Second Mencken Chrestomathy (55 page)

I know of no course in honor in any American Sunday-school, yet it must be plain that human relations, when they are profitable and agreeable, are based upon honor much oftener than they are based upon morals. It is immoral, in every rational meaning of the
word, to violate the Volstead Act, and it is moral to give the
Polizei
aid against anyone who does so. But what is the practical answer of decent men to those facts? Their practical answer is that such giving of aid is dishonorable. The law does not punish it; it rewards it. But it is punished swiftly and relentlessly by civilized public opinion.

My contention, in brief, is that there is room for a book showing why this is so—for a book of advice to young men setting forth, not what some ancient hypocrite of a college president or Y.M.C.A. secretary thinks would be nice, but what is regarded as nice by the overwhelming majority of intelligent and reputable men. In other words, there is room for a book of inductive ethics, based upon the actual practises of civilized society. Such a book, in the department of sexual conduct, would differ enormously from the present banal manuals. It would denounce as ignoble many of the acts they advocate and it would give its approval to others that they ban. And in the wider field of the relations between man and man it would differ from them even more radically. It would have little to say about ideals, but a great deal about realities.

Most boys admire their fathers and take their notions from them in this department. The boy who has a father who is a genuinely civilized man needs no advice from outside experts. Common decency will be in him when he grows up. He will not be afraid of women and he will not try to make over men. But vast herds of American fathers, succumbing to the Service buncombe, have ceased to be safe guides for their sons. Their practise is misleading and their counsel is dangerous. Thus the way opens for a counselor less credulous and more sagacious. Thus a vast market shows itself for the sort of book I have been trying to describe.

F
ROM
P
REJUDICES
: T
HIRD
S
ERIES
, 1922, pp. 310–19. These notes were to have been part of a book of the same title, long planned and never done. I began to toy with the idea of it in 1914 or thereabout, and made notes for it, off and on, for the next thirty years, but it never got itself finished. From 1920 onward I also played with the notion of a book to
be called Homo Sapiens—a wholly objective treatise on the human species, following the lines of Thomas Henry Huxley’s treatise on the crayfish, but with plenty of attention, of course, to mental processes and institutions, including government and religion. I accumulated a great deal of material from the literature of biology and psychology, and in 1936 or thereabout my old friend Raymond Pearl, professor of biology at the Johns Hopkins, confided to me that he was contemplating a book on the same subject, so I gave up mine, for Pearl’s competence for the job was plainly and enormously superior. He presently fell to work, and the first fruits of his labors appeared in five lectures of the Patten Foundation at Indiana University in October, 1938. Unhappily, his sudden death on November 17, 1940, left his book unfinished. But by that time I had abandoned mine and dispersed most of my notes, and I never resumed. Pearl’s lectures were published by Indiana University under the title of Man the Animal in 1946. They represent but a small fragment of what he had in mind

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. It is my honest belief that I am no wiser today than I was years ago; in fact, I often suspect that I am appreciably
less
wise. Every man goes uphill in sagacity to a certain point, and then begins sliding down again. Theoretically, the old fellows should be much wiser than younger men, if only because of their greater experience, but actually they seem to take on folly faster than they take on wisdom. Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance, and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their grasp of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely feeble, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.

First printed in the
Smart Set
, May, 1919, p. 51

Some of the loosest thinking in ethics has duty for its theme. Practically all writers on the subject agree that the individual owes certain unescapable duties to the race—for example, the duty of engaging in productive labor, and that of marrying and begetting offspring. In support of this position it is almost always argued that if
all
men neglected such duties the race would perish. The logic is hollow enough to be worthy of the college professors who are guilty of it. It simply confuses the conventionality, the pusillanimity, the lack of imagination of the majority of men with the duty of
all
men. There is not the slightest ground for assuming, even as a matter of mere argumentation, that
all
men will ever neglect these alleged duties. There will always remain a safe majority that is willing to do whatever is ordained—that accepts docilely the government it is born under, obeys its laws, and supports its theory. But that majority does not comprise the men who render the highest and most intelligent services to the race; it comprises those who render nothing save their obedience.

For the man who differs from this inert and well-regimented mass, however slightly, there are no duties
per se.
What he is spontaneously inclined to do is of vastly more value to all of us than what the majority is willing to do. There is, indeed, no such thing as duty-in-itself; it is a mere chimera of ethical theorists. Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. The very concept of duty is thus a function of inferiority; it belongs naturally only to timorous and incompetent men. Even on such levels it remains largely a self-delusion, a soothing apparition, a euphemism for necessity. When a man succumbs to duty he merely succumbs to the habit and inclination of other men.

