Second Mencken Chrestomathy (21 page)

From the
Smart Set
, April, 1919, p. 49

A
DOG
is a standing proof that most so-called human rights, at bottom, are worth nothing. A dog is proverbially devoid of any such rights, and yet it lives well and is happy. For one dog that is starved and mistreated there are 10,000 that are coddled and overfed. How many human beings, even under the perfect democracy which now exists in the United States, are so comfortable and contented? Perhaps a few actors—that is about all.… Moreover, it is idiotic to say that a dog’s life is empty and bestial. A dog has highly fastidious tastes in food; it knows how to play and to be gay; it has a talent for amorous adventure; it acquires manners and prefers good society. In all those ways it is surely much superior to the average Methodist. Yet more, a dog is very religious and its religion is free from superstition. The god it believes in is its master, and that god actually exists, and is actually concerned about its welfare, and actually rewards it and punishes it, on a plan comprehensible to dogs and meeting with their approval, for its virtues and vices. Dogs need not waste any time over insoluble theological problems. Their god is plainly visible and wholly understandable—they have no need of clergy to guess for them, mislead them and get them into trouble.… Yet a dog has none of the great rights that men esteem, glory in and die for. It cannot vote. It cannot get converted by Dr. Billy Sunday. It cannot go to jail for some great and lofty principle—say, equal suffrage or birth control. It is barred from the Elks, the Harvard Club and Congress. It cannot serve its country by dying of septicaemia or acute gastro-enteritis. It cannot read the
Nation.
It cannot subscribe to the Y.M.C.A. It cannot
swear at waiters. It cannot eat in Pullman dining-cars. It cannot be a Presbyterian.

From the
Smart Set
, July, 1919, p. 65

The concept of man as the moral animal
par excellence
is full of absurdity. The truth is that man is the least moral of all the mammals, and that what little native morality he possesses is an inheritance from his savage ancestors, and tends to vanish as he grows civilized. No race of men has ever punished violations of the moral code as severely as they are punished by the lower animals. Among tigers, lions, hyenas, jackals, elephants, leopards, cougars and wolves the punishment for adultery is death. This surely beats the Unitarians.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, June 12, 1922

Most religions lean heavily upon the fallacious assumption that there is a strong desire for virtue in human beings. But this desire, as a matter of fact, is very weak, and a great deal of effort is necessary to prevent the contrary desire for adventure from overpowering it. “Onward, Christian Soldiers!”—what else is this save an admission that virtue may be made tolerable only by transforming it into combat,
i.e.
, into rough-house. In the United States today, with Sunday-schools every few hundred yards, there are literally millions of women who hold their chastity so lightly that they will swap it for childish finery. And who ever heard of an American politician who wasn’t ready to sacrifice his honor in order to get public office?

From the
Smart Set
, June, 1920, p. 43

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking all their gaudy visions and hallucinations seriously. The lowly yokel, pausing in the furrow to mop his brow, dreams a dream of high achievement in the adjacent city. Ten years later there is a plow standing idle—and another victim of Wall Street is laboring as a bus-driver. Nearly all poverty is caused by idealism. The normal poor man is simply a semi-idiot whose dreams have run away with his capacities. Designed by nature to be a dish-washer in a lunch-room, he has endeavored to make himself a structural ironworker at $5 an hour—and so he has lost his leg, his means of existence, and his sacred honor. It is idealism that causes marriage. It is idealism that makes poets. Every poorhouse is full of idealists.

From the Manchester (England)
Sunday Chronicle
, July 21, 1935

The human race detests thrift as it detests intelligence. The man who accumulates more than he needs and saves the surplus is disliked by all who either can’t or won’t follow his example, and that means the great majority of his fellow men. He makes them ashamed of themselves and they resent it.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 152–70. First printed in the
Smart Set
, Sept., 1915, pp. 304–10. Dr. Parsons was born in 1875 and died in 1941. She was educated at Barnard College and took her Ph.D.
in 1899. Her chief interest was in the American Indian, but her active mind also ranged widely into other fields. At the close of her life she was president of the American Anthropological Association

