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To the promoters of this pageant, and probably to most of the actors,
it seemed as if they had managed to express the most intimate
difficulty to friendly association between the older peoples of
America and the newer. The contradiction of their stereotypes
interfered with the full recognition of their common humanity. The
people who change their names know this. They mean to change
themselves, and the attitude of strangers toward them.

There is, of course, some connection between the scene outside and the
mind through which we watch it, just as there are some long-haired men
and short-haired women in radical gatherings. But to the hurried
observer a slight connection is enough. If there are two bobbed heads
and four beards in the audience, it will be a bobbed and bearded
audience to the reporter who knows beforehand that such gatherings are
composed of people with these tastes in the management of their hair.
There is a connection between our vision and the facts, but it is
often a strange connection. A man has rarely looked at a landscape,
let us say, except to examine its possibilities for division into
building lots, but he has seen a number of landscapes hanging in the
parlor. And from them he has learned to think of a landscape as a rosy
sunset, or as a country road with a church steeple and a silver moon.
One day he goes to the country, and for hours he does not see a single
landscape. Then the sun goes down looking rosy. At once he recognizes
a landscape and exclaims that it is beautiful. But two days later,
when he tries to recall what he saw, the odds are that he will
remember chiefly some landscape in a parlor.

Unless he has been drunk or dreaming or insane he did see a sunset,
but he saw in it, and above all remembers from it, more of what the
oil painting taught him to observe, than what an impressionist
painter, for example, or a cultivated Japanese would have seen and
taken away with him. And the Japanese and the painter in turn will
have seen and remembered more of the form they had learned, unless
they happen to be the very rare people who find fresh sight for
mankind. In untrained observation we pick recognizable signs out of
the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill
out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that
sunset; rather we notice that the thing is man or sunset, and then see
chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subjects.

3

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly
and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting,
and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In a circle of
friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is
no shortcut through, and no substitute for, an individualized
understanding. Those whom we love and admire most are the men and
women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than
with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we
might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel
intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not
necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association has
final dignity in which each does not take the other as an end in
himself. There is a taint on any contact between two people which does
not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both.

But modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical
distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other,
such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither
time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice a
trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the
picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is
an agitator. That much we notice, or are told. Well, an agitator is
this sort of person, and so _he_ is this sort of person. He is an
intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a "South
European." He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard Man. How different
from the statement: he is a Yale Man. He is a regular fellow. He is a
West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager:
what don't we know about him then, and about her? He is an
international banker. He is from Main Street.

The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences ere those which
create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about
the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we
experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made
us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They
mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the
difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar,
and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They are aroused by small
signs, which may vary from a true index to a vague analogy. Aroused,
they flood fresh vision with older images, and project into the world
what has been resurrected in memory. Were there no practical
uniformities in the environment, there would be no economy and only
error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there
are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing
attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes
for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human
life.

What matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility
with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon those
inclusive patterns which constitute our philosophy of life. If in that
philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code
which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going
on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us
that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence
catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas,
then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only
stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend,
also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where
they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful
history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what
fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play,
picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in
that mind.

4

Those who wish to censor art do not at least underestimate this
influence. They generally misunderstand it, and almost always they are
absurdly bent on preventing other people from discovering anything not
sanctioned by them. But at any rate, like Plato in his argument about
the poets, they feel vaguely that the types acquired through fiction
tend to be imposed on reality. Thus there can be little doubt that the
moving picture is steadily building up imagery which is then evoked by
the words people read in their newspapers. In the whole experience of
the race there has been no aid to visualization comparable to the
cinema. If a Florentine wished to visualize the saints, he could go to
the frescoes in his church, where he might see a vision of saints
standardized for his time by Giotto. If an Athenian wished to
visualize the gods he went to the temples. But the number of objects
which were pictured was not great. And in the East, where the spirit
of the second commandment was widely accepted, the portraiture of
concrete things was even more meager, and for that reason perhaps the
faculty of practical decision was by so much reduced. In the western
world, however, during the last few centuries there has been an
enormous increase in the volume and scope of secular description, the
word picture, the narrative, the illustrated narrative, and finally
the moving picture and, perhaps, the talking picture.