First printed in the
Smart Set
, April, 1922, pp. 45–46

“History,” says Henry Ford, “is bunk.” I inscribe myself among those who dissent from this doctrine; nevertheless, I am often hauled up, in reading history, by a feeling that I am among unrealities. In particular, that feeling comes over me when I read about the religious wars of the past—wars in which thousands of men, women and children were butchered on account of puerile and unintelligible disputes over transubstantiation, the atonement, and other such metaphysical banshees. It does not surprise me that the majority murdered the minority; the majority, even today, does it whenever it is possible. What I can’t understand is that the minority went voluntarily to the slaughter. Even in the worst persecutions known to history—say, for example, those of the Jews of Spain—it was always possible for a given member of the minority to save his hide by giving public assent to the religious notions of the majority. A Jew who was willing to be baptized, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, was practically unmolested; his descendants today are 100% Spaniards. Well, then, why did so many Jews refuse? Why did so many prefer to be robbed, exiled, and sometimes murdered?

The answer given by philosophical historians is that they were a noble people, and preferred death to heresy. But this merely begs the question. Is it actually noble to cling to a religious idea so tenaciously? Certainly it doesn’t seem so to me. After all, no human being really
knows
anything about the exalted matters with which all religions deal. The most he can do is to match his private guess against the guesses of his fellow-men. For any man to say absolutely, in such a field, that this or that is wholly and irrefragably true and this or that is utterly false is simply to talk nonsense. Personally, I have never encountered a religious idea—and I do not except even the idea of the existence of God—that was instantly and unchallengeably convincing, as, say, the Copernican astronomy is instantly and unchallengeably convincing. But neither have
I ever encountered a religious idea that could be dismissed off-hand as palpably and indubitably false. In even the worst nonsense of such theological mountebanks as Brigham Young and Mrs. Eddy there is always enough lingering plausibility, or, at all events, possibility, to give the judicious pause. Whatever the weight of the probabilities against it, it nevertheless
may
be true that man, on his decease, turns into a gaseous vertebrate, and that this vertebrate, if its human larva has engaged in embezzlement, bootlegging, profanity or adultery on this earth, will be boiled for a million years in a cauldron of pitch. My private inclination, due to my defective upbringing, is to doubt it, and to set down any one who believes it as an ass, but it must be plain that I have no means of disproving it.

In view of this uncertainty it seems to me sheer vanity for any man to hold his religious views too firmly, or to submit to any inconvenience on account of them. It is far better, if they happen to offend, to conceal them discreetly, or to change them amiably as the delusions of the majority change. My own views in this department, being wholly skeptical and tolerant, are obnoxious to the subscribers to practically all other views; even atheists sometimes denounce me. At the moment, by an accident of American political history, these dissenters from my theology are forbidden to punish me for not agreeing with them. But at any succeeding moment some group or other among them may seize such power and proceed against me in the immemorial manner. If it ever happens, I give notice here and now that I shall get converted to their nonsense instantly, and so retire to safety with my right thumb laid against my nose and my fingers waving like wheat in the wind. I’d do it even today, if there were any practical advantage in it. Offer me a box of good Havana cigars, and I engage to submit to baptism by any rite ever heard of, provided it does not expose my gothic nakedness. Make it ten boxes, and I’ll agree to be both baptized and confirmed.

The science of psychological pathology is still in its infancy. In all its literature in nine languages, I can’t find a line about the permanent ill effects of acute emotional diseases—say, for example, love affairs. The common assumption of the world is that when a love affair is over it is over—that nothing remains behind. This is probably grossly untrue. It is my belief that every such experience leaves scars upon the psyche, and that they are quite as plain as the scars left on the neck by a carbuncle. A man who has passed through a love affair, even though he may eventually forget the lady’s very name, is never quite the same thereafter. The sentimentalist, exposed incessantly, ends as a psychic cripple; he is as badly off as the man who has come home from the wars with shell-shock.

Patriotism is conceivable to a civilized man in time of stress and storm, when his country is wobbling and sore beset. His country then appeals to him as any victim of misfortune appeals to him—say, a street-walker pursued by the police. But when it is safe, happy and prosperous it can only excite his loathing. The things that make countries safe and happy are all intrinsically corrupting and disgusting. It is as impossible for a civilized man to love his country in good times as it would be for him to respect a politician.

From E
SSAY IN
P
EDAGOGY
, P
REJUDICES
: F
IFTH
S
ERIES
, 1926, pp. 218–36

M
OST
American novelists, before they challenge Dostoievski, put in an apprenticeship on the public prints, and thus have a chance to study and grasp the peculiarities of the journalistic mind; nevertheless, the fact remains that there is not a single genuine newspaper man, done in the grand manner, in the whole range of American fiction. There are some excellent brief sketches, but there is no adequate portrait of the journalist as a whole, from his beginnings as a romantic young reporter to his finish as a Leader of Opinion, correct in every idea and as hollow as a jug. Here, I believe, is genuine tragedy. Here is human character in disintegration—the primary theme of every sound novelist ever heard of, from Fielding to Zola and from Turgeniev to Joseph Conrad. I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. He is, in his first phase, genuinely romantic. He plans to be both an artist and a moralist—a master of lovely words and a merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass in his community—that is, if his career goes on to what is called success. He becomes the repository of all its worst delusions and superstitions. He becomes the darling of all its frauds and idiots, and the despair of all its honest men.