Asses' Ears
FROM the time when the Lord talked to Moses on the misty top of Mount Sinai to the evening I talked to Mrs. Cheney at the Bowling Green Country Club was a long lapse of years, indeed; but even that span of centuries, I surmise, did not measure the drop in altitude between the two conversations. And I do not say this because the Lord carried on most of the conversation on the one occasion and Mrs. Cheney on the other, — if that were all, I should not have mentioned it, — but because I managed to follow the drift of the conversation in our general vicinity at the long table in the club dining room: Fred Carpenter, Professor Cooper, and Dr. Brownlee discussing how many yards ‘Chuck’ Wilson had made and why he had n’t made more; Mrs. Cheney, Mrs. Kinney, and Mrs. Armstrong discussing the varied problems of household help; a group a little farther down the table happy over the prospects of a promising divorce case; and all of us eventually finding common ground in the latest predicament of ‘Amos ’n’ Andy.’
Even my own conversation was not as brilliant or versatile that evening as I had planned to make it, being limited by the nature of the subject to three simple propositions: namely, I had not seen the game; I had not heard what Amos and Andy said the night before; and I had not, so far as I knew, had any trouble with our maid — sentiments which obviously did not lend themselves to any great elaboration or detail. But the brevity of my remarks left wide interims of contemplation between them; and the frequent repetition of thought and phraseology in the conversation around me provided a background of soothing monotony that offered little distraction from any line of thought one might fall upon.
The line I fell upon was not the happiest, as I had just come from down town and had read on the way home how many points my particular stocks had dropped that day, how much the ‘averages’ had declined, and how much farther the deflation of commodities and of the situation in general seemed likely to go. I had been puzzling profoundly (as all of us have) over the problem of this world-wide deflation and had discussed it with some of the ‘best minds’ that travel on the 5.14. I had found them in a somewhat similar state of deflation, but the consensus of opinion was that the situation had been brought about by a world-wide overproduction, and that this overproduction was due primarily to mechanical inventions and technological improvements, which had enormously increased productive capacities in all fields and magnified the maladjustments among them. Indeed, this general view of the economic deflation had by this time become somewhat of a commonplace among the better circles on the 5.14, and its poignancy — like that of the deflation itself — had been softened by prolonged familiarity with both.
But here I found myself, an hour and a half later, in the midst of a social activity entirely removed from questions of production, prices, market trends, averages, and so forth: a social activity that represented the maximum of freedom and spontaneity on the part of the group about the table; and yet — I began to realize — an activity which somehow had all the familiar symptoms of drastic deflation.
Now deflation implies comparison with a previous level; and I realize that a level of conversation is something much more difficult to define than a level of prices or wages, and infinitely more difficult of measurement. Indeed, my first impulse was to repel the suggestion altogether, with some rebuke to myself for merely being out of harmony with the occasion. There could scarcely be any analogy between conditions in the stock and commodity markets, on the one hand, and the flow of conversation around the table at a country club on the other.
Yet, I could not help reflecting, I had participated at sundry times and places in conversations that did register a high degree of intelligence, that touched on matters of real significance, that called forth one’s intellectual best in the process, and that left a tingle of vibration in one’s brain cells for hours afterward. Having been brought up on the classics at Princeton, I recalled the noble part that conversation had played in the development of the broad currents of human thought in the past — the ‘conversations’ of the great teachers and philosophers, the ‘dialogues’ of the Greeks, the ‘colloquia’ of the Romans — and the part that ordinary social discourse had played in the social, political, and literary life of Europe and of the earlier days of our own country.
All these I readily recalled from an early familiarity with the classics. But having foresworn the classics some time back, and being accustomed now to thinking in terms of factors and functions, I suddenly realized that throughout that long vista of centuries, over which my mind had run from force of habit, the function of conversation had changed, and that the nature of conversation itself had undergone as revolutionary changes as any other element of modern life. Not only this, but I began to apprehend further, with a vague sense of being on the verge of an unpleasant discovery, that this revolutionary change had been brought about by nothing other than those same mechanical inventions and technological discoveries that underlie our recurring periods of economic deflation.
