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THE CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF EXISTENCE
LESSONS OF A LIFETIME
I OFFER THE following conclusions after 42 years of unremitting observation and reflection, aided by consultations with hundreds of other observers, dead and alive:
1. There is no such thing as honest politics, in the strict sense. All persons who aspire to public office, without a single exception, are mountebanks. Even those who start out honestly, with a sincere desire to sacrifice their private comfort to the public good, become mountebanks the moment they face an assemblage of voters, just as every man becomes a mountebank the moment he faces a woman. Under a republic, with the vote of a farmhand counting exactly as much as the vote of a Huxley, intellectual honesty in politics is inhibited by the very nature of things.
2. It is a capital mistake to assume that the common people are stupid but honest. The exact contrary is more nearly true. The common people never sacrifice their own good to the general good. They are always in favor of the man who promises to get something for them without cost to them—i. e., to steal something for them. This capacity for predatory enterprise they venerate above all other human qualities. Even when it is turned against them, they have a sneaking respect for it. They may laugh at a college professor or an archbishop, but they never laugh at a Charles F. Murphy. One cannot laugh at a man one envies—at the man one would like to be.
3. Virtue is often a mere symptom of meanness, or of poverty, which is the same thing. The mildest vice is an overhead charge, a dead expense. A man of intense and unyielding virtue is often merely a man of overpowering meanness. This explains why it is that such virtue is usually found in combination with lack of generosity, boorishness, suspiciousness—why it is, in brief, that a virtuoso of virtue is seldom a gentleman. It costs something, even to be merely polite. One cannot show any genuine toleration for the other fellow—the essence of being a gentleman—without at the same time practicing, or at least freely condoning, his vices, i. e., his unutilitarian acts. The true test of a man is not the way he gets his money, but the way he spends it. Men are drawn into firm friendship and understanding, not so much by common occupations, as by common vices. Professional musicians usually dislike one another, but amateur musicians are strongly attracted to one another. Thus it appears that good will between man and man is largely based upon common vices—e. g., music, politics, alcoholism, gambling, or the pursuit of women (either openly, as Don Juans, or in disguise, as vice crusaders).
4. Women and actors have this advantage in common: that any sign of intelligence in them, however slight, causes surprise, and is therefore estimated above its true worth. In the case of actors this surprise is justified, but justified or not, it works to the same end. No one gets excited over a man who has read Kant, but a woman who has done so, or who merely gets the reputation of having done so, becomes a sort of celebrity ipso facto. In the same way an actor who is able to put together a dozen intelligible paragraphs about Shakespeare is hailed as a Shakespearean scholar and invited to address universities. I say “intelligible,” mind you, and not “intelligent.” No actor has ever written anything actually intelligent about Shakespeare, or even about acting. Of all the professions open to males, acting is the only one whose practitioners have never contributed anything of value to its theory.
5. A man who has never faced the hazards of war is in exactly the same position as a woman who has never faced the hazards of maternity. That is to say, he has missed the supreme experience of his sex, and is hence an incomplete being. There is something in all of us which makes us crave these natural hazards—some impulse toward danger and courage—and when they are not experienced we are prone to invent imaginary substitutes. Thus it is that the men of a nation long at peace become old maidish: they torture themselves with artificial austerities and hobgoblins—for example, prohibition and the Rum Demon. The remedy for such vapors is war, just as the remedy for hypochondria is a knock in the head.
6. Whatever may be the demerits of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s scheme of psychoanalysis, there is at least sound support for his theory that the thing we hate most is the thing most dangerous to us—that a man’s prejudices afford an index to his weaknesses. The most cruel and vindictive judge is the one who is most a criminal at heart. The loudest whooper for prohibition is the man who is most tempted every time he passes a saloon. But perhaps the best proof of Freud’s theory is to be found in those strange fanatics who specialize in denouncing nude pictures and statuary. The argument of these gentlemen is that such pictures and statues incite the beholder to lewd thougthts. This is a faulty generalization from their personal experience. Their error lies in the assumption that all men, or even any considerable number of men, are as dirty-minded as they are themselves. Wasn’t it Arnold Bennett who said that a novelist must always get his psychology from himself? The same thing is true of a moralist.
