Karel Capek should have lived on Main Street. The Robots were mechanical creatures of his imagination. If he had been an American they would have been living results of his experience… The only difference between the Capek robot and the American Robot is that the latter comes into existence by a different method. That is all.

Hard words these. Wild exaggeration. But the medicine of truth, to be taken in any considerable doses these pampered days, requires the sweetening of exaggeration. And yet who is there who will deny that Americanism is simply Robotism?

… There may be some of you who have never read the play of Capek. I forget that the undergraduate of to-day is more interested in rugby than Robots, and that he will tell you more about Carol Dempster (is she a “movie queen” or the wife of a pugilist?) than about Karel Capek. What I mean by Robotism, then, is this. It is the crushing curse of sameness, the destruction of individuality, the dead level of mechanical mediocrity. Robotism is the vice of standardization, the cult of the plain man. I have heard it called democracy. You will remember the story of Periander? … (He) was a very wise Greek who, when asked by Thrasybulus as to the best method of preserving a tyrannical government, said nothing, but took his tyrant friend out into a field of corn and silently lopped off the tallest ears. That is precisely the effect of our twentieth century Robotism. We are lopping off the tallest ears, and not silently.

The great United States of America is the culprit. They have spent a century or more over there in perfecting the standardization of inanimate things, and now, forsooth, they would standardize personality. For the deep crimson of genius, the deep blue of wisdom, the deep green of sin, they would substitute the dead grey of nothing at all. A hundred million Robots! I know of no better way to discover national characteristics than by watching a nation at play. Go into the spacious rotunda of an American pleasure resort and look for individuals. You will have difficulty in finding any. They are all highly successful mechanisms. The prosperous-looking gentleman sitting in the corner behind a cigar is the founder, developer and director of the largest safety pin manufactory in this or any other world. The man opposite him, who also smokes a cigar, is exactly the same. Only with him it is canned tomatoes. They all have the fascinating interest of so many cash registers. The first one intrigues, but the others leave you cold.

Europe may be decadent and disintegrating, but it is still far away from Robotism, even if Karel Capek is a Hungarian. … If I lounge in a continental resort I am interested at once. Every person who passes me is an individual. They defy classification. The man who looks like a duke is an olive oil merchant, whereas the person who has all the appearance of being a travelling salesman is probably a marquis.

What about our own country? We are certainly not free from the disease. It has kept coming up from the South till now it is widespread even in Toronto. If there were any place where one might expect to find immunity from Robotism, it would be a university, for the aim of real education is the development of individuality. Unfortunately, only a small minority of students come to Toronto to be really educated. The great majority use the university simply as a social nursery. University students in Europe will starve and shiver to get intellectual food and mental warmth, but you at Varsity must be spoon-fed in enervating ease; and always with the same food from the same spoon, the food of material advantage from the spoon of practical knowledge. A university education, you think, is for the sole purpose of making you a better money-making Robot. There are only a half a dozen individualities in Victoria, a scant half dozen, who are actually developing themselves. The rest are sheep, and the shepherd who keeps you in order is public opinion. How many of you would dare to stray from the flock? You will even force back any daring animal that is brave enough to try and leave your ordered ranks. This forcing process, which I see going on continually, is interesting, resulting, of course, from a narrowness of mentality. All eccentricity is frowned upon as a sign of folly, whereas it is more often the denotation of genius. You think that every person who walks about without a hat or attempts to develop his individuality by sartorial differentiation is the victim of the whims of some fraternity initiators. Among you, to be subtle, brilliant and clever, is to be peculiar and, hence, to be unpopular…

But how to cure this disease? Shun, I implore you, the dead level of decided opinion. Suspect anything that is accepted. Be seeking individuals. If a professor gives utterance to a view with which you disagree, rise up and silence his babbling with argument. Above all protect yourself against the tyranny of public opinion. Don’t move in mass formation, for what is a mass but a collective mediocrity? First “know yourself” and then develop yourself on the strength of that knowledge. Don’t let the world do your developing for you. Remember what one great individualist said, “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded, and the amount of eccentricity in a nation has been generally proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

Now that I have delivered my message I expect to see a great revival, or rather a great birth of eccentricity around these classic halls. Robotism will die. Men will let their hair grow to unheard-of lengths, while fair co-eds will go to the other extreme and sell their flowing locks for the benefit of Europe’s starving students. The library will swarm with intellectual Bolshevists and the rink will attract no one. Students will burst into song as they go from lecture to lecture, and there may be peace in Burwash Hall. All will be different.

I am pleased to be satirical. Yes, but in deadly earnest, too.

48:5 pg.8-10 (1924)

« Back to Notable Contributors