[3] The word ‘congested’ is used to denote the oppression of spiritual stuffiness rather than of physical overcrowding.
For this reason all American citizens strive to be exactly like each other, and, on the whole, they succeed. They have the same clothes, they live in the same houses, they have the same social habits, the same respect for money and the same suspicion of such superfluous eccentricities as thought, culture, and art.
A friend of mine, who had wintered in a Southern State, as the season advanced discarded his felt hat for the regulation straw. A few weeks later he had occasion to travel northwards to New York. As he left the train he noticed that he was an object of attention to people on the platform. Porters and loungers stared, and as he walked away from the station, he found himself followed by a small and apparently hostile crowd. Hailing a taxi, he drove to his hotel. In the porch he met an acquaintance, told him of the notice he had attracted, and asked the reason. His friend explained the matter by pointing to his straw hat. It was too early in New York for the change over into straws, he said, and of course one could not dress differently from other people.
The rigid enforcement of uniformity is hostile not only to freedom of action but also to independence of thought. The laws against teaching or holding doctrines displeasing to the majority are particularly severe in America. Immigrants, for example, are not allowed to land in America until they have first expressed their disbelief in Communism, atheism, and free love. Many people are put in prison for holding unpopular views, although these views do no apparent harm to anybody. Advocacy of birth-control, possession of irreverent and disreputable books such as Jurgen, expression of subversive opinions with regard to the relationship of capital and labour, and disbelief in God are among the offences so punished.
Not only is it necessary not to profess unpopular views—it is sometimes necessary to profess popular ones. In order to placate herd opinion it is found necessary to enforce by law the propagation of deliberate falsehood. This happens especially in those cases, unfortunately only too numerous, in which the truth is less gratifying to human conceit than we could wish, so that its adoption involves the abandonment of cherished beliefs. Such, for instance, is the belief that man is a degenerate angel, which is thought to be more flattering than the truth that he is a promoted ape. Thus the State of Tennessee has recently officially repudiated the “monkey ancestry” of its citizens. A law has been passed under which it is illegal for any teacher in a university or other public school to teach anything denying the story of creation given in the Bible, or that man has descended from the lower order of animals, and men have already been imprisoned for teaching evolution. It is not, so far as I know, maintained even in America that the doctrine of evolution is untrue. It is sufficient that it incurs the disapproval of the stronger. Thus truth herself is liable to be stigmatized as immoral if she is inconsiderate enough to flout the wishes of respectable citizens.
Where individuality is to a large extent obliterated, and citizens are cut according to approved specification by the social machine, nothing is so much valued as personality. I have said that every American wishes to be like every other American, and so he does—but with a difference. He wants to have a personality of his own. He wishes to have a something about him that will convey an impression of uniqueness and cause him to be talked about among his fellows. Nothing is so much discussed in America as personality. Men try to cultivate it as they try to cultivate biceps; agencies exist in order to tell you how to be unique, and psycho-analysts flourish by the simple process of telling you that you are unique.
But this is just what the conditions upon which herd morality depends will not let you be. Depart one hair’s-breadth from the standard habits of thought and accepted codes of conduct, and the herd will make your existence intolerable until you consent to toe the line.
Now the drift of British development follows increasingly the course set by America. America is our most advanced nation in morals as in everything else, and, if we want to know what England will be like to-morrow, we cannot do better than look at America to-day. America is at once a signpost and a stimulus. What American business men are, that do our business men strive humbly to be. They ape their magnificence, and enjoy a large and increasing share of this power. The stockbroker’s conception of the good life is becoming increasingly accepted by the clerk, the clerk’s by the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper’s by the workman, so that the community as a whole is doing its best to live up to the standard which its business men set. So soon as we have got rid of the last vestiges of our dying aristocracy, such as respect for hunting and a semi-feudal tenantry, we shall subside into an inferior and imitative satellite of the States.
The objects of American civilization are to substitute cleanliness for beauty, mechanism for men, and hypocrisy for morals. It devotes so much energy to obtaining the means to make life possible, that it has none left to practise the art of living. Hot baths and more hot baths, larger and ever larger hotels, faster and ever faster cars, golf played by ever fatter and more vulgar men, and lap-dogs kept by ever fatter and more vulgar women, cocktails and culture, psycho-analysis and faith healing, sensual poetry and sensational sport, supported and maintained by an illiterate governing class ready to be imposed upon by any quack or charlatan who can persuade it to take an interest in what it imagines to be its soul, such is the probable development of bourgeois civilization in England.
Hints of the growing adhesion of the herd to the ideals and pursuits of big business are not wanted in current developments of moral sentiment. As the profiteer supplants the aristocrat as the dominant force in the community, a slight twist is given to the moral opinions of the herd as a whole in order that they may be brought into line with the changed interests of the stronger. Moral sentiments suitable to the interests of a hereditary aristocracy of landed proprietors insensibly give place to a morality designed to protect and safeguard the pursuits of the fat man on holiday.