That Marvel The Movie: A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant Future

With striking unanimity contemporary writers dealing with the problems vexing humanity to-day express amazement at the fact that the race has learned so little from its variegated past, that age after age it commits, under new conditions and with changes in terminology, ancient blunders resulting, as they did aforetime, in the tragedies of war, revolution, famine, epidemics and poverty. As of old, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse periodically sally forth, to have their evil way with men; more potent, through long practice, in their iconoclasm, as they have proved in recent years, than they were in the days of our ancestors. The individual, unless he be a moron, learns lessons from experience, avoids committing errors that marred his past and may become, eventually, worthy the name of a civilized, even a highly civilized, being. But there are many experts in mob psychology who despondently assert that, while the individual may demonstrate his well-nigh infinite superiority to his jungle progenitors, the seeming progress of the race as a whole has been merely illusory, that mankind is inherently as savage to-day as it was countless centuries ago. But why should not the race at large follow the course pursued by the average individual and derive from its past errors a mandatory enlightenment enabling it to avoid those recurrent retrogressions that furnish the cynic with arguments against the proposition that mankind is gradually ascending to a higher plane of civilization? Various answers may be given to this query, but the one to which this chapter calls attention is to the effect that to the vast majority of the human race the story of mankind's struggles and failures, triumphs and defeats, attainment of high civilizations only to lose them again, is a sealed book. The individual man can recall every detail of his experience of life and can pursue a course of safety by aid of the lighthouse of his past. If this prerogative of the individual could be magnified to include all mankind might not the time come presently when no generation would repeat the costly errors of preceding generations? Would not the mass learn and profit by experience, as does the unit? Now, is there any possible method whereby the human race can be induced to go to school to its recorded past, to the end that our posterity may establish eventually a civilization permanently safe from the internal and external forces of disintegration that have destroyed so many mighty civilizations founded by our forefathers? Is there any way by which men in the mass may employ mass history in the same advantageous manner adopted by individuals who use their "dead selves as stepping-stones to higher things?" Lothrop Stoddard's recent book, in which he demonstrates most ably the disquieting fact that contemporary civilization is menaced by many and grave perils, presents to a public that habitually resents disturbance of its self-complacent optimism an array of startling data making the above queries, to put it mildly, extremely pertinent. "Of the countless tribes of men," says Stoddard, "many have perished utterly while others have stopped by the wayside, apparently incapable of going forward, and have either vegetated or sunk into decadence. Man's trail is littered with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted with the graves of promising peoples stricken by an untimely end."

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