|
|
|
|
By Tom Meyer
AKYPD is published
by Berghahn Books, 2000
ISBN 1-57181-218-0
| Beginning Synopsis | Preface
& Introduction |
Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 |
| Ch 3-7 Synopsis |
Ch 5 | Ch 6 | Ch 7 | Ch 8 | |
| Ch
8-12 Synopsis |
Ch 9 | Ch 10 | Ch 11 | Ch 12 |
| Looking Forward | Ch 13 | Ch 14 | Ch 15 |
Preface – 1942, Preface – 1965, Chapters I, called Introduction, and II, called Clearing the Air are meant to introduce Margaret Mead and her credentials, and to establish that she has a capability to do what she asserts, as an anthropologist, she can do. Chapter II might today be called “Setting the Stage,” for it immediately divides the plot of the author, (which is the question of how to fight war successfully) into two distinctly different kinds of answers. On the left hand, there are those answers which generals will “general about,” and on the right hand, there are those answers about which anthropologists might well marshal their learned talents.
Reason for the book
Chapter I is called Introduction. And Keep Your Powder Dry has an Introduction – 1942, and an Introduction – 1965, when later rewritten. As conceived during the onset of World War II, Mead wrote “I came home to a world on the brink of war, convinced that the next task was to apply what we knew as best we could, to the problems of our own society.” (page 1) Mead was speaking as a trained anthropologist, returning from field studies among peoples in the Asian Pacific Islands, to the British and American peoples, but especially to her fellow Americans. In the first edition to her book, she spoke of her sense of responsibility – “The obligation of the scientist to examine his material dispassionately is combined with the obligation of the citizen to participate responsibly in his society.” It was her own remark, lifted from her symposium in 1940 with Wilson College, and which continued to impress its weight upon her.
Legitimacy for the book
Referring to the post-World War I period, Mead writes “A score of years ago the British invented a special use for anthropologists as advisors to the government.” (page 4) She cites the need for anthropologists to find the answers to “vexatious” questions, and speaks of anthropological training as providing an ability to get to the heart of such matters in cultural terms hurriedly, and to provide answers that might pass political muster. Head-hunting, for example, might be replaced within cannibalistic societies with a recommendation for, say, boar-hunting, and still provide the necessary cultural means for achieving male adulthood.
Organizing skeletal design for the books chapters
“Most of the ideas in the chapters which follow,” wrote Mead, “were developed in answer to definite questions brought to me by groups of people hopeful that a different experience and training might throw light on their problems.” (page 5) Mead links her credentials to her purpose more specifically with a kind of modern Robert Fulgrum statement. “When I talk about what Americans must do if they are to use the full resources of their character structure, I will be making highly technical statements, and they will often sound exactly like a Sunday school lesson.” (page 6) (Robert Fulgrum wrote All I Ever Learned in Life I Learned in Kindergarten, some fifty years after Mead’s book.) The titles of Mead’s chapters which follow do not take the form of answers to the questions posed to her by visiting groups of intellectuals, each seeking light on its own problems. The great questions do not themselves, it seems, make great chapter titles. The chapter titles take as their organizational schemata the broad and universal character-shaping patterns that Mead carefully observes. The chapter titles Mead uses are the people-shaping patterns which in fact we call culture. Thus we can expect to find chapters dealing with the influence of family parents on learned behavior, the influence of brothers and sisters, the influence of peer groups, etc. But it is with elegance that Mead concludes her Introduction – 1942 in deference to these central questions. She wrote “…we will now do what we can, as anthropologists, to win the war. We can come out into the marketplace, work in the dust of the traveled road, laying aside immunities of the ivory tower, and try to ask the right questions, secure in the faith that, whenever in all his history Man has asked the right question, he has found the answer.” (page 8)
Who this book is for
Mead tells the reader the original printing of And Keep Your Powder Dry was conceived as a departure from sending her message to a universal English audience, to instead, a strictly American audience. From her Preface – 1942 Mead wrote “I wrote this book for my own countrymen to add what I have of knowledge and love of them, to armor them for the years of conflict ahead.” (Page xxxvi) She goes on to say that she had the publisher alter the printing of words like labour to labor so that the world-wide English could better be understood by these same countrymen. “This particular book,” she asserts, “was written for Americans.” … “It was written with a profound faith in the strengths of my own people…” (xxxviii)
Yet the message (and theme) are universal
In spite of narrowing the language to improve American understanding, Mead continues her train of thought with this global theme: “…every nation does best to cultivate its strengths and watch warily over its weaknesses, denying neither, accepting both.” Referring to her book, Mead says, “ It was written in the belief that only by each people developing their separate genius to the full as they cooperate more and more with each other, can a culture develop that will take all these themes, not only those from Britain, the United States and the Dominions, but from China and Russia, from France and Burma, from India and Italy, from Yugoslavia and Japan, and Germany, from the glory that was Greece, and the future dream of an ordered world society of peoples, in which each may stand in his own appointed place and find it good.” (xxxviii) It is remarkable that her vision includes revitalizing of both the victor and the vanquished, preserving the unique dignities of both.
