A doctor might say that someone is fat, incurably sick or brain-dead; but this, of itself, neither means the doctor is a nihilist, nor that he is incompetent to discuss what he can’t cure. As Mencken said:
My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology. That simple statement of fact, I daresay, will be accepted as a confession, condemning me out of hand as unfit for my task, and even throwing a certain doubt upon my bona fides. For it is one of the peculiar intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of the insoluble becomes unfashionable — nay, almost infamous. To lack a remedy is to lack the very license to discuss disease. The causes of this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law. The aim of government is to repeal the laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments. War becomes simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to make over the father which begat it.1
And:
Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that go floating about the country, particularly in the field of governmental reform. The trouble with them is not only that they won’t and don’t work; the trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably, beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. To tackle them with a proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable argument of it, is sound criticism; to tackle them with another solution that is quite as bad, or even worse, is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an automobile.2
Equally, it is unlikely that “the great majority of human beings” — that is, “the optimists and chronic hopers of the world, the believers in men, ideas and things” — that is, “the advocates of leagues of nations, wars to make the world safe for democracy, political mountebanks, ‘clean-up’ campaigns, laws, raids, Men and Religion Forward Movements, eugenics, sex hygiene, education, newspapers”3 — can actually be shown the error of their ways.4 As Mencken said:
What is to be done for [the man full of faith, the forward-looker]? How is he to be cured of his great thirst for sure-cures that do not cure, and converted into a contented and careless backward-looker, peacefully snoozing beneath his fig tree while the oppressed bawl for succor in forty abandoned lands, and injustice stalks the world, and taxes mount higher and higher, and poor working-girls are sold into white slavery, and Prohibition fails to prohibit, and cocaine is hawked openly, and jazz drags millions down the primrose way, and the trusts own the legislatures of all Christendom, and judges go to dinner with millionaires, and Europe prepares for another war, and children of four and five years work as stevedores and locomotive firemen, and guinea pigs and dogs are vivisected, and Polish immigrant women have more children every year, and divorces multiply, and materialism rages, and the devil runs the cosmos? What is to be done to save the forward-looker from his torturing indignations, and set him in paths of happy dalliance? Answer: nothing. He was born that way, as men are born with hare lips or bad livers, and he will remain that way until the angels summon him to eternal rest. Destiny has laid upon him the burden of seeing unescapably what had better not be looked at, of believing what isn’t so. There is no way to help him. He must suffer vicariously for the carnal ease of the rest of us. He must die daily that we may live in peace, corrupt and contented[.]5
Why do people like Mencken believe this?
Is it because they are afraid? Is it because they are not intrigued by it? … The real reason … is this: that none of them — that no genuinely thoughtful and prudent man — can imagine any solution which meets the tests of his own criticism — that no genuinely intelligent man believes the thing is soluble at all.6
It follows:
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection.7
Mencken believed that, although people are far from perfect, they are unimprovable, or at least unable to be predictably and intentionally improved. When they become convinced that one of their beliefs are erroneous, they just go out and find another. In the previous section we saw Mecken say exactly that.
This conservatism requires much more discipline than resorting to psychoanalysis, utilitarian economics, social studies, theology, or any of the other popular and apparently complex so-called disciplines. That problems are soluble; that solutions are knowable; that solutions are likely to be adopted; that ignorance does have causes, i.e., that there is reason behind ignorance; that stupidity does have cures, i.e., that education is possible; that evil is punished and good rewarded: for many people, as Mencken said, it is “easier to imagine it than not to imagine it.”8 Mencken also said, “Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”9
Conservatism is simple and calmly pessimistic, so it bores most people, is rarely held unfalteringly, and does not receive any funding or attention — that is, as a purely political or scientific pursuit.