7. The prosperity of such bogus healing schemes as osteopathy and Christian Science is largely based upon the fact that they offer simple and intelligible theores as to the causation of disease. In this department scientific medicine has made but little progress. It can tell us clearly what nephritis is, but it cannot tell us why it is. Even when it ventures to answer—as in the case of typhoid fever—it really begs the question. The bacillus typhosus, in itself, cannot cause typhoid: there must be a preliminary state of receptivity in the body. What that state of receptivity is and how it is produced are questions that scientific medicine has yet failed to answer in simple terms. The answers given by osteopathy and Christian Science, of course, are not true, but they are at least simple, and to the popular mind they thus become plausible. Even an antivivisectionist is intelligent enough to understand the theory that typhoid is caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft nervous tissue. But only a few persons can understand the warring hypotheses of immunity, and even these are left in doubt and darkness.
8. I have spoken above (in paragraph 5) of the impulse to danger and courage that is inherent in all of us. Its psychological roots are to be found in the wille zur macht, the will to power—a thing differing considerably from Schopenhauer’s will to live, despite many elements in common. The impulse to do something daring is simply an impulse to give an exhibition of efficiency—in particular, of the sort of efficiency that few other men possess. And added to this psychical impulse (and no doubt underlying it) is the purely physical impulse to function: in brief, the life force. That the life force, working thus through the medium of the impulse to daring enterprise, may produce its own destruction—i. e., may produce death—is not an objection of any importance. We all know that nature is an ass. She is constantly failing, through what may be called excess of zeal, to accomplish her own purposes. She is extraordinarily inept, clumsy and wasteful. Even when her purposes seem to be clear (which is not often) her means of accomplishing them are commonly fatuous to the point of unintelligibility. Nature’s plans are magnificent, but her workmanship is almost always bad. An optician who made a microscope as defective as the human eye would be taken out into the alley and shot.
9. The hardest job in the world is that of a clergyman. If he preaches a scheme of life that is actually livable, he is condemned as a compromiser with evil, and if he preaches a scheme that is ideal, and hence unlivable, he is condemned for not living it himself. No other man is watched so closely, or judged so harshly. And not only are the judgments upon him harsh, but they are also wholly unfair. He is expected to have sympathy for every human weakness, even the worst, and yet to show no human weakness himself, even the least. Imagine a grown man, perhaps with sciatica, Mexican mine stock and a mother-in-law, who is forbidden to utter so much as a single damn! Imagine a man whose material rewards in his profession are exactly in inverse proportion to his sincerity, his industry and his enthusiasm! Again, recall this staggering fact: the clergyman is the only professional man who cannot, in decency, abandon his profession. And yet, being founded wholly upon faith, without any support whatever in exact knowledge, it is precisely the profession which exposes its practitioner to the most insidious doubts. A lawyer who begins to doubt the law may switch to business or politics, and still hold up his head. But a clergyman who is unfrocked, even at his own request, remains a suspicious character to the end of his days.
These, at least, are my honest views. If I err I shall be very glad to apologize. [25 March 1914, 30 March 1914, 10 April 1914]
BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS?
The Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform Association, in THE EVENING SUN of yesterday:
It is all very well, so long as we ourselves have beer and skittles, to say that the vast majority of us get exactly what we deserve, and that all is as it should be in this best of all possible worlds. But in our hearts we know that it’s a lie while our lips are saying it. * * * Resign from the World’s Boomers’ Association, Brother Mencken! * * *
For shame, Charles! Oblique and unmanly advice! When have I ever preached any such rubbishy doctrine? The best of all possible worlds, forsooth! How can this ever be the best of all possible worlds so long as I have hay fever, and grow bulky to the verge of immobility, and have to work eight hours every day for a meagre living, and owe $7 on my Sunday clothes?
Best of all possible worlds? Bosh! One of the worst worlds I can imagine. The fact that I never blush is proof enough that I did not make it, and do not defend it. Huxley once ventured the modest guess that he could improve upon the weather. I go much further. I think that I could improve upon sciatica, upon the human liver, upon the tonsils, upon mud, upon jiggers, upon snakes, upon babies, upon chilblains. If I were manager of the world there would be no whiskers, no bunions, no twins. No fat women, incrusted with diamonds, would loll provokingly in automobiles. Vice crusading would develop swiftly into convulsions, coma and dissolution. The Hon. Mr. Anderson would choke upon his own sinister eloquence.
No, Charles, I am no apologist for this world, no press agent for nature. I know very well that the human eye, so loudly praised as nature’s masterpiece, is really the most fragile and undependable of optical instruments, that any man who made a microscope so badly would be heaved out of the union. I wonder that so clumsy a banjo as the glottis should ever make music at all. I deny that katzenjammer1 is either a logical or a moral necessity. I believe that many men die too soon, and that a great many more men do not die soon enough.
