Читать книгу Notes on Democracy - H. L. Mencken - Страница 7

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Two other emotions are observed in the raw human being, fresh from God's hands: one is rage, and the other is what, for want of a more accurate name, may be called love. This love, of course, is something quite different from the thing that poets sing. It is a great deal more earthly, and perhaps a great deal more honest. It manifests itself typically in a delight in being tickled; its psychic overtones take the form of being amiable. The child that is capable of it in the fullest measure is the one that coos loudest when its mother pats and strokes it, and tucks it into bed. In these sad days, when every flapper has read Freud and ponders on the libido, there is no need, I take it, for me to explain that such delights have their seats chiefly in erogenous zones, and have more to do with the hormones than with the soul. Here the new child psychology confirms the observations of the Freudians, and reinforces their allegation that even the most tender and innocent infant may be worthy of suspicion. Dr. Watson says that the dreadful phenomenon of tumescence in the male can occur at birth—a satirical fact of the first calibre, if a fact. It concerns us here only because the incurable infantilism of the inferior man brings him to manhood with his emotions in this department substantially what they were when he yielded himself to auto-erotic exercises in the cradle.

But there is yet a difference, and it is important. In character his amorous fancies are the same; in intensity they are immensely exaggerated. His brain, in the first years of his second decade, ceases to develop, but simultaneously his glands begin to unfold gloriously, and presently they dominate his whole organism. In his middle teens, he is no more than a vast geyser of hormones. The sweet passion of love, in these years, is to him precisely what it is to a Tom cat. If he is of the bucolic variety of Homo stultus he has his will of his neighbour's daughter, and there begins a race between the village pastor and the village sage-femme. If he is of the urban proletariat, he finds the outer world more inhospitable to the inner urge, for there are no dark lanes in the cities and no moonlight nights, but the urge itself remains irresistible and so in some way or other, vicariously or in harsh physiological terms, he yields himself to it, and loses his immortal soul.

Later on the thing grows more subtle and even more refined. His vast capacity for illusion, his powerful thirst for the not true, embellishes his anthropoid appetite without diminishing it, and he begins to toy with sentiment, even with a sort of poetry. If you want to discover the content of that poetry go look at any movie, or listen to any popular song. At its loftiest, it is never far from the poetry of a rooster in a barnyard. Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus. The eminent psychologists who conduct tabloid newspapers make this fact the corner-stone of their metaphysical system. Their ideal piece of news is one in which nothing is left to the imagination that can be wormed through the mails. Their readers want no sublimation and no symbolism.

Love, as Freud explains, has many meanings. It runs from the erotic to the philanthropic. But in all departments and on all planes the inferior man reduces it to terms of his own elemental yearnings. Of all his stupidities there is none more stupid than that which makes it impossible for him to see beyond them, even as an act of the imagination. He simply cannot formulate the concept of a good that is not his own good. The fact explains his immemorial heat against heretics, sacred and secular. His first thought and his last thought, contemplating them, is to stand them up against a wall, and have at them with musketry. Go back into history as far as you please, and you will find no record that he has ever opened his mouth for fairness, for justice, for decency between man and man. Such concepts, like the concepts of honour and of liberty, are eternally beyond him, and belong only to his superiors. The slaughters in the Roman arena delighted him; he applauded Torquemada; only yesterday he was marching against radicals—i.e., idiots who lamented his exploitation and sought to end it—with the American Legion. His natural cowardice, of course, moves him powerfully in such situations: his congenital fear is easily translated into cruelty. But something must also be said for his mere incapacity to project himself into the place of the other, his deficiency in imagination. Are the poor charitable? Then it is only to the poor. When their betters stand before them, asking for something that they may withhold—when they are thus confronted, though the thing asked for be only fair dealing, elemental justice, common decency, they are wolves.

In a previous work I have adverted to the appalling development of this wolfishness among peasants. They may be safely assumed, I believe, to represent the lowest caste among civilized men. They are the closest, both in, their avocations and in their mental processes, to primeval man. One may think of them as the sediment remaining in the filter after the stream of progress has gone through. Even the city proletariat is appreciably superior, if only because it embraces those more intelligent yokels who have had the wit to escape from the dreadful drudgery of the dunghill. Well, give a glance at the theology and politics prevailing on the land. The former, in all countries and all ages, has kept contact with the primitive animism of savages: it bristles everywhere with demons, witches and ghosts. In its public aspect it is as intolerant of heresy as Thibetan lamaism. The yokel not only believes that all heretics are doomed to be roasted in hell through all eternity; he also holds that they should be harassed as much as possible on this earth. The anti-evolution laws of the South afford an instructive glimpse into the peasant mind. They are based frankly upon the theory that every man who dissents from the barnyard theology is a scoundrel, and devoid of civil rights. That theory was put very plainly by the peasant attorney-general during the celebrated Scopes trial, to the visible satisfaction of the peasant judge.

In politics the virtuous clod-hopper, again speaking for inferior man, voices notions of precisely the same sort. The whole process of government, as he views it, is simply a process of promoting his private advantage. He can imagine no good save his own good. When his affairs are prospering—which is to say, when the needs of the city man are acute, and the latter is thus at his mercy—he rams his advantage home with relentless ferocity. For him to show any altruism in such a situation, or even any common humanity, would be so strange as to appear fabulous. But when things are running against him he believes that the city man should be taxed to make up his losses: this is the alpha and omega of all the brummagem progressivism that emanates from the farm. That "progressivism," in the hands of political mountebanks, is swathed in the trappings of Service, but at the heart of it there is nothing but bald self-seeking. The yokel hates everyone who is not a yokel—and is afraid of everyone. He is democratic man in the altogether. He is the glory and bulwark of all democratic states. The city proletarian may be flustered and run amok by ideas—ideas without any sense, true enough, but still ideas. The yokel has room in his head for only one. That is the idea that God regards him fondly, and has a high respect for him—that all other men are out of favour in heaven and abandoned to the devil.