Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington. Gilbert Clinton Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ was no longer the special creation of God. God, instead of making Adam and Eve his wife, fashioned a grain of star dust and gave it a grain of star dust to wife, leaving the rest to Progress. Man who had been a little lower than the angels became, by an immense act of faith, a little higher than the earthworm. The old doctrine of the Fall of Man took on a reverse twist. Man had not fallen but he had risen from such debased beginnings that he had not got far. He was in about the same place where he would have been if he had fallen.

      It was easy to turn upside down our belief in the Fall of Man. We always knew there was something wrong with him, but we did not know what it was until evolution explained his unregenerate character so satisfactorily. Still the thought that Man did not move forward as fast as things, was less the special ward of Progress than automobiles, elevators and bathtubs, was vaguely disturbing.

      The Greeks had left us records which showed that the human mind was as good three thousand years ago as it is today, or better. We shut our eyes to this bit of evidence by abandoning the study of the classics and excluding all allusion to them in the oratory of our Congress. And Mr. Wells in his History has since justified us by proving that the Greeks were after all only the common run of small-town folk – over-press-agented, perhaps, by some fellows in the Middle Ages who had got tired of the Church and who therefore pretended that there was something bigger and better in the world than it was.

      So we pinned our hopes on the Martians and spent our time frantically signalling to the nearby planet, asking whether, when the earth grew as cold as King David when his physicians "prescribed by way of poultice a young belle," and responded only weakly to the caress of the Sun, when its oceans dried up and only a trickle of water came down through its valleys from the melting ice at its poles, we should not, like the fancied inhabitants of the nearest celestial body, have evolved at last into super-beings. We wanted some evidence from our neighbors that, in spite of the Greeks, by merely watching the clock we should arrive at a higher estate.

      The point I am trying to make is that we have been conducting the most interesting of Time's experiments in the government of men at a period when Man has been at a greater discount than usual in his own mind, when self-government faced too much competition from government by the clock.

      When I speak of government by the clock, I should, perhaps, use capital letters to indicate that I have in mind that timepiece on which is recorded God's Time; whose ticking is the forward march of progress. Clocks as they touch our lives require human intervention. The winders of these clocks perform something that may be described as an office.

      You recall the place the clock filled in our households a generation ago. Father wound it once a week, at a stated time, as regularly as he went to church. The winding of it was a function. No other hand but father's touched the key; if one had, the whole institution of family life would have been imperiled. Father is a symbol for the government of the clock-winders, those sacred persons who translated Progress into terms of common utility.

      When we descended from the regions of theocratic power to those of human institutions, we found ourselves in America to be workers in one vast countrywide workshop. The workshop touches us more directly and more importantly than does the nation. Out of the workshop comes our bread and butter. When the workshop closes down we suffer and form on line at the soup kitchens.

      Three meals a day concern us more than do post-offices and federal buildings, of however white marble or however noble façades. What we have to eat and to wear, what we may put in the bank, what real freedom we enjoy, our position in the eyes of men, our happiness and unhappiness, depend on our relations to the national workshop, not on our relations to the national government.

      We conceived of it vaguely as a thing which produced prosperity, not prosperity in its larger and more permanent aspects – that was ours through the beneficence of Progress and the immortal luck of our country – but prosperity in its more immediate details.

      A lot of confused thinking in which survived political ideas as old as the race, converted into modern forms, entered into our conception of it. It was a thing of gods and demigods, with legends of golden fleeces and of Hercules holding up the skies. It was feudal in its privileges and immunities. It enjoyed the divine right of kings. Yet it operated under laws not made by man.

      When it failed to effect prosperity, it was because of a certain law that at the end of ever so many years of fatness it must produce a famine. At such times men, demigods, stepped out of banks with sacks of gold on their shoulders and mitigated the rigors of its failure.

      And these splendid personages might set going again that which law stopped. We bowed patiently and unquestioningly to its periodic eccentricity as part of the Fate that fell upon the original sinner, and watched hopefully the powerful men who might in their pleasure or their wisdom end our sufferings.

      We were taught to regard it as a thing distinct from political authority, so that the less governors and lawmakers interfered with it the better for the general welfare. Back in our past is a thorough contempt for human intelligence which relates somehow to the religious precept against questioning the wisdom of God. Whatever ordinary men did in the field of economics was sure to be wrong and to check the flow of goods upon which the well-being of society depended. We were all, except the familiars of the great forces, impotent pieces of the game economic law played upon this checker-board of nights and days.

      I have said that this government of the national workshop in which we were all laborers or foremen or superintendents or masters sometimes seemed to our consciousness a government of laws and sometimes a government of men. In any primitive faith priests played a large part, and probably the primitive worshippers before them much of the time did not think beyond the priests, while sometimes they did – when it was convenient for the priests that they should.

      When famines or plagues came it was because the gods were angry. When they are averted it is the priests who have averted them. When economic panics came it was because we had sinned against economic law; when they were averted it was because men had averted them, men who lived on intimate terms with economic law and understood its mysterious ways, and enjoyed its favor, as their great possessions testified.

      Naturally, we are immensely more directly and more constantly concerned with this government than with the government at Washington. Besides, we were mostly business men, or hoped to be. It was our government more truly than was the government at Washington.

      Only a limited area in the political consciousness was left for self-government. You descended from the heights to the broad flat plain of man's contempt for man. It was there, rooted firmly in the constitution, that the government at Washington reared its head. Self-government is a new thing; no myth has gathered about it. It was established among men who believed in the doctrine of the original sin, and it had been carried by their successors, who had abandoned the sinner Adam as the progenitor of their kind for the sinless but inglorious earthworm. The inferiority complex which is the race's most persistent heritage from the past was written all over it.

      I suppose it was Adam Smith who made self-government possible by discovering that the things really essential to our welfare would take care of themselves if we only let them alone and that the more we let them alone the better they would take care of themselves, under eternal and immutable laws. Ah, the happy thought occurred, if the really essential things are thus beneficially regulated why shouldn't we have the fun of managing the non-essentials ourselves?

      Progress ruled the world kindly and well. It might be trusted to see that all went for the best. The government of business functioned effectively for the general weal. The future was in the hands of a force that made the world richer and better. The present, in all that concerned man most vitally with regards food and shelter, was directed by enlightened self-interest represented by men who personified success.

      It was impossible not to be optimistic when existence was so well ordered. There was no sorry scheme of things to СКАЧАТЬ