But after all, what would you? Say what you will, the massive fact remains that the world is as it is. You and I didn’t make it, we are not consulted about its management, we do not even know why it exists, we can do precious little to change it, even in minor details. Was it Romanes or Lankester who said that we human beings sometimes prevail modestly against nature, that we sometimes gain a puny and trivial victory of outposts, but that every time we do so we lose as much as we have won? Taking man as he stands, is he better off than his anthropoid fathers? Is he healthier, happier, more fit? In many ways he undoubtedly is. In many other ways he undoubtedly isn’t. And in so far as he is, it is probably due as much to nature’s victories over advancing civilization as to civilization’s victories over nature.
In brief, the world, as it stands, at least works. By hook or crook it wabbles along. Revile it as you will, my dear Ogle, you must always admit, in the end, that you and I have survived in it, and that, to that extent, it is humane, benevolent, intelligent, praiseworthy, and a success. Our survival, true enough, has had a million times more luck in it than merit—but who are we to complain against luck? Why try to discount it, deplore it, account for it? Why worry so much about the other fellow? Is he worrying about us? I doubt it. His one great passion is to increase his own luck, his own beer, his own skittles—and nine times out of ten he tries to do it by decreasing ours.
Therefore, let us admit freely the injustice and savagery of the world, and at the same time put the matter out of mind. Nothing that we can do can set aside, for more than an inconsequential moment or two, the great natural law that the strong shall prey upon the weak. In the most lovely Utopia that you and I could plan, there would still be men who were less fitted to survive than the best man, or even than the average man. And nothing that laws or philanthropy could accomplish would make these men more fit. [21 August 1912]
THE ESSENCE OF EDUCATION
The Rev. Charles Fiske, D. D., in the course of an article on “The Debt of the Educated Man”:
Some years since Senator Lodge expressed the opinion that the chief defect of our modern educated life was its tendency to arouse unduly the critical spirit. * * * There are plenty of intellectual mugwumps2 in the world, and they are always barren of lasting achievement. They sit complacently on judgment stools, passing cynical criticisms on evils which they make no effort to correct.
To which, perhaps, the most apt of answers was made by Immanuel Kant fully 150 years ago, to wit:
So viel ist gewiss: wer einmal Kritik gekostet hat, den ekelt auf immer alles dogmatische Gewäsche.
Which may be put into English as follows:
So much is sure: Whoever has once tasted Criticism, is disgusted forever after with all dogmatic twaddle.
That is to say, once education and experience have aroused the critical spirit in a man, he straightway loses all belief in brummagem schemes for making the world a one-horse paradise overnight. The chief impression left on a healthy mind by a sound education, indeed, is an impression of what may be called the infinite complexity of the social reaction. An ignorant man believes in short cuts, ready answers, sovereign specifics. He believes, for example, that Peruna will cure Bright’s disease, that such terms as “good” and “bad” have definite and unchangeable meanings, that a simple act of the Legislature is sufficient to stamp out such things as prostitution, avarice, cleverness, drunkenness and the law of natural selection. The educated man is simply a man who knows better. The fact that he knows better is the one practicable test of his education. It may not be a sufficient and infallible test, but nevertheless it is the only test that actually works.
There is no need, I take it, of supporting this proposition with a host of examples, for a large number of them will immediately occur to every reflective man. All proposals for the reduction of enormously complex phenomena to simple equations come from the dreamers of the race, i. e., from those persons whose pressing sense of what ought to be is uncontaminated by any appreciable sense of what is. Viewed romantically, such persons are prophets. Their thinking is not grounded upon reason, but upon intuition—and it is always pleasant to argue that intuition is superior to reason. But viewed realistically, the thing they offer is not prophecy at all, but merely ignorance. It is the business of the persons who possess superior knowledge—that is to say, of those who are better educated—to combat this ignorance with criticism, and to pull off its successive husks, one by one, until finally the inner kernel of truth is revealed. Sometimes that kernel is microscopic, but it is very seldom, of course, that it has no existence at all, for even error is unimaginable save as it is an exaggerated and distorted statement of truth.
