Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front, everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion, everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction. People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to Tâoism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers are many.
Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes. Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts.
And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has the hornier hand.
Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers. Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal aims—in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions, arts, appointments, professorships, churches.
Art has for the third time changed its master—after the princes, Mæcenas, the middle-class market; after Mæcenas, the plebs, and export trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research, learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has given way to actuality.[14]
Certain reactions based on practical experience are not excluded; the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken, though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can result.
The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success, watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to these.
In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state of things of which a foretaste already exists in parts of America and of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and mentality, has created its own form of civilization.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on the hypothesis of the profound inward change, which is to be discussed later on.