Chapter 15

But the skill of the prospectus with its sometimes half fraudulent features would, after all, not gain such influence if suggestion were not produced from another side as well, namely, through the instinct of imitation. The habit of making risky investments is so extremely widespread that the individual buyer does not feel himself isolated, and therefore dependent upon his own judgments and deliberations. He feels himself as a member of a class, and the class easily becomes a crowd, even a mob, a mob in which the logic of any mob reigns, and that is the logic of doing unthinkingly what others do. It is well known that every member of a crowd stands intellectually and morally on a lower level than he would stand if left to his spontaneous impulses and his own reflections. The crowd may fall into a panic and rush blindly in any direction into which any one may have happened to start and no one thinks about it, or it may go into exaltation and exuberantly do what no one alone would dare to risk. This mass consciousness is also surely a form of increased suggestibility. The individual feels his own responsibility reduced because he relies instinctively on the judgment of his neighbours, and with this decreased responsibility the energy for resistance to dangerous propositions disappears. Men buy their stocks because others are doing it.

But finally, may we not call it suggestion, too, if the individual even tremblingly accepts the risks of perilous deals, because he feels obliged to grasp for an unusually high income in order to live up to the style of his set? Of course there is no objective standard of living if we abstract from that where the income simply secures the needs of bare existence. Above that, everything depends upon the habits of those around us. If the community steadily screws up these habits, makes life ostentatious for those of moderate means as well as for the rich, hysterically emphasizes the material values, the will to be satisfied with the income of safe investments has to fight against tremendous odds. The truly strong mind will keep its power to resist, but the slightly weak mind will find the suggestion of the surrounding life more powerful than the fear of possible loss. If all the neighbours in the village have automobiles, the man who would enjoy a quiet book and a pleasant walk much more than a showy ride will yield, and spend a thousand dollars for his motor car where fifty dollars for books would have brought him far more intense satisfaction. In no country have fashion and ostentatiousness taken such strong possession of the masses, and the willingness to be satisfied with a moderate income is therefore nowhere so little at home.

Yet neither gambling and taking risks, nor suggestibility and imitation, are the whole of the story. We must not forget the superficiality of thinking, the uncritical, loose, and flabby use of the reasoning power which shows itself in so many spheres of American mass life. It is sufficient to see the triviality of argument and the cheapness of thought in those newspapers which seek and enjoy the widest circulation. It is difficult not to believe that fundamentally sins of education are to blame for it. The school may bring much to the children, but no mere information can be a substitute for a training in thorough thinking. Here lies the greatest defect of our average schools. The looseness of the spelling and figuring draws its consequences. Whoever becomes accustomed to inaccuracy in the elements remains inaccurate in his thinking his life long. If the American public loses a hundred million dollars a year by investments in worthless undertakings, surely not the smallest cause is the lack of concise reasoning. Wrong analogies control the thought of the masses. Any copper stock must be worth buying because the stock of Calumet-Hecla multiplied its value a hundredfold. But the irony of the situation lies in the fact that, as experience shows, those who are the clearest thinkers in their own fields are in the realm of investments as easily trapped as the most superficial reasoners. It is well known that college professors, school teachers, and ministers figure prominently on the mailing lists of unscrupulous brokers, and their hard-earned savings are especially often given for stocks which soon are not worth the paper on which they are printed. Sometimes, to be sure, this unpractical behaviour of the idealists really results from an unreasonable indifference to commercial questions. The true scholar, whose life is tuned to the conviction that he has more important things to do in the world than to make money, readily falls into a mood of carelessness with regard to the money which he does chance to make. In this state of indifference he follows any advice and may easily be misled.

But it seems probable that the more frequent case is the opposite one. Just because the teacher and the pastor have small chance to save anything, they give their fullest thought to the question how to multiply their earnings, and their mistake springs rather from their ignorance of the actual conditions. They think that they can figure it out by mere logic and overlook the hard realities. They resemble another group of victims who can be found in the midst of commercial life, the over-clever people who rely on especially artificial arguments. They feel sure that they see some points which no one else has discovered, and while they may have noticed some small reasonable points, they overlook important conditions which the simpler-minded would have seen. They know everything better than their neighbours, and whatever their friends buy or sell they at once have a brilliant argument to prove that the step was wrong. They generally forget that the listener must be suspicious of their wisdom, as they themselves have never earned the fruit of their apparent wisdom. They all, however, may find comfort in the well-known fact that hardly any great financier has died, not even a Harriman or a Morgan, without there being found in his possession large quantities of worthless stocks and bonds. But the variety of intellectual types, the careless and the uncritical, the over-clever and the illogical thinkers, could easily protect themselves against the dangers of the shortcomings in their mental mechanism if their minds had not another trait, which, too, is more frequent in America than anywhere else in the world--the lack of respect for the expert.

