501 Critical Reading Questions

Critical Reading Questions
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whole picture—as nearly as I can. I don’t want to put on the blinders of
‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and limit my vision. If I used the term ‘good’ on a thing
I’d lose my license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don’t
you see? I want to be able to look at the whole thing.”
Mac broke in heatedly, “How about social injustice? The profit sys-
tem? You have to say they’re bad.”
Dr. Burton threw back his head and looked at the sky. “Mac,” he said.
“Look at the physiological injustice, the injustice of tetanus [ . . . ], the
gangster methods of amoebic dysentery—that’s my field.”
“Revolution and communism will cure social injustice.”
“Yes, and disinfection and prophylaxis will prevent others.”
“It’s different, though; men are doing one, and germs are doing the
other.”
“I can’t see much difference, Mac.”
[ . . . ] “Why do you hang around with us if you aren’t for us?”
“I want to see,” Burton said. “When you cut your finger, and strepto-
cocci get in the wound, there’s a swelling and a soreness. That swelling
is the fight your body puts up, the pain is the battle. You can’t tell which
one is going to win, but the wound is the first battleground. If the cells
lose the first fight the streptococci invade, and the fight goes on up the
arm. Mac, these little strikes are like the infection. Something has got
into the men; a little fever has started and the lymphatic glands are shoot-
ing in the reinforcements. I want to see, so I go to the seat of the wound.”
“You figure the strike is a wound?”
“Yes. Group-men are always getting some kind of infection. This
seems to be a bad one. I want to see, Mac. I want to watch these
group-men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all
like single men. A man in a group isn’t himself at all, he’s a cell in
an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body
are like you. I want to watch the group, and see what it’s like. Peo-
ple have said, ‘mobs are crazy, you can’t tell what they’ll do.’ Why
don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly
always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.”
“Well, what’s this got to do with the cause?”
“It might be like this, Mac: When group-man wants to move, he makes
a standard. ‘God wills that we recapture the Holy Land’; or he says, ‘We
fight to make the world safe for democracy’; or he says, ‘We will wipe out
social injustice with communism.’ But the group doesn’t care about the
Holy Land, or Democracy, or Communism. Maybe the group simply
wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains
of individual men. I say it might be like that, Mac.”
“Not with the cause, it isn’t,” Mac cried.
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