Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

NERVES

Young as America is, she is nevertheless old enough to have known the time when there were no such things as nerves. Our earliest settlers and colonists, our proverbially hardy pioneers apparently managed to get along with a very modest repertory of diseases. They died, if not from malnutrition or exposure or from Indians, then from some old-fashioned, heaven-sent seizure or sudden pain, not to mention from “old age,” long a favourite diagnosis of a pious and not too inquisitive school of medicine even where the patient’s age had to be entered by the coroner as of forty or thereabouts. As for the various forms of nervousness which belong to our age of indulgence and luxury, they were unknown to those sturdier times, and would undoubtedly have put their unhappy victims under the quick suspicion of having had forbidden converse with the Devil.

If, nevertheless, we feel justified in assuming that this golden age of health and disease probably hid beneath its tinsel a good many of the nervous afflictions which had already made the Middle Ages so interesting, we must bear in mind that the pioneer neurotic of those days had at his command a number of disguises and evasions to which his fellow-sufferer of to-day can no longer have recourse. One of his favourite expedients for concealing his neurotic maladjustment was to take refuge in some form of religion or rather in some new variation of religious belief or practice, for it is, of course, not claimed here that religion itself can be exhaustively explained as a manifestation of nervous maladjustment. But the colonial period was an era when it was still good form, so to speak, for a neurosis to express itself in some religious peculiarity, and as this was a country without monasteries (which had proved to be such a haven for the neurotically afflicted during the Middle Ages), the neurotic was forced to exhibit his neo-religionism in the open. Often he blossomed forth in some new form of religious segregation, which allowed him to compensate for his social defect and often gave him positive advantages.

The neurotic legacy which he thus bequeathed to the nation can still be seen all around us to-day in the extraordinary multiplicity of religious variations, not to say eccentricities, which dot the theological heavens in America. For the neurotic as a religion founder—or better, inventor—quickly gathered similarly inclined adherents, formed a sect, and moved a little further West, so that the country was rather plentifully sown with strange creeds. He was thus freed from the criticism which would have overtaken him in a more settled society and his neurotic disguise remained undetected to a degree no longer possible to-day. For if nowadays we still occasionally encounter a brand-new and crassly individual religion all registered and patented like any temperance elixir, we usually discover that its prophet is either a defective or even an illiterate person who has distorted some biblical text in favour of a bizarre interpretation, or else a psychopathic individual who already has highly systematized ideas of the delusioned type. This class of neurotic has tended to disappear by somewhat the same process through which the more flamboyant type of hysteric such as flourished in the Middle Ages has gradually succumbed to progressive exposure—an analogy to which I refer with some diffidence in the face of one of the supreme ironies of the 20th century, namely, the canonization of Joan of Arc. But that lapse into the darkness of mediævalism is probably to be explained as a by-product of the war mind.

The other great loophole for the early American neurotic was purely geographical. He could always move on. In view of the tendency towards social avoidance so characteristic of the neurotic, this was of inestimable advantage. It is, of course, generally supposed that when the embryonic American trekked Westward it was either in response to some external pressure of political oppression or religious intolerance or to the glad, free call of wider horizons and more alluring opportunities, as was the case with the earliest colonists in their flight from Europe. In both cases, however, the assumption may be challenged as a sufficient explanation. For it is extremely probable that a good many of these pioneers were, like Mr. Cohan’s “Vagabond,” fugitives from their own thoughts quite as much as from the tyranny of others. They felt an urge within them that made a further abidance in their social environment intolerable. This geographical flight of the neurotic has always been the most natural and the most obvious, checked though it is to-day to a large extent by the disappearance of further virgin territory and the sophistication born of the knowledge wrought by a world-wide intercommunication which says that mankind is everywhere much the same, a truth which can again be translated into an internal realization that we cannot escape from ourselves.

Certainly our pioneers have been too much romanticized. The neurotic legacy which they bequeathed to us can plainly be seen in many characteristics of our uncouth Westerners with their alternate coldness towards visitors and their undignified warmth towards the casual stranger who really cannot mean anything to them. There is something wrong about man as a social animal when he cannot live happily in a valley where he sees more than the distant smoke of his neighbour’s chimney. When at last the pressure of population forces him to live socially his suspicion and distrust are likely to turn him into a zealot and reformer and make possible the domination in American life of such a sub-cultural type as Bryan or the beatitudes of a State like Kansas. The favourite Western exhortation to be able to look a man in the eye and tell him to go to Hell is worthy of an anti-social community of ex-convicts, and the maxim about minding your own business can only be understood as a defence against the prevalent tendency of everybody to mind his neighbour’s business. Thus the self-isolating neurotic ends by revenging himself upon society by making it intolerable.

But this is to anticipate. It must be said that until after the Civil War America remained singularly free from “nerves.” This is perhaps largely due to the fact, as I have tried to show, that they were not known as such. The only serious epidemic was the witchcraft hunting of the 17th century. It is certainly most charitable towards a religion which had so many other repellent features to characterize this as an hysterical epidemic and let it go at that, though it also freshly illustrates the time-worn truth that intolerance does not seem to make its victims any more tolerant in their turn. The passing of this epidemic also marked the last irruption of State intolerance towards religion, with the exception of later incidents in connection with the Mormon Church, though it has rarely been understood that especially in this country State tolerance of religion was compensated for by individual and social intolerance in matters that quite transcended the religious sphere. The vast importance of this phenomenon in relation to our modern nervous tension will be referred to again later on.

The first typical manifestation of American nerves on an imposing scale began to develop in the sixties and seventies of the last century in the form of neurasthenia. Until then the typical American, despite his religious obsessions and his social deficiencies, had, to a large extent, remained externally minded, a fact which is sufficiently attested by his contempt for the arts and his glorification of his purely material achievements. He had been on the make, an absorbing process while it lasts, though rather dangerous in the long run because it never comes to an end. Neurasthenia developed rapidly as soon as it had been properly labelled, and claimed a notable number of victims among our captains of industry and high-pressure men: indeed, the number might easily lead to the perhaps rather unkindly conclusion that business dishonesty, even though successful, is likely to result in nervous breakdown in a generation piously reared on the unimpeachable maxims of a Benjamin Franklin or a Herbert Smiley. More fundamentally it was, of course, the logical penalty for cultivating the purely energetic side of man at the expense of his contemplative nature. The philosophy of hurry and hustle had begun to totter.

The discoverer, expounder, and popularizer of neurasthenia was Doctor George M. Beard, under whose ægis neurasthenia came to be known as “the American disease.” Dr. Beard was a sound neurologist within the limits of his generation of medicine, but with a dangerous gift of imagination. His conception of neurasthenia was truly grandiose. According to him this fascinating disease was endemic in the United States and was the result of our peculiar social conditions. Its cause, he claimed, was “modern civilization, which has these five characteristics—steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, the mental activity of women.” Among the secondary and tertiary causes of neurasthenia or nervousness he threw in such things as climate, the dryness of our air and the extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, our institutions as a whole, inebriety, and the general indulgence of our appetites and passions. In a remarkable chapter he also assigned as one of the causes of our nervousness the remarkable beauty of American women, though he does not clearly state whether this made only the men nervous or the women as well. Such a diagnosis was to turn sociologist with a vengeance and Doctor Beard lived up to his implications by saying that the cure of neurasthenia would mean “to solve the problem of sociology itself.”

The inevitable result of such a broad and confident diagnosis was to make of neurasthenia a kind of omnium gatherum of all the ills of mankind less obvious than a broken leg. To explain the affliction in terms of America rather than in terms of the patient and his symptoms had about the value of a foreigner’s book about America written on his home-bound steamer after a six-weeks’ sojourn in this country. In fact, the wildest diagnoses were made, and such perfectly well-defined medical entities as tabes, arteriosclerosis, parathyroidism, myasthenia, and incipient tumours of the brain were frequently given the neurasthenic label. Various theories of exhaustion and nervous strain were also advanced and the attempt was made to feed and strengthen the nervous system directly on the analogy of Professor Agassiz’s famous assumption that the phosphates in fish could be directly absorbed as material for brain-cells, a theory which did not account for the fact that comparatively few intellectual giants have sprung from fisher-folk. This naturally opened up a wide field for quackery and ushered in the era of “nerve tonics” which are still with us to-day. The craze for sanitariums also started at about this time, and with every doctor having a little sanitarium of his own the public was pretty well fleeced both by its “medicine men” and its men of medicine.

