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The more untrained a mind, the more readily it works out a theory that
two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally
connected. We have already dwelt at some length on the way things
reach our attention. We have seen that our access to information is
obstructed and uncertain, and that our apprehension is deeply
controlled by our stereotypes; that the evidence available to our
reason is subject to illusions of defense, prestige, morality, space,
time, and sampling. We must note now that with this initial taint,
public opinions are still further beset, because in a series of events
seen mostly through stereotypes, we readily accept sequence or
parallelism as equivalent to cause and effect.

This is most likely to happen when two ideas that come together arouse
the same feeling. If they come together they are likely to arouse the
same feeling; and even when they do not arrive together a powerful
feeling attached to one is likely to suck out of all the corners of
memory any idea that feels about the same. Thus everything painful
tends to collect into one system of cause and effect, and likewise
everything pleasant.

"IId IIm (1675) This day I hear that G[od] has shot an arrow into the
midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary ye sign of the
Swan, the ordinary Keepers name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of
the disease. It is observable that this disease begins at an alehouse,
to testify God's displeasure agt the sin of drunkenness & yt of
multiplying alehouses!" [Footnote: _The Heart of the Puritan_, p.
177, edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom.]

Thus Increase Mather, and thus in the year 1919 a distinguished
Professor of Celestial Mechanics discussing the Einstein theory:

"It may well be that.... Bolshevist uprisings are in reality the
visible objects of some underlying, deep, mental disturbance,
world-wide in character.... This same spirit of unrest has invaded
science." [Footnote: Cited in _The New Republic_, Dec. 24, 1919,
p. 120.]

In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause
or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently. They may
have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and
Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion. In a
superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of Celestial Mechanics,
emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever
it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all
sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be
related to anything else, provided it feels like it. Nor has a mind in
such a state any way of knowing how preposterous it is. Ancient fears,
reinforced by more recent fears, coagulate into a snarl of fears where
anything that is dreaded is the cause of anything else that is
dreaded.

10

Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all
evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of
the absolute shows itself. For we do not like qualifying
adverbs. [Footnote: _Cf_. Freud's discussion of absolutism in
dreams, _Interpretation of Dreams_, Chapter VI, especially pp.
288, _et seq_.] They clutter up sentences, and interfere with
irresistible feeling. We prefer most to more, least to less, we
dislike the words rather, perhaps, if, or, but, toward, not quite,
almost, temporarily, partly. Yet nearly every opinion about public
affairs needs to be deflated by some word of this sort. But in our
free moments everything tends to behave absolutely,--one hundred
percent, everywhere, forever.

It is not enough to say that our side is more right than the enemy's,
that our victory will help democracy more than his. One must insist
that our victory will end war forever, and make the world safe for
democracy. And when the war is over, though we have thwarted a greater
evil than those which still afflict us, the relativity of the result
fades out, the absoluteness of the present evil overcomes our spirit,
and we feel that we are helpless because we have not been
irresistible. Between omnipotence and impotence the pendulum swings.

Real space, real time, real numbers, real connections, real weights
are lost. The perspective and the background and the dimensions of
action are clipped and frozen in the stereotype.

PART IV

INTERESTS

CHAPTER 11. THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST
" 12. SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED

CHAPTER XI

THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST

I

BUT the human mind is not a film which registers once and for all each
impression that comes through its shutters and lenses. The human mind
is endlessly and persistently creative. The pictures fade or combine,
are sharpened here, condensed there, as we make them more completely
our own. They do not lie inert upon the surface of the mind, but are
reworked by the poetic faculty into a personal expression of
ourselves. We distribute the emphasis and participate in the action.

In order to do this we tend to personalize quantities, and to
dramatize relations. As some sort of allegory, except in acutely
sophisticated minds, the affairs of the world are represented. Social
Movements, Economic Forces, National Interests, Public Opinion are
treated as persons, or persons like the Pope, the President, Lenin,
Morgan or the King become ideas and institutions. The deepest of all
the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to
inanimate or collective things.

The bewildering variety of our impressions, even after they have been
censored in all kinds of ways, tends to force us to adopt the greater
economy of the allegory. So great is the multitude of things that we
cannot keep them vividly in mind. Usually, then, we name them, and let
the name stand for the whole impression. But a name is porous. Old
meanings slip out and new ones slip in, and the attempt to retain the
full meaning of the name is almost as fatiguing as trying to recall
the original impressions. Yet names are a poor currency for thought.
They are too empty, too abstract, too inhuman. And so we begin to see
the name through some personal stereotype, to read into it, finally to
see in it the incarnation of some human quality.