The operation of this process is seen most plainly, perhaps, in the field of medicine, for it is probable that men have done more thinking in that field, first and last, than in any other, not even excepting religion. Everyone of us is ill at times, and everyone of us wants to get well. The result of this universal yearning has always been an effort to dispose of ancient difficulties, to find short cuts, to reduce the complex and baffling to a beautiful simplicity. Such has been the origin of all the quack healing cults since the day of Hammurabi. For example, Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy was able to devise her puerile magic, and to believe in it after she had devised it, not because she was educated, for she wasn’t, but precisely because she was incredibly ignorant. Difficulties and objections that would have halted an educated person at the very start did not bother her in the slightest. She was ignorant of the most elementary facts of anatomy and physiology, and so she went blundering on. The result was a healing scheme of unparalleled simplicity—but also one of unparalleled imbecility.
But didn’t it convince many persons who were educated? It did not. It convinced only those who thought they were educated, who passed as educated. It convinced, in the first place, a crowd of women with no more genuine education, whatever their pretensions, than so many chorus girls or Slavonic immigrants. And it convinced, in the second place, a crowd of male boobies so powerful in intellect that they were willing to take the simple word of a vapid old woman, on an extremely recondite and technical question, against the sober and unanimous judgment of men who had devoted their whole lives to studying it. Many of these persons, male and female, were highly estimable. Most of them belonged to Sunday-schools. All of them, so far as I know to the contrary, paid their taxes, beat their children daily and sent money to the heathen. But in the whole lot there was not one who showed the slightest development of that critical faculty which is the chief fruit, sign and essence of true education. They were refined, peacable and honest—but they were infinitely credulous and ignorant.
The same phenomenon is frequently witnessed in the domain of morals. Speaking generally, the most ignorant man is always the most immovably moral man. That is to say, the most ignorant man is always the most sure that his right is the right, and that all other rights are bogus, and that no change in moral values will ever be possible in future, and that the world would be perfect if all dissenters were clapped into jail. Such is the fine, blatant, bumptious morality of vice crusaders, prohibitionists, Sunday snouters and all other such gladiators of Puritanism. The thought that their easy solution of all the problems of the world may be wrong—that civilization may be a vastly more complex affair than they assume it to be—this thought never crosses their minds. They are so sure that they are right that they are ecstatically eager to shed the blood of every man who raises any question about it.
Is it the duty of educated men, who should and do know better, to join in this preposterious bellowing? Or is it their duty to stand forever against it, to expose its weaknesses, one by one, to oppose it with all their might? I leave the answer to every man who esteems the true above the merely sonorous, to every man who feels any responsibility of gratitude for his opportunities to acquire knowledge, to every man who believes that deceit, cant, fustian, hypocrisy and stupidity are evil and shameful things, however virtuous their wrappings. [14 June 1913]
WAR IS GOOD
War is enormously destructive, not only to life and goods, but also to platitudes and platitutidinarians, the pediculidæ3 of civilization. Once the band begins to play and men are on the march there is no audience left for the Bryans and the Billy Sundays, the Carnegies and the Lydia Pinkhams. It is not good but bad fortune that keeps the United States out of the present mix-up. More than any other people we need the burden of resolute and manly effort, the cleansing shock of adversity. A foreign war—and, in particular, a foreign war in which we got the worst of it—would purge the national blood of the impurities which now pollute it. The Civil War had that effect, and for all its horrors, it was of profit to the race. It cut short an era of moralizing, posturing and tub-thumping and ushered in an era of action. It rid us of the abolitionist forever, and of the prohibitionist, the revivalist and the prude at least temporarily. It cleared the way for the unimpeded and unmoral enterprise of the 70’s and 80’s, during which decades the new nation found itself and came to genuine greatness.
The warlike qualities of daring and pugnacity are inherent in all healthy peoples and individuals, and a race must be far gone in decadence before they fall into ill repute. There is something deep down in the soul of every man worthy of the name which makes him crave power and consequence for himself and his own, that he and they may stand clearly above the common run of men. This craving is at the bottom of all that we know of human achievement and all that is loftiest and noblest in human aspiration. It moves the saint in his sheet of flame no less than the general on the battle field; it is as much responsible for the higher forms of sacrifice as for all forms of conquest. Human progress would be impossible without this inborn and irresistible impulse, this eternal will to power.
