CHAPTER XIIA NATION OF DREAMERS
Eachyear 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 folliesas 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 andwiser 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 foresightwhich 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 themasses, 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 theseconcentrations 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 universalcry. 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 humanmind; 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!