Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
Nearly all the time that could be said to have been spent in his life in
dealing with other men he spent in doing for them on a nobler scale the
thing that Frederick Taylor did. He went up to men--to hundreds of men a
day, that he saw humdrumming along, despising themselves and despising
their work and expecting nothing of themselves and nothing of any one
else and asked them to put their lives in his hands and let him show
what could be done with them.
This is Frederick Taylor's profession.
The Sermon on the Mount began with telling people that they would be
successful if they knew how--if they had a vision. It proceeded to give
them the vision. It began with giving them a vision for the things that
they had, told them how even the very things that they had always
thought before were what was the matter with the world they could make a
great use of. "Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those that
hunger; blessed are the meek."
And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and nobler and more
free from the cares and weights of this earth they could be if they
wanted to be, than they had dared to believe. He told the people who
were around Him bigger things about human nature, how successful it was
or could be than any one had ever claimed for people in this world
before. They put Him up on a Cross at last and crucified Him because
they thought He was too hopeful about them, and about human nature or
because, as they would have put it, He was blasphemous and said every
man was a Son of God.
As human nature then was and in the then spirit of the world, no better
means than a Cross could have been employed to get the attention of all
men, to make a two thousand year advertisement for all nations of what a
success human nature was, of what men really could be like.
But I think that if Christ were to come to us again and if he were to
try to get the attention of the whole world once more to precisely the
same ideas and principles that he stood for before, the enterprise would
be conducted in a very different manner.
There is a picture of Albert Durer's which hangs near my desk, and once
more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it. It is the
familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and
with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it
and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old,
bent-over scientist with a halo over his head.
If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the
first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the
scientist's head.
There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing,
at least, that could be put in a stained-glass window in Frederick
Taylor's tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a
pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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