in young countries like America and Australia tends to the practical,
inventive, scientific, executive kinds rather than to the painter of pictures or
poems, the carver of statues or words, we must understand that each age
and place needs and elicits some types of ability rather than others in its
pursuit of environmental control. We should not compare the work of one
land and time with the winnowed best of all the collected past. Our problem
is whether the average man has increased his ability to control the
conditions of his life.
If we take a long-range view and compare our modern existence,
precarious, chaotic, and murderous as it is, with the ignorance, superstition,
violence, and diseases of primitive peoples, we do not come off quite
forlorn. The lowliest strata in civilized states may still differ only slightly
from barbarians, but above those levels thousands, millions have reached
mental and moral levels rarely found among primitive men. Under the
complex strains of city life we sometimes take imaginative refuge in the
supposed simplicity of pre-civilized ways; but in our less romantic
moments we know that this is a flight reaction from our actual tasks, and
that the idolizing of savages, like many other young moods, is an impatient
expression of adolescent maladaptation, of conscious ability not yet
matured and comfortably placed. The “friendly and flowing savage” would
be delightful but for his scalpel, his insects, and his dirt. A study of
surviving primitive tribes reveals their high rate of infantile mortality, their
short tenure of life, their lesser stamina and speed, their greater
susceptibility to disease.
If the prolongation of life indicates better
control of the environment, then the tables of mortality proclaim the
advance of man, for longevity in European and American whites has tripled
in the last three centuries. Some time ago a convention of morticians
discussed the danger threatening their industry from the increasing
tardiness of men in keeping their rendezvous with death.
undertakers are miserable progress is real.
