I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the
quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but
even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come
many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and
exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they
exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed
1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which
degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of
industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance,
capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized
education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches
"run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity
agents."
Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society
with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social
group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding
stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local
trade or craft guild and to his parish church: the essence of wholesome
association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he
knows personally--and preferably so well that he calls them all by their
first names.
As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals
whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of
personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to
the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which
covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential
matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He
votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he
knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another
group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the
United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds
himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if
he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps,
except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or
in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he
find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind
and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of
potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human
animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and
quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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