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which
the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They
seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human
meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind
conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture,
requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But
on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting,
and then imagining, has been accomplished for you. Without more
trouble than is needed to stay awake the result which your imagination
is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen. The shadowy idea
becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan,
thanks to Mr. Griffiths, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a
Nation. Historically it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a
pernicious shape, but it is a shape, and I doubt whether anyone who
has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than
Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those
white horsemen.

5

And so when we speak of the mind of a group of people, of the French
mind, the militarist mind, the bolshevik mind, we are liable to
serious confusion unless we agree to separate the instinctive
equipment from the stereotypes, the patterns, and the formulae which
play so decisive a part in building up the mental world to which the
native character is adapted and responds. Failure to make this
distinction accounts for oceans of loose talk about collective minds,
national souls, and race psychology. To be sure a stereotype may be so
consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from
parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact. In some
respects, we may indeed have become, as Mr. Wallas says, [Footnote:
Graham Wallas, _Our Social Heritage_, p. 17.] biologically
parasitic upon our social heritage. But certainly there is not the
least scientific evidence which would enable anyone to argue that men
are born with the political habits of the country in which they are
born. In so far as political habits are alike in a nation, the first
places to look for an explanation are the nursery, the school, the
church, not in that limbo inhabited by Group Minds and National Souls.
Until you have thoroughly failed to see tradition being handed on from
parents, teachers, priests, and uncles, it is a solecism of the worst
order to ascribe political differences to the germ plasm.

It is possible to generalize tentatively and with a decent humility
about comparative differences within the same category of education
and experience. Yet even this is a tricky enterprise. For almost no
two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the
same household. The older son never does have the experience of being
the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the
difference in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of
nature. As well judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their
yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether
they have been cultivated and enriched, exhausted, or allowed to run
wild.

CHAPTER VII

STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE

1

THERE is another reason, besides economy of effort, why we so often
hold to our stereotypes when we might pursue a more disinterested
vision. The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal
tradition, the defenses of our position in society.

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to
which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our
hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of
the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are
adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places,
and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We
are members. We know the way around. There we find the charm of the
familiar, the normal, the dependable; its grooves and shapes are where
we are accustomed to find them. And though we have abandoned much that
might have tempted us before we creased ourselves into that mould,
once we are firmly in, it fits as snugly as an old shoe.

No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an
attack upon the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the
foundations of _our_ universe, and, where big things are at
stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between
our universe and the universe. A world which turns out to be one in
which those we honor are unworthy, and those we despise are noble, is
nerve-racking. There is anarchy if our order of precedence is not the
only possible one. For if the meek should indeed inherit the earth, if
the first should be last, if those who are without sin alone may cast
a stone, if to Caesar you render only the things that are Caesar's,
then the foundations of self-respect would be shaken for those who
have arranged their lives as if these maxims were not true. A pattern
of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting
order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not
merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is
the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world
of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own
rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the
feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our
tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves
safe in the position we occupy.

2

When, for example, in the fourth century B. C., Aristotle wrote his
defense of slavery in the face of increasing skepticism, [Footnote:
Zimmern: _Greek Commonwealth_. See his footnote, p. 383.] the
Athenian slaves were in great part indistinguishable from free
citizens Mr. Zimmern quotes an amusing passage from the Old Oligarch
explaining the good treatment of the slaves. "Suppose it were legal
for a slave to be beaten by a citizen, it would frequently happen that
an Athenian might be mistaken for a slave or an alien and receive a
beating;--since the Athenian people is not better clothed than the
slave or alien, nor in personal appearance is there any superiority."
This absence of distinction would naturally tend to dissolve the
institution. If free men and slaves looked alike, what basis was there
for treating them so differently? It was this confusion which
Aristotle set himself to clear away in the first book of his Politics.
With unerring instinct he understood that to justify slavery he must
teach the Greeks a way of _seeing_ their slaves that comported
with the continuance of slavery.