Two methods to prepare for war
“There are many ways in which a country may reckon its assets and its liabilities for war, for peace after wars, for building an order in which war and peace shall become as outmoded as alterations of famine and plenty, plague and health…” (page 9).
The first way is…
“We may count over our natural resources – and a great many experts are doing just that. We may make an inventory of our idle stock – in warehouses, in the rusting rails of abandoned trolley tracks or the pedestals of our less-loved public statuary. We may draw maps and calculate distances as they were when men sailed the seas, as they are not when bombers have a range of thousands of miles. We may even count noses and match them up with the number of sub-machine guns…What we have available on or under the earth, what we have made and are not using or need not use, where we are and how much trouble it will be for other people to get to us or we to them, laden with either bombs or food – these are familiar problems. (page 9)
The second way is…
“But there is another problem which is just as relevant to the question of winning this war and playing an effective and decent role in the post-war world which people have taken less seriously. Not the problem of what we have, where we are and how many of us are available to use how many machines and weapons, but the problem of what we are ourselves. (page 9) To the question of how total war must be fought, Mead supplements the problems of “material, geography, and sheer numbers” with another – “the quality of the people; their national character” – terms she borrows from the psychological writings of Gregory Bateson. (page 9) Total war, Mead says, tests our national character. Speaking of war, she writes “It tests our ability to work together, to compensate quickly for errors and miscalculations, to fight a battle so that it leaves one strong enough to gather up the wounded, rally one’s own troops, stop fires which may have started in the neighborhood, order new supplies, sleep soundly, and rise to work – if there is no more fighting to do – on the morrow. And it tests our enemies and our allies, and our ability to co-operate with our allies in the same way. (page 10)
From this question derive the strategy with which we fight
There is a strategy to the way in which Meade proposes we fight. The way in which Mead proposes we fight is ask first What is an American, a German, an Englishman, or an Australian? What are his strengths and his weaknesses, what is his peculiar pattern of strength and weakness, invincible under one set of conditions, infinitely vulnerable under another? (page 10) In describing the enemy Mead writes “If people, potentially similar at birth, can be developed to look so very different, to walk and talk differently, quarrel and make love, drive a bargain and mourn a relative, race a horse or shoot a rabbit – so differently – we must also recognize that they – the Germans, the Italians, the English – and the Americans – are different now… The Germans lacked democratic machinery because their way of life lacked those emphases and attitudes on which democratic machinery can flourish.” (page 12) “We are our culture. The culture of 100 years ago was the behavior of those who lived a hundred years ago.”
What is culture?, how does it originate?, and of what importance is it that culture renders us different?
Mead explains that terms like culture, character, and character formation, though they are abstractions of the mind, have a definite consistency or pattern which can be distinguished and therefore dissected into each variety of national strengths and weaknesses. “So, in every culture, in Samoa, in Germany, in Iceland, in Bali, and in the United States of America, we will find consistencies and regularities in the way in which new-born babies grow up and assume the attitudes and behavioral patterns of their elders – and this we call ‘character formation.’” (page 13) Culture, then, is the learned by-product of socialization within each unique grouping of peoples.
“If differences between peoples are to be referred to culture, and to circumstances, events in their past and present situation – and those cultures and those circumstances are different – then the people themselves will be different.” (pages 13-14) Mead will later argue that even if philosophically all men are created equal, that it remains important to discern differences. That such differences should cause us to wish to eliminate or isolate the worst from our common natures (slavery, racism, disease, etc), and to retain the unique and best attributes of each culture, both friend and foe.
If you would win, fight according to your own style
Thus she concludes Chapter II – Clearing the Air with the idea that “We must fight and win the war as Americans, not as hastily streamlined, utterly inadequate, imitation Germans or Japs. It’s a safe bet that an attempt to make an American adult into an imitation of a Nazi soldier will produce something inferior to a Nazi soldier. We believe that the strength of those who are reared to freedom is greater than the strength of those reared in an authoritarian state. Now, in the strength of this faith, we wish the chance to fight and if need be, die. Therefore, we must also articulate the other half of the belief – that only as we use the character developed under that freedom, in all its uniqueness, can we win. Freedom’s battles must be fought by freedom’s own children.” (page 16)
These chapters express the psychodynamics of growing up as an American. We are the result of the influence of our forefathers from Europe (Chapter Three and Five); we are motivated by success (Chapters Four through Seven). Our language, our families, and our upbringing occur under uniquely American conditions.
What patterns make Americans who they are?
“What then is this American character?” asks Mead. (page 17) American character consists of the patterns acquired in being raised in America. Americans establish ties to one another by identifying landmarks along the road which each is expected to have traveled. Thus we ask each other’s home town, or favorite baseball team, or holiday ornament, or Thanksgiving dressing. Behind that kind of questioning, asserts Mead, Americans remember and purposively set aside their European ancestry. Life has ceased to be the static European equivalent of growing up on and retaining one’s father’s estate. Life is mobile for every American, and every American is regarded as having no likely common ancestors with any other American. If every American has followed his own long and lonely road, so too has every other American. It is therefore the road and the changes and places themselves which we have in common with one another. (paraphrase – pages 17-21)
How is this theme of always moving on reflected in the upbringing of American children?
Perhaps the first point in the process of socializing American children is that “all the great configuration of American culture is mediated to the child by his parents, his siblings, his near relatives, and his nurses.” (page 24)
Parents in Europe transmit a different set of expectations to their children than do American parents. In the old societies of Europe, as byproducts of the parents’ static position in life, their children inherited a defined, probable place in life. Not so of third-generation Americans, who are always moving, always readjusting, always expecting to improve their lives. “With this orientation towards a different future for the child comes also the expectation that the child will pass beyond his parents and leave their standards behind him.” (page 26) To continue Mead’s reasoning, “Americans expect their children to live in a different world, to clothe their moral ideas in different trappings, to court in automobiles although their forebears courted, with an equal sense of excitement and moral trepidation, , on horsehair sofas.” (page 27) She therefore reasons that “Americans add the mixture of hope and envy and anxiety which comes from knowing that their children are not deteriorated versions of themselves, but actually – very actually – manage a car better than father ever did.” (page 27) If we slide among past generations of Americans we might well find the following general attitudes:
“By and large, the American father has an attitude toward his children which might be loosely classified as autumnal. They are his for a brief and passing season and in a very short while they will be operating gadgets which he does not understand and cockily talking a language to which he has no clue. (page 28)
Who are the three generations?
Grandfather and second generation were contributors to such resulting feelings but were indeed different form third generation Americans. Grandfathers had rebelled by leaving lands in which they were expected to stay, and their rebelliousness was quelled only by the success they achieved in the new world. Grandfather is torn between encouraging his own sons to strike out in the American way on their own, and between the guilt he feels in thinking that he did not have to tear so completely from his European ways, and might it not be better if his own family descendants might remain somewhat loyal to and around him.
The second generation consists of American born of European-bred parents. The second generation set part of the tone for their own children to succeed. The second generation is expected to succeed, to go further than his father went. Leaving his father, he leaves a partial failure, for the father still clung to the values of the past. He rejects European ties and entanglements. He seeks to dominate nature in his own country. He becomes intolerant of foreign language and foreign ways.
The grandchild, or third generation, “is told in school, in the press, over the radio, about the founding fathers, but they were not after all his founding fathers; they are, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, somebody else’s ancestors” according to Mead. (page 30) An observer from Europe “hears an endless invocation of Washington and Lincoln, of Jefferson and Franklin. Obviously, Americans go in for ancestor worship, says the European.” But Mead says they miss the point. “Washington represents the thing (the ideal) for which grandfather left Europe…” “Washington is not that to which Americans passionately cling but that (ideal form of community) to which they want to belong, and fear, in the bottom of their hearts, that they cannot and do not. This odd blending of the future and the past, in which another man’s great-grandfather becomes the symbol of one’s grandson’s future, is an essential part of American culture.” (page 31)
Knowing that we cannot all be third generation Americans, Mead qualifies her interpretation near her conclusion to Chapter III. “When I say that we are most of us – whatever our origins – third-generation in character structure, I mean that we have been reared in an atmosphere which is most like that which I have described for the third generation.” She tells us that father is to be out-distanced and considered outmoded. He is to be thought of as having done very well in his own time, but that he is no longer current. He is like his descendants in moving forward and away from Europe, but he now stands for the way things were done, which was pretty good then, but are no longer up-to-date now. We lack his rebellious sense, but we need not fight him, merely pass him by proving with new cars and better homes and more stylish clothing that we have gone on ahead into today’s world. Our momentum, says Mead, is “onward and upward, towards the world of Washington and Lincoln; a world in which we don’t fully belong, but which we feel, if we work at it, we some time may achieve.” (page 33)
In Europe, much of what one learns in survival depends upon the class one is born into, and culture consists in part of learned behaviors. And so for America, Chapter 4 could concern itself with – What distinguishes the middle class? How is middle class in Europe different from middle class in America? But Mead finds a different method to examine American character. “Class thinking, derivative as it is from caste thinking,” she says, “defines one’s own position in terms of one’s group.” (page 35) She asserts “In America especially in the old communities of the Eastern seaboard, it is possible to find quite a considerable echo of the European system. Enough people have lived there long enough to establish themselves in a stratified position, to which they do or do not admit newcomers, according as the latters’manners and pocket-books appear to approximate those of the people in possession.” (page 36) While at Boston University I observed in the Dean of International Studies that characteristic. He could count the generations, knew his lineage, and denoted his precise place within the community of scholars, and would subject newcomers to his manner of inclusion or exclusion.
The chapter makes distinctions as to the meaning of upper-upper, and lower-lower (class), but brings Mead to her idea that “American society is very like a fish society, based as it is on length of residence in a community rather than upon original antecedents or special personality characteristics.” (page 40)
From the point of view of American character formation, the relevant questions in America may not involve class. For “Class in America is in fact part of the success. Game. ‘How much did you have to start with? Hm, not much, started with a big handicap. And how far did you get?’…”
“It is possible to describe the American system without mentioning class, to talk instead of the premium on success, and to directly to the dynamics of character formation which lie back of the American will to succeed” we are told. (page 41)
She adds that class in America is not a dynamic variable, meaning: “People can be made afraid by class, they can be reassured by class, they can suffer because of class-typed behavior, but they do not act because of class except in pathological cases where this special form of mobility has become an obsession.” (pages 42-43)
The relevant questions insofar as character formation in America are concerned do not invoke class. The relevant questions concern success and are four-fold: (1) “Is it not, however, more relevant to ask: Has the American scene shifted so that we still demand of every child a measure of success (in material goods) which is actually less and less possible for him to attain? (2) …Have we made it a condition of success that a man should reach a position higher than his father’s, when such an achievement (for the many) is dependent upon the existence of a frontier and an expanding economy? (3) Have we given a sense of failure and ignominy all of those who were plunged downward by the Depression? (4) … Is the American success system flexible enough to adjust to changing conditions? (page 43) In the USA, the relevant variable isn’t class, it’s success.
We have made ourselves different from those we left behind.
“Gradually,” says Mead, “a dichotomy has developed between those things in terms of which we permit Europe to look down upon us, and those things in terms of which we look down on Europeans: art, ‘culture,’ music, … these things we concede and meanwhile we reserve the material and moral worlds for our own superiority – better plumbing, friendlier personal relations, more moral marriages … . We have more democracy and more peace and more freedom. America is a new man’s country o r God’s! Europe is old… (pages 44-45)
We must succeed in a new world that is as yet unordered.
We are driven towards success by the impetus embedded in our parents. During three centuries, the “Order, form, discipline, style – all of the attributes of old and settled culture … were lacking in our lives. … For all our lives, our own and those of our ancestors who lived in America, have been spent in living up to an unknown standard – learning to live in a world that did not yet exist for us yet, finding no clues where all other people have found clues… You must be a success. (page 46)
The American dream is unfinished and requires continued new energy to achieve.
“If the first generation started poor enough, and had back enough luck, the American dream could last more than three generations before it became an empty myth…We got a long way to go. But the way to get there is to make something new, not break something old. … Get on out and hustle and stop brooding. (pages 46-47)
We are persons in two parts – the part created in Europe and whose offspring we are, and the new American, striving toward goals set by the forefathers of America.
“Freedom is not enough. Freedom that is its own goal has no design, but is only an impulse… . The European is in our midst, either learning our ways and becoming like us, an American who is devoted to success in an endless race, or not learning our ways, scorning us and our ways and turning his eyes back to Europe that has disowned him. … We have assimilated him into our national character both his patience and his eagerness in the face of American life, and his scornful impatience of its lack of design. (page 49)
Chapter 6 tries to answer the question How do we become Americans? Mead answers this in three ways: (1) by studying the effect our language in a new land has on us, (2) by recognizing the dynamics between parents and children of those seemingly propelled to succeed, and (3) by mentioning the role of teachers in America.
Our language is the public language learned in the marketplace, the factory, the post office, the workplace. Our private language was the foreign tongue maintained at home. The overtones of the private language embodying personal relationships languished in a foreign tongue, while the language of use, of written words, and of action was occasioned by those who learned it in a particular work-like setting.
“When we ask how babies become Americans, we are asking how all these precipitates in the American language … have been recreated in the upbringing of the growing child.” (page 53)
These characteristics mark the American family: Parents and children typically live in a house by themselves; grandparents live at a distance and are not really necessary; brothers and sisters are essential to the make-up of a family; fathers come home from work, and every cultural device – radios, songs, phrases – affirm the importance of having a family. (page 54)
In Europe, children move easily between relatives, but in America, two parents are all the anchors one gets in a world which is otherwise vague and shifting. The American child is dependent on his parents of whom there is but one copy in the world.
Mothers conceive of their role as answering “how close am I to what I should expect to be?” and admonishes her child if he deviates from that which is common on the block in which he lives. A desperate uncertainty is conveyed to the baby. (pages 55-56) The child is learning that his whole place in society – everything – depends upon his parents. (page 57) Thus the young American starts life with a tremendous impetus toward success. (page 58) There is an emphasis upon achievement in order to deserve parental love. (page 59) Yet the child is expected to surpass his parents and thus must leave them and their ideas behind. (page 60)
The teacher is the representative of the changing world in which the child must succeed. She helps the child take home to the parents the success they so eagerly demand of him. The teacher is in fact, the representative of the future, into which parents anxiously wish their children to enter, and to be successful. (pages 61-62)
Although purporting to be a chapter on brothers and sisters, Chapter 7 is about sibling rivalry in America. American parents face the unique task of educating their children to be successful and competitive at a time and place in the future during a time of future productive adulthood. This chapter explains why the competition among children, is competition for parents’ approval.
