A NATION OF DREAMERS
Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in
exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the
doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in
seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly
in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort
of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both
ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The
problems of mental and physical food are not analogous; they are two
parts of a whole. Our ignorance of chemistry and hygiene and our
unguarded appetites lead us into gastronomic folly; our ignorance of
the simple and easily learned laws of the mind and our vitiated and
undiscriminating mental appetites, called passions and prejudices, lead
us into educational follies as wild but no wilder than our gastronomic
follies. The results of the one show in poor health; the results of
the other show in confusion in the conduct of our affairs, private and
public.
Some of us have no means of getting good mental food, and would not
know what to select and what to reject if we had. Others, and these are
the overwhelming majority, have no power to discriminate between the
true and the false, the rational and the irrational, between that which
strengthens the powers of the mind and that which weakens or perverts
them. We take in cheap or worthless mental food just as we put cheap or
worthless stuff into our stomachs. We take in that which is easy and
pleasant to the taste--that is, we patronize the intellectual pastry
cooks and confectioners too liberally. Or, we go to the purveyors of
the strong waters of passion and prejudice, and under the influence of
such whiskies and brandies imagine ourselves beings of extraordinary
and fine mentality.
There is as much, indeed, there is greater, cause for alarm over the
gastronomic than over the mental follies. But neither kind is evidence
that we are on the down grade. We are more alert and wiser all the
time in matters of physical health, despite our own appetites and
foolish inclinations and lazy disinclinations, despite the pretentious
ignorance of the medical profession and the shrewd chicanery of the
quacks. In the same manner we are more and more alive to the importance
of mental health, of the well-fed, well-exercised brain; and this
improvement goes steadily forward, despite the harmful effects of
alleged literature and drama, despite the pretentious ignorance of
our regularly constituted teachers, despite the energetic educational
quackeries of false learning, false culture and false taste.
Intelligence will spread; Democracy will compel.
A hundred years ago small indeed was the part of the human race that
could be reached by an appeal to the reason. To-day in many parts of
the civilized world advances begin to be made not alone by appeals
to empty stomachs, by shouts about full and empty dinner pails, but
by real intellectual force. There are even a few rare but highly
significant instances of masses of men being induced to sacrifice a
small immediate good to gain a remoter larger good. That is, the masses
begin to show signs of that same intelligent foresight which created
and maintained class rule in times past, which makes some successful
far beyond their fellows. And those who are so greatly concerned by the
vast concentration of machinery and capital in a few hands fail to give
proper consideration to the two most important points, more important
far than the evils of concentration of wealth and power:
First: Concentrations of capital are at the mercy of brains. They are
impotent unless they are administered by brains, administered by a
multitude of brains working intelligently and harmoniously for a common
end.
Second: Their evil consequences result from lack of reasoning power,
lack of far-sightedness, due to imperfect education in the managers;
lack of knowledge how to protect their own interests on the part of the
masses.
On one hand we see an enormous increase in the brain power of the
people--a multitude able to think, eager to think, not to be prevented
from thinking, where only two or three generations ago the thinking was
done exclusively by the few. On the other hand we see the necessity for
more thinking, for vigorous stirring-up of the minds of the masses,
for more and more education. And, year by year, the stirring-up process
increases. The evils of the present day are as old as the race, as old
as ignorance, as old as human frailty. The good, the benefits, are new,
entirely new.
The material and mental forces of modern civilization have already
wrought wonders. Think of it! Less than a century and a half ago the
world for the first time heard a plea for the freedom, the dignity,
the individuality of man. To-day millions of minds have that gospel as
their fundamental creed. And freedom of thought, freedom of action, is
the realized ideal of many nations, the realizing ideal of almost all
the others. Why should we fear that the idea of manhood will lose its
charm; that the democratic ideal, which has real beauty, should prove
less attractive than the old ideal of inequality and injustice and
inhumanity, which is now seen to be in fact hideous? Why should we fear
that as we grow in enlightenment, grow in capacity to think and act
with freedom, we should care less and less about thinking and acting
with freedom?
What will come out of this vast, unbarriered flood of sunshine of
enlightenment, out of these concentrations social called cities,
these concentrations industrial called combinations? Who can say? Who
would care to destroy life’s chief interest, the veiled future, by
foreseeing? One thing we can be assured of--it will not be tyranny.
It could not be tyranny, because the light of intellect, of real
intelligence, is now in millions of minds, is kindling in millions more.
Of the many misreadings of history perhaps the silliest is that which
attributes to former times an idealism greater than that of our own
day. And of the many misreadings of our own times certainly the
silliest is that which attributes more idealism to such countries as
Germany, Austria, and Italy than to these United States.
The Middle Ages are generally cited as the period of intensest and
loftiest idealism. But looking past the artistic and literary few
of those centuries, looking at nations and peoples, what do we see?
Ignorance, squalor, inconceivable physical and mental and moral
wretchedness; ferocious tyrannies worse almost than anarchy itself and
constantly producing it; stolid and heartless indifference in almost
all to the welfare of their fellow-beings; “Every man for himself” the
universal cry. No wonder there was a passionate yearning for the life
beyond the grave with its promise of escape from a world made hideous
by “man’s inhumanity to man.” And in these modern countries where
so-called idealism is rampant, we find false and oppressive social and
industrial conditions in the ascendant, we find a deplorable incapacity
for dealing with the problems of life or an ignorant insensibility to
them.
If idealism means inanely beating the empty air, if it means the
worship of the vague, the remote and the purely fanciful, then this
age cannot be charged with idealism and our country must plead guilty
to the charge of gross materialism; and for idealism we must look to
seclusions and deserts, where a few surviving dirty and distracted
hermits and yogis spend their time in fantastical imaginings. But if
idealism means rational, realizable and realizing dreams of a to-morrow
that shall be as much better than to-day as to-day is better than
yesterday, then the world was never before so idealistic, and America
is the chief prophet and chief apostle of idealism.
In this sense the Declaration of Independence is the most idealistic
literary product of the human mind; the so-called idealism of
superstition, of chivalry, of kingship and aristocracy, of the
divinely appointed few taking care of the many, of “never mind this
world; all will be righted in the next,” has the cheap, dull glitter
of “fool’s gold” and paste diamonds. These fallacies were, and
still are, poisonous, because of their interference with the growth
of true idealism--the idealism of self-help and helping others to
help themselves. And to show them up and then to show them down and
out--especially down and out of our colleges and universities--we need
another Cervantes and a revised and enlarged Don Quixote.
Never before was the true ideal, humanity, clear and universal. “Light
from the East” was the old proverb; the new proverb is “Light from the
West!” For ours is the dawn-land of the Golden Age. We are a nation,
a race of idealists, of dreamers. Even our plutocrats, with their
Americanism submerged and all but suffocated in their wealth, still
dream fitfully of justice and equality and universal enlightenment and
the brotherhood of man.
We are a nation of dreamers who make their dreams come true!