But civilization, as we all know, attempts a vain but none the less pertinacious war upon it. That security which is one of the chief fruits of civilization gives artificial advantages to the man who has it only faintly—to the poor-spirited, harbor-seeking sort of man—to the compromiser, the “right-thinker,” the joiner, the mob member, the hider behind skirts. And at the same time civilization tries to put an artificial restraint upon the man in whom the will to power is unusually strong, and who makes no effort of his own to throttle it—that is, upon the man of daring enterprise and intelligent self-seeking, the violator of precedents, the assertive and bellicose man, the “bad” citizen. In both directions the pressure is toward conformity, peaceableness, self-effacement. But in neither direction is it strong enough to achieve more than a mere appearance of prevailing. The yearning for self-functioning is still powerful in every healthy individual, and the measure of that self-functioning, in civilized societies, no less than in the sea ooze, is power.
War is a good thing because it is honest, because it admits the central fact of human nature. Its great merit is that it affords a natural, normal and undisguised outlet for that complex of passions and energies which civilization seeks so fatuously to hold in check. Let us not forget the fatuity of the effort. Let us not forget that man, under peace, is just as much urged and bedeviled by his will to power as man in war. The only difference is that war makes him admit the fact and take pride in it, whereas peace seduces him into lying denials of it. And out of that difference grow all the evils that a long peace nourishes—too much moralizing, petty and meticulous fault-finding, a childish belief in soothsayers, a sentimental reverence for poverty and inefficiency, a cult of self-sacrifice, a universal fear, suspiciousness, over-niceness, prudishness and hypochondria. In brief, a nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid. It grows weak in body and aberrant in mind. The energies that should be turned against its foes and rivals are turned against itself. It seeks escape for its will to power by flogging its own hide.
No need to dredge up examples out of history. We have a capital one under our very noses. The American people, too secure in their isolation and grown too fat in their security, show all the signs of deteriorating national health. The very qualities which won a great empire from the wilderness are the qualities which they now seek to deny and punish. Once a race of ruthless and light-hearted men, putting the overt act above any metaphysical significance of it, they now become introspective and conscience-stricken, and devote their chief endeavors to penalizing one another for artificial crimes, and to brooding maudlinly over dangers and “wrongs” that their healthier fathers never gave a thought to. In every evidence of superabundant energy, in every manifestation of sound wind and quick blood, they see only the spectre of disaster. They become afraid of everything, including even themselves. They are afraid of women, they are afraid of alcohol, they are afraid of money. And their fear, playing upon their sick will to power, arouses them to that abominable orgy of spying and hypocrisy, that disgusting mutual pursuit and persecution, which is fast becoming the chief mark of American civilization in the eyes of other peoples.
A war would do us good. It would make us healthier in body, cleaner in mind. It would put an end to our puerile brooding over petty “wrongs” and ills, our old-womanish devotion to neighborhood gossip and scandal-monging, our imbecile following of snide messiahs. No race can long hold a respectable place in the world which shrinks from the hazards amd sacrifices of honorable, stand-up combat, and hangs instead upon the empty words of fact-denying platitudinarians. At this moment the peoples of Europe are preparing to fight out the great fight that must inevitably select and determine, in man no less than among the protozoa, the fittest to survive. And at this moment our ranking officer of state, taking his place between the performing dogs and the Swiss bell-ringers, is wooing the ears of marveling hinds with his grotesque repeal and re-enactment of the law of natural selection.4 [4 August 1914]
THE CASE AGAINST DEMOCRACY
The Hon. S. Broughton Tail, the Walbrook thinker, continues to fill the Letter Column with his solemn proofs that the German Kaiser is not a democrat. When this great labor is over let us hope that the Hon. Mr. Tail will present his reasons for holding that the Hon. Tom McNulty is not a Jewish rabbi, and that the Hon. Jack Johnson is not an albino, and that Sir Almroth Wright is not a militant suffragist, and that I myself am not a bishop in the A. M. E. Church. A man of such gifts for convincing argumentation owes the human race a high duty: he must exercise them constantly if he would go to Heaven when he dies. Let us all rejoice that one so suave and sapient is in our fevered midst.
Seriously, it is as vain to argue that the Kaiser is not a democrat as it would be to argue that dogs have fleas. If it means anything at all, democracy means government by men in the mass, without any regard whatever for the personal fitness of the individuals composing the mass for that difficult and highly technical business. It is grounded firmly and immovably upon the doctrine that, in the voting booth at least, all men are equal—that the opinion of a corner loafer or a farm hand is just as good as the opinion of a Lincoln, a Bismarck or a Huxley. The Kaiser is wholly opposed to that doctrine. He regards it as windy nonsense, as utter puerility and damphoolishness. And what is more, the overwhelming majority of intelligent men, not only in Germany but everywhere else, agree with him.