(In America, as) “A mother learns to see her child… she can refer him to no absolute standard, only compare him, shoulder to shoulder, weight for weight, with the baby next door. …Only by keeping her eye on this year’s fashionable dicta about this year’s crop can the anxious mother get any security at all. … American parents send their children to school or kindergarten or first grade, to measure up to and be measured against their contemporaries.” (pages 65-66)
“Much of our so-called objective science is merely an apologia for the current climate of opinion,” writes Mead. Americans have a familiarity with and an empathy towards marking on the curve. That’s because we’ve been impressed by our statisticians who tell us that things to be measured frequently distribute themselves with 50 percent of the cases above average, 50 percent below average, and with the most frequently occurring measurement falling around the average. This process, says Mead, banishes forever any absolute standard, and substitutes one’s position in reference to an accidental set of contemporaries. Enroll among those unable to spell and you will earn a good grade in spelling. But enroll among high performers and you are likely to earn a middle grade. American parents accept the relative grading system and reward and punish in its name. (pages 66-67)
“This attitude towards success is expressed in the American version of sibling rivalry. …Characteristically, the American sibling position is one of competition, not for the mother’s person … but for her approval, and her approval has to be got by one’s achievement.” (pages 67-68)
Mother love is condition in America. ‘I will love you only if you achieve as much as other people’s babies. I can’t love you if you don’t’ survives into every competitive situation in life.” (page 69) How is this scene through the eyes of a child? According to Mead, “…in the American family, the child’s eyes are focused upon the outside world. He wins praise and approval as he displays that he ‘loves mother’ not by loving her, but by eating his carrots and growing to be the tallest boy of his age on the block.” (page 70) “So to the American” she continues, “only the very near contemporary is a potential rival or a potential stimulus. … Taught to measure himself on a flat narrow scale, he keeps his eyes where he has been trained to keep them, on others who can be compared to himself, and he has many devices for doing this. One of them is money. … Then you get another common denominator – how often one of them has his name in the paper, or his picture.” (page 71)
How is this regarded elsewhere? “Horrible, shudders the European. Reducing every sort of talent to a single gross scale, to dollars or clippings or fan mail, to some meaningless, quantitative scale, on which all human beings become comparable and so inevitably cheap.” (page 71) And yet, Mead says that this process has a positive, if unintended consequence in the hearts of some young lads that makes them very American. She says that “the listening boy may decide that he will do something a jot more daring, go around the world alone in a ketch.” She says that “American familiarity with greatness has its daring side.” (page 72)
Can we have confidence that our youth can fight and win against the Nazi, the Japanese, and the Italians? Yes answers Mead. Under what circumstances will American youth fight well? Mead enumerates the characteristics of the struggle which will whet the American appetite for conflict and overturn our reluctance for violence. How shall we fight? Answer – in the American style. Can our character proceed towards and implement a new world order?
Chapters Three through Seven established the psycho-dynamics of the American character development. Chapter 8 begins to bring that analysis to fruition. Mead opens the chapter with a list of attributes that if present, enable an American to fight well. A possible alarming question is then raised which might cause Americans not to fight well. But the question is answered in such as way as to both point to the importance of the role and development of the human conscience, and to suggest a means of measuring and recognizing the presence of that conscience among the youth in America.
“Under what conditions can an American display a full
determination to fight and win?”
(1) The other fellow must start the
fight.
(2) The other fellows must have
more breaks than we have at the start.
(3) We must feel that we are on the
side of the Right.
Though present at the onset of World War II, these conditions do not remove the fact that the generation going off to war was reared by a generation whom Mead felt had betrayed their own causes at the close of World War I. That generation had not carried forth with plans to reorganize the world in a way that justified the war to end all wars. Was this to be a liability for their children?
“The thesis of this book has been that the experience of generations of men, in a changing world, leaves its marks upon the culture, in the very bodies and souls of the next generation, that the behavior of those of us who live today carries traces of other behaviors, themes developed under other stresses… Our behavior, good and bad, our strengths and our weaknesses are the resultant of the choices, voluntary and involuntary, of those who have gone before us.” (page 76)
Speaking as a parent to herself, Mead replies “We did not fail in that a proper treaty in 1919 would have saved the world. … But we did fail in that we withdrew our moral effort from the job, and in that we stopped trying. … Still, we can say with a deep thankfulness that we have failed to break you, failed to rob you of your American inheritance. … In this our final failure, to put upon our children our own weakness, we have failed also, thank God.” (pages 79-80)
This psycho-dynamic if it is true has the following effects on the children – the combatants of World War II. The parents have represented themselves to their children as better than they truly were. And children come to find their parents wanting, especially during adolescence. Yet children have already internalized the kind of conscience held by their parents. Thus the children know that they too shall be found wanting, and imperfect.