Conservatives/libertarians believe they are smarter than most romantics/interventionists, because they are the ones who are right. But how is this compatible with the fact that they have failed to communicate their case as well as romantics/interventionists? Is truth that big a disadvantage to successful activism? Who has been outsmarted now; can the smart be outsmarted by the stupid? One can endlessly quibble about strategy and list areas for improvement, but to a conservative it is obvious that far from being outsmarted, conservatives/libertarians have been outstupided. As Mencken said, “it seems to me to be nonsensical for a man to offer generally some commodity that only a few rare and dubious Americans want, and then weep and beat his breast because he is not patronized.”10 Purely to raise money, Mencken co-founded three highly profitable magazines Saucy Stories, Parisienne and Black Mask (which apparently was the original title for the 1994 film Pulp Fiction), and wanted to start another that was to be called Pretty Girls.11
Conservatives have such accurate understanding and subsequent low — or, rather, appropriate — expectations that they cannot apply the term failure to themselves or their surroundings. On this definition, conservatism escapes the label of pessimism, or becomes only an incidental pessimism. Pessimism is a very confused term — if it were struck from the world’s vocabulary, I would be quite optimistic about the results. Pessimism is as confusing a concept as the claim that Mencken was one of the great hopes of the conservative movement. It has a certain attraction, due to its common usage, but on reflection it is either meaningless or misleading.
Mencken further addressed the confusing of negative fact with negative philosophy when describing the proposals of conservatives like Mencken himself:
His remedy, in brief, is to abandon all attempts at a solution, to let the whole thing go, to cork up all the reformers and try to forget it … He admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death … Such men are never popular. The public taste is for merchandise of a precisely opposite character. The way to please is to proclaim in a confident manner, not what is true, but what is merely comforting. This is what is called building up. This is constructive criticism.12
And:
Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he prove it? Doesn’t he prove enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing — that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts? The fact is enormously significant.13
Mencken never built anything teetering on the edge or precariously in the clouds. He tried to set firm foundations and do things in the proper order. But no matter how much muckraking he did, he never progressed past the plumbing. Meanwhile, other commentators were addressing the décor of their dreams, explaining the silver lining of their clouds, and building flimsy walls on which to display their accomplishments — it’s as if they used newspapers for shelter. Mencken would give them his two cents, and enjoy their gutter-sniping.
Footnotes- Ibid., pp. 195-96. [↩]
- H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Octagon Books, 1985), p. 212. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 213. [↩]
- As George Bernard Shaw said, “There is no harder scientific fact in the world than the fact that belief can be produced in practically unlimited quantity and intensity, without observation or reasoning, and even in defiance of both, by the simple desire to believe founded on a strong interest in believing.” Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (London: Constable and Company, 1922), p. xxiv. [↩]
- Prejudices: Third Series, pp. 225-26. A similar passage is in James Fitzjames Stephen,Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. Stuart D. Warner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993), pp. 155-56:
If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction … The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.
Another similar passage, especially to the Stephen one, is in Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1946), p. 203:
Taking the sum of the State’s physical strength, with the force of powerful spiritual influences behind it, one asks … what can be done against the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement? Simply nothing. So far from encouraging any hopeful contemplation of the unattainable, the student of civilized man will offer no conclusion but that nothing can be done. He can regard the course of our civilization only as he would regard the course of a man in a row-boat on the lower reaches of the Niagara — as an instance of Nature’s unconquerable intolerance of disorder, and in the end, an example of the penalty which she puts upon any attempt at interference with order.
This river is shaped by government banks and government levies, and the tide of opinion that fills it drowns out dissent. As a result, we are ruled by current affairs. The best the libertarian can do is damn it. There is no watertight way to water it down. We might not be able to call a stop to government, but at least we can to analogies and puns. Or can we? Is not government just a metaphorical application of the language of justice and progress to crime and demagoguery? [↩]
- Prejudices: Second Series, p. 215. [↩]
- A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 11. [↩]
- Treatise on the Gods, p. 15; see also, for example, pp. 13, 42-43, 328-33. [↩]
- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book In C Major (New York: John Lane, 1916), p. 34. Similarly, it reads in G.K Chesterton’s Heretics, ch. IV, in vol. I of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 66: “Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.” See also G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades, ch. IV, in vol. VI of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 133. [↩]
- Prejudices: Third Series, p. 15. [↩]
- H.L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 86, 350-53. [↩]
- Prejudices: Second Series, pp. 216-18. [↩]
- Prejudices: Fourth Series, p. 139. [↩]