So, said Aristotle, there are beings who are slaves by nature.
[Footnote: _Politics_, Bk. 1, Ch. 5.] "He then is by nature
formed a slave, who is fitted to become the chattel of another person,
_and on that account is so_." All this really says is that
whoever happens to be a slave is by nature intended to be one.
Logically the statement is worthless, but in fact it is not a
proposition at all, and logic has nothing to do with it. It is a
stereotype, or rather it is part of a stereotype. The rest follows
almost immediately. After asserting that slaves perceive reason, but
are not endowed with the use of it, Aristotle insists that "it is the
intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and free men
different from each other, that the one should be robust for their
necessary purposes, but the other erect; useless indeed for such
servile labours, but fit for civil life... It is clear then that some
men are free by nature, and others are slaves. ..."

If we ask ourselves what is the matter with Aristotle's argument, we
find that he has begun by erecting a great barrier between himself and
the facts. When he had said that those who are slaves are by nature
intended to be slaves, he at one stroke excluded the fatal question
whether those particular men who happened to be slaves were the
particular men intended by nature to be slaves. For that question
would have tainted each case of slavery with doubt. And since the fact
of being a slave was not evidence that a man was destined to be one,
no certain test would have remained. Aristotle, therefore, excluded
entirely that destructive doubt. Those who are slaves are intended to
be slaves. Each slave holder was to look upon his chattels as natural
slaves. When his eye had been trained to see them that way, he was to
note as confirmation of their servile character the fact that they
performed servile work, that they were competent to do servile work,
and that they had the muscles to do servile work.

This is the perfect stereotype. Its hallmark is that it precedes the
use of reason; is a form of perception, imposes a certain character on
the data of our senses before the data reach the intelligence. The
stereotype is like the lavender window-panes on Beacon Street, like
the door-keeper at a costume ball who judges whether the guest has an
appropriate masquerade. There is nothing so obdurate to education or
to criticism as the stereotype. It stamps itself upon the evidence in
the very act of securing the evidence. That is why the accounts of
returning travellers are often an interesting tale of what the
traveller carried abroad with him on his trip. If he carried chiefly
his appetite, a zeal for tiled bathrooms, a conviction that the
Pullman car is the acme of human comfort, and a belief that it is
proper to tip waiters, taxicab drivers, and barbers, but under no
circumstances station agents and ushers, then his Odyssey will be
replete with good meals and bad meals, bathing adventures,
compartment-train escapades, and voracious demands for money. Or if he
is a more serious soul he may while on tour have found himself at
celebrated spots. Having touched base, and cast one furtive glance at
the monument, he buried his head in Baedeker, read every word through,
and moved on to the next celebrated spot; and thus returned with a
compact and orderly impression of Europe, rated one star, or two.

In some measure, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are
printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes,
so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy
consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we
looked at red through blue glasses and saw green. If what we are
looking at corresponds successfully with what we anticipated, the
stereotype is reinforced for the future, as it is in a man who knows
in advance that the Japanese are cunning and has the bad luck to run
across two dishonest Japanese.

If the experience contradicts the stereotype, one of two things
happens. If the man is no longer plastic, or if some powerful interest
makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes, he pooh-
poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves the rule,
discredits the witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to forget
it. But if he is still curious and open-minded, the novelty is taken
into the picture, and allowed to modify it. Sometimes, if the incident
is striking enough, and if he has felt a general discomfort with his
established scheme, he may be shaken to such an extent as to distrust
all accepted ways of looking at life, and to expect that normally a
thing will not be what it is generally supposed to be. In the extreme
case, especially if he is literary, he may develop a passion for
inverting the moral canon by making Judas, Benedict Arnold, or Caesar
Borgia the hero of his tale.

3

The role played by the stereotype can be seen in the German tales
about Belgian snipers. Those tales curiously enough were first refuted
by an organization of German Catholic priests known as Pax. [Footnote:
Fernand van Langenhove, _The Growth of a Legend._ The author is a
Belgian sociologist.] The existence of atrocity stories is itself not
remarkable, nor that the German people gladly believed them. But it is
remarkable that a great conservative body of patriotic Germans should
have set out as early as August 16, 1914, to contradict a collection
of slanders on the enemy, even though such slanders were of the utmost
value in soothing the troubled conscience of their fellow countrymen.
Why should the Jesuit order in particular have set out to destroy a
fiction so important to the fighting morale of Germany?

