Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man
(which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really
is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters.
The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the
world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless
art. The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to
be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient
for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more
uncomfortable than he does. He would not even be allowed the comfort of
saying how uncomfortable. The world belongs to the average man, and,
excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him,
the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more
beautiful in it than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his
side, in spite of him, and claims it for him. Then he slowly claims it
for himself. The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for
the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average
men in it. If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow
massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is
highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them
shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life,
where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if
the ideal of democracy is tableland--that is--mountains for
everybody--a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out
of.
Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization--having the extraordinary
men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having
the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary
ones--are equally impracticable.
This brings us to the horns of our dilemma. If the crowd cannot be made
beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not allow itself to be made
beautiful by any one else, the crowd can only be made beautiful by a man
who lives so great a life in it that he can make a crowd beautiful
whether it allows him to or not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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