I know a great many Americans of position and influence, but save for professional politicians and a few sentimentalists I do not know three who even make a pretense of believing in anything approaching genuine democracy. Not many of them, true enough, argue against it publicly. They look upon the question as a closed one in the United States, at least for the present, just as the question of a state church is a closed one, and the question of free education. But though they thus dodge the empty and thankless job of bucking the enraptured rabble, they by no means confess thereby that they are in accord with it. On the contrary, they are opposed to it, and they will remain opposed to it until the last galoot’s ashore.
The very theory of democracy, in fact, is unintelligible to men accustomed to reflection, just as the theory of Christian Science is unintelligible. And the cause thereof is as plain as day: it is because democracy is not founded upon an idea at all, but merely upon an emotion. That emotion is the lowly one of envy, perhaps the most degraded in the whole human repertoire. Democracy is a device for giving to the relatively inefficient and unsuccessful (and hence, bitterly envious) majority, by the artificial and dishonest device of the ballot, that preponderance of power and influence which belongs rightfully to the minority by reason of its superior efficiency, honesty and intelligence. In brief, democracy is an attempt to wreak punishment upon successful men for the crime of being successful, and its charm lies in its promise of loot. The one thing that may be said in favor of it is that it seldom works.
Here in the United States, for example, we have had to dilute and modify genuine democracy over and over again in order to save the nation from utter destruction and ruin. The enfranchisement of the negro was a device of genuine democracy: it set up the frank doctrine that the opinion of a Georgia field hand, but three generations removed from cannibalism, was as good as the opinion of Gen. Robert E. Lee—that his desires and ideals were just as respectable, that his notions of civilized government were just as sound. Lincoln and other sane men stood against that doctrine, but it was forced upon the country by a typically democratic process, i. e., emotionally, unintelligently, in a villainous spirit of revenge.
But it had no sooner been adopted than everyone saw that it would not work. The States south of the Potomac begin to suffer from it even more than they had suffered from the Civil War and some of the Northern States also found it an unmitigated curse. The result was an organized attack upon it, resulting in the gradual pulling of its teeth. To abandon it bodily, of course, was beyond the American imagination, but hypocrisy, as is usual in democratic nations, did the work that honesty was unequal to. Today there is not a Southern State in which the Fifteenth Amendment is actually in force. Self-preservation demanded that this supreme masterpiece of democracy be reduced to a mere shell of words.
What is more, very few professed democrats advocate its restoration. Not a word in favor of that folly ever comes from the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, or from the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, or from the Hon. Bob La Follette, or from the Hon. Woodrow Wilson, or from any other great apostle of the plain people. What is still more, the few lingering impossibilists who yet weep and argue for it are open opponents of democracy in other directions. I cite the Hon. C. J. Bonaparte as an example. This eminent statesman looses a tear ever and anon for the stolen “rights” of the virtuous niggero—but let us not forget that he was against local option,5 and that he devotes himself ardently to opposing self-government at Back River.6 The persons who make Back River an inhabited place are almost unanimously in a favor of an open Sunday, but Mr. Bonaparte and his friends frankly endeavor to block their attainment of it by arousing the passions and prejudices of remote yokels who have never been nearer to Back River than Watson street and the Monumental Theatre. [21 October 1914]
MORALITY AND IMMORALITY
The Hon. James A. Dunham, in the long-suffering Letter Column:
THE SUN has ideals and standards, while [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken apparently has neither.
The traditional verdict of stupidity upon the unfamiliar. Because, forsooth, the ideals and standards to which I adhere are not the sweet and soothing ones to which the Hon. Mr. Dunham himself adheres, he comes to the solomonic judgment that I have no ideals and standards at all! But do not laugh. The absurdity into which this virtuous and well-meaning, if somewhat naif and unreflective, gentleman falls is one which occasionally engulfs the best of men. The most difficult of all mental processes, indeed, is that of grasping the other fellow’s point of view, particularly with sympathy. And when we enter the domain of morals that difficulty becomes a practical impossibility. It is a first article of faith with all of us that those whose morals differ from our own have no morals at all. We habitually denominate them, indeed, by the simple word “immoral.”
