139. Reform in Institutions
This is one reason why radical changes are so difficult to bring about in institutions. These are social and therefore in a sense arbitrary. In mechanical or “practical” matters people adjust themselves to the pressure of new conditions more quickly. If a nation has been in the habit of wearing clothing of wool, and this material becomes scarce and expensive, some attempt will indeed be made to increase the supply of wool, but if production fails to keep pace with the deficiency, cotton is substituted with little reluctance. If, on the other hand, a calendar becomes antiquated, which could be changed by a simple act of will, by the mere exercise of community reason, a tremendous resistance is encountered. Time and again nations have gone on with an antiquated or cumbersome calendar long after any mediocre mathematician or astronomer could have devised a better one. It is usually reserved for an autocratic potentate of undisputed authority, a Cæsar or a Pope, or for a cataclysm like the French and Russian revolutions, to institute the needed reform. As long as men are concerned with their bodily wants, those which they share with the lower animals, they appear sensible and adaptable. In proportion however as the alleged products of their intellects are involved, when one might most expect foresight and reason and cool calculation to be influential, societies seem swayed by a conservatism and stubbornness the strength of which looms greater as we examine history more deeply.
Of course, each nation and generation regards itself as the one exception. But irrationality is as easy to discern in modern institutions as in ancient alphabets, if one has a mind to see it. Daylight saving is an example very near home. For centuries the peoples of western civilization have gradually got out of bed, breakfasted, worked, dined, and gone to sleep later and later, until the middle of their waking day came at about two or three o’clock instead of noon. The beginning of the natural day was being spent in sleep, most relaxation taken at night. This was not from deliberate preference, but from a species of procrastination of which the majority were unintentionally guilty. Finally the wastefulness of the condition became evident. Every one was actually paying money for illumination which enabled him to sit in a room while he might have been amusing himself gratis outdoors. Really rational beings would have changed their habits—blown the factory whistle at seven instead of eight, opened the office at eight instead of nine, gone to the theater at seven and to bed at ten. But the herd impulse was too strong. The individual that departed from the custom of the mass would have been made to suffer. The first theater opening at seven would have played to empty chairs. The office closing at four would have lost the business of the last hour of the day without compensation from the empty hour prefixed at the beginning. The only way out was for every one to agree to a self-imposed fiction. So the nations that prided themselves most on their intelligence solemnly enacted that all clocks be set ahead. Next morning, every one had cheated himself into an hour of additional daylight, and the illuminating plant out of an hour of revenue, without any one having had to depart from established custom; which last was evidently the course actually to be avoided at all hazards.
Of course, most individual men and women are neither idiotic nor insane. The only conclusion is that as soon and as long as people live in relations and act in groups, something wholly irrational is imposed on them, something that is inherent in the very nature of society and civilization. There appears to be little or nothing that the individual can do in regard to this force except to refrain from adding to its irrationality the delusion that it is rational.