Of course no treatment could possibly be successful in curing such a wide variety of diseases the very existence of many of which was hidden from the physician under the blanket term of neurasthenia; and in those cases where an actual neurasthenia was present the treatment as developed by Beard and his followers made only superficial progress. The S. Weir Mitchell formula, for instance, with its emphasis upon quiet, diet, and rest, remained, in the majority of cases, essentially a treatment of symptoms rather than of causes. The tired and over-wrought business man was given a pacifying vacation from his dubious labours and was then promptly sent back to them, like a dog to his vomit. The American woman, grown nervous from being insufficiently occupied, was initiated into a different form of doing nothing, whereat she felt much relieved for a time. Neurasthenia was soon moving in a vicious and ever-widening circle; the more it spread the more it had to include and thus became less and less digested medically; it played havoc especially among American women who exploited their “nervousness” much as their European sisters had exploited their “migraine” or their “vapours” in previous generations. By the nineties, however, neurasthenia had run its course as a fashionable affliction, other countries had succeeded in surviving without erecting a quarantine against it, and medical circles had begun to debate whether there was such a thing as neurasthenia at all.

But, despite the breakdown of neurasthenia and the sins that were committed in its name, it would be a mistake to be merely amused at Doctor Beard for the pretentiousness of his concept or to criticize him too severely for being too much of a medical popularizer. His insight was, after all, of considerable value. For he realized, however imperfectly, that the neuroses as a class are cultural diseases and that they cannot be properly understood without taking into account the background of modern civilization. This is a rare virtue in American medicine where the specialist is constantly in danger of isolating himself, a tendency which is particularly harmful in the study of the mental sciences. Unfortunately Doctor Beard did not follow through. He seems to have become frightened at his own diagnosis. For no sooner had he drawn the worst possible picture of American civilization as a breeder of neurasthenia than he turned around and assured the public that things were not so bad after all. He accomplished this by enriching his sociology with a philosophy which is a prodigy in itself. This philosophy of his he called the “omnistic philosophy” and claimed for it the peculiar virtue of being able to include “optimism on the one hand and pessimism on the other and make the best of both,” which is undoubtedly as uplifting a piece of American metaphysics as one is likely to find on the whole Chautauqua circuit. In criticizing the slow advance of American medicine as a whole it is always well to remember the atmosphere of intellectual quackery in which our physicians no less than our early metaphysicians so confidently moved.

By the end of the 19th century the study of functional nervous disorders in America was, as I have said, pretty well strewn with the disjecta membra of neurasthenia which still breathed slightly under the stimulus of electro- and hydrotherapeutics and of the “health foods” industry. Meanwhile hypnotism also had come to do its turn upon the American medical stage, where it ran through a swift cycle of use and abuse. Neurology as a special department, like the rest of American medicine, had been greatly enriched by contact with continental medicine, and the works of Kraepelin had come into honour among the psychiatrists. Dr. Morton Prince had begun to publish some interesting studies of double personalities, and a number of tentative systems of psycho-therapy based on a rather mixed procedure had been set up only to be knocked down again as a beneficial exercise for the critical faculty.

But now the stage was set for the appearance of the two modern theories of the neuroses as presented in Europe by Janet and Freud. In the rivalry that immediately ensued between these two opposing theories that of Janet was soon outdistanced. His fundamental conception of hysteria as a form of degeneration was in a way quite as repugnant to American optimism as the sexual interpretation of Freud was to American prudery. Janet had indeed been of invaluable help to the hysteric by taking him seriously, but his presentation of the subject was so narrow and his theory in the end proved so static that his views have made little headway. Janet was also under the disadvantage of working as an isolated figure in a prescribed field and did not come into any revolutionary relation to psychology as a whole or find those immensely suggestive analogies in the field of psychiatry, especially in dementia præcox and paranoia, which have given the work of Freud such a wide range. He had, besides, the defects common to so much of French medicine which is often so peculiarly insular and, so to speak, not made for export. His contribution more or less began and ended with the theory of the dissociation of the personality which is not characteristic of hysteria alone and could not successfully be grafted upon the old psychology to which Janet clung.

On the other hand, Freud after an initial resistance rapidly became epidemic in America. As was the case in Europe, he enjoyed considerable vogue among the lay public while still violently opposed in medical circles. His visit to America, however, in 1909, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University, created a very favourable impression and brought him to the attention of such American psychologists as William James, Edwin B. Holt, Adolf Meyer, and others. His works appeared in this country in translations by Doctor A. A. Brill, and in a short while Freud was “taken up” with a vengeance.

He has had both the advantages and the handicaps of a boom. His admirers have obscured or exaggerated him and his enemies have derided his popularity as proof of a reputation based upon sensationalism. In fact, Freud met with three fates: he was either wildly embraced, or rejected in toto with an appropriate academic lynching, or else he was accepted with “improvements.”

