A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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betterment of the city and State be held up to ridicule and scorn?
The objection of a critic who deserves respect—but is he quite fair? I question it. When a man comes before a community with a new pill for the cure of its malaises, and particularly when he proposes to administer it by force of arms, the thing for the community to determine is not whether the man himself is pious and honest, but whether the pill will actually cure. If the probabilities are all against it, then it is the duty of every good citizen to denounce the quack, and that duty increases in direct ratio to the citizen’s opportunities. I have no apologies to offer for howling from my own private stump. I am paid to howl; I enjoy howling; it makes me feel virtuous to howl.
The fact that a quack happens to be respectable is no defense of his quackery. The more respectable he is, the more dangerous he is. If the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte were an obscure shyster, his public advocacy of pharisaical and unenforceable laws would be of no consequence. But it so happens that he is a man of the highest position and dignity, the bearer of a great name, a powerful maker of public opinion, and therefore his errors are of very serious consequence indeed. When he tries to enforce them by the mere weight of his authority, disdaining all honest opposition and grossly libeling its spokesmen, it is an agreeable business to show that vastly weightier authority is ranged against him. And when he tries to prevail by the sheer violence of his whoops, then it is a pious act to whoop even louder.
No word of abuse has ever been printed in this place against any man who sought to persuade people to his honest opinion by fair and honest argument. But there is a tremendous difference between honest persuasion and violent and ill-natured browbeating, and that difference I shall continue to point out from time to time. The objection to the moralists whom the Rev. Dr. Harris defends is not only that they are wrong, but also and more especially that they are intolerant, pharisaical, cruel, ignorant, vindictive, vituperative and disingenuous. In brief, they try to overcome their opponents, not by proving them in error, but by calling them scoundrels. That is a fault so discreditable that it wipes out all the credit of their holy zeal. It is a fault that their pastors should beat out of them with clubs. They should be taught manners before ever they are allowed to teach the rest of us morals.
I give so much space to the Rev. Dr. Harris’ accusation because I regard him as an honest man, and hence one among many. What is more, he is a sinner and thus my brother. I myself once caught him in sin, and he frankly admitted it. This lifts him above all suspicion of personal interest. I hold no brief against any moralist save the bogus archangel, the lofty sniffer, the manhater, the pharisee, the bichloride tablet. Let me call on the rev. gent., then, for the name of one gentleman, not obviously of that fair brotherhood, whom I have ever attacked unjustly, and to whom I have ever shown discourtesy. Let him produce one lone honest moralist with authentic wounds. [17 October 1913]
BEING ON THE LOSING SIDE
Friendly caution and summons of an anonymous contributor to the Letter Column:
Sir Lancelot, don’t you know you’re on the losing side? Can’t you discern the signs of the times?
Well, suppose I am? Suppose I can? What of it? Is there any special virtue in being on the winning side? If so, let’s hear it. Personally, I have always found it a great deal more exciting to lose than to win, and what is more, a great deal more soothing to the soul. Imagine a man winning with the mob behind him, or, say, the City Council, or the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or the salacious old deacons of the Anti-Saloon League!4 The immediate fruits of victory, true enough, would be his. He would be applauded, he would be esteemed, perhaps he would even get a good job. But consider the damage to his self-respect, the staggering psychic insult! How he would blush when he shaved in the morning—and looked into his mirror!
But what good is accomplished by combating the irresistible, the inevitable? For example, what good is accomplished by opposing prohibition, which is bound to triumph in Maryland within five years, and perhaps within two years? The answer is as simple as can be: no good is accomplished. Utilitarianism sees the enterprise as wasteful and vain, and hence as immoral. But while utilitarianism thus denounces it, hedonism approves it. That is to say, its objective uselessness is outweighed by its subjective pleasantness. Herein lies the beauty of philosophy: it is so full of contradictions that it affords excuse for every imaginable immorality. And herein lies the charm of life: that one man’s poison is another man’s meat.
Just why it is so all-fired agreeable to object to what the great bulk of “right-thinking” men regard as nice I do not profess to determine with accuracy. My own theory is that the feeling is based upon sound logical and psychological grounds: that the pursuit of the truth is inherently pleasant, and that the pursuit of the truth necessarily involves a conflict with the majority of men, who view it, at best, with suspicion, and at worst, with the most savage hostility. Some one has put the fact into a platitude: What everyone believes is never true. It was voiced by Paul in his famous saying, The truth shall make you free5—i. e., shall release you from membership in the stupid and credulous mob.
All belief in the intelligence of the mob—which is to say, all democracy—is based upon the erroneous assumption that logic is instinctive in man, just as lying and theft are instinctive. Nothing could be more ridiculously untrue. The fact is that logic is one of the youngest of the arts, and that relatively few men ever attain to any facility in its practice, even after the most painstaking instruction. Such rare men, I believe, tend to increase just as the men who can read and write tend to increase, but the vast majority still labor under a congenital unfitness or incapacity. These inept ones, whose logical fingers are all thumbs, run the United States today. They believe that Friday is an unlucky day, that Peruna6 will cure catarrh, that a cat has nine lives, that one American militiaman would be a fair match for 10 Germans or 20 Frenchmen, that all rich men are rogues ipso facto and that universal human appetites may be obliterated by a simple legislative fiat. They venerate Theodore Roosevelt as the male Jane Addams, and Jane Addams as the female Roosevelt, and both as profound and revolutionary thinkers.
One of the minor errors we make in considering the logical faculty is that of confusing it with mere education. The two things, of course, are wholly distinct, and in some sense even antagonistic. A man may have a mind richly stored with facts, and yet at the same time he may fall into error in the most elementary reasoning processes. I offer as an example a distinguished member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, whose name and chair I charitably suppress. This gentleman, with the best intentions in the world, once composed a pamphlet that has since been widely circulated by interested persons. It covers but a few pages, but in those few pages the whole science of logic is reduced to madness. The learned professor jumps through syllogisms with the abandon of a hunter leaping a hedge. It would be impossible to imagine a wilder debauch of faulty premises and unwarranted conclusions. And yet the thing was composed seriously, and is accepted seriously by 99 readers out of every 100 today.
When we come to men less trained to purely intellectual processes, by reason, perhaps, of a preoccupation with emotional and hence unreasonable matters, we find even worse examples, if worse be possible, of logical burlesque and buffoonery. At the risk of seeming to push a point too hard, I cite again the astounding chain of reasoning whereby the Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte has established, to his own satisfaction, that all men who oppose the hounding of miserable prostitutes are either frequenters of their studios or friends of their prosperity. This chain of reasoning, it may be said at once, has convinced not only the Hon. Mr. Bonaparte himself, but also many other persons. And yet, at bottom, it is not only at war with the easily demonstrable facts, but also inherently unsound and ridiculous. Here we have a former Attorney-General of the United States—i. e., a recognized leader in a profession based upon logic—backing logic into a corner and beating it to death.
And if there be any further desire to seek clinical material, and no objection is made to visiting the free wards wherein the lowly fight for life, I offer this column gladly. Herein one observes full oft that even an amateur, who ordinarily loves the art he practices, may maul it quite as mercilessly as a professional, who ordinarily hates it. Two or three weeks ago some kind gentleman informed the Letter Column that he had found no less than six separate logical absurdities in my compositions in one week. Obviously a blind man—or a humanitarian. My real