A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
Читать онлайн книгу.
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