A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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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