Nine times out of ten, of course, this use of the word is idiotic, for very few persons, in point of fact, are wholly immoral. Even those persons whose immorality is assumed by an almost unanimous public opinion are often devotees of a rigid and austere moral code. For example, the unfortunate women whose pursuit and persecution are so significantly attractive to a certain type of “moral” man. These women, true enough, habitually violate one of the Ten Commandments, and are thus immoral by our prevalent standards, but it would vastly surprise some of their pursuers to know how sternly moral they are in other respects—for example, how honorable they are in their dealings with one another, how violently they disapprove the man who seeks to bring other women to their plight, and how unyieldingly they frown upon that snivelling hypocrisy which sometimes offers them a way out. Ask one of these women what she thinks of any conspicuous moralist of our vicinage, and it is a safe bet that she will tell you he is cruel and mendacious—i. e., that he is immoral.
So much for the morality of a class generally admitted to be sub-moral. What is constantly forgotten is that there are also classes which properly deserve to be called super-moral. That is to say, there are classes which accept all, or at least nearly all, of the restrictions imposed by the current popular morality, and then add restrictions that the popular morality does not demand. The gentlemen of the monastic orders offer a familiar example: some of them reach a degree of morality quite impossible, and even unimaginable, to the average man, or even to the average professional moralist. And one finds something of the same sort, though in less degree, among prohibitionists, vegetarians, Sabbatarians, Moslem dervishes, and the breed of kill-joys and uplifters in general.
No need to say that all of these super-moral persons have been, and are today, regarded as atrociously immoral by other persons of sound mind. The doctrine that asceticism is immoral once attained to such wide acceptance that it contributed very largely to an epoch-making schism in the Christian church, and it is still held today, I believe, by fully eight Protestants out of ten. (Even among those who approve of ascetism some of its earlier manifestations are now regarded as immoral; for example, self-mutilation, flagellation and immersion in filth, all of which had countenance, popularly if not officially, in the first centuries of our era.) And one need not walk 20 steps to find a man who believes the prohibitionists to be tyrannical and dishonest, and hence immoral, or another man to denounce the Blue Laws, or animal-worship, or the Moslem holy war.
Thus it appears that morality, considered broadly, is a gem of many facets, and that the man who clings to one of them gets a sadly distorted view of the men clinging to the others. On some rules of morality, true enough, most civilized men agree, for example: on the rule against punching out the eyes of sleeping babies with tack pullers. But on the vast majority of rules opinion is anything but unanimous, even among persons who regard themselves as conventionally moral. I know hundreds of men who would rather starve than steal, and yet most of them habitually violate the Sabbath without the slightest sense of sin, and some of them swear like archdeacons, or gamble for money, or go to burlesque shows, or perform some other act that would give the Hon. Jack Cornell the fantods. Worse, all of them regard Jack as an immoral and abhorrent fellow, basing their opinion upon the very snoutery that is the foundation of his moral eminence among professional moralists!
Viewing the Hon. Mr. Dunham’s allegation from such lofty peaks, I can well afford to pronounce upon it a superior Pooh-pooh! and so let it go. My own personal morality seems to me to be vastly more austere and elevating than that with which the hon. gent. contrasts it—to wit, the morality of the Sunpaper. I could fill this whole column with a list of things that the Sunpaper has done in the past, and that I myself wouldn’t dare to do. For example, I would never print a line in praise or defense of such a charlatan as the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, knowing his character as I know it, and as the Sunpaper knows it, and as every intelligent American knows it. Again, I would never make a noisy pretense of neutrality in a great and bloody war, and then attack one of the contestants unfairly under cover of it, as the Sunpaper did in August last, and as Monsignor Russell properly denounced it for doing. Yet again—
But no more examples! I am not going to gloat over the poor old Sunpaper because my moral code happens to be too harsh and exacting for it. Nor am I going to revile the Hon. Mr. Dunham because that code is beyond his comprehension. He is, I take it, a virtuous man, and he probably does his darndest within his limitations. If the higher sort of honesty is over his head, he is at least in numerous company. To the average, everyday, unreflecting, platitude-eating man, the truth ever bears a sinister and forbidding aspect. He regards it as immoral, and with reason. If it prevailed in the world, then nine-tenths of the things that he believes in, and that give his life a meaning, and that soothe him and comfort him, and fill him with a pleased, boozy feeling of rectitude and security, would be blown up. [5 November 1914]
MENCKEN AND MATERIALISM
Some anonymous friend in the long-suffering Letter Column:
[The Hon. Mr.] Mencken’s * * * eyes are earthbound. Ethics of the mud. A gross materialist, that fellow, with only earth fires to lighten him.
