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ON THEATRE AND CINEMA— UNIVERSAL
situation. Our contemporary State centralism may lead to the same consequences as in Athens and Rome,* if we do not maintain a healthy and vigorous tradition in local government. For the time being we still live — in U.S.A. and Great Britain — on a past tradition. Politicians like Joseph Chamberlain, David Lloyd George, Herbert Morrison or Wilson and Roosevelt went through the great school of local government. I suspect they represent rather the exception than the rule. To achieve a balance between the tendency towards State centralisation and decentralisation is perhaps the most urgent task of our time.1
This further digression may be regarded, as misplaced in the general context of this study. Yet it seems to me that in view of the centralised structure of the modern cinema with its deliberate generalised (and consequently abstract) appeal, it may ultimately prove one of the great forces in speeding up the centralising process in which we live. Our modern local universal audiences are, when compared with the old medieval pageants, mysteries, and interludes of the town guilds, merely spectators, not active participants of a communal experience. The temptation to use the cinema as a mere instrument of passive entertainment is enormous. Only when local educational authorities — from primary schools upwards to universities and adult educational institutions — recognise that a critical, and that means vigilant, attitude towards the cinema may eventually create an appreciative and selective public opinion, only then shall we be able to force the film distributor to show us films which do not drug us with sensation and political apathy.
I hope the preceding pages have reminded the modern reader that during earlier phases of our European civilisation social philosophy had a vital interest in theatrical art and in all its degenerate forms. From Plato to Augustine an uninterrupted interpretation and discussion of dramatic art continues. Theatre, plays, and shows are interpretations of society, and as such the social philosophers reflect on the moral and philosophical norms which express themselves in the art of the theatre.
This tradition was maintained in later centuries: we find reflections on the theatre in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, in Luther and Melanchton, in Feneion, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, right down to Edmund Burke, who writes in an
1 In Great Britain, the 'organic' unity of parliamentary and municipal organisations fell 'quite apart', since the municipal reform in 1835. (Gf. Maitland, Constitutional History of England, p. 495.) It would now seem to be imperative to readjust by a conscious and deliberate effort what 'growth' and the society of 'laissez-faire appear in danger of destroying completely.
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