A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken

       II

      THE CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF EXISTENCE

      LESSONS OF A LIFETIME

      I OFFER THE following conclusions after 42 years of unremitting observation and reflection, aided by consultations with hundreds of other observers, dead and alive:

      1. There is no such thing as honest politics, in the strict sense. All persons who aspire to public office, without a single exception, are mountebanks. Even those who start out honestly, with a sincere desire to sacrifice their private comfort to the public good, become mountebanks the moment they face an assemblage of voters, just as every man becomes a mountebank the moment he faces a woman. Under a republic, with the vote of a farmhand counting exactly as much as the vote of a Huxley, intellectual honesty in politics is inhibited by the very nature of things.

      2. It is a capital mistake to assume that the common people are stupid but honest. The exact contrary is more nearly true. The common people never sacrifice their own good to the general good. They are always in favor of the man who promises to get something for them without cost to them—i. e., to steal something for them. This capacity for predatory enterprise they venerate above all other human qualities. Even when it is turned against them, they have a sneaking respect for it. They may laugh at a college professor or an archbishop, but they never laugh at a Charles F. Murphy. One cannot laugh at a man one envies—at the man one would like to be.

      3. Virtue is often a mere symptom of meanness, or of poverty, which is the same thing. The mildest vice is an overhead charge, a dead expense. A man of intense and unyielding virtue is often merely a man of overpowering meanness. This explains why it is that such virtue is usually found in combination with lack of generosity, boorishness, suspiciousness—why it is, in brief, that a virtuoso of virtue is seldom a gentleman. It costs something, even to be merely polite. One cannot show any genuine toleration for the other fellow—the essence of being a gentleman—without at the same time practicing, or at least freely condoning, his vices, i. e., his unutilitarian acts. The true test of a man is not the way he gets his money, but the way he spends it. Men are drawn into firm friendship and understanding, not so much by common occupations, as by common vices. Professional musicians usually dislike one another, but amateur musicians are strongly attracted to one another. Thus it appears that good will between man and man is largely based upon common vices—e. g., music, politics, alcoholism, gambling, or the pursuit of women (either openly, as Don Juans, or in disguise, as vice crusaders).

      4. Women and actors have this advantage in common: that any sign of intelligence in them, however slight, causes surprise, and is therefore estimated above its true worth. In the case of actors this surprise is justified, but justified or not, it works to the same end. No one gets excited over a man who has read Kant, but a woman who has done so, or who merely gets the reputation of having done so, becomes a sort of celebrity ipso facto. In the same way an actor who is able to put together a dozen intelligible paragraphs about Shakespeare is hailed as a Shakespearean scholar and invited to address universities. I say “intelligible,” mind you, and not “intelligent.” No actor has ever written anything actually intelligent about Shakespeare, or even about acting. Of all the professions open to males, acting is the only one whose practitioners have never contributed anything of value to its theory.

      5. A man who has never faced the hazards of war is in exactly the same position as a woman who has never faced the hazards of maternity. That is to say, he has missed the supreme experience of his sex, and is hence an incomplete being. There is something in all of us which makes us crave these natural hazards—some impulse toward danger and courage—and when they are not experienced we are prone to invent imaginary substitutes. Thus it is that the men of a nation long at peace become old maidish: they torture themselves with artificial austerities and hobgoblins—for example, prohibition and the Rum Demon. The remedy for such vapors is war, just as the remedy for hypochondria is a knock in the head.

      6. Whatever may be the demerits of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s scheme of psychoanalysis, there is at least sound support for his theory that the thing we hate most is the thing most dangerous to us—that a man’s prejudices afford an index to his weaknesses. The most cruel and vindictive judge is the one who is most a criminal at heart. The loudest whooper for prohibition is the man who is most tempted every time he passes a saloon. But perhaps the best proof of Freud’s theory is to be found in those strange fanatics who specialize in denouncing nude pictures and statuary. The argument of these gentlemen is that such pictures and statues incite the beholder to lewd thougthts. This is a faulty generalization from their personal experience. Their error lies in the assumption that all men, or even any considerable number of men, are as dirty-minded as they are themselves. Wasn’t it Arnold Bennett who said that a novelist must always get his psychology from himself? The same thing is true of a moralist.

      7. The prosperity of such bogus healing schemes as osteopathy and Christian Science is largely based upon the fact that they offer simple and intelligible theores as to the causation of disease. In this department scientific medicine has made but little progress. It can tell us clearly what nephritis is, but it cannot tell us why it is. Even when it ventures to answer—as in the case of typhoid fever—it really begs the question. The bacillus typhosus, in itself, cannot cause typhoid: there must be a preliminary state of receptivity in the body. What that state of receptivity is and how it is produced are questions that scientific medicine has yet failed to answer in simple terms. The answers given by osteopathy and Christian Science, of course, are not true, but they are at least simple, and to the popular mind they thus become plausible. Even an antivivisectionist is intelligent enough to understand the theory that typhoid is caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft nervous tissue. But only a few persons can understand the warring hypotheses of immunity, and even these are left in doubt and darkness.

      8. I have spoken above (in paragraph 5) of the impulse to danger and courage that is inherent in all of us. Its psychological roots are to be found in the wille zur macht, the will to power—a thing differing considerably from Schopenhauer’s will to live, despite many elements in common. The impulse to do something daring is simply an impulse to give an exhibition of efficiency—in particular, of the sort of efficiency that few other men possess. And added to this psychical impulse (and no doubt underlying it) is the purely physical impulse to function: in brief, the life force. That the life force, working thus through the medium of the impulse to daring enterprise, may produce its own destruction—i. e., may produce death—is not an objection of any importance. We all know that nature is an ass. She is constantly failing, through what may be called excess of zeal, to accomplish her own purposes. She is extraordinarily inept, clumsy and wasteful. Even when her purposes seem to be clear (which is not often) her means of accomplishing them are commonly fatuous to the point of unintelligibility. Nature’s plans are magnificent, but her workmanship is almost always bad. An optician who made a microscope as defective as the human eye would be taken out into the alley and shot.

      9. The hardest job in the world is that of a clergyman. If he preaches a scheme of life that is actually livable, he is condemned as a compromiser with evil, and if he preaches a scheme that is ideal, and hence unlivable, he is condemned for not living it himself. No other man is watched so closely, or judged so harshly. And not only are the judgments upon him harsh, but they are also wholly unfair. He is expected to have sympathy for every human weakness, even the worst, and yet to show no human weakness himself, even the least. Imagine a grown man, perhaps with sciatica, Mexican mine stock and a mother-in-law, who is forbidden to utter so much as a single damn! Imagine a man whose material rewards in his profession are exactly in inverse proportion to his sincerity, his industry and his enthusiasm! Again, recall this staggering fact: the clergyman is the only professional man who cannot,