“Then comes the spiritual crisis. … What shall I put in my parents’ place? What shall I aspire to that is better than myself? I am certainly not it. … But the Truth must lie somewhere. And here, generation after generation, the belief in Progress is reborn in the minds of the young. Progress, the belief that there is something better than our own way of life, that our own fumbling version of how men shall live with men here on earth, rest upon these very special mechanics, in which parents first hold themselves up as good and their children learn the rare and beautiful faith that there can be something better than oneself.” (page 85)
“The dynamics of American effort today depend on this relationship between moral parents and gradually disillusioned children who have, however, learned the lesson that goodness greater than their own lies somewhere within someone’s reach. … As long as youth argues as to whether one ought or ought not to have ideals, or to fight for what is right, we may be sure that they have come through, as Americans, through the miasma of twenty-five years of parents who repudiated responsibility (toward an improved world).” (pages 86-87)
The way in which each people handle the problem, or pattern of aggression is important.
“Cultures have patterned aggression in many different ways: they have regarded it as primary and rewarded it; regarded it as incidental and undesirable and extinguished it; regarded it as primary and punished it; regarded it as secondary and developed it. The degree to which one individual will fight, attempt to dominate or destroy persons or objects which interfere with his attainment of a goal, is of very great concern in human societies, and almost all societies of which we know are, in some measure, concerned with the problem, with staying the baby’s hand … (page 89)
How is aggression handled in the United States?
“What kind of pattern of aggressive behavior have we, as Americans? When is aggression justified in our eyes and when is it condemned? (page 89) Watching the schoolground, Mead pens her answer by comparing British to American schoolchildren. “In England, aggression is taken more for granted. Boys are regarded by adults as tough little devils… The job of civilizing them is the job of teaching them a set of rules which have been devised to make men behave decently to one another.” (page 92)
“In America, a new twist has been given to this Anglo-Saxon position. … Our notion of fair play, like theirs, includes the opponent, but it includes him far more personally. Where a count of English admonitions would show a larger emphasis on ‘Play fair,’ the American is more likely to bristle with ‘Pick on someone your own size,’ ‘Cradle robber!’, etc. … The English mother or the English nurse has a simpler job. She must teach her charge to start as few fights as possible and that there are rules. That is enough. … The American mother sees the external dangers. … To take it, he must dish it out. ‘Don’t let him take that shovel, Billy. Hit him back!’” (pages 92-94)
Mead is telling her readers that the Brits and us share an interest in emphasizing rules, creating opponents who are equal, and in permitting effort to be proportional to the relative strengths of those embroiled.
There is an American pattern - it is called the ‘chip on one’s shoulder,’ or ‘I dare you to knock it off.’ “So the American boy learns a series of lessons: aggression and fighting are wrong and are to be avoided as low, liable to arouse his mother’s and often his father’s disapproval; but aggression and fighting are also necessary, and, in fact compulsory whenever anyone tries to ‘pick on you,’ ‘push you around,’ ‘take things away from you.’ ‘You have to be tough to get along in this world, and you Billy, probably aren’t tough enough. Your dad isn’t.’ (page 95)
Under what conditions will an American be goaded, neigh, be willing, able, and boastful about his ability to fight?
“When the game is fair; when he can’t be told he started the fight, nor that he is pushing around someone smaller than he is. … And with his back to the wall, as the English fight best? No. The back to the wall position depends on the English basic assurance that they have more aggression than they need. When your back is against the wall, then, by the rules of the game, every ounce of aggression that is in you must come out. And, if you keep the rules and hit hard, you always win. That is the English conviction.” (page 96)
“The American, face with an audience, patterns his behavior on his childhood, on his boasts at the family table, on the recitations he stumbled through in Sunday school. … This boasting goes with the whole American character in which the child is expected to outdistance the parent.” (pages 98-99)
“The Pearl Harbor which woke America up was just the fact that Japan came along and pushed the chip off our shoulder and left us free to fight where our hands had been tied before.” Until then we had been “hog-tied by our own phrasing of life which forbade our starting war – a phrasing which we share with the other democracies and which will someday be the basis of a better world. But right at the moment it was a handicap. And then Japan pushed the chip off, and we could fight; fight with a clear conscience, because we didn’t start this fight. Japan did. And then Germany came along and ganged up with her and did the starting , too. … The chip on the shoulder – “It’s an American custom, and, when followed, has behind it that part of the American character which fights best when other people start pushing us around.” (page 100)
It would not do to take the passive attitude toward war. Rather, a pro-active attitude is consistent with the mental picture we hold of ourselves. Indeed, 1942 will become what we make of it. The future is partly in our own hands. “Trust God, my boys, and keep your powder dry” is the Puritan Anglo-Saxon tradition. Or for the women, cling to the phrase “Get your distaff ready, and God will send the flax.” We are a God-fearing nation.