Why do the great majority of Presbyterians (and, for that matter, of Baptists, Episcopalians and Swedenborgians as well) regard it as unlucky to meet a black cat and lucky to find a pin? What are the logical steps behind the theory that it is indecent to eat peas with a knife? By what process does an otherwise sane man arrive at the conclusion that he will go to Hell unless he is baptized by total immersion? What causes men to be faithful to their wives: habit, fear, poverty, lack of imagination, lack of enterprise, stupidity, religion? What is the true nature of the vague pooling of desires that Rousseau called the social contract? Why does an American regard it as scandalous to wear dress clothes at a funeral, and a Frenchman regard it as equally scandalous
not
to wear them? Why is it that men trust one another so readily, and women trust one another so seldom? Why are we all so greatly affected by statements that we know are not true?—
e.g.
, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, the Declaration of Independence and the CIII Psalm. What is the origin of the so-called double standard of morality? Why do so many people dislike Jews? Why are women forbidden to take off their hats in church?

All these are questions of interest and importance to all of us, for their solution would materially improve the accuracy of our outlook upon the world, and with it our mastery of our environment, but the psychologists, busily engaged in chasing their tails, leave them unanswered, and, in most cases, even unasked. Thus the field lies open to the amateur, and not infrequently he enters it to good effect. The late Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche did it often, and the usufructs were many curious and daring guesses as to the genesis of this, that or the other common delusion of man—
e.g.
, the delusion that the law of the survival of the fittest may be repealed by an act of Congress. Into the same field several very interesting expeditions were made by Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, a lady once celebrated by the newspapers for her invention of trial marriage—an invention, by the way, in which the Nietzsche aforesaid preceded her by at least a dozen years. The records of her researches
are to be found in a brief series of books: “The Family” (1906), “The Old-Fashioned Woman” (1913), and “Fear and Conventionality” (1914). Apparently they have wrung relatively little esteem from the learned, and I seldom encounter a reference to them, and Dr. Parsons herself is not often recalled. Nevertheless, they are extremely instructive volumes, particularly “Fear and Conventionality.” I know of no other work, indeed, which offers a better array of observations upon that powerful complex of assumptions, prejudices, instinctive reactions, racial emotions and unbreakable vices of mind which enters so massively into the daily thinking of all of us. The author does not concern herself, as so many psychologists fall into the habit of doing, with thinking as a purely laboratory phenomenon, a process in
vacuo.
What she deals with is thinking as it is done by men and women in the real world—thinking that is only half intellectual, the other half being as automatic and unintelligent as swallowing, blinking the eye, or falling in love.

The power of the complex that I have mentioned is usually very much underestimated, not only by psychologists, but also by all other persons who pretend to enlightenment. We take pride in the fact that we are thinking animals, and like to believe that our thoughts are free, but the truth is that nine-tenths of them are rigidly conditioned by the babbling that goes on around us from birth, and that the business of considering this babbling objectively, separating the true in it from the false, is an intellectual feat of such stupendous difficulty that very few men are ever able to achieve it. Not one of us is actually a free agent. Not one of us thinks for himself, or in any orderly and scientific manner. The pressure of environment, of mass ideas, of the socialized intelligence, improperly so called, is too enormous to be withstood. No genuine American, no matter how sharp his critical sense, can ever get away from the notion that democracy is, in some subtle and mysterious way, more conducive to human progress and more pleasing to a just God than any of the systems of government which stand opposed to it. In the privacy of his study he may observe very clearly that it exalts the facile and specious man above the really competent man, and from his reflections upon it he may draw the conclusion that its abandonment would be desirable, but
once he emerges from his academic seclusion and resumes the rubbing of noses with his fellow men, he will begin to be tortured by a sneaking feeling that such ideas are heretical and unmanly, and the next time the band begins to play he will thrill with the best of them—or the worst.

