Our popular literature reveals that our fellow citizens desire to escape from life as it is lived among us into a dream world of brutality and carnality, desire it with a passionate intensity whihc makes them buy in large quantity fiction much of which is worse than disreputable. A few books even yet, few among the many that are printed, are designed to be read by literate and decent people; must of the products of press and bindery is escapist trash. This fact certainly has cultural significance, especially in a society where the Common Man determines life patterns to the extent that he does in America.
Look at another index. Americans are immensely concerned with amusement; but their desire is not so much to amuse themselves as to be amused by someone else. Take music, for instance. Despite a growth in musical appreciation in this century which has been more than considerable, though perhaps it has not been so great as is sometimes supposed, we do not make nearly as much music today as our grandparents did. Instead, we are content to sit back and listen to someone else make music for us. Perhaps we are too lazy to sing and play instruments. Perhaps we are unwilling to go through the discipline necessary to acquire musical facility. Perhaps we are overawed by professional expertness, unaware that much more enjoyment is gained by singing or playing oneself, even though one does it badly, than from hearing it done, however perfectly. Our musical experience is largely receptive, not creative.
The same is true of other arts. We do not, for example, make or decorate our homes or the objects of common use within them, not to the extent that our grandparents did, and got great joy from it. We buy what mass producers tell us is in the best taste. It may or may not be good; but it is not ours, no matter how much we pay for it. Neither in creating nor arranging things domestic do we find much self-expression. The drama, too, we relegate to professionals whose performances we pay to look at, not often in a theater (for we have killed the theater by extravagance and exploitation) but at the motion pictures or over the radio and television. We write or produce or act next to no plays ourselves; and most of us, and our children, would rather be caught dead than observed playing charades or reciting monologues. Even general conversation, which to be amusing always involves dramatic give and take, has become nearly a lost art.
This same misfortune has overtaken what used to be the greatest American amusement of them all, the art called athletics. We are not really a sporting people, not any more. We do not, most of us, play games; we watch them. Our idea of sport is to buy seats in a stadium and look at paid gladiators do combat while we applaud them or abuse them or wager on them. The scandals of late in what used to be, and still purports to be, amateur sport, have not been caused by wicked betting rings. There would be no betting rings, no bribery by them, if it were not for the fact that we have sunk from a sporting activity into a sporting passivity. We would rather bet on a winner than contend. As long as this remains true of us, as it was not of our fathers, athletes will be subsidized and games fixed.
Another index of culture is the degree to which profession of political principles is or is not matched by responsible action. In respect to this, the situation in America reveals a good deal. We say that we believe in the rightness of majority rule, with due protection of the rights of minorities, all this made effective by law duly enacted and enforced by elected representatives. As a matter of fact, however, a large part of our people is unwilling to participate in such government, even to the extent of casting ballots at election time... Half the electorate stayed away from the polls. Similar proportion prevails when lesser or more local officers than President are being chosen. In elections for membership in Congress, the percentage of nonparticipation sometimes runs to as high as 70 per cent [1952 figures being cited here].
Our people apparently do not care to take the trouble to help govern themselves or to choose their governors. Or else, it may be, they feel incompetent to judge the issues at stake, never having learned at home or in school how to judge anything. Or else they are of the opinion that no party or politician is better or wrose than his or its rivals, that all politicians are rascals and all party platforms dishonest. These impressions may or may not be justified. This is not the place to argue that out. The significant thing to note here is the evident popular opinion that "politics and politicians are rotten" and that the citizens generally can do nothing about it. Or else they may suppose that it does not much matter who holds office since the real governors, they feel sure, are the lobbies of pressure groups which tell the officeholders, from the President and Congress down to the most humble bailiff, what is to be done, and when, to whom and not to whom.
The evident discrepancy between political theory and political action must alarm those who believe in our kind of democracy. The cultural indication is twofold. First, it would seem that most of us have such small respect for the body politic that we do not feel it worth while to bother about who are entrusted with the making or enforcement of the laws. Secondly, it reveals that a majority of us, a constantly growing majority, is willign to talk one way and act another, in respect to a basic human activity like government, with a nonchalance that is not even cynical.
Another index not to be ignored is the degree to which residence is stable or otherwise. If families frequently move about, there are soon too little of those mutual connections which come from neighborly interrelationships.
What is a civilized man? By derivation fo the word, he is one who lives and thinks in a city. The Greek city, the medieval city, the American city as it was before industrialization brought about huge agglomerations of urban population, was a community, a constant group of families each of which, and each of whose members, had a stake in the common welfare and was not permitted to forget it. Such a city was large enough for reasonable self-expression but small enough for public influence on behavior. One had not merely to obey the statute law or go to jail, but also the customs, the unwritten law, or be sent to Coventry. For a city to function, its population has to be not too great, and stable from year to year, if possible from generation to generation.
The late W. N. Guthrie used to say there was no civilized man or woman in New York City who had not been civilized somewhere else, in a small town on the plains, in the ghetto in Warsaw, on a southern plantation, somewhere like that. New York, he maintained, could civilize nobody for, while in that megalopolis there is opportunity to express oneself all over the map, there is next to no neighborhood opinion to exercise correction. There are, in fact, no neighborhoods, only frequently migrating human units, anarchs, so lonely that they will gladly follow any demagogic quack who pretends to be friendly.
Well, there used to be the ethnic neighborhoods, which exercised some civilizing influence, and preserved the old ways and culture. On the other hand, were they able to create a civic identity ordered to the common good, and not merely a narrow tribal or ethnic identity? Undoubtedly some of this was due to discrimination; if one is excluded from society by the majority, then members of the minority must band together and "look after their own interest." As for assimilation through the school system, "civics" classes would not be enough, if the way one actually lived undermined the lessons (and one can argue that simplistic platitudes about the way the system worked were very inadequate in educating citizens who could participate and bring about real reform).
How long did such enclaves last? It doesn't seem that there are many of them left--everyone's moved out of them as they've become more socially and economically mobile. A half-century? Less? The ethnic churches did what they could to pass on the religion, but it doesn't seem that they were successful in mobilizing a army of Catholic faithful who would be the leaven of their society, renewing it from within.
This was exaggeration, but not greatly so. With us the mores are no longer determined by mutual consent among friends. They are built up mechanically and anoymously; and because they are what they are, they no longer help as of yore. We still more or less obey statute law; we pay little heed to unwritten customs of mutual dignity, or even of decency. This is now true not only in such monstrosities as New York or Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles or Houston but in much smaller places. Thanks to the frequent migration of vast segmets of our people, all our cities have ceased to civilize, have ceased to be communities.
In such a situation it is not unnatural that individuals should live more and more each for self, with less and less consideration for the comfort, even for the safety, of the people next door or the family over the way. One does not know their names. Why bother to learn? They will soon be moving, or one will move oneself. After years of this there remains in America little regard for the rights of others to privacy or peace. Let the radio blast. Let the children yell. Throw the rubbish where you will. The sanctity of property, either communal or personal, becomes nobody's proper concern. In New York City, for example, children in 1951 caused wanton damage to school property--windows, fences, tile, furniture, equipment, works of art--which it cost the taxpayers over $500,000 to replace. Such vandalism is matched in proportion to population, in hundreds of other municipalities. As for private property other than one's own, litter it, maul and deface it, walk off with it, make it necessary for the owners to keep it under lock and key; while open lawns and flower beds have become a nostalgic memory for many who once lived in a civilized fashion.
No such degeneration could happen if we were not a restlessly migratory folk. This index reveals a fundamental weakness in our way of life, one which cannot be ignored.
No comments:
Post a Comment