Yet human qualities are themselves vague and fluctuating. They are
best remembered by a physical sign. And therefore, the human qualities
we tend to ascribe to the names of our impressions, themselves tend to
be visualized in physical metaphors. The people of England, the
history of England, condense into England, and England becomes John
Bull, who is jovial and fat, not too clever, but well able to take
care of himself. The migration of a people may appear to some as the
meandering of a river, and to others like a devastating flood. The
courage people display may be objectified as a rock; their purpose as
a road, their doubts as forks of the road, their difficulties as ruts
and rocks, their progress as a fertile valley. If they mobilize their
dread-naughts they unsheath a sword. If their army surrenders they are
thrown to earth. If they are oppressed they are on the rack or under
the harrow.

When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays,
moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their
transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction from
the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted. We
cannot be much interested in, or much moved by, the things we do not
see. Of public affairs each of us sees very little, and therefore,
they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with the makings of
an artist, has translated them into a moving picture. Thus the
abstraction, imposed upon our knowledge of reality by all the
limitations of our access and of our prejudices, is compensated. Not
being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to
think and talk about. Being flesh and blood we will not feed on words
and names and gray theory. Being artists of a sort we paint pictures,
stage dramas and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.

Or, if possible, we find gifted men who can visualize for us. For
people are not all endowed to the same degree with the pictorial
faculty. Yet one may, I imagine, assert with Bergson that the
practical intelligence is most closely adapted to spatial
qualities. [Footnote: _Creative Evolution_, Chs. III, IV.] A
"clear" thinker is almost always a good visualizer. But for that same
reason, because he is "cinematographic," he is often by that much
external and insensitive. For the people who have intuition, which is
probably another name for musical or muscular perception, often
appreciate the quality of an event and the inwardness of an act far
better than the visualizer. They have more understanding when the
crucial element is a desire that is never crudely overt, and appears
on the surface only in a veiled gesture, or in a rhythm of speech.
Visualization may catch the stimulus and the result. But the
intermediate and internal is often as badly caricatured by a
visualizer, as is the intention of the composer by an enormous soprano
in the sweet maiden's part.

Nevertheless, though they have often a peculiar justice, intuitions
remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social
intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often
steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions,
he usually has great difficulty in making them real to others. When he
talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist. For while intuition
does give a fairer perception of human feeling, the reason with its
spatial and tactile prejudice can do little with that perception.
Therefore, where action depends on whether a number of people are of
one mind, it is probably true that in the first instance no idea is
lucid for practical decision until it has visual or tactile value. But
it is also true, that no visual idea is significant to us until it has
enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or
resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains
one of the objects which do not matter.

2

Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying an idea, and
next in order, words that call up pictures in memory. But the idea
conveyed is not fully our own until we have identified ourselves with
some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has
called empathy, [Footnote: _Beauty and Ugliness_.] may be almost
infinitely subtle and symbolic. The mimicry may be performed without
our being aware of it, and sometimes in a way that would horrify those
sections of our personality which support our self-respect. In
sophisticated people the participation may not be in the fate of the
hero, but in the fate of the whole idea to which both hero and villain
are essential. But these are refinements.

In popular representation the handles for identification are almost
always marked. You know who the hero is at once. And no work promises
to be easily popular where the marking is not definite and the choice
clear. [Footnote: A fact which bears heavily on the character of news.
_Cf_. Part VII.] But that is not enough. The audience must have
something to do, and the contemplation of the true, the good and the
beautiful is not something to do. In order not to sit inertly in the
presence of the picture, and this applies as much to newspaper stories
as to fiction and the cinema, the audience must be exercised by the
image. Now there are two forms of exercise which far transcend all
others, both as to ease with which they are aroused, and eagerness
with which stimuli for them are sought. They are sexual passion and
fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend
into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every
other theme in the breadth of its appeal. There is none so engrossing
or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers.

The sexual motif figures hardly at all in American political imagery.
Except in certain minor ecstasies of war, in an occasional scandal, or
in phases of the racial conflict with Negroes or Asiatics, to speak of
it at all would seem far-fetched. Only in moving pictures, novels, and
some magazine fiction are industrial relations, business competition,
politics, and diplomacy tangled up with the girl and the other woman.
But the fighting motif appears at every turn. Politics is interesting
when there is a fight, or as we say, an issue. And in order to make
politics popular, issues have to be found, even when in truth and
justice, there are none,--none, in the sense that the differences of
judgment, or principle, or fact, do not call for the enlistment of
pugnacity. [Footnote: _Cf_. Frances Taylor Patterson, _Cinema
Craftsmanship_, pp. 31-32. "III. If the plot lacks suspense: 1. Add
an antagonist, 2. Add an obstacle, 3. Add a problem, 4. Emphasize one
of the questions in the minds of the spectator.,.."]

