Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by
merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just
showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.
There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are
particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded,
romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people. The real
adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth
century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of
seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with
good cheer, acting on them. The human race has a new temperament. The
way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to
look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or bring the
enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with cooeperation, with
understanding him and being understood by him, by being impregnably,
obstinately his brother, by piling up huge happy citadels of good-will,
of services rendered, services deserved, and services returned. We had
an idea once that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of
him. We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by getting inside
first and then dealing with outside things together.
We see the inside. It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack
the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that.
The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a
kind of chemistry.
Hercules is a bust now.
We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph
Lister, or like Wilbur Wright--the courage that faces material facts,
that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the
heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy.
When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have
is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves: "What are
the most difficult facts to face in people?"
They are:
The facts about how they are different from us. The facts
about their being like us. The facts as to what we can do
about it.
So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and
difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the
courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can
be made to go together.
A man's courage is his sense of identity.
A man's courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas, deserts,
chemistry, geology, is his sense of identity with God and of his right
to share with God in the creating of His world.
His courage toward people is his sense of identity with men who seem
different from him, of all races, all classes, and all nations. He sees
the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances. Then
he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account