But in our public opinions few can be expert, while life is, as Mr.
Bernard Shaw has made plain, so short. Those who are expert are so on
only a few topics. Even among the expert soldiers, as we learned
during the war, expert cavalrymen were not necessarily brilliant with
trench-warfare and tanks. Indeed, sometimes a little expertness on a
small topic may simply exaggerate our normal human habit of trying to
squeeze into our stereotypes all that can be squeezed, and of casting
into outer darkness that which does not fit.
Whatever we recognize as familiar we tend, if we are not very careful,
to visualize with the aid of images already in our mind. Thus in the
American view of Progress and Success there is a definite picture of
human nature and of society. It is the kind of human nature and the
kind of society which logically produce the kind of progress that is
regarded as ideal. And then, when we seek to describe or explain
actually successful men, and events that have really happened, we read
back into them the qualities that are presupposed in the stereotypes.
These qualities were standardized rather innocently by the older
economists. They set out to describe the social system under which
they lived, and found it too complicated for words. So they
constructed what they sincerely hoped was a simplified diagram, not so
different in principle and in veracity from the parallelogram with
legs and head in a child's drawing of a complicated cow.
Pages:
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129