“The Germans saw God on their side just because they were Germans. …They followed a tribal God whose preferences were determined by race. (page 103) But in America our creed is like that voiced in the Star-Spangled Banner: “Then triumph we must,” “For our cause it is just.” “And this be our motto, In God is our Trust.” (pages 103-104)
The Puritan position has its own weakness. We must be correctly informed. Referring to Americans, Mead writes “But against great and overwhelming defeats, defeats whose moral relationship to his own behavior he cannot see, he is helpless.” … “The war must make sense to us.” (pages103-104
It would not do to take the passive attitude toward war. Rather, a pro-active attitude is consistent with the mental picture we hold of ourselves. Indeed, 1942 will become what we make of it. The future is partly in our own hands. “Trust God, my boys, and keep your powder dry” is the Puritan Anglo-Saxon tradition. Or for the women, cling to the phrase “Get your distaff ready, and God will send the flax.” We are a God-fearing nation.
“The Germans saw God on their side just because they were Germans. …They followed a tribal God whose preferences were determined by race. (page 103) But in America our creed is like that voiced in the Star-Spangled Banner: “Then triumph we must,” “For our cause it is just.” “And this be our motto, In God is our Trust.” (pages 103-104)
The Puritan position has its own weakness. We must be correctly informed. Referring to Americans, Mead writes “But against great and overwhelming defeats, defeats whose moral relationship to his own behavior he cannot see, he is helpless.” … “The war must make sense to us.” (pages103-10
It would not do to take the passive attitude toward war. Rather, a pro-active attitude is consistent with the mental picture we hold of ourselves. Indeed, 1942 will become what we make of it. The future is partly in our own hands. “Trust God, my boys, and keep your powder dry” is the Puritan Anglo-Saxon tradition. Or for the women, cling to the phrase “Get your distaff ready, and God will send the flax.” We are a God-fearing nation.
“The Germans saw God on their side just because they were Germans. …They followed a tribal God whose preferences were determined by race. (page 103) But in America our creed is like that voiced in the Star-Spangled Banner: “Then triumph we must,” “For our cause it is just.” “And this be our motto, In God is our Trust.” (pages 103-104)
The Puritan position has its own weakness. We must be correctly informed. Referring to Americans, Mead writes “But against great and overwhelming defeats, defeats whose moral relationship to his own behavior he cannot see, he is helpless.” … “The war must make sense to us.” (pages103-104)
“Winning the war” said Mead “is a job of social engineering… We must understand and use the American character in the process. … Is not science, itself the child of democracy, the child of freedom to think and inquire, a monster child that must inevitably destroy its permissive parent? (page 112)
There is a way to get around the incompatibilities of good science, and the freedoms within democracy. “It is possible … that with the development of social science, with the application of real scientific inquiry to the ways of man, with techniques for freeing ourselves form the limitations imposed by our own culture, with techniques for including and allowing for the psychology of the investigator himself, the world has entered a new era… It is this type of social science, which is not a mere lifeless aping of the mannerisms of the natural sciences but which shapes its hypotheses to its materials and includes the repercussions of a hypothesis inside its equations, can give us premises by which we can set men free; release in them energies which can be trusted to develop towards more freedom instead of towards a machine model of slavery or Utopian totalitarianism. (page 115)
Ask, she says “How can we organize a society in which war will have no place? … What are the conditions in a culture, in its system of education, in its system of inter-personal relationships which promote a sense of free will? (page 116)
“We must recognize that one of the principal tasks in building a better world is to develop and conserve the leaders who must shape it…” (page 118) These things (like leadership) we can invent. “Democracy (itself) is an invention, like fire and language and marriage.” (page 122) “We must devise a for of social planning in which we never draw a final plan, … in which we determine the direction but not the end of the road … (page 122)
There is a danger – “the power to control individual human behavior and the exercise of such power are incompatible with human freedom. By recognizing that circumstance, by voluntarily tying our own hands and laying a solemn injunction upon our ardent imaginations, we become able to use the control that science has given us to set future generations free. (page 122)
Here are the hallmarks of American character structure:
“What is the role for such character structure – after winning the war – in working towards building the world anew? (page 123)
The American character structure contains within it the very special circumstance of linking moral virtue and success, as the outcome of its legacy of Puritanism. “The essence of Puritanism … was a belief that there was a relationship here on earth between good behavior and good deserts. … Very few peoples have ever trafficked long with such an unmanageable moral code”, but the peculiar conditions of American life promoted this attitude.” (page 124)
“The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.” (page 125) In our culture, the failure to keep moving upward by creating progress brings shame and guilt.
“This is our character; this our need for success. We talk about saving the American way of life – and this stands for a number of vague things. … Or it may mean something more; it may mean saving that dynamic principle which associates success and goodness. … If we cannot again work and move in a world where there is some relationship between our success and our effort and willingness to work, this American character is doomed to disappear with the physical frontier which fostered it. This insistence upon a relationship between what we do and what we get is one of our most distinguishing characteristics. (page 128)
“Those who see a worship of success as the worship of seven devils should ponder deeply the story of the worse devils who (might) enter.” (page 129) “… this American character … which built cities faster than cities had ever been built before, which created a civilization in which men were more nearly equal than they had ever been before, which created a civilization which could dream of freeing the whole world – does depend upon valuing success. (page 130) “If we are to keep it, we must do two things: (1) we must redefine success without, however, breaking the thread which ties success to effort; and (2) we must find a place which , like the great plains of the New World, gives us a wide stage on which to act out our parts.” (page (130)
“Can we not take this sense of moral purpose …so indomitable when it sets itself to a hard job – and shape from it a tool with which the building of a new world can be done? … Can we not tackle the job of post-war planning as we once tackled the wilderness? … “For our willingness to work on inventions, our belief that problems are to be solved by purposeful thought and experimentation, is another aspect of this type of character structure.” (page 131)
“Only in those societies which shifted success from heaven to earth, and so put the whole impact of religion back of efficiency, could we have a type of character in which it became a virtue to do the kind of thinking which lies back of invention, a virtue to set problems and solve them. … Social organization is also a matter of invention. … Not until we develop a comparable strategy of peace … will we have made the necessary inventions which will supercede war.” (pages 133-134)
“If our generals and our admirals will hold before their troops the chance of remaking the world, they will fight with every energy that is in them. (page 136)
What must we do to win the war and rebuild the world within the context of American character structure?
(1) We must see the emerging world as a world of plenty, of great expansion, of room for everybody to make a contribution, and succeed.
(2) We must see ourselves tackling a job which we believe can be done practically, like any other big job. We must be confident…
(3) It is necessary to recognize that we have a world worth keeping – a world in need of repair, a world in need of much redesigning, a world which is not organized on a world scale, but a world which contains many irreplaceable values, which once destroyed might never again be rediscovered.
(4) Each people in this existing world has something to contribute to the whole… values to add, points of view and ways of behaving , skills and insights and abilities which no other culture has.
(5) From our conscience… we can draw the motivation for not attacking other cultures, but we also need a motive for relying – in a positive sense – on what they have to give. (pages 138 – 142)
“American inventiveness mediate the break between European hand skill and the machine… We substituted an ability to analyze and build for the ability to feel and to be something different from ourselves.” (page 142)
“The very energy with which we can take over and reconstitute the painfully acquired skill of others comes from our lack of discrimination; our interest in quantity rather than quality; our emphasis upon the degree of success, not upon the kind of success. … We did not realize that values, like the ability to weave or to forge, cannot be reproduced without a pattern.” (page 143)
“We have gone beyond the stone age man, beyond the realm of random experimentation, beyond the level where the genius was the man who saw the importance of what some other man had probably done by accident… Conscious invention, articulately implemented by systematic knowledge has introduce a qualitative difference between the Eskimo or the Australian aborigine and ourselves, between the age of random trial and error and the age of purposeful invention.” (page 144)
“It is in the field of consumption – the field of living, rather than producing in order to live – that the new inventions are needed. … For some fifty thousand years man’s pride has lain in making up good answers to the riddle of human life, good explanations … It has only been very recently that we have turned from making up answers to asking questions, … setting ourselves problems instead of reconciling ourselves to disaster…. (page 147)
To win the chance to tackle the next great question … Americans are specially fitted to take part. We believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and our future, and in our parents and in our children, in that peculiar blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character. (page 148-149)
What must we do?
“We must go to school to other cultures, analyze them and rationalize our findings. We must find models and patterns which orchestrated together on a world scale, will make a world as different from the old as the machine world was from the craft industries of the Middle Ages. … If we are to learn from all these peoples, it is necessary that they should continue to maintain their own way of life.” (page 149-150)
“Every culture know to science has developed certain human gifts and neglected others, … Each culture has done this at tremendous trial and error cost, over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years.” (page 151)
“To be culturally tolerant … does not mean that we must have no standards. … As long as ther is anywhere in the world a center of infectious intolerance for a race or a sex, an age group or an occupation, a caste or a class, or for those who profess one religion rather than another, all of us are endangered.” (page 152-153) … “Only if they are incurable do we continue to segregate them.” (page 155)
“It’s not only decent – in terms of our American ethics – to give every other country a chance at the game, but – the reliable old puritan ethic again –it is also efficient to do so. We want the job well done, and we can do it better the more we insist that every other country does its own particular stuff.” (page 158)
“If it’s a technical job, an American job, an engineering job with a purpose that we are being given a change to do, will we be trained for it? … Are these students being taught to analyze and use the gifts of other cultures or merely to evade or exploit them? … Are they getting ready to orchestrate many cultural gifts – a possible route to a real new order – or to drown out every voice but ours.” (page 162)
“I have outlined American character as it looks against the background of seven other cultures which I have studied…” (page 165)
“Although this is not a job for Americans alone we must see it as America’s. Americans will not do it – being what we are – unless we feel that for some aspect of it we are better fitted than any people on earth today. We are proud but not sure, anxious to succedd but never certain that we will, willing to go ahead and tackle any job – but it must be our job. … we will count worth fighting for, that goal… phrased in American terms, in that mixtgure of faith in the right and faith in the power of science: Trust God – and keep your powder dry.” (page 166)
