The ideal service

There is an implication of selfishness in the words materialism and comfort – a suggestion of self – pampering at the expense of others. Yet ,vulnerable as americans are to criticism on other points, even their critics have not denied their generosity and concern to help those who have not been so richly blessed with material goods. The christian command.” Do unto others as you would have them do you unto “ is frequently invoked, A disaster , whether at home or abroad , invariably brings forth a flood of voluntary contributions , the necessity for mutual aid in the first settlements and on the frontier may have passed, but the responses is still there.

Service as an ideal has spread out into many branches of american life. More and more the institusion of community are expected to participate the needs oof citizen and to make possible a healthier , happier, richer life. Meanwhile services as a commercial activity has leaped ahead. Since 1870 the experienced labor force engganed in production of services for the new infant , a carwash ( many of them mechazied so as to be completed in ten or fifteen minutes ) or a clipping for your poodle , you are sure to find it. The yellow pages in the back of every telephone book list hundreds of such offrings.

While the supermaket have been moving in the direction of self – service in exchange for lower prices, smaller enterprise have sprung up to supply whom services to those who want it, especially to the many people who now live in rural or suburban areas. Our country district is visited regularly by a grocer , a green grocer, several bakers , a dispenser of frozen foods and three ice cream man, not to mention the occasional salesman of brushes , vacuum cleaners, insurance, magazine or cars, and the obsolutely indispensable country institution the rural leather carrier.

The accent on services suggests an attempt to blame the two conflict things forces in the national character-the hardheaded drive for bussiness success and the soft religiously inspired urge us to serve other. As the recipient of such service’ we intend find ourselves when think to patronize them all , for the weak and for women, fair play in all the other miserable moral traits. Psychologists believe that since it is practically universal in americans will confess that father , as the final arbiter and dispenser of punishment , sticks in their minds as the averenger of the moral law, and that goodness consequently bears a strongly masculine imprint – even one that is psychologicall locatable.

Gorer who says that no other society gives so important a role to the mothers of grown sons , sees the mother symbols in the goddess of liberty as the moral force which keeps agrgreessiveness in check. Americans , he feels , have two standards of conduct , one for business , the other for human relation .They are symbolized by uncel sam, the shrewd demanding father , and by the goddess of liberty , the encapsulated mother speaking moral imperatives. The contradiction between male and female worlds comes to the fore in arguments over political and welfare projects. Thus resistance to the new deal was partly an objections to introducing social legislation into domain of masculine affair and confusion in foreign policy often arises because we want to be hard – headed as well as generous and likeable.
Although there are some truths in his observation about conflicting impulses, the current trend is for business to absort the social consciousness into its own orbit