THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and
the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know
what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming
and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take
part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp
the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of
self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles
in such ways as to control the structural transformations that
usually lie behind them.
Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many men
been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of
change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic
changes as have the men and women of other societies is due to
historical facts that are now quickly becoming 'merely history/
The history that now affects every man is world history. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one
sixth of mankind is transformed from all that is feudal and backward
into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful. Political
colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed.
Revolutions occur; men feel the intimate grip of new
kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are smashed to
bits—or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy,
capitalism is shown up as only one way to make society into an
industrial apparatus. After two centuries of hope, even formal
democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind.
Everywhere in the underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life
are broken up and vague expectations become urgent demands.
Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority
and of violence become total in scope and bureaucratic in form.
Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-nation at either
pole concentrating its most co-ordinated and massive efforts upon
the preparation of World War Three.
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to
orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which
values? Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older
ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings
are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any
wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger