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A man who merely rides in other people's automobiles may not rise to
finer discrimination than between a Ford, a taxicab, and an
automobile. But let that same man own a car and drive it, let him, as
the psychoanalysts would say, project his libido upon automobiles, and
he will describe a difference in carburetors by looking at the rear
end of a car a city block away. That is why it is often such a relief
when the talk turns from "general topics" to a man's own hobby. It is
like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field
outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a
sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response to
his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen.
We easily identify, says Ferenczi, two only partially similar things:
[Footnote: Internat. Zeitschr, f. Arztl. Psychoanalyse, 1913.
Translated and republished by Dr. Ernest Jones in S. Ferenczi,
_Contributions to Psychoanalysis_, Ch. VIII, _Stages in the
Development of the Sense of Reality_.] the child more easily than
the adult, the primitive or arrested mind more readily than the
mature. As it first appears in the child, consciousness seems to be an
unmanageable mixture of sensations. The child has no sense of time,
and almost none of space, it reaches for the chandelier with the same
confidence that it reaches for its mother's breast, and at first with
almost the same expectation. Only very gradually does function define
itself. To complete inexperience this is a coherent and
undifferentiated world, in which, as someone has said of a school of
philosophers, all facts are born free and equal. Those facts which
belong together in the world have not yet been separated from those
which happen to lie side by side in the stream of consciousness.
At first, says Ferenczi, the baby gets some of the things it wants by
crying for them. This is "the period of magical hallucinatory
omnipotence." In its second phase the child points to the things it
wants, and they are given to it. "Omnipotence by the help of magic
gestures." Later, the child learns to talk, asks for what it wishes,
and is partially successful. "The period of magic thoughts and magic
words." Each phase may persist for certain situations, though overlaid
and only visible at times, as for example, in the little harmless
superstitions from which few of us are wholly free. In each phase,
partial success tends to confirm that way of acting, while failure
tends to stimulate the development of another. Many individuals,
parties, and even nations, rarely appear to transcend the magical
organization of experience. But in the more advanced sections of the
most advanced peoples, trial and error after repeated failure has led
to the invention of a new principle. The moon, they learn, is not
moved by baying at it. Crops are not raised from the soil by spring
festivals or Republican majorities, but by sunlight, moisture, seeds,
fertilizer, and cultivation. [Footnote: Ferenczi, being a pathologist,
does not describe this maturer period where experience is organized as
equations, the phase of realism on the basis of science.]
Allowing for the purely schematic value of Ferenczi's categories of
response, the quality which we note as critical is the power to
discriminate among crude perceptions and vague analogies. This power
has been studied under laboratory conditions. [Footnote: See, for
example, Diagnostische Assoziation Studien, conducted at the
Psychiatric University Clinic in Zurich under the direction of Dr. C.
G. Jung. These tests were carried on principally under the so-called
Krapelin-Aschaffenburg classification. They show reaction time,
classify response to the stimulant word as inner, outer, and clang,
show separate results for the first and second hundred words, for
reaction time and reaction quality when the subject is distracted by
holding an idea in mind, or when he replies while beating time with a
metronome. Some of the results are summarized in Jung, _Analytical
Psychology_, Ch. II, transl. by Dr. Constance E. Long.] The Zurich
Association Studies indicate clearly that slight mental fatigue, an
inner disturbance of attention or an external distraction, tend to
"flatten" the quality of the response. An example of the very "flat"
type is the clang association (cat-hat), a reaction to the sound and
not to the sense of the stimulant word. One test, for example, shows a
9% increase of clang in the second series of a hundred reactions. Now
the clang is almost a repetition, a very primitive form of analogy.
4
If the comparatively simple conditions of a laboratory can so readily
flatten out discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In
the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather
trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the subject's interest and
self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress
intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat
in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and
telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments
formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can
anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in
the general glare that does not flash like an electric sign? The life
of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are
noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant
sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms,
but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes
on in a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and
foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign
people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where
experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.
"The intolerable burden of thought" is a burden when the conditions
make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable.
It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural.
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of
the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that
helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the
citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst
possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the
movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air,
order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the
intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the
merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the
worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of
muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an
automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from
anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he
is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his
attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define
clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which
needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children,
raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating
ornament.
Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and
spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away
distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how
cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the
ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled
minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and
tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why
so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent
differences.
5
But this external disorder is complicated further by internal.
Experiment shows that the speed, the accuracy, and the intellectual
quality of association is deranged by what we are taught to call
emotional conflicts. Measured in fifths of a second, a series of a
hundred stimuli containing both neutral and hot words may show a
variation as between 5 and 32 or even a total failure to respond at
all. [Footnote: Jung, _Clark Lectures_.] Obviously our public
opinion is in intermittent contact with complexes of all sorts; with
ambition and economic interest, personal animosity, racial prejudice,
class feeling and what not. They distort our reading, our thinking,
our talking and our behavior in a great variety of ways.
And finally since opinions do not stop at the normal members of
society, since for the purposes of an election, a propaganda, a
following, numbers constitute power, the quality of attention is still
further depressed. The mass of absolutely illiterate, of
feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated
individuals, is very considerable, much more considerable there is
reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal
is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians,
people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose
vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has
comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion. The stream of
public opinion is stopped by them in little eddies of misunderstanding,
where it is discolored with prejudice and far fetched analogy.
A "broad appeal" takes account of the quality of association, and is
made to those susceptibilities which are widely distributed. A
"narrow" or a "special" appeal is one made to those susceptibilities
which are uncommon. But the same individual may respond with very
different quality to different stimuli, or to the same stimuli at
different times. Human susceptibilities are like an alpine country.
There are isolated peaks, there are extensive but separated plateaus,
and there are deeper strata which are quite continuous for nearly all
mankind. Thus the individuals whose susceptibilities reach the
rarefied atmosphere of those peaks where there exists an exquisitive
difference between Frege and Peano, or between Sassetta's earlier and
later periods, may be good stanch Republicans at another level of
appeal, and when they are starving and afraid, indistinguishable from
any other starving and frightened person. No wonder that the magazines
with the large circulations prefer the face of a pretty girl to any
other trade mark, a face, pretty enough to be alluring, but innocent
enough to be acceptable. For the "psychic level" on which the stimulus
acts determines whether the public is to be potentially a large or a
small one.
6
Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted
in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and
social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty
of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling,
by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our
access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity
of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception,
to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive
us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead.
PART III
STEREOTYPES
CHAPTER 6. STEREOTYPES
" 7. STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE
" 8. BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE
" 9. CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES
" 10. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES
CHAPTER VI
STEREOTYPES
1
Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface,
moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few
intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best
only a phase and an aspect. This is as true of the eminent insiders
who draft treaties, make laws, and issue orders, as it is of those who
have treaties framed for them, laws promulgated to them, orders given
at them. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach
of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe.
They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have
reported and what we can imagine.
Yet even the eyewitness does not bring back a naéve picture of the
scene. [Footnote: _E. g. cf._ Edmond Locard, _L'Enquête Criminelle
et les Méthodes Scientifiques._ A great deal of interesting material has
been gathered in late years on the credibility of the witness, which
shows, as an able reviewer of Dr. Locard's book says in _The
Times_ (London) Literary Supplement (August 18, 1921), that
credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events,
and also as to type of perception. Thus, perceptions of touch, odor,
and taste have low evidential value. Our hearing is defective and
arbitrary when it judges the source and direction of sound, and in
listening to the talk of other people "words which are not heard will
be supplied by the witness in all good faith. He will have a theory of
the purport of the conversation, and will arrange the sounds he heard
to fit it." Even visual perceptions are liable to great error, as in
identification, recognition, judgment of distance, estimates of
numbers, for example, the size of a crowd. In the untrained observer,
the sense of time is highly variable. All these original weaknesses
are complicated by tricks of memory, and the incessant creative
quality of the imagination. _Cf_. also Sherrington, _The Integrative
Action of the Nervous System_, pp. 318-327.
The late Professor Hugo Münsterberg wrote a popular book on this
subject called _On the Witness Stand_.] For experience seems to
show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he
takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the
account of an event is really a transfiguration of it. Few facts in
consciousness seem to be merely given. Most facts in consciousness
seem to be partly made. A report is the joint product of the knower
and known, in which the role of the observer is always selective and
usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and
the habits of our eyes.
An unfamiliar scene is like the baby's world, "one great, blooming,
buzzing confusion." [Footnote: Wm. James, _Principles of
Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 488.] This is the way, says Mr. John Dewey,
[Footnote: John Dewey, _How We Think_, pg 121.] that any new
thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange.
"Foreign languages that we do not understand always seem jibberings,
babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut,
individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded street,
the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between
experts in a complicated game, are further instances. Put an
inexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a
meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look
alike to the visiting stranger. Only gross differences of size or
color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which
is perfectly individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an
indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not
understand. The problem of the acquisition of meaning by things, or
(stated in another way) of forming habits of simple apprehension, is
thus the problem of introducing (1) _definiteness_ and _distinction_
and (2) _consistency_ or _stability_ of meaning into what is
otherwise vague and wavering."
But the kind of definiteness and consistency introduced depends upon
who introduces them. In a later passage [Footnote: _op. cit._, p.
133.] Dewey gives an example of how differently an experienced layman
and a chemist might define the word metal. "Smoothness, hardness,
glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy weight for its size ... the
serviceable properties of capacity for being hammered and pulled
without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold, of
retaining the shape and form given, of resistance to pressure and
decay, would probably be included" in the layman's definition. But the
chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian
qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters
into combination with oxygen so as to form a base."
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define
first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the
outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us,
and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form
stereotyped for us by our culture. Of the great men who assembled at
Paris to settle the affairs of mankind, how many were there who were
able to see much of the Europe about them, rather than their
commitments about Europe? Could anyone have penetrated the mind of M.
Clemenceau, would he have found there images of the Europe of 1919, or
a great sediment of stereotyped ideas accumulated and hardened in a
long and pugnacious existence? Did he see the Germans of 1919, or the
German type as he had learned to see it since 1871? He saw the type,
and among the reports that came to him from Germany, he took to heart
those reports, and, it seems, those only, which fitted the type that
was in his mind. If a junker blustered, that was an authentic German;
if a labor leader confessed the guilt of the empire, he was not an
authentic German.
At a Congress of Psychology in Göttingen an interesting experiment was
made with a crowd of presumably trained observers. [Footnote: A. von
Gennep, _La formation des légendes_, pp. 158-159. Cited F. van
Langenhove, _The Growth of a Legend_, pp. 120-122.]
"Not far from the hall in which the Congress was sitting there was a
public fete with a masked ball. Suddenly the door of the hall was
thrown open and a clown rushed in madly pursued by a negro, revolver
in hand. They stopped in the middle of the room fighting; the clown
fell, the negro leapt upon him, fired, and then both rushed out of the
hall. The whole incident hardly lasted twenty seconds.
"The President asked those present to write immediately a report since
there was sure to be a judicial inquiry. Forty reports were sent in.
Only one had less than 20% of mistakes in regard to the principal
facts; fourteen had 20% to 40% of mistakes; twelve from 40% to 50%;
thirteen more than 50%. Moreover in twenty-four accounts 10% of the
details were pure inventions and this proportion was exceeded in ten
accounts and diminished in six. Briefly a quarter of the accounts were
false.
"It goes without saying that the whole scene had been arranged and
even photographed in advance. The ten false reports may then be
relegated to the category of tales and legends; twenty-four accounts
are half legendary, and six have a value approximating to exact
evidence."
Thus out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a
scene that had just happened before their eyes, more than a majority
saw a scene that had not taken place. What then did they see? One
would suppose it was easier to tell what had occurred, than to invent
something which had not occurred. They saw their stereotype of such a
brawl. All of them had in the course of their lives acquired a series
of images of brawls, and these images flickered before their eyes. In
one man these images displaced less than 20% of the actual scene, in
thirteen men more than half. In thirty-four out of the forty observers
the stereotypes preempted at least one-tenth of the scene.
A distinguished art critic has said [Footnote: Bernard Berenson,
_The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance_, pp. 60, _et
seq_.] that "what with the almost numberless shapes assumed by an
object. ... What with our insensitiveness and inattention, things
scarcely would have for us features and outlines so determined and
clear that we could recall them at will, but for the stereotyped
shapes art has lent them." The truth is even broader than that, for
the stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, in
the sense of painting and sculpture and literature, but from our moral
codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations as
well. Substitute in the following passage of Mr. Berenson's the words
'politics,' 'business,' and 'society,' for the word 'art' and the
sentences will be no less true: "... unless years devoted to the study
of all schools of art have taught us also to see with our own eyes, we
soon fall into the habit of moulding whatever we look at into the
forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted. There is
our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors
which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms
and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to reproduce things
as we know they certainly are, or we accuse him of insincerity."
Mr. Berenson speaks of our displeasure when a painter "does not
visualize objects exactly as we do," and of the difficulty of
appreciating the art of the Middle Ages because since then "our manner
of visualizing forms has changed in a thousand ways." [Footnote:
_Cf._ also his comment on _Dante's Visual Images, and his Early
Illustrators_ in _The Study and Criticism of Italian Art_ (First
Series), p. 13. "_We_ cannot help dressing Virgil as a Roman,
and giving him a 'classical profile' and 'statuesque carriage,' but
Dante's visual image of Virgil was probably no less mediaeval, no
more based on a critical reconstruction of antiquity, than his entire
conception of the Roman poet. Fourteenth Century illustrators make
Virgil look like a mediaeval scholar, dressed in cap and gown, and
there is no reason why Dante's visual image of him should have been
other than this."] He goes on to show how in regard to the human
figure we have been taught to see what we do see. "Created by
Donatello and Masaccio, and sanctioned by the Humanists, the new canon
of the human figure, the new cast of features ... presented to the
ruling classes of that time the type of human being most likely to win
the day in the combat of human forces... Who had the power to break
through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things,
to select shapes more definitely expressive of reality than those
fixed by men of genius? No one had such power. People had perforce to
see things in that way and in no other, and to see only the shapes
depicted, to love only the ideals presented...." [Footnote: _The
Central Italian Painters_, pp. 66-67.]
2
If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know
what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to
appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal,
but the minds through which they have filtered it. For the accepted
types, the current patterns, the standard versions, intercept
information on its way to consciousness. Americanization, for example,
is superficially at least the substitution of American for European
stereotypes. Thus the peasant who might see his landlord as if he were
the lord of the manor, his employer as he saw the local magnate, is
taught by Americanization to see the landlord and employer according
to American standards. This constitutes a change of mind, which is, in
effect, when the inoculation succeeds, a change of vision. His eye
sees differently. One kindly gentlewoman has confessed that the
stereotypes are of such overweening importance, that when hers are not
indulged, she at least is unable to accept the brotherhood of man and
the fatherhood of God: "we are strangely affected by the clothes we
wear. Garments create a mental and social atmosphere. What can be
hoped for the Americanism of a man who insists on employing a London
tailor? One's very food affects his Americanism. What kind of American
consciousness can grow in the atmosphere of sauerkraut and Limburger
cheese? Or what can you expect of the Americanism of the man whose
breath always reeks of garlic?" [Footnote: Cited by Mr. Edward Hale
Bierstadt, _New Republic_, June 1 1921 p. 21.]
This lady might well have been the patron of a pageant which a friend
of mine once attended. It was called the Melting Pot, and it was given
on the Fourth of July in an automobile town where many foreign-born
workers are employed. In the center of the baseball park at second
base stood a huge wooden and canvas pot. There were flights of steps
up to the rim on two sides. After the audience had settled itself, and
the band had played, a procession came through an opening at one side
of the field. It was made up of men of all the foreign nationalities
employed in the factories. They wore their native costumes, they were
singing their national songs; they danced their folk dances, and
carried the banners of all Europe. The master of ceremonies was the
principal of the grade school dressed as Uncle Sam. He led them to the
pot. He directed them up the steps to the rim, and inside. He called
them out again on the other side. They came, dressed in derby hats,
coats, pants, vest, stiff collar and polka-dot tie, undoubtedly, said
my friend, each with an Eversharp pencil in his pocket, and all
singing the Star-Spangled Banner.
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