The current situation in America is by way of being something of a psychiatrical clinic. In order to come to an understanding of this
situation there is doubtless much else to be taken into account, but the
case of America is after all not fairly to be understood without making due allowance for a certain prevalent unbalance and derangement of mentality, presumably transient but sufficiently grave for the time being. Perhaps the commonest and plainest evidence of this unbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certain fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of the Americans are effected. As contrasted with their state of mind before the war, they are predisposed to believe in footless outrages and odious plots and machinations - "treasons, stratagems, and spoils." They are readily provoked to a headlong intolerance, and resort to unadvised atrocities as a defense against imaginary evils. There is a visible lack of composure and logical coherence, both in what they will believe and in what they are ready to do about it.
Throughout recent times the advance of exact knowledge in the material
sciences has been progressively supplanting the received barbarian beliefs in magical and supernatural agencies. This progressive substitution of matter-of-fact in the place of superstition has gone forward unremittingly and at a constantly accelerated rate, being the most characteristic and most constructive factor engaged in modern civilisation. But during the past six or eight years, since the outbreak of the war, and even more plainly since its conclusion, the churches, high and low, have been gaining both in numbers and in revenues, as well as in pontifical unction. The logical faculty appears to have suffered a notable degree of prostration throughout the American community; and all the while it is the more puerile crudities of superstitious fear that have been making particular and inordinate gains. So, for example, it is since the outbreak of the war that the Rev. Billy Sunday has effectively come into his own, and it is since the peace that he has become such a power of obscurity as to command a price as an agency of intimidation and misrule. So also it is during these last few years of the same period of nervous prostration that the Fundamentalists are effectually making headway in their campaign of obscuration designed to reinstate the Fear of God in place of common-sense. Driven by a nerve-shattering fear that some climax of ghostly atrocities is about to be visited on all persons who are found lacking in bigotry, this grosser sort of devout innocents now impugn certain findings of material science on the ground that these findings are presumed to be distasteful to a certain well-known anthropomorphic divinity, to whom His publicity-agents impute a sadistic temper and an unlimited power of abuse. These evidences
of a dilapidated mentality are growing more and more obvious. Meantime even a man of such signal good sense and humanity as Mr. Bryan is joining forces with the Rev. Billy Sunday in the propaganda of intolerance, while the gifts of so engaging a raconteur as Sir Conan Doyle are brought in to cover the flanks of this drive into intellectual twilight.
It may be said, of course, that such-like maggoty conceits are native to
the religious fancy and are due to come into the foreground in all times of
trouble; but just now the same fearsome credulity is running free and large through secular affairs as well, and its working-out is no more edifying in that department of human conduct. At the date when America formally entered the war, American popular sentiment had already been exposed to a protracted stress of apprehension and perplexity and was ready for alarms and excursions into intolerance. All manner of extravagant rumors met with ready belief, and, indeed, few were able to credit anything that was not extravagant. It was a period dominated by illusions of frightfulness and persecution. It was the peculiar misfortune of the American people that they were called into action only after their mental poise had been shattered by a long run of enervating perplexity and agitation. The measures taken under these circumstances were drawn on such lines of suspicion and intolerance as might be looked for under these circumstances. Differences of opinion were erected into statutory crimes, to which extravagant penalties were attached. Persons charged with these new-found statutory crimes were then convicted on a margin of legal interpretation. In effect, suspected persons were held guilty until proved innocent, with the doubt weighing against them. In one of these episodes of statutory frightfulness, that of the far-famed "Lusk Committee," some ten thousand persons were arrested on ungrounded suspicion, with extensive destruction of papers and property. The foreignlanguage press was laid under disabilities and the use of the mails was interrupted on general grounds of hysterical consternation. On the same grounds circulation and credence were given to extravagantly impossible fictions of Bolshevik propaganda, and the
I.W.W. were by interpretation erected into a menace to the Republic,while
the Secret Service kept faithfully on the job of making two suspicions grow where one grew before. Under cover of it all the American profiteers have diligently gone about their business of getting something for nothing at the cost of all concerned, while popular attention has been taken up with the maudlin duties of civil and religious intolerance.
The Republic has come through this era of spiritual dilapidation with an
unbalanced budget and an increased armament by use of which to "safeguard American Interests" - that is to say, negotiate profitable concessions for American oil companies - a system of passports, deportations, and restricted immigration, and a Legion of veterans organised for a draft on the public funds and the cultivation of warlike distemper. Unreflecting patriotic flurry has become a civic virtue. Drill in patriotic - that is to say military - ritual has been incorporated in the ordinary routine of the public schools, and it has come to be obligatory to stand uncovered through any rendition of the "National Anthem" - a musical composition of which one could scarcely say that it might have been worse. The State constabularies have been augmented; the right of popular assembly freely interfered with; establishments of mercenary "gunmen," under the formal name of detective-
agencies, have increased their output; the Ku-Klux-Klan has been reanimated and reorganised for extra-legal intimidation of citizens; and the American Legion now and again enforces "law and order" on the unfortunate by extra-legal measures. Meantime the profiteers do business as usual and the Federal authorities are busied with a schedule of increased protective duties designed to enhance the profits of their business.