It is the business of Dr. Parsons, in “Fear and Conventionality,” to prod into certain of these ideas which thus pour into every man’s mind from the circumambient air, sweeping away, like some huge cataract, the feeble resistance that his own powers of ratiocination can offer. In one direction they lay upon us the bonds of what we call etiquette,
i.e.
, the duty of considering the habits and feelings of those around us—and in another direction they throttle us with what we call morality,
i.e.
, the rules which protect the life and property of those around us. But, as Dr. Parsons shows, the boundary between etiquette and morality is very dimly drawn, and it is often impossible to say of a given action whether it is downright immoral or merely a breach of the punctilio. Even when the moral law is plainly running, considerations of mere amenity and politeness may still make themselves felt. Thus, as Dr. Parsons points out, there is even an etiquette of adultery. “The
ami de la famille
vows not to kiss his mistress in her husband’s house”—not in fear, but “as an expression of conjugal consideration,” as a sign that he has not forgotten the thoughtfulness expected of a gentleman. And in this delicate field, as might be expected, the differences in racial attitudes are almost diametrical. The Englishman, surprising his wife with a lover, sues the rogue for damages and has public opinion behind him, but for an American to do it would be for him to lose caste at once and forever. The plain and only duty of the American is to open upon the fellow with artillery, hitting him if the scene is south of the Potomac and missing him if it is above.

I confess to an endless interest in such puzzling niceties, and to much curiosity as to their origins and meaning. Why do we Americans take off our hats when we meet a female on the street, and yet stand covered before a male of the highest eminence? A Continental would regard this last as boorish to the last degree; in greeting any equal or superior, male or female, actual or merely conventional, he lifts his head-piece. Why does it strike us as ludicrous
to see a man in dress clothes before 6
P.M.
? The Continental puts them on whenever he has a solemn visit to make, whether the hour be six or noon. Why do we regard it as indecent to tuck the napkin between the waistcoat buttons—or into the neck—at meals? The Frenchman does it without thought of crime. So does the Italian. So does the German. All three are punctilious men—far more so, indeed, than we are. Why is it bad manners in Europe and America to ask a stranger his or her age, and a friendly attention in China? Why do we regard it as absurd to distinguish a woman by her husband’s title—
e.g.
, Mrs. Judge Jones, Mrs. Professor Smith? In Teutonic and Scandinavian Europe the omission of the title would be looked upon as an affront.

Such fine distinctions, so ardently supported, raise many interesting questions, but the attempt to answer them quickly gets one bogged. Several years ago I ventured to lift a sad voice against a custom in America: that of married men, in speaking of their wives, employing the full panoply of “Mrs. Brown.” It was my contention—supported, I thought, by logical considerations of the loftiest order—that a husband, in speaking of his wife to his equals, should say “my wife”—that the more formal mode of designation should be reserved for inferiors and for strangers of undetermined position. This contention, somewhat to my surprise, was vigorously combated by various volunteer experts. At first they rested their case upon the mere authority of custom, forgetting that this custom was by no means universal. But finally one of them came forward with a more analytical and cogent defense—the defense, to wit, that “my wife” connoted proprietorship and was thus offensive to a wife’s
amour propre.
But what of “my sister” and “my mother”? This discussion, alas, came to nothing. It was impossible to carry it on logically. The essence of all such inquiries lies in the discovery that there is a force within the liver and lights of man that is infinitely more potent than logic. His reflections, perhaps, may take on intellectually recognizable forms, but they seldom lead to intellectually recognizable conclusions.

Nevertheless, Dr. Parsons offers something in her book that may conceivably help to a better understanding of them, and that is the doctrine that the strange persistence of these rubber-stamp ideas, often unintelligible and sometimes plainly absurd, is due to fear,
and that this fear is the product of a very real danger. The safety of human society lies in the assumption that every individual composing it, in a given situation, will act in a manner hitherto approved as seemly. That is to say, he is expected to react to his environment according to a fixed pattern, not necessarily because that pattern is the best imaginable, but simply because it is determined and understood. If he fails to do so, if he reacts in a novel manner—conducive, perhaps, to his better advantage or to what he thinks is his better advantage—then he disappoints the expectation of those around him, and forces them to meet the new situation he has created by the exercise of independent thought. Such independent thought, to a good many men, is quite impossible, and to the overwhelming majority of men, extremely painful. “To all of us,” says Dr. Parsons, “to the animal, to the savage and to the civilized being, few demands are as uncomfortable,… disquieting or fearful, as the call to innovate.… Adaptations we all of us dislike or hate. We dodge or shirk them as best we may.” And the man who compels us to make them against our wills we punish by withdrawing from him that understanding and friendliness which he, in turn, looks for and counts upon. In other words, we set him apart as one who is anti-social and not to be dealt with, and according as his rebellion has been small or great, we call him a boor or a criminal.