The average American is his own expert in every field. This is certainly not a reproach. It supplies American public life with an immense amount of energy and readiness to help. Above all, historically, it was the necessary outcome of the political democracy. In striking contrast to the European bureaucracy, any citizen could at any time be called to be postmaster or mayor or governor or member of the cabinet. A true American would find his way, however complex the work before him. That was, and is, splendid. Yet the development of the recent decades has clearly shown that the danger of this mental attitude after all appears to the newer American generation alarmingly great in many fields. Civil service has steadily grown, the influence of the engineer and the expert in every technical and practical field has more and more taken control of American life, because the go-as-you-please methods of the amateur have shown increasingly their ineffectiveness. Education has slowly been removed from the dilettantic, unprepared school boards. The reign of the expert in public life seems to have begun. But in private life such an attitude is still a part of the mental equipment of millions. They ignore the physician and cure themselves with patent medicines or mental healing: they ignore the banker and broker and make their investments in accordance with their own amateurish inspiration. They pick up a few data, ask a few friends who are as little informed as themselves, but do not think of asking the only group of men who make a serious, persistent study of the market their lifework.

They call this independence, and it cannot be denied that some features of our home and school education may have fostered this tendency not to submit to the judgment of those who know better. They have grown up in schools in which the kindergarten method never stopped, in which they were permitted to select the studies which they liked, and to learn just what pleased them; they were brought up in homes in which they were begged and persuaded, but never forced to do the unwelcome; in short, they have never learned to submit their will to authority. It cannot be surprising that they fancy that it is the right kind of mental setting to feel one's self the ultimate authority in every field, and it would be harmless indeed if the patent medicines would really cure as well as the prescriptions of the physician, and if the wildcat schemes would really yield the same safe income as those investments recommended by the reliable banker. It is then, after all, no chance that this commercially clever American nation wastes more in anti-economic fancies than any other people on the globe. It is the outcome of psychological traits which are rooted in significant conditions of our educational and social life. Yet as soon as these connections are recognized and these reasons for waste are understood, it ought not to be difficult fundamentally to change all this and to make the savings of the nation everywhere really sources of national income.

IX

SOCIETY AND THE DANCE

The story of the dance is the history of human civilization, of its progress and regress. To be sure, as the human mind remains ultimately the same, mankind has often unintentionally returned again to the old forms. The pirouette, which the artists of the ballet invented a hundred years ago, and which was applauded as the wonder of its time, as we now know, was danced by old Egyptians. Not seldom the same outer forms referred to very different mental motives. We learn that many people danced half naked as an expression of humility. Who would claim that the lack of costume in the ballet of to-day is a symbol of humility, too? Moreover, the right perspective can hardly be gained as long as we take the narrow view and think only of those few forms of dance which we saw yesterday in the ballroom and the day before yesterday on the stage of the theatre. The dance has not meant to mankind only social pleasure and artistic spectacle, it originally accompanied the social life and surrounded the individual in every important function.

Dancing certainly began as a religious cult. It was the form in which every increase of emotion expressed itself, grief as well as joy, awe as much as enthusiasm. The primitive peoples danced and in many places still dance when the seasons change or when the fields are to be cultivated, when they start on the hunt or go to war, when health is asked for the sick, and when the gods are to be called upon. The Iroquois Indians have thirty-two chief types of dances, and even among civilized nations, for instance the Bohemians, a hundred and thirty-six dances may be discriminated. Moreover, at first, the dance is really one with the song; music and dancing were only slowly torn asunder. And if we look over the whole world of dance, it almost appears as if what is left to us is after all merely a poor remnant. Yet in these very days much seems to suggest that the dance is to come to its own again. At least, he who observes the life along Broadway may indeed suspect that dancing is now to be intertwined again with every business of life, and surely with every meal of life. No longer can any hostelry in New York be found without dancing, and wider still than the dance sweeps the discussion about it. The dance seems once more the centre of public interest; it is cultivated from luncheon to breakfast; it is debated in every newspaper and every pulpit.

