Restoring the national safeguard
As another working week beckons I thought it would be appropriate to share a comment William James relates in his essay ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’. It is a remark made by the then most eminent psychiatrist (or ‘mad-doctor’) in Scotland, Dr. Clouston:
You Americans, wear too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used I regard, as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life.
Since then ‘you Americans’ has become us all or at least more than I would like. If the national safeguard is to be restored it is important to note, as James goes on to observe, that the remedy ‘lies where lay the origins of the disease’:
If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for a thing, the fashion and taste must be changed…if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity and ease...there is only one way to improve ourselves and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west.
In other words, reject enthusiastic display and be seen to do so. By all means smile. Laugh too but only in the unlikely event you have reason to. Things will then be well again soon.