RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL ELEMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Imagine yourselves standing at a street corner of a large and  busy city. Everything in front of you is bustling, moving. Here, to your left, a man laboriously pushes a wheelbarrow. There in measured trot, a horse is pulling a carriage; on all sides you see a constant stream of cars and buses. Above you, somewhere in the distance, can be heard the buzzing noise of an aeroplane. In all this there is nothing unusual; nothing that would to-day call for surprise or astonishment; it is only when concentrated analysis has revealed the problematic aspect of even the most obvious things in life that we discover sociological problems underlying these everyday phenomena. Wheelbarrow, carriage, automobile, and aeroplane are each typical of the means of conveyance in different phases of historical development. They originate in different times, thus they represent different phases of technical development; and yet they are all used simultaneously. This particular phenomenon has been called the law of the 'contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous'. However well these different phases of history seem to exist side by side in the picture before us, in certain situations and under particular circumstances they can lead to the most convulsive disturbances in our social life.

No sooner does this thought occur to us than we can see a different picture unfolding itself. The pilot who only a minute ago seemed to be flying quietly above us hurls a hurricane of bombs and in the twinkle of an eye lays waste everything and annihilates everybody underneath him. You know that this idea is far from being a figment of the imagination, and the uneasiness which its horror awakens in you leads involuntarily to a modification of your previous admiration of human progress. In his scientific and technical knowledge man has, indeed, made miraculous strides forward in the span of time that separates us from the days when the carriage came into use; but is human reason and rationality, in other than the technical field, today so very different from what it was in the distant past of which the wheelbarrow is a symbol? Do our motives and impulses really operate on a higher plane than those of our ancestors? What, in essence, does the action of the pilot who drops bombs signify?

Surely this: that man is availing himself of the most up-to-date results of technical ingenuity in order to satisfy ancient impulses and primitive motives. If, therefore, the city is destroyed by the deadly means of modern warfare this must be attributed solely to the fact that the development of man's technical powers over nature is far ahead of the development of his moral faculties and his knowledge of the guidance and government of society. The phenomenon suggested by this whole analogy can now be given a sociological designation; it is the phenomenon of a disproportionate development of human faculties. This phenomenon of a disproportionate development can be observed not only in the life of groups but also in that of individuals. We know from child-psychology that a child may be intellectually extremely precocious, whilst the development of his moral or temperamental qualities has been arrested at an infantile stage. Such an unevenly balanced development of his various faculties may be a source of acute danger to an individual; in the case of society, it is nothing short of catastrophic.

(From Hobhouse Memorial Lecture, 1940, by Karl Mannheim)