I quote from M. van Langenhove's account:

"Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors
began to circulate. They spread from place to place, they were
reproduced by the press, and they soon permeated the whole of Germany.
It was said that the Belgian people, _instigated by the clergy,_
had intervened perfidiously in the hostilities; had attacked by
surprise isolated detachments; had indicated to the enemy the
positions occupied by the troops; that old men, and even children, had
been guilty of horrible atrocities upon wounded and defenseless German
soldiers, tearing out their eyes and cutting off fingers, nose or
ears; _that the priests from their pulpits had exhorted the people
to commit these crimes, promising them as a reward the kingdom of
heaven, and had even taken the lead in this barbarity._

"Public credulity accepted these stories. The highest powers in the
state welcomed them without hesitation and endorsed them with their
authority...

"In this way public opinion in Germany was disturbed and a lively
indignation manifested itself, _directed especially against the
priests_ who were held responsible for the barbarities attributed
to the Belgians... By a natural diversion _the anger_ to which
they were a prey _was directed_ by the Germans _against the
Catholic clergy generally._ Protestants allowed the old religious
hatred to be relighted in their minds and delivered themselves to
attacks against Catholics. A new _Kulturkampf_ was let loose.

"The Catholics did not delay in taking action against this hostile
attitude." (Italics mine) [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 5-7]

There may have been some sniping. It would be extraordinary if every
angry Belgian had rushed to the library, opened a manual of
international law, and had informed himself whether he had a right to
take potshot at the infernal nuisance tramping through his streets. It
would be no less extraordinary if an army that had never been under
fire, did not regard every bullet that came its way as unauthorized,
because it was inconvenient, and indeed as somehow a violation of the
rules of the Kriegspiel, which then constituted its only experience of
war. One can imagine the more sensitive bent on convincing themselves
that the people to whom they were doing such terrible things must be
terrible people. And so the legend may have been spun until it reached
the censors and propagandists, who, whether they believed it or not,
saw its value, and let it loose on the German civilians. They too were
not altogether sorry to find that the people they were outraging were
sub-human. And, above all, since the legend came from their heroes,
they were not only entitled to believe it, they were unpatriotic if
they did not.

But where so much is left to the imagination because the scene of
action is lost in the fog of war, there is no check and no control.
The legend of the ferocious Belgian priests soon tapped an old hatred.
For in the minds of most patriotic protestant Germans, especially of
the upper classes, the picture of Bismarck's victories included a long
quarrel with the Roman Catholics. By a process of association, Belgian
priests became priests, and hatred of Belgians a vent for all their
hatreds. These German protestants did what some Americans did when
under the stress of war they created a compound object of hatred out
of the enemy abroad and all their opponents at home. Against this
synthetic enemy, the Hun in Germany and the Hun within the Gate, they
launched all the animosity that was in them.

The Catholic resistance to the atrocity tales was, of course,
defensive. It was aimed at those particular fictions which aroused
animosity against all Catholics, rather than against Belgian Catholics
alone. The _Informations Pax_, says M. van Langenhove, had only
an ecclesiastical bearing and "confined their attention almost
exclusively to the reprehensible acts attributed to the priests." And
yet one cannot help wondering a little about what was set in motion in
the minds of German Catholics by this revelation of what Bismarck's
empire meant in relation to them; and also whether there was any
obscure connection between that knowledge and the fact that the
prominent German politician who was willing in the armistice to sign
the death warrant of the empire was Erzberger, [Footnote: Since this
was written, Erzberger has been assassinated.] the leader of the
Catholic Centre Party.

CHAPTER VIII

BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE

1

I HAVE been speaking of stereotypes rather than ideals, because the
word ideal is usually reserved for what we consider the good, the true
and the beautiful. Thus it carries the hint that here is something to
be copied or attained. But our repertory of fixed impressions is wider
than that. It contains ideal swindlers, ideal Tammany politicians,
ideal jingoes, ideal agitators, ideal enemies. Our stereotyped world
is not necessarily the world we should like it to be. It is simply the
kind of world we expect it to be. If events correspond there is a
sense of familiarity, and we feel that we are moving with the movement
of events. Our slave must be a slave by nature, if we are Athenians
who wish to have no qualms. If we have told our friends that we do
eighteen holes of golf in 95, we tell them after doing the course in
110, that we are not ourselves to-day. That is to say, we are not
acquainted with the duffer who foozled fifteen strokes.

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