Just as one sometimes finds one’s premises suddenly abutting on a new gasoline station or other unneighborly structure, on a vacant lot which hitherto he has considered harmless, so in this case I found my mind abutting on a new idea with some feeling of apprehension; for I have always treasured the hope that there are some spheres of life so human, intimate, and spontaneous, and so free from pecuniary calculus, that they cannot be brought under the sway of the machine. Yet here in an entirely informal and spontaneous conversation, among cultured people, in a typically suburban group, there suddenly rose the spectre of Mechanization itself, sitting like a ghost at the banquet table and laying upon the conversation the same iron hand that it has already laid so heavily upon industrial life, with its machine-made product, its quantity output, and its recurring deflation. What was happening about the table was this ‘deflation’ of conversation; and it was happening for much the same reasons that commodities are deflated, that the wheat markets of the world are demoralized, and that South American countries and countries in other parts of the world are in a turmoil of revolutionary uprisings.
And just as the early historical economists found it possible to trace the course of evolution in the form of ‘stages,’ marked by fundamental changes in productive technique, status of labor, or other aspects of economic organization, so it gradually dawned upon me that one of the most significant trails of social evolution had been blazed by successive changes in the nature and function of social conversation. For fear, however, that this may seem too fanciful an idea to emerge from our conversation at the club, let me interrupt my narrative of the evening long enough to set down these stages in conventional form, much as Karl Bücher originally set down his Pastoral, Agricultural, Handicraft, and Industrial stages of production.
STAGE I
Conversation a Repository of Racial Knowledge and Experience. — In the period with which this narrative happened to open, the time when the Lord talked to Moses, and for two to three thousand years thereafter, conversation was the one great repository of knowledge. The ‘word of mouth’ from father to son, from priest to disciple, from teacher to pupil, was the medium through which was preserved the most priceless heritage of a people—their law, religion, tribal history and culture, and knowledge of the practical arts. There was many a conversation, on other mountains than Sinai, that was fraught with momentous consequences; and many humbler conversations about the doorstep and the hearth, in the fields and shops, which, like modern doctors’ theses, ‘contributed to the sum total of human knowledge.’ It is true, the art of writing was known; but when words had to be carved on stone, graven in bronze, or laboriously scrawled with a goose quill on coarse parchment, with no duplicate copies, written compendia were few and brief and the cyclopædia of universal knowledge was an oral one.
What brought this stage of conversation to a close? To some extent the development of more easy and rapid forms of writing among the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient peoples. But the machine that put an end to this stage with revolutionary suddenness was the crude and primitive printing press. The printing press meant the mechanization of knowledge, with a cheapness, a precision, and a volume of output characteristic of the machine process everywhere.
STAGE II
Conversation a Medium for Conveying Current Information. — After the greater categories of knowledge and of literature had been mechanized, there still remained large areas of important and interesting information which were available only by word of mouth. One of these was made up of those fields of humbler knowledge represented by the practical arts and the processes of everyday life — health, cookery, agriculture, and handicraft. The ‘cookbook’ came eventually, after law, religion, and other essential fields had been reduced to printed form, and after a lot of the world’s worst doggerel had likewise been preserved for posterity; but for thousands of years the world’s cooking was done ‘by word of mouth,’ by those who learned to cook from someone else who told them how.
The other great area of oral communication was news, the whole world of what was happening anywhere — at one’s neighbor’s, in the near-by village, in the city, in England, Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere; what Parliament or Congress had done; what countries were at war; what the King, the President, Daniel Webster, or somebody else was doing. In other words, news — personal, local, national, international — had in the main to be ‘ covered ’ orally, catch as catch can, as one could gather it from someone lucky enough to have come from somewhere or to have heard something from someone who had been somewhere. Even when governments built military highways and post roads, with provision for the more or less regular dispatch of official messages, these messages, signed and sealed, represented small editions compared to the unofficial news sections, which the messengers delivered orally as they went. And the great Genghis Khan is said to have covered his vast empire with a network of post roads, over which fleet runners passed from time to time, each one covering a certain distance and at the end of his stretch telling his budget of news to another runner, who in turn relayed it to the next, and so on to the most distant provinces of the realm.