But is not all this merely a new demonstration that the story of the dance is the story of civilization? Can we deny that this recent craze which, like a dancing mania, has whirled over the country, is a significant expression of deep cultural changes which have come to America? Only ten years ago such a dancing fever would have been impossible. People danced, but they did not take it seriously. It was set off from life and not allowed to penetrate it. It had still essentially the role which belonged to it in a puritanic, hardworking society. But the last decade has rapidly swept away that New England temper which was so averse to the sensuous enjoyment of life, and which long kept an invisible control over the spirit of the whole nation. Symptoms of the change abound: how it came about is another question. Certainly the increase and the wide distribution of wealth with its comforts and luxuries were responsible, as well as the practical completion of the pioneer days of the people, the rich blossoming of science and art, and above all the tremendous influx of warm-blooded, sensual peoples who came in millions from southern and eastern Europe, and who altered the tendencies of the cool-blooded, Teutonic races in the land. They have changed the old American Sunday, they have revolutionized the inner life, they have brought the operas to every large city, and the kinometograph to every village, and have at last played the music to a nation-wide dance. Yet the problem which faces every one is not how this dancing craze arose, but rather where it may lead, how far it is healthy and how far unsound, how far we ought to yield to it or further it, and how far we ought to resist. To answer this question, it is not enough to watch the outside spectacle, but we must inquire into the mental motives and mental consequences. Exactly this is our true problem.

Let us first examine the psychological debit account. No one can doubt that true dangers are near wherever the dancing habit is prominent. The dance is a bodily movement which aims at no practical purpose and is thus not bound by outer necessities. It is simply self-expression: and this gives to the dancing impulse the liberty which easily becomes licentiousness. Two mental conditions help in that direction; the mere movement as such produces increased excitement, and the excitement reenforces the movement, and so the dance has in itself the tendency to become quicker and wilder and more and more unrestrained. When gay Vienna began its waltzing craze in the last century, it waltzed to the charming melodies of Lanner in a rhythm which did not demand more than about one hundred and sixty movements in a minute; but soon came Johann Strauss the father, and the average waltzing rhythm was two hundred and thirty a minute, and finally the king of the waltz, Johann Strauss the younger, and Vienna danced at the rhythm of three hundred movements. But another mental effect is still more significant than the impulse to increase rapidity. The uniformity of the movements, and especially of the revolving movement, produces a state of half dizziness and half numbness with ecstatic elements. We know the almost hypnotic state of the whirling dervishes and the raptures in the savage war dances; all this in milder form is involved in every passionate dance. But nothing is more characteristic of such half-hypnotic states than that the individual loses control of his will. He behaves like a drunken man who becomes the slave of his excitement and of every suggestion from without. No doubt many seek the dancing excitement as a kind of substitute for the alcoholic exaltation.

The social injury which must be feared if the social community indulges in such habits of undisciplined, passionate expression needs no explaining. The mind is a unit: it cannot be without self-control in one department and under the desirable self-discipline of the will in another. A period in which the mad rush of dancing stirs social life must be unfavourable to the development of thorough training and earnest endeavour. The fate of imperial Rome ought to be the eternal warning to imperial Manhattan. Italy, like America, took its art and science from over the sea, but gave to them abundant wealth. Instead of true art, it cultivated the virtuosi, and in Rome, which paid three thousand dancers, the dance was its glory until it began ingloriously to sink.

