The unanswered question is how far these tendencies will reëstablish
the void left by the disintegration of the family, church and
neighborhood. We cannot predict the outcome. But we can assert with
confidence that there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have
effected uniform standardization, mobility and remote invisible
relationships that is fatally obstructive to the return movement of
their consequences into the local homes of mankind. Uniformity and
standardization may provide an underlying basis for differentiation and
liberation of individual potentialities. They may sink to the plane
of unconscious habituations, taken for granted in the mechanical
phases of life, and deposit a soil from which personal susceptibilities
and endowments may richly and stably flower. Mobility may in the end
supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction
and interdependence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible,
preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past,
and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and many-hued
experience. Organization may cease to be taken as an end in itself.
Then it will no longer be mechanical and external, hampering the
free play of artistic gifts, fettering men and women with chains of
conformity, conducing to abdication of all which does not fit into
the automatic movement of organization as a self-sufficing thing.
Organization as a means to an end would reënforce individuality and
enable it to be securely itself by enduing it with resources beyond its
unaided reach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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