There was much animated conversation in those days. It is true, the news was not exactly ‘up to the minute.’ News of the Treaty of Ghent did not reach General Jackson until he had fought the glorious but superfluous battle of New Orleans. News of Polk’s election did not reach some sections of the Kentucky mountains until their secluded denizens had spent months discussing Presidential policies under the supposed administration of Henry Clay. But under these conditions zest for the news more than compensated for the tardiness of its arrival. Why did the houses of those times all nestle close to the side of the highway? In order not to lose the sight of a single traveler or miss an item of news. And the zest of carrying news, we may surmise, was fully as great as that of receiving it. Every traveler was a Marathon runner who bore tidings about something or other; and the passengers aboard a stagecoach from a distant city were seized upon in every village in which they alighted as eagerly as if they had been a bunch of ‘extras’ thrown upon the station platform. Needless to say, the substance of the news thus relayed from village to village became the subject of animated conversation for weeks afterward in the shops and stores, at church, at Sunday dinners, and around the fireside. If conversation was momentous in the first stage, it was still breathless in the second.
But the second stage, likewise, came to an end in consequence of a series of mechanical inventions. These included the further development of the printing art in the form of the linotype press, which made possible the printing of huge newspaper issues at costs within the range of all; the development of steam transportation, which made it possible to distribute these newspapers quickly over a wide territory; and, more than all, the invention of the telegraph and telephone, which brought news instantly from the most distant and diverse parts of the earth.
All these have now brought about a complete mechanization of ordinary information and news. The tense watcher of Biblical times who cried, as he caught sight of an oncoming chariot raising the dust a mile down the road, ‘The driving is like the driving of Jehu,’ no longer watches from the battlements. He sits at a telephone, and his secretary takes down the messages. The ‘beautiful feet of him that bringeth good tidings’ are no longer seen ‘upon the mountains.’ Those ‘beautiful feet’ now step on the gas of some newspaper ‘flivver.’ And the nameless immortal who only touched the high spots of the twentysix-mile stretch of road from Marathon to Athens in his eagerness to break the news of victory — the glorious Marathon runners of old are now relegated to the skating rinks and dance halls!
STAGE III
Conversation a Medium for Discussion. — Along with its functions of providing a repository of knowledge and a means for conveying current information, conversation has always served a further noble purpose as a medium for the exchange of ideas. At bottom, however, this is not so much exchange as it is a process of production of ideas, a process of generating and developing ideas — what Socrates called bringing ideas to birth. This is something vastly different from merely handing down knowledge or communicating information. Conversation in this function means the hammering of vigorous minds upon the hot iron on the anvil, out of which something is forged that did not exist before.
This has been one of the richest aspects of conversation in past centuries; in economic terms, we should call it one of the most productive functions of conversation. In its highest form it is illustrated by the ‘sermons’ of Christ and the dialogues of the Greek and Roman philosophers, not only in the conventionalized versions written by their literary disciples, but in the actual conversations of these groups of thinkers that were never reported. In one of its most picturesque forms it is illustrated by the conversations in the brilliant salons of European capitals a century or two ago, which sometimes exercised momentous influence on the course of political and diplomatic events. It flourished with particular exuberance in the period of political ferment and of intellectual storm and stress throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the days of the old Cheshire Cheese in London, in the coffeehouses, Rathskellers, clubs, in the gathering places of students, literati, communists and revolutionaries of one field or another, and in almost any place where serious and intelligent people came together to eat and drink — and talk.
In our own country, stirring questions of religion and politics created a lot of good conversation and developed a lot of high-grade intellectual fibre. Mark Hopkins on one end of the log and the student on the other had no monopoly on that type of intellectual timber. Most of us have listened to conversations among sundry groups at one time or another which, in originality, keenness, and vigor, would rival the harness shops, coffeehouses, and salons of any earlier period; for this function of conversation survived long after conversation as a repository of knowledge and a medium for the communication of information had been eliminated by the mechanization of these fields.
