1
_To Him that Hath_
The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and
disdainful air, is the reputation of being well to do. Nothing else
so neatly eases one’s way through life, especially in democratic
countries. There is in ninety-nine per cent. of all democrats an
irresistible impulse to crook the knee to wealth, to defer humbly to
the power that goes with it, to see all sorts of high merits in the
man who has it, or is said to have it. True enough, envy goes with
the pliant neck, but it is envy somehow purged of all menace: the
inferior man is afraid to do evil to the man with money in eight banks;
he is even afraid to _think_ evil of him—that is, in any patent and
offensive way. Against capital as an abstraction he rants incessantly,
and all of the laws that he favors treat it as if it were criminal. But
in the presence of the concrete capitalist he is singularly fawning.
What makes him so is easy to discern. He yearns with a great yearning
for a chance to tap the capitalist’s purse, and he knows very well,
deep down in his heart, that he is too craven and stupid to do it by
force of arms. So he turns to politeness, and tries to cajole. Give
out the news that one has just made a killing in the stock market, or
robbed some confiding widow of her dower, or swindled the government
in some patriotic enterprise, and at once one will discover that one’s
shabbiness is a charming eccentricity, and one’s judgment of wines
worth hearing, and one’s politics worthy of attention and respect. The
man who is thought to be poor never gets a fair chance. No one wants to
listen to him. No one gives a damn what he thinks or knows or feels. No
one has any active desire for his good opinion.
I discovered this principle early in life, and have put it to use
ever since. I have got a great deal more out of men (and women) by
having the name of being a well-heeled fellow than I have ever got by
being decent to them, or by dazzling them with my sagacity, or by hard
industry, or by a personal beauty that is singular and ineffable.
2
_The Venerable Examined_
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom. It is my honest belief that I am no wiser to-day
than I was five or ten years ago; in fact, I often suspect that I
am appreciable _less_ wise. Women can prevail over me to-day by
devices that would have made me hoof them out of my studio when I was
thirty-five. I am also an easier mark for male swindlers than I used
to be; at fifty I’ll probably be joining clubs and buying Mexican
mine stock. The truth is that every man goes up-hill in sagacity
to a certain point, and then begins sliding down again. Nearly all
the old fellows that I know are more or less balmy. Theoretically,
they should be much wiser than younger men, if only because of their
greater experience, but actually they seem to take on folly faster than
they take on wisdom. A man of thirty-five or thirty-eight is almost
woman-proof. For a woman to marry him is a herculean feat. But by the
time he is fifty he is quite as easy as a Yale sophomore. On other
planes the same decay of the intelligence is visible. Certainly it
would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of
thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and
lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average
age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of
them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their
knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out
to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon
a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely
equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.
3
_Duty_
Some of the loosest thinking in ethics has duty for its theme.
Practically all writers on the subject agree that the individual
owes certain unescapable duties to the race—for example, the duty
of engaging in productive labor, and that of marrying and begetting
offspring. In support of this position it is almost always argued that
if _all_ men neglected such duties the race would perish. The logic is
hollow enough to be worthy of the college professors who are guilty
of it. It simply confuses the conventionality, the pusillanimity, the
lack of imagination of the majority of men with the duty of _all_ men.
There is not the slightest ground for assuming, even as a matter of
mere argumentation, that _all_ men will ever neglect these alleged
duties. There will always remain a safe majority that is willing to
do whatever is ordained—that accepts docilely the government it is
born under, obeys its laws, and supports its theory. But that majority
does not comprise the men who render the highest and most intelligent
services to the race; it comprises those who render nothing save their
obedience.
For the man who differs from this inert and well-regimented
mass, however slightly, there are no duties _per se_. What he is
spontaneously inclined to do is of vastly more value to all of us
than what the majority is willing to do. There is, indeed, no such
thing as duty-in-itself; it is a mere chimera of ethical theorists.
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. The
very concept of duty is thus a function of inferiority; it belongs
naturally only to timorous and incompetent men. Even on such levels it
remains largely a self-delusion, a soothing apparition, a euphemism for
necessity. When a man succumbs to duty he merely succumbs to the habit
and inclination of other men. Their collective interests invariably
pull against his individual interests. Some of us can resist a pretty
strong pull—the pull, perhaps, of thousands. But it is only the
miraculous man who can withstand the pull of a whole nation.
_Martyrs_
“History,” says Henry Ford, “is bunk.” I inscribe myself among those
who dissent from this doctrine; nevertheless, I am often hauled up,
in reading history, by a feeling that I am among unrealities. In
particular, that feeling comes over me when I read about the religious
wars of the past—wars in which thousands of men, women and children
were butchered on account of puerile and unintelligible disputes
over transubstantiation, the atonement, and other such metaphysical
banshees. It does not surprise me that the majority murdered the
minority; the majority, even to-day, does it whenever it is possible.
What I can’t understand is that the minority went voluntarily to the
slaughter. Even in the worst persecutions known to history—say, for
example, those of the Jews of Spain—it was always possible for a
given member of the minority to save his hide by giving public assent
to the religious notions of the majority. A Jew who was willing to
be baptized, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, was practically
unmolested; his descendants to-day are 100% Spaniards. Well, