Was Mencken’s conservatism caused by the incidence and severity of the quacks, shysters and demagogues of his time, or was it just a coincidence? If there was no believing and espousing of untruths, would he have advocated and invented them? Did his libertarianism come before his conservatism or vice versa? It is to such questions that Mencken said:
How are we to account for it? My question, of course, is purely rhetorical. Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.1
So here’s a messy, slightly fanciful and more descriptive than explanatory attempt:
Mencken’s criticism was not due solely to his cynicism, but to a changing symbiosis or mishmash of alertness (actually seeing things), bravery (saying unpopular things), honesty (choosing to say his own beliefs), humour, aesthetic taste, knowledge (having theories, facts and vocabulary to draw from), intelligence (interpreting history and his surroundings correctly), luck (with infinite variables coming together, including many not mentioned in this list, and talent alone insufficient), generosity (sharing his skills), and malice (sharing his views with people who didn’t want to hear it and would be humiliated by others hearing it). It was brought on, reinforced, or shaped by: what he witnessed, read,2 and learnt from his father.3 Or, as he put it, “laborious research … long experience, profound pondering and incessant prayer.”4
Mencken’s cynicism was largely a secondary thing: a reaction to the world more than a way of looking at it. His cynicism is not contrariness except in result; it is the result of reasoning inductively — assuming that what has happened in the past, will happen in the future — and deductively — finding what an espoused position entails. He may have been arrogant, cruel and pessimistic, but he was also right. He was both idealist and realist, and, since they were both accurate and therefore mutually supporting, never compromised either position. He did not lack faith; he lacked deserving locations for it. He believed that death was very popular, seeing that few people ever returned from it.
Mencken was not shallow, cheap or dismissive. He made fun of things because he took them more seriously than their most avid supporters. He was able to make light of things, because he was not in the dark about them. His criticisms were not shots in the dark. He took frauds like government so seriously that, rather than accept the jests of its defenders, he worked out where its policies and principles led. Many self-professed and so-called emulators of Mencken fail to realise this. Sometimes they get close, but no cigar. They stand for nothing and sneer or joke about everything, which is different to Mencken and often less forceful. Instead of being incisive and provocative, they attract attention to, distract from or trivialise the issue. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it may even be fierce. But without Mencken’s principled approach (a conservative libertarianism), those hoping to emulate him will find their work lacks his consistent fierceness — as Mencken said, “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”5 Also, because facts date whereas principles are timeless, their humour and force rarely lasts long. As Mencken said, they are:
engaged endlessly upon a laborious and furious discussion of transient futilities … wholly unconscious of the underlying political currents … [T]he puerile combats of parties and candidates [are] scarcely … distinguished from a mere combat for jobs … What is printed in the newspapers … acres and acres of it every day, is dead the day after it is printed.6
It was because Mencken could see so clearly what was happening that he was amused by it. It was not because he was easily amused, had a fertile imagination or was a talented entertainer.
Footnotes- A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 443. [↩]
- For example, Letters of H.L. Mencken, p. 337: “The books of your old chief, Dr. Sumner, made a powerful impression on me when I was young, and their influence has survived. I only wish that such things as ‘The Forgotten Man’ could be printed as circulars in editions of millions.” [↩]
- On the influence of Mencken’s father, see H.L. Mencken, Happy Days (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 188, 251-52: e.g., “I [Mencken] picked up the idea [‘that reform was mainly only a conspiracy of prehensile charlatans to mulct taxpayers’] from him [Mencken senior] … He [Mencken senior] believed that political corruption was inevitable under democracy, and even argued, out of his own experience, that it had its uses.” [↩]
- A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 575; and H.L. Mencken, Mencken’s Last Campaign, ed. Joseph C. Goulden (Washington, D.C.: The New Republic Book Company, 1978), p. 112. [↩]
- A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 439. [↩]
- A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, pp. 373-74. [↩]