But where pugnacity is not enlisted, those of us who are not directly
involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are
involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no
issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity, or
by subtle rivalry or invention. But for those to whom the whole
problem is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily
come into play. In order that the faint image of the affair shall mean
something to them, they must be allowed to exercise the love of
struggle, suspense, and victory.

Miss Patterson [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 6-7.] insists that
"suspense... constitutes the difference between the masterpieces in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the pictures at the Rivoli or the
Rialto Theatres." Had she made it clear that the masterpieces lack
either an easy mode of identification or a theme popular for this
generation, she would be wholly right in saying that this "explains
why the people straggle into the Metropolitan by twos and threes and
struggle into the Rialto and Rivoli by hundreds. The twos and threes
look at a picture in the Art Museum for less than ten minutes--unless
they chance to be art students, critics, or connoisseurs. The hundreds
in the Rivoli or the Rialto look at the picture for more than an hour.
As far as beauty is concerned there can be no comparison of the merits
of the two pictures. Yet the motion picture draws more people and
holds them at attention longer than do the masterpieces, not through
any intrinsic merit of its own, but because it depicts unfolding
events, the outcome of which the audience is breathlessly waiting. It
possesses the element of struggle, which never fails to arouse
suspense."

In order then that the distant situation shall not be a gray flicker
on the edge of attention, it should be capable of translation into
pictures in which the opportunity for identification is recognizable.
Unless that happens it will interest only a few for a little while. It
will belong to the sights seen but not felt, to the sensations that
beat on our sense organs, and are not acknowledged. We have to take
sides. We have to be able to take sides. In the recesses of our being
we must step out of the audience on to the stage, and wrestle as the
hero for the victory of good over evil. We must breathe into the
allegory the breath of our life.

3

And so, in spite of the critics, a verdict is rendered in the old
controversy about realism and romanticism. Our popular taste is to
have the drama originate in a setting realistic enough to make
identification plausible and to have it terminate in a setting
romantic enough to be desirable, but not so romantic as to be
inconceivable. In between the beginning and the end the canons are
liberal, but the true beginning and the happy ending are landmarks.
The moving picture audience rejects fantasy logically developed,
because in pure fantasy there is no familiar foothold in the age of
machines. It rejects realism relentlessly pursued because it does not
enjoy defeat in a struggle that has become its own.

What will be accepted as true, as realistic, as good, as evil, as
desirable, is not eternally fixed. These are fixed by stereotypes,
acquired from earlier experiences and carried over into judgment of
later ones. And, therefore, if the financial investment in each film
and in popular magazines were not so exorbitant as to require instant
and widespread popularity, men of spirit and imagination would be able
to use the screen and the periodical, as one might dream of their
being used, to enlarge and to refine, to verify and criticize the
repertory of images with which our imaginations work. But, given the
present costs, the men who make moving pictures, like the church and
the court painters of other ages, must adhere to the stereotypes that
they find, or pay the price of frustrating expectation. The
stereotypes can be altered, but not in time to guarantee success when
the film is released six months from now.

The men who do alter the stereotypes, the pioneering artists and
critics, are naturally depressed and angered at managers and editors
who protect their investments. They are risking everything, then why
not the others? That is not quite fair, for in their righteous fury
they have forgotten their own rewards, which are beyond any that their
employers can hope to feel. They could not, and would not if they
could, change places. And they have forgotten another thing in the
unceasing war with Philistia. They have forgotten that they are
measuring their own success by standards that artists and wise men of
the past would never have dreamed of invoking. They are asking for
circulations and audiences that were never considered by any artist
until the last few generations. And when they do not get them, they
are disappointed.

Those who catch on, like Sinclair Lewis in "Main Street," are men who
have succeeded in projecting definitely what great numbers of other
people were obscurely trying to say inside their heads. "You have said
it for me." They establish a new form which is then endlessly copied
until it, too, becomes a stereotype of perception. The next pioneer
finds it difficult to make the public see Main Street any other way.
And he, like the forerunners of Sinclair Lewis, has a quarrel with the
public.

