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HITCH YOUR THEATRE TO A STAR
49
sliops, the houses, the churches and the schools are all alike. There may be woolen mills here and steel mills there and oil refineries farther away but the pattern of life — except as the difference is dictated by climate — is pretty much everywhere the same. Why? Dr. Shapley answers that when he says:
"Much of our thinking and feeling has been delegated to others through the domination of chain newspapers, broadcasting syndicates, and movie theaters. ... It is alarming to realize how many of us hear the same news commentators, the same comedians and music analyzers; and to realize how many of us read the same comic strips, eat the same food, pin up the same girl, announce the same profound observations on the goodneighbor policy and the morals of Mussolini. Unconsciously, we have delegated our thinking, our feeling, much of our tasting, and even the intonation of our trite comments to a few score of men and women, mostly mediocre, who have gained access to our food jobbers, our broadcasting studios and our newspapers."
Dr. Shapley, being a star-gazer, is not pessimistic about all this as we are sometimes tempted to be. He accepts the fact that it is too late to begin over; but at this hour of great changes we can still change:
"It is high time," he says bravely, "we got started on a program of deliberate cultivation of community life. ... A pohtical internation and a universal economic agreement need not lead to a sterile uniformity in the cultural world. . . . That's the point
to remember. Hills, valleys, deserts, mountains, the seashores, and the various belts of latitude will remain, notwithstanding the ingenuity and deviltry of man. And the climates, soils, waters, and scenery of various . . . localities can and will have a basic effect upon the folkways of whatever inhabitants choose to remain. . . . That localized cultures change slowly (whether of man, plant or animal), and with some care might be made almost permanent, is demonstrated in nearly all the large countries of the world by the present social and domestic differences in contiguous groups. Only if the world maintains these cultural human varieties, these endemic cultures, will it provide natural opportunities for evolution. I mean evolution in taste and art, as well as growth in industry and natural science. For it is well recognized hy the biologist that a uniform population changes hut little, and that that small change is li\ely to he for the worse." (The italics are ours.)
But if we are to change our tack — to move consciously from an imposed sameness toward a natural diversity^— how and where shall we begin? One way would be to borrow — without benefit of lend-lease — from our allies the Russians, to borrow not only their purpose to develop within each separate Soviet every evidence of local or national culture and tradition, but, more particularly, to borrow the free and fearless use of the word soul, and with it the free and fearless defense of the idea that it represents.