He was fortified by previous experience against the second alternative and probably resigned to the third: it was the embrace that most nearly proved fatal to him. For America was to see the most extravagant development of the so-called “wild” psychoanalysis, a danger against which Freud himself had issued a warning. In 1916, for instance, an informal canvas revealed that approximately five hundred individuals were quite willing to psychoanalyze patients in the city of New York alone, whereas there were probably not more than six properly qualified medical practitioners in the whole State. Advertisements offered to teach the psychoanalytic technique by mail and instructors in chiropractic included it in their curriculum. This gross abuse was due to the general laxness of medical law in this country which still remains to be remedied. It was not only the amateurs that offended; doctors themselves were often at fault. For it cannot be too often emphasized that a psychoanalyst must have something more than the conceit of psychological subtlety common to most of us; he must be a trained neurologist and must have had considerable experience in psychiatry if he would escape the pitfalls of differential diagnosis—a case of hysteria can be dangerously like an incipient tumour of the brain and a compulsion-neurosis may simulate a paranoid condition. These abuses are, of course, no criticism of the intrinsic value of psychoanalysis. It has been the history of so many medical discoveries that they are recommended as a cure-all; we need but recall vaccination, or the present vitamine craze. On the other hand, it is regrettable that the direct attack upon Freud in this country has rarely risen above the level of denunciation. Quite recently, for instance, one of our socially eminent neurologists allowed himself to indulge in the teleological, or rather disguised theological, argument that if the unconscious is really so full of dreadful things as Freud says, they should be left there. And yet it is just serious and sympathetic criticism of which the science of psychoanalysis stands most in need.

The attempts to assimilate Freud were of two kinds. The first of these, like Professor Holt’s book on “The Freudian Wish” or Doctor Edward J. Kempf’s “The Autonomic Functions and the Personality,” were sincere attempts of critical dignity to relate psychoanalysis to American behaviouristic psychology on the part of men who are not altogether professed Freudians. The second were more in the nature of somewhat pompous criticisms which attempted to reconcile and soften what seemed to be the more repellent features of the Freudian theories. There is a prevalent tendency among medical men in America to indulge in criticism without any due regard to the proportions between the magnitude of a subject and their familiarity with it, somewhat after the manner of the green theological student who is confident of his ability to subvert the theory of evolution in a casual thesis of his own. The scientist in many fields is constantly facing this debasement of standards, making science not too scientific or logic not too logical lest it should be misunderstood; it is certainly a commentary that the majority of Americans, for instance, look upon Edison as our greatest scientist. The tendency to sweeten and refine Freud has taken some peculiar forms, due, in great part, to Doctor Jung who, on having re-introduced the libido theory to American audiences with a number of philosophical and mystical trimmings of his own, felt that he had made Freud more palatable over here.

Ironically enough, it would have been a very simple matter to “put over” Freud in this country with all the éclat of the Bergsonian craze which just preceded him. It was merely a question of the right kind of publicity, for the problem of how to handle sex in America has been solved long ago. The way to do it is to sentimentalize it. If Freud, instead of saying that the incestuous longing of the child for the parent of opposite sex is a natural impulse, though normally sublimated during the period of adolescence, had put the same idea into the phraseology of so many of our popular songs which reiterate the theme about mother being her boy’s first and last and truest love, he would have encountered no opposition. And if he had given his theory of the unconscious a slightly religious setting by emphasizing the fact that the unconscious has no sense of the passage of time and cannot conceive its own annihilation, he would have been hailed as the latest demonstrator of the immortality of the soul. A little personal press-agenting to the effect that he led a chaste life and was the father of a flourishing family would have completed the prescription. He would have gone over with a bang, though he probably would have been quite as amiably misunderstood as he is now viciously misunderstood.

Freud, however, presented his case at its own value and, aside from informing an astonished American audience that Doctor Sanford Bell had preceded him in announcing the preadolescent sexuality of children, shouldered the responsibility for his theories. What he has said, carefully and repeatedly, is that ever since, for a long period in our development, the difficulties of satisfying the hunger impulse have been overcome in so far as civilized man has pretty well solved the problem of nutrition; it is the sex impulse to which the individual has the greatest difficulty in adjusting himself. This difficulty increases rather than decreases with the advance of culture and at certain stages leads to the group of diseases known as the neuroses. In a normal sexual life there is no neurosis. But our civilization has in many ways become so perverse that we find something akin to an official preference for a neurosis rather than a normal sexual life, in spite of the fact that the neurosis ultimately will destroy civilization. This is the vicious circle which Freud attacked. In doing so he had first to enlarge the concept of sexuality and show its complex relation to our whole culture. In studying civilization at its breaking point he naturally had to study what was breaking it up, namely, the individual’s maladjustment to his sexual impulses. But he has never attempted to sexualize the universe, as has been claimed, nor has he ever lost sight of the fact that while man as an egocentric being must put the self-regarding instincts first, man regarded as one of the processes of nature remains to be studied in terms of his reproductive instincts. Freud has been persistently oversexualized both by his admirers and his opponents, and the degree to which this has been done in America is at least some indication of how close he has come home to conditions here.