Empty nonsense, true enough, but nevertheless it bobs up in the Letter Column regularly. One of the hardest of all things for a professed idealist to believe is that the man who dissents from his particular idealism may be an idealist also. This difficulty is at the bottom of most of the political and theological wars that rack the world. The first charge that one disputant makes against another is always that he is a materialist, that he has no idealism. And the counter-charge is always exactly the same. The whole dispute between Catholic and Protestant, Democrat and Monarchist, Christian and Jew, may be reduced to just such terms. The Englishman scorns the German as a worshiper of force; the German scorns the Englishman as a worshiper of ease; the Frenchman sniffs at both as gross and materialistic; both denounce the Frenchman as a voluptuary and an atheist. And so on and so on.
Every man is thus convinced, not only of the brutish materialism of the other fellow, but also and more especially of his own lofty idealism. I myself, for example, though constantly accused of neglecting the things of the spirit (and, from the standpoint of my critics, with excellent cause), am nevertheless an almost fanatical idealist in my own sight. As I look back over my life I see a long record of more or less steady devotion to worthy ideals, often at a heavy sacrifice of material benefits. The picture is intensely agreeable to me; in it I take on a sort of mellow, romantic aspect; I am positively touched. And yet my life, to many other men, must needs appear grossly materialistic, for its net results, to date, are that I am fat, that I have stopped going to Sunday-school, and that my conscience seldom bothers me.
Even when two men pursue one and the same ideal, they often fall into irreconcilable differences over the manner of its attainment. Consider, for example, the commonplace ideal, visioned by practically all of us, of a carefree and happy human race. I should like to see it realized, and Dr. Kelly would like to see it realized. But observe how vastly we differ in our plans for its realization. My plan is to let people do whatever they please, so long as they do not invade the right and freedom of other persons to do the same: that is, I see liberty of desire, of taste, of action as the capital essential to happiness. But Dr. Kelly, with the very same end in view, advocates a diametrically contrary route to its attainment. That is to say, he proposes to make people happy by force, by terrorism, by compulsion. His plan, in brief, is to decide what sort of life is a happy one, and then compel them to live it. This seems to me to be utter nonsense, almost a contradiction in terms. And yet Dr. Kelly and his friends undoubtedly believe in it, and (setting aside the natural pleasure that all of us get out of pursuing and punishing our fellow-men) undoubtedly work for it in good faith, and with a keen and even overpowering sense of virtue.
The correspondent I have quoted bases his accusation that my “eyes are earthbound” chiefly on the fact that I defend and advocate the German cause in this war. This seems to him an effective proof that I am no idealist, but a “gross materialist.” In all friendliness, could anything be more absurd? Even supposing me to be a “gross materialist” as a general thing, certainly the fact must stick out plainly that I am far from being one in this particular case. What have I to gain, materially, by arguing for the Germans? Is there any reward hung up for that advocacy, save the wholly impalpable one (but far from unreal one!) of the idealist? Surely, it would be far more comfortable to drift with the tide. And surely the material rewards of such drifting could not be less.
But perhaps the learned writer means to say that I am not an idealist because the Germans themselves are not—that is, that the attorney shares the culpability of his client. Another absurdity. No people in history have made heavier sacrifices for their ideals than the Germans; no people in history have had ideals that were higher. The German is not content with material prosperity; he also wants to see his country great and venerable. And as a means to that end he counts in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony quite as much as he counts in the War Machine, and such men as Siemanns7 and Ehrlich quite as much as such men as Hindenburg and Bismarck. The German civilization that he sees ahead is a civilization vastly transcending anything that the world knows today, and he is not only eager to work for it but also ready to fight for it. Does the attainment of his ideal demand the risk of his life? Then he risks it gladly and gallantly, and his womenfolk urge him on. (What a golden page of history belongs to German women in this war!)
I believe fully in this German idealism, and what is more, I believe that it will prevail. The truth is behind it, and the truth has a mailed fist. The snuffling and the sobbing dies; the moralists and the mobmasters depart. What stands is the immutable law of human progress: That the more fit shall conquer and obliterate the less fit. This present war is merely the first skirmish. The real battle will be fought out later on. On the one side will be a vigorous, an intelligent and a courageous people, and an ideal that sets great deeds immeasurably above empty words. On the one8 side will be a group of peoples crippled by fear, suspicion and irresolution, and an ideal that makes weakness a virtue and truth-telling an unforgivable sin. I have no doubt of the outcome. [23 December 1914]
