Grey River Argus WEDNESDAY, August 14, 1935. WHOSE TRAGEDY ?

Grey River Argus, 14 August 1935, Page 4

Grey River Argus WEDNESDAY, August 14, 1935. WHOSE TRAGEDY ?

Lecturing in England to an international conference on education, a noted neurologist, Dr. Hugh. Crichton-Miller, lias defined his particular idea of the tragedy of modern life. According to the cabled summary of his remarks, this lies in the fact that an escape from reality is being valued as freedom. There are, he says, any number of opportunities to “escape from chewing gum to morphia, and from dancing to ocean cruises.” More interest might have attached to those observations had the cable indicated quite clearly whether this expert in functional nervous adments was referring to the public generally, or merely to that section ■which is in a post tion to join in ocean cruises. It is only too often the case that the ponular press, when professing to record sidelights on modern’ life, features the foibles and ennui characteristic rather of the life of the idle rich than of the working class. As a matter of notorious fact the art of killing time is cultivated far less b> those whose days are occupied with a job or the pursuit of one than by those whose lives are not. Yet the toilers are those who ar e kept up closest to life’s realities by the necessities of existence, and the chance of flight, whether to sea or to dope, is denied them, even were they prone to seek it, by a fear no less persistent than'that of other realities, namely, the fear of the sack ! The ' learned psychotherapeutist declares the quest for distraction a symptom of illness. because he considers real health demands that the individual should not be. impelled constantly to seek for distraction. It is true that the pace, as well as the urban environment of modern life makes for nervous instability. Mechanisation has played no small part in making reality a drab affair for the wage ■ earner, but that nervous irritability which creates the constantwish for change is most, manifest among people who are immersed in what can be only classed as the artificalities of modern life. If one were to look for a symbol, Hollywood might fill the bill. Modern industrialism has created the environment from which so many welcome fantastical , ways of escape, even morphia, which is a synonym for any number of forms of dope, not cnly physical, but intellectual. Many nostrums are prescribed for the victims of monotony, but there is certainly a moral value my l6 suggestion of Dr. Crichton-Millet that people must set their faces against the flight from reality, since it implies that, in addition to the courage requisite to be cultivated, there should be a united endeavour to better reality. For the idle rich this should mean the provision of an 'occupation, and for the poor the alleviation at least of the fear of want. The eugenists, like Bern ard Shaw, would scrap the Irving human material in the attempt to improve the realities of life, and rely upon. the generations yet to be born, but the daughter of Britain’s ex-Prime Minister, Miss Ishbel MacDonald appeared to go nearer reality when she commended to the conference the notion of “producing a generation of grandfathers and grandmothers who did not creak with rheumatism.” The material is already available for that under taking, and an improvement of the environment of the masses is indicated as the road to the remedy. Incidentally, it may be

added that not only does capitalistic industrialism make life a drab reality, but at the same time produces those very “ways of escape” which constitute the wrong road to recovery, and a false form of freedom. It is true enough, indeed, that the expedients of the idle rich to beguile the time in one generation tend in the next to become more popular, but there is another lesson to be drawn from the reflection of Dr. Crichton Miller, and it 1 that the myriad poor, in whose ranks th ( . rich would uescry a surplus or an unfit class, are daily facing reality in a form more grim and difficult than that from which others fly to dope or ocean cruises. Educationalists may do well to instil a warning against false freedom and dope dangers in the rising generation, but the young must have more than dictation. They require both the example and the opportunity tn live a more rational and loss restricted life, which can only come with a reversal of the soci al and economic development ■which divorced the majority of people from a life that is really natural.