A Dance of Jitterbugs

The mind of contemporary man is likewise a dumping place of the most fantastic and diverse bits of the most fragmentary ideas, beliefs, tastes and scraps of information. From communism to Catholicism, from Beethoven or Bach to the most peppy jazz and the catcalls of crooning; from the fashion of the latest movie or best-seller to the most opposite fashion of another movie or best-seller—all coexist somehow in it, jumbled side by side, without any consistency of ideas, or beliefs, or tastes, or styles . . . our intellectual life is but an incessant dance of jitterbugs. Its spineless and disjoined syncretism pervades all our social and mental life. Our education consists mainly in pumping into the mind-area of students the most heterogeneous bits of information about everything.

Pitirim Sorokin, Crisis of Our Age, 1941

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