Those traits in this current situation wherein it is different from the
relatively sober state of things before the war, have been injected by
America's participation in the war; and it is, in effect, for their failure
to join hands and help in working up this state of things that the
conscientious objectors, draft-evaders, I.W.W.'s, Communists, have been
penalised in a manner unexampled in American history. This is not saying
that the pacifists, conscientious objectors, etc., are not statutory
criminals or that they foresaw such an outcome of the traffic against which they protested, or that they were moved by peculiarly high-minded or unselfish considerations in making their protest; but only that the
subsequent course of events has unhappily brought out the fact that these distasteful persons took a stand for the sounder side of a debatable
question. Except for the continued prevalence of a distempered mentality
that still runs on illusions of persecution, it might reasonably have been
expected that this sort of de facto vindication of the stand taken by these
statutory criminals would be allowed to count in extenuation of their de
jure fault. But the distemper still runs its course. Indeed, it is
doubtless the largest, profoundest, and most enduring effect brought upon the Americans by America's intervention in the great war.
Typically and commonly, dementia praecox is a distemper of adolescence or of early manhood, at least such appears to be the presumption held among psychiatrists. Yet its occurrence is not confined within any assignable age-limits. Typically, if not altogether commonly, it takes the shape of a dementia persecutoria, an illusion of persecution and a derangement of the logical faculty such as to predispose the patient to the belief that he and his folks are victims of plots and systematic atrocities. A fearsome credulity is perhaps the most outstanding symptom, and this credulity may work out in a fear of atrocities to be suffered in the next world or in the present; that is to say a fear of God or of evil men. Prolonged or excessive worry appears to be the most usual predisposing cause. Expert opinions differ as to how far the malady is to be reckoned as a curable disease; the standard treatment being rest, security, and nutrition. The physiological ground of such a failure of mentality appears to be exhaustion and consequent deterioration of nerve-tissue, due to shock or prolonged strain; and recuperation is notoriously slow in the case of nerve-tissue.
No age, sex, or condition is immune, but dementia praecox will affect
adolescents more frequently than mature persons, and men more frequently than women; at least so it is said. Adolescent males are peculiarly subject to this malady, apparently because they are - under modern circumstances - in a peculiar degree exposed to worry, dissipation, and consequent nervous exhaustion. The cares and unfamiliar responsibilitiesof manhood fall upon them at that period, and under modern circumstances these cares and responsibilities are notably exacting, complex, and uncertain. Given a situation of widespread apprehension, uncertainty, and agitation, such as the war-experience brought on the Americans, and the consequent derangement
of mentality should be of a similarly widespread character - such as has come in evidence.
The peculiar liability of adolescent males carries the open suggestion that
a similar degree of liability should also extend to those males of more
advanced years in whom a puerile mentality persists, men in whom a boyish temper continues into later life. These boyish traits may be seen in
admirably systematised fashion in such organisations as the Boy Scouts.
Much the same range of characteristics marks the doings and aspirations,
individual and collective, of high-school boys, undergraduate students, and organisations of the type of the Y.M.C.A. In this connection it would
perhaps be ungraceful to direct attention to the clergy of all
denominations, where self-selection has resulted in a concentration on the lower range of the intellectual spectrum. One is also not unprepared to find a sensible infusion of the same puerile traits among military men. A certain truculent temper is conspicuous among the stigmata. Persons in whom the traits and limitations of the puerile mentality persist in a
particularly notable degree are called "morons," but there are also many
persons who approximate more or less closely to the moronic grade of
mentality without being fully entitled to the technical designation. Such a
degree of arrested spiritual and mental development is, in practical
effect, no bar against entrance into public office. Indeed, a degree of
puerile exuberance coupled with a certain truculent temper and boyish
cunning is likely to command something of popular admiration and affection, which is likely to have a certain selective effect in the democratic choice of officials. Men, and perhaps even more particularly the women, will be sympathetically and affectionately disposed toward the standard vagaries of boyhood, and this sentimental inclination is bound to be reflected in the choice of public officials in any democratic community, where such choice is habitually guided by the play of sentiment. America is the most democratic of all nations; at least so they say. A run of persecutory credulity of the nature of dementia praecox should logically run swiftly and with a wide sweep in the case of such a community endowed with such an official machinery, and its effects should be profound and lasting.