Not without inner relation to the inebriety, and yet distinctly different, is the erotic character of the dance. Lovemaking is the most central, underlying motive of all the mimic dances all over the globe. Among many primitive peoples the dance is a real pantomimic presentation of the whole story from the first tender awaking of a sweet desire through the warmer and warmer courtship to the raptures of sensual delight. Civilized society has more or less covered the naked passion, but from the graceful play of the minuet to the graceless movements of the turkey trot the sensual, not to say the sexual, element can easily be recognized by the sociologist. Here again cause and effect move in a circle. Love excitement expresses itself in dance, and the dance heightens the love excitement. This erotic appeal to the senses is the chief reason why the church has generally taken a hostile attitude. For a long while the dance was denounced as irreligious and sinful on account of Salome's blasphemous dancing. Certainly the rigid guardians of morality always look askance on the contact of the sexes in the ballroom. To be sure, the standards are relative. What appeared to one period the climax of immorality may be considered quite natural and harmless in another. In earlier centuries it was quite usual in the best society for the young man to invite the girl to a dance by a kiss, and in some times it was the polite thing for the gentleman after the dance to sit in the lap of the girl. The shifting of opinion comes to most striking expression, if we compare our present day acquiescence to the waltz with the moral indignation of our great-grandmothers. No accusers of the tango to-day can find more heated words against this Argentine importation than the conservatives of a hundred years ago chose in their hatred of the waltz. Good society had confined its dancing to those forms of contact in which only the hands touched each other, leaving to the peasants the crude, rustic forms, and now suddenly every mother has to see her daughter clasped about the waist by any strange man. Even the dancing masters cried out against the intruder and claimed that it was illogical for a man to be allowed to press a girl to his bosom at the sound of music, while no one would dare to do it between the dances.

Thus the immorality of our most recent dances may be hardly worse than the dancing surprises of earlier fashions, but who will doubt that these sensual elements of the new social gayeties are to-day especially dangerous? The whole American atmosphere is filled with erotic thought to a degree which has been unknown throughout the history of the republic. The newspapers are filled with intra- and extra-matrimonial scandals, the playhouses commercialize the sexual instinct in lurid melodramas, sex problems are the centre of public discussion, all the old barriers which the traditional policy of silence had erected are being broken down, the whole nation is gossiping about erotics. In such inflammable surroundings where the sparks of the dance are recklessly kindled, the danger is imminent. If a nation focuses its attention on sensuality, its virile energy must naturally suffer. There is a well-known antagonism between sex and sport. Perhaps the very best which may be said about sport is that it keeps boyhood away from the swamps of sexuality. The dance keeps boyhood away from the martial field of athletics.

The dance has still another psychological effect which must not be disregarded from a social point of view. It awakes to an unusual degree the impulse to imitation. The seeing of rhythmic movements starts similar motor impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well known that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe suffered from dancing epidemics. They started from pathological cases of St. Vitus' dance and released in the excitable crowds cramplike impulses to imitative movements. But we hear the same story of instinctive imitations on occasions of less tragic character. It is reported that in the eighteenth century papal Rome was indignant over the passionate Spanish fandango. It was decided solemnly to put this wild dance under the ban. The lights of the church were assembled for the formal judgment, when it was proposed to call a pair of Spanish dancers in order that every one of the priests might form his own idea of the unholy dance. But history tells that the effect was an unexpected one. After a short time of fandango demonstration the high clerics began involuntarily to imitate the movements, and the more passionately the Spaniards indulged in their native whirl, the more the whole court was transformed into one great dancing party. Even the Italian tarantella probably began as a disease with nervous dancing movements, and then spread over the land through mere imitation which led to an ecstatic turning around and around. Whoever studies the adventures of American dancing during the last season from New York to San Francisco must be impressed by this contagious character of our dancing habits. But this means that the movement carries in itself the energy to spread farther and farther, and to fill the daily life with increased longing for the ragtime. We are already accustomed to the dance at the afternoon tea; how long will it take before we are threatened by the dance at the breakfast coffee?

We have spoken of three mental effects: the license, the eroticism, and the imitativeness which are stirred up by the dancing movements. But in the perspective of history we ought not to overlook another significant trait: the overemphasis on dancing has usually characterized a period of political reaction, of indifference to public life, of social stagnation and carelessness. When the volcanoes were rumbling, the masses were always dancing. At all times when tyrants wanted to divert the attention of the crowd, they gave the dances to their people. A nation which dances cannot think, but lives from hour to hour. The less political maturity, the more happiness does a national community show in its dancing pleasures. The Spaniards and the Polish, the Hungarians and the Bohemians, have always been the great dancers--the Gypsies dance. There is no fear that the New Yorkers will suddenly stop reading their newspapers and voting at the primaries; they will not become Spaniards. But an element of this psychological effect of carelessness and recklessness and stagnation may influence them after all, and may shade the papers which they read, and even the primaries at which they do vote.