Freudian research in this country has been limited almost entirely to cases. Our physicians who practise psychoanalysis have lacked either the leisure or the culture to apply their science to wider cultural questions to which the Freudian psychology applies, and among the lay scholars using the psychoanalytic technique there has been no outstanding figure like that of Otto Rank who has done such notable work in Vienna. But the study of specific cases of hysteria and neurosis as they occur in America already permit of some general conclusions as to the character of the national matrix from which they spring. One of the most striking features of our emotional life is the exaggerated mother-love so frequently displayed by Americans. The average American, whether drunk or sober, can grow maudlin about his mother’s perfections and his devotion to her in a way that must shock the European observer. Not that the European loves his mother less: it is simply that he is more reticent about expressing an emotion which he feels has a certain private sanctity; he would experience a decided constraint or αἰδώς in boasting about it, just as a woman of breeding would not parade her virtue. The American adult knows no such restraint; he will “tell the world” how much he loves his mother, will sing sentimental songs about her and cheerfully subscribe to the advice to “choose a girl like your mother if you want to be happily married,” and then grows violent when the incest-complex is mentioned. This excessive mother worship has reached almost cultic proportions. It is reflected in our fiction, in our motion-pictures, in the inferior position of the American husband, and in such purely matriarchal religions as Christian Science where a form of healing is practised which is not very far removed from a mother’s consolation to her boy when he has bruised his knees. All this points to a persistent sexual infantilism and an incomplete sublimation, which are such fertile breeders of hysteria. One is involuntarily reminded of Doctor Beard’s rather enigmatic statement that the extraordinary beauty of our women is one of the causes of nervousness in America. In so far as they offer a maximum of enticement with a minimum of conjugal satisfaction the charge is certainly justified. It is as if they did not even know their own business in terms of their sexual function of weaning their husbands from their mothers and thus completing the necessary exogamic process. We thus have the condition where the husband, in further seeking to overcome his incest-complex, becomes everything in his business and nothing in his home, with an ultimate neurotic breakdown or a belated plunge into promiscuity. The wife, on her part, either becomes hysterical or falls a victim to religious or reformatory charlatanism.

The study of compulsion-neuroses and allied paranoid states which are so prevalent among us has given us further insights into the neurotic character of the American temperament. One of the most valuable of these is the recognition of the compulsive nature of so much of our thinking. This has also been well observed by a foreign critic like Santayana who says of America, “Though it calls itself the land of freedom, it is really the land of compulsions, and one of the greatest compulsions is that we must think and feel alike.” This is a rather fatal indictment of our boasted individualism, which is, as a matter of fact, an individualism born of fear and distrust such as already marked our early pioneers. We are indeed ultra-conformists, and our fear of other-mindedness amounts almost to a phobia. But such an atmosphere constitutes a paradise for the compulsion-neurotic because he finds it easy to impose his compulsions upon the rest of society. The fact that compulsion-neurotics are constantly indulging in neo-religious formations through which they are enabled temporarily to accommodate their taboos and phobias in religious ceremonials, enables them to make use of the general religious sanctions of society in order to impose their compulsions upon their fellow-beings.

Herein probably lies a better explanation of American intolerance than in the indictment of Puritanism which furnishes such a favourite invective for our iconoclasts. Puritanism has become a literary catchword and by no means covers the case. For it must be remembered that we are dealing with offshoots of deteriorated religions which spring from a very wide range of individuals. Religion, having been cut off from direct interference with the State, and having gradually lost its primitive anthropomorphism which really was one of its sources of strength, proceeded to project itself more and more outwardly upon social questions. As the personality of God grew dim the figure of the Devil also lost its vividness and the problem between good and evil could not longer be fought out entirely in the individual’s own bosom; he was no longer tempted by the figure of the Devil appearing to him in person. Christian religion in its prime saw very clearly that the soul must put its own salvation to the fore, and constantly used many apt similes, such as the beam in our own eye, to remind us that while our neighbour might also have his hands full in fighting the Devil, he probably was capable of taking care of himself. Our modern reformer has no use for any such simile; he would have to go out of business if he could not keep picking at the mote in his neighbour’s eye. He finds the equivalent of the Devil in our social vices, in alcohol, in tobacco, in tea and coffee, in practically all forms of amusements. He preaches a crusade which no longer has an ideal object, and enlists a vague religious emotion which is inaccessible to reason and mocks intellectual criticism. The device of using religious associations as carriers of propaganda has often been used for political purposes with consummate skill. Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech and Roosevelt’s Armageddon appeal are excellent examples of it.