This quarrel is due not only to the conflict of stereotypes, but to
the pioneering artist's reverence for his material. Whatever the plane
he chooses, on that plane he remains. If he is dealing with the
inwardness of an event he follows it to its conclusion regardless of
the pain it causes. He will not tag his fantasy to help anyone, or cry
peace where there is no peace. There is his America. But big audiences
have no stomach for such severity. They are more interested in
themselves than in anything else in the world. The selves in which
they are interested are the selves that have been revealed by schools
and by tradition. They insist that a work of art shall be a vehicle
with a step where they can climb aboard, and that they shall ride, not
according to the contours of the country, but to a land where for an
hour there are no clocks to punch and no dishes to wash. To satisfy
these demands there exists an intermediate class of artists who are
able and willing to confuse the planes, to piece together a
realistic-romantic compound out of the inventions of greater men, and,
as Miss Patterson advises, give "what real life so rarely does-the
triumphant resolution of a set of difficulties; the anguish of virtue
and the triumph of sin... changed to the glorifications of virtue and
the eternal punishment of its enemy." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p.
46. "The hero and heroine must in general possess youth, beauty,
goodness, exalted self-sacrifice, and unalterable constancy."]

4

The ideologies of politics obey these rules. The foothold of realism
is always there. The picture of some real evil, such as the German
threat or class conflict, is recognizable in the argument. There is a
description of some aspect of the world which is convincing because it
agrees with familiar ideas. But as the ideology deals with an unseen
future, as well as with a tangible present, it soon crosses
imperceptibly the frontier of verification. In describing the present
you are more or less tied down to common experience. In describing
what nobody has experienced you are bound to let go. You stand at
Armageddon, more or less, but you battle for the Lord, perhaps.... A
true beginning, true according to the standards prevailing, and a
happy ending. Every Marxist is hard as nails about the brutalities of
the present, and mostly sunshine about the day after the dictatorship.
So were the war propagandists: there was not a bestial quality in
human nature they did not find everywhere east of the Rhine, or west
of it if they were Germans. The bestiality was there all right. But
after the victory, eternal peace. Plenty of this is quite cynically
deliberate. For the skilful propagandist knows that while you must
start with a plausible analysis, you must not keep on analyzing,
because the tedium of real political accomplishment will soon destroy
interest. So the propagandist exhausts the interest in reality by a
tolerably plausible beginning, and then stokes up energy for a long
voyage by brandishing a passport to heaven.

The formula works when the public fiction enmeshes itself with a
private urgency. But once enmeshed, in the heat of battle, the
original self and the original stereotype which effected the junction
may be wholly lost to sight.

CHAPTER XII

SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED

1

THEREFORE, the identical story is not the same story to all who hear
it. Each will enter it at a slightly different point, since no two
experiences are exactly alike; he will reenact it in his own way, and
transfuse it with his own feelings. Sometimes an artist of compelling
skill will force us to enter into lives altogether unlike our own,
lives that seem at first glance dull, repulsive, or eccentric. But
that is rare. In almost every story that catches our attention we
become a character and act out the role with a pantomime of our own.
The pantomime may be subtle or gross, may be sympathetic to the story,
or only crudely analogous; but it will consist of those feelings which
are aroused by our conception of the role. And so, the original theme
as it circulates, is stressed, twisted, and embroidered by all the
minds through which it goes. It is as if a play of Shakespeare's were
rewritten each time it is performed with all the changes of emphasis
and meaning that the actors and audience inspired.

Something very like that seems to have happened to the stories in the
sagas before they were definitively written down. In our time the
printed record, such as it is, checks the exuberance of each
individual's fancy. But against rumor there is little or no checks and
the original story, true or invented, grows wings and horns, hoofs and
beaks, as the artist in each gossip works upon it. The first
narrator's account does not keep its shape and proportions. It is
edited and revised by all who played with it as they heard it, used it
for day dreams, and passed it on. [Footnote: For an interesting
example, see the case described by C. J. Jung, _Zentralblatt für
Psychoanalyse_, 1911, Vol. I, p. 81. Translated by Constance Long,
in _Analytical Psychology_, Ch. IV.]

Consequently the more mixed the audience, the greater will be the
variation in the response. For as the audience grows larger, the
number of common words diminishes. Thus the common factors in the
story become more abstract. This story, lacking precise character of
its own, is heard by people of highly varied character. They give it
their own character.

2

The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and
religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications,
according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the
individual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an
emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on
the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches
him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs,
anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through
his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take
his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment.
He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement
of his private life.

But not necessarily of that private life as he would describe it to
himself. For in his private life the choices are narrow, and much of
himself is squeezed down and out of sight where it cannot directly
govern his outward behavior. And thus, beside the more average people
who project the happiness of their own lives into a general good will,
or their unhappiness into suspicion and hate, there are the outwardly
happy people who are brutal everywhere but in their own circle, as
well as the people who, the more they detest their families, their
friends, their jobs, the more they overflow with love for mankind.

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