is an ideal location contiguous to one of our great cities
adapted by man and nature to the needs of our experiment in racial
regeneration. Where this location may be is a question to be answered in
the future. Upon this site, however, when it has been chosen, can not
you who have read the foregoing, and have begun, perhaps, to dream my
dream, picture a vast group of buildings, both beautiful and
utilitarian, within which all that mankind has done of good or evil
shall be revealed, year after year, generation after generation, to the
critical but hopeful eyes of the race at large? Give full rein to your
imagination in this connection! Here shall be shown to our Mecca’s
pilgrims all of Man’s achievements in the realms of science, art,
government, industry, commerce, social betterment. Here shall be
revealed, also, the blunders, the failures, the tragedies that were the
price paid for these achievements.
Here may you visualize the epic tale of Man’s rise from protoplasm to
power, from an amœba to ruler of the earth. Here may a Chinaman study
the past of his people through forty centuries of weal and woe; the
modern Greek glory in the splendors of ancient Athens or appraise his
compatriots’ achievements of yesterday; the Norseman, the Slav, the
Teuton, the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, the Jap, the Arab, the
East Indian learn from the screen what his race, or nation, or tribe has
done for or against—and they have all done both—the cause of advancing
civilization. There shall radiate, if our dream comes true, from this
great centre where all knowledge is visualized a light that shall grow
ever brighter, as the generations come and go, routing the errors of
ignorance and racial prejudice and making possible that for which the
great hearted of the race have so long striven in vain, namely, the
brotherhood of man.
Let me transpose two sentences from a timely book from which I have
already quoted. Says Frederick Palmer on the last page of his
enlightening volume “The Folly of Nations”: “The world of to-day thinks
through its eyes looking at the screen. Where are our millionaires who
seek worthy objects for their benefactions?” And, from another recently
published book, “The Salvaging of Civilization,” by H. G. Wells, can be
most aptly quoted the following pertinent excerpt:
It has become clear that the task of bringing about that
consolidated world state which is necessary to prevent the
decline and decay of mankind is not primarily one for the
diplomatists and lawyers and politicians at all. It is an
educational one. It is a moral based on an intellectual
reconstruction. The task immediately before mankind is to find
release from the contentions, loyalties and hostilities of the
past, which make collective world-wide action impossible at the
present time, in a world-wide common vision of the histories and
destines of the race. On that basis, and on that alone, can a
world control be organized and maintained. The effort demanded
from mankind, therefore, is primarily and essentially a bold
reconstruction of the outlook upon life of hundreds of millions
of minds.
During the past eight years the human race has undergone the bloodiest
ordeal of the ages and, succeeding it, the bitterest disappointment that
mankind has yet been forced to endure. A confusion of tongues that made
European diplomacy helpless at a great crisis rendered a world war
inevitable and the lack of a common medium of enlightenment at
Versailles postponed indefinitely the establishment of permanent peace
upon earth. Had Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando been
obliged every morning at the Peace Conference to spend several hours,
before tackling the affairs of a disordered world, in front of a screen
upon which was depicted before their keen eyes the immediate tragic past
and the deplorable present of the nations of the earth the final outcome
of their deliberations might have been of greater value to the cause of
civilization than it has proved to be. Had the Esperanto of the Eye been
adopted as the official language at Versailles could not the Conference
have avoided a repetition of the fatal errors that crept into its
verdicts as an evil heritage from its century-old predecessor, the
Conference of Vienna? Did not Wilson and Lloyd George fail to take
advantage of a new medium of enlightenment that was denied a hundred
years ago to Metternich and Talleyrand? Is it not even possible that had
the cinema played an enlightening part at Versailles that which is of
real value in the basic idea underlying the League of Nations might be
exercising greater potency in a quarrelsome world to-day than it appears
to be?
These queries and conjectures are put forward not for the purpose of
stimulating further controversy regarding the details of what I have
called above “the bitterest disappointment that mankind has yet been
forced to endure,” namely, the Versailles Peace Conference. They are
thrown out merely to emphasize the comprehensive fact, recognized by
Palmer, Stoddard, Wells, and many other able contemporary writers, that
mankind, if it is to make use of the errors of the past to avoid the
pitfalls of the future, must find a way to get great truths into the
mind of the race at large not through the lurid flashes of the
battlefield but by means of a universal language. There is, and for an
indefinite future there can be, but one such medium of expression,
namely, the Esperanto of the Eye. Through it, and through it alone, can
Wells, and those who believe with him that civilization may yet be
salvaged, further that “world-wide common vision of the histories and
destinies of the race” that has become of late the one great hope
mankind can to-day reasonably cherish.
A Lighthouse of the Past, a university of universities, a fountain of
all revealed knowledge inculcated through a medium understood of all
men, a Mecca for the pilgrims of peace and progress from all corners of
the earth, forever adapting itself to the growing needs of mankind for
enlightenment, sending forth, year after year, its polyglot graduates to
carry its teachings, warnings, promises to every tribe and nation on the
planet—is it not a consummation to be devoutly wished, a dream worth
every sacrifice to bring within the purview of reality? If your answer
to this query, dear reader, is in the affirmative, the chances seem to
be that you will find the following chapters of this book worthy of your
earnest consideration.
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