The question has often arisen why the fanatical reformer is so omnipotent in America. Why does he succeed so well in imposing his compulsions upon others? Why are we so defenceless against his blackmail? Why, in plain language, do we stand for him? Foreign observers have frequently commented upon the enormous docility of the American public. And it is all the more curious because ordinarily the average American prides himself upon his assertiveness and his quickness in detecting false pretensions. Yet it is a common occurrence to meet people with valid claims to hard-headedness who nevertheless submit to every form of compulsion. They do not believe in prohibition but vote for it, they smoke but think smoking ought to be stopped, they admit the fanatical nature of reform movements and yet continue their subscriptions.

In giving what can at best be only a partial answer to this national enigma, we may briefly consider two types which profoundly contribute to our atmosphere of compulsion: our immigrant and our native aristocrat. The first, from the very nature of the case, becomes the victim of compulsion, while the second imposes the compulsion and then in turn, however unwillingly, succumbs to it himself. Our society, with its kaleidoscopic changes of fortune and its unchannelled social distinctions, presents a problem of adjustment with which even those who are at home in America find it difficult to cope. People on the make, people who are not sure of themselves on a new social ladder, are likely to conform: we find an astonishing amount of social imitation, in its milder and more ludicrous form, in all our pioneer communities. The immigrant faces the same problem to an intensified degree. He comes to us in an uprooted state of mind, with many of his emotional allegiances still lingering in his native country, and often with an entirely alien tradition. His mind is set to conform, to obey at first without much asking. He is like a traveller arriving in a strange town who follows the new traffic directions even though he does not understand their purpose. But even with the best of will he cannot entirely conform. He finds himself in a new world where what formerly seemed right to him is now considered wrong, his household gods have lost their power, his conscience is no longer an infallible guide. It is a sign of character in him to resist, to refuse to sink his individuality entirely, to struggle somewhat against the democratic degradation which threatens to engulf him too suddenly. But his struggle leads to a neurotic conflict which is often not resolved until the third generation. It is thus quite permissible to talk of an immigrant’s neurosis, which has considerable sociological importance even though it does not present an integral clinical picture. It leads either to the formation of large segments of undigested foreigners in American society who sullenly accept the forms we impose upon them while remaining comparatively inarticulate in our cultural and political life, or else it produces a type of whom our melting-pot romanticists are foolishly proud, the pseudo-American who has sunk from individualism to the level of the mob, where he conforms to excess in order to cover his antecedents and becomes intolerant in order that he may be tolerated.

Ordinarily, the mob tyranny which has become such an alarming feature of our public life would be checked by the aristocratic element in society. It is part of the aristocratic function to foster cultural tolerance and to resist herd suggestion: the aristocratic or dominant type, in enjoying the most privileges, is normally least subject to compulsions and taboos. With us that is not the case. The Southerner, for instance, our most traditional aristocrat, finds himself paralyzed by the consciousness of a black shadow behind him who constantly threatens both his political and his sexual superiority. He moves in an atmosphere of taboos from which he himself cannot escape, for it is an established fact that interdiction in one line of thought has a crippling effect upon a man’s intellectual activity as a whole. Elsewhere our native aristocrat frequently finds himself in the position of a lonely outpost of a thin Anglo-Saxon tradition which he must defend against the constant onslaughts of alien civilizations, in the desperate attempt to uphold the fiction that spiritually, at least, we are still an English colony. He is in a state of tension where he himself cannot move with any of the freedom which he vaunts as one of the outstanding characteristics of the country of his fathers. In his hands his own latest hope, our war-born Americanization programme, which should really be an initiation into freedom, has quickly become little more than a forced observance of sterile rites with which to impress the alien. He already sees its failure, and, like a general who is afraid of his own army, he does not sleep very well.

Alfred B. Kuttner