This function still survives in scattered places and among odd groups here and there, just as remnants of the Agricultural and Handicraft stages may still be found in out-of-the-way corners of modern economic life. But as a prevalent or characteristic type of social conversation it appears to be no longer extant. Social groups now rarely ‘discuss.’ They narrate personal incidents, tell stories, gossip, repeat bits from the theatre, make ‘wisecracks’ and ‘come-backs,’ and keep up a general running conversation. But one rarely finds that clash of minds that generates thought or that hammering of minds upon the molten metal of ideas. One does n’t come away at the end of an evening with new ideas or kindled mental activity, and probably has not contributed to either. It may be that no one is more responsible than another. But what is the trouble?
One trouble, peculiar to modern life and the result of modern conditions, is that the ordinary subjects of current interest have all been discussed, up and down and crossways, before any of us have a chance at them. They have been discussed by the morning papers on the way into town and by the evening papers on the way out. Not only has each subject been discussed by the papers themselves, but they have related what President Hoover, Secretary Mellon, Owen Young, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, or Mussolini has said about it. If it is a matter of local interest, it has already been discussed at luncheons of the Chamber of Commerce, the Real Estate Board, the Rotary Club, and the Woman’s City Club. When we get together at the Country Club or elsewhere, what more is there to be said about it? About all one can say is that he agrees or disagrees with what some score of papers and prominent citizens have already said about it. The result is that everyone is fully informed upon the subject, but no one has any ideas about it; and that is not the soil out of which vigorous conversation grows.
Two things have made all this predigested discussion possible — in addition to the factors we have already considered. These are our intense urbanization and our elaborate business and social organization, both of which are direct results of the mechanical and technological factors of modern life, but only lately carried to the degree in which we see them now. If to these general factors we add the most recent and most revolutionary invention, the radio, with its verbose discussions of everything on earth, we have a fairly adequate explanation of the way in which machine and large-scale methods of discussion have robbed conversation of one of its richest functions.
Perhaps in this, as in other fields of production, one may still feel that the machine-made product is the better. Certainly the radio can command more expert ability in every field and can bring more distinguished people to the discussion of our problems than any of us could ever hope to gather together in our own households. Yet somehow this is n’t the whole story; for if, without intending any sacrilege, one can imagine Christ broadcasting the Sermon on the Mount from Station WMQ on the Mount of Olives and signing off, as the sun went down, to allow the Chairman of the Board of Subdividers to expound the rare opportunities for investment in summer cottages on the Sea of Galilee, one cannot but wonder whether the Beatitudes would ever have carried their message of comfort to mankind.
STAGE IV
Conversation as a Form of Entertainment. — The final stages move rapidly, just as mechanical and technological inventions have moved rapidly in recent periods. But after the more serious functions — what we might call the more productive functions — of conversation had been replaced by machine methods, one of the most charming functions of conversation still remained outside the range of the factory system. This is that large volume of conversation that has always been carried on for the sole purpose of good companionship and pleasant entertainment. Friendly colloquium has always been one of the richest enjoyments of human companionship, one of the things, in fact, which have helped to maintain that sometimes wavering line of distinction between man and the animals. The descriptions of the mellow warmth and untiring delight of genial conversation in the De Senectute and De Amicitia, in Pliny and scores of later writers, do not exaggerate the real enjoyment that people have always found in talking to each other, especially in the relaxation of social gatherings.
This one delightful function of conversation still survives; presumably it will always survive among choice spirits here and there. But as a recognized type of social entertainment it appears to be well on the way toward extinction. Social groups no longer sit around the fireplace and talk all evening. The mere mention of such a thing brings a reminiscent smile and a picture of the simpler village life of the eighties or some other remote period. If an orchestra or other agency does not ' provide entertainment,’ there are cards and dancing and other standardized forms of amusement. In any case, the entertainment is provided. In Roman times, everyone carried his own napkin to the dinner party; and it would have been as discourteous for one’s hostess to offer one a napkin as for a modern hostess to inquire whether one of her guests needed a handkerchief. So, in simpler times, one was expected, in a way, to bring his entertainment with him in the form of readiness to contribute to the conversation of the occasion. Now, both napkins and entertainment are provided.
The particular inventions which have pushed the mechanization of entertainment further than ever before are, of course, the moving pictures and the radio. The radio, like the vacuum cleaner, has now invaded every household, the radio coming on when the vacuum cleaner has signed off for the day. It has thus displaced conversation in its most intimate habitat.
How can one converse when Amos and Andy are ‘conversing’? Perhaps here also the machine-made product is better. I suppose it’s a matter of taste. Certainly, if an increased production of small talk is desirable, one would prefer to have it done by machine rather than have to do it one’s self. In any case, the mechanization of entertainment and of talking as a form of entertainment appears now to be eliminating natural conversation as a recognized form of social diversion.
So here we are, approaching apparently the close of a fourth stage in this long course of evolution — an evolution as sharply defined as that of industry and economic life in general and one that has been subject in large degree to the same determining factors. There have been many discourses on the ‘Lost Art of Conversation,’ implying that a fine art has been lost through changes in literary taste and social ideals. If conversation is a lost art, it is for much the same reasons that the art of the spinning wheel, the hand shuttle, and the shoemaker’s last are lost arts; because conversational machinery has been developed that can turn out conversation in greater quantities than even the most loquacious of our ancestors could have hoped to emulate.
I would not concede that, as an art, it is altogether lost; but when conversation as a repository of racial knowledge and experience, a means for the communication of information, a medium for the discussion of ideas, and a form of social entertainment — when all these functions of conversation have been replaced by machine methods for doing the same things, what are we going to have left? Should we make an effort either to counteract the trend toward mechanization or to minimize its undesirable consequences? Perhaps we should simply waive all these misgivings, as of lesser import in comparison with the magnitude of the progress made. The older schools of economic thought have always measured human progress in terms of man’s increasing ‘power over nature.’ Machinery has multiplied man’s hands has made him a modern Briareus, a hundredhanded giant; modern forms of transport by land and sea have given him seven-league boots and the wings of Mercury; telescope and television have given him a hundred eyes, with which to pry into the remotest corners of the earth and sky; and now the telephone and radio have magnified his hearing until, like the Indian bison hunter, he can put his ear to the earth and hear the footsteps of the antipodes.
But while man is thus busy increasing his power over nature, what is happening to him? The biologists tell us, humorously perhaps, that if we cease to use our legs and feet they may in the course of time be eliminated or greatly abbreviated, just as the whale’s quadrupedal equipment has disappeared since he took to the sea for his livelihood. The hand has lost much of its deftness and craftsmanship since the advent of the machine. Is there danger that the mechanical extension of our hearing may after all have some resemblance to the elongation of Midas’s ears in the old legend? As a reminder of the king’s folly in listening too constantly to the voice of avarice, Apollo decreed that his ears should grow longer and longer; and as they grew they became pointed at the ends and covered with long coarse hair, until the king’s astonished barber beheld that lo, Midas had ass’s ears! Greatly embarrassed, Midas made the barber swear, under pain of death, never to reveal the secret. And the barber went about for days, laughing covertly at his master’s predicament but keeping the throbbing secret in his breast, until, fearful that he might not be able to restrain his mirth or his secret longer, he went out into the fields and, digging a hole in the ground, whispered to the earth, ‘ Midas hath ass’s ears’; then, filling the hole again, he retraced his steps, greatly relieved. But the reeds and rushes grew up where the barber had digged; and in the autumn, when the breeze blew over the field and rustled their leaves, the reeds and rushes whispered, ' Midas hath ass’s ears ’; and the secret was out.
So I apprehend that the mechanization of speech is having some unhappy effects, not only on the conversation of the speaker, but upon the ears of the hearer. We are growing a new crop of ears — ears that listen with equal avidity to the tooth-paste advertiser, the marathon-dance announcer, and the political buffoon. There is danger that the machine process is going to lend itself to exploitation by some of the worst elements in our social and political life — elements that can speak most eloquently when there are asses’ ears to listen. While going up and down and to and fro in the Windy City and elsewhere, I have for some time been noticing the ears of people and have observed with some anxiety that many of them are growing longer and longer and becoming more and more pointed at the ends, but have kept the secret to myself withal — until, like Midas’s barber, fearful that I may not be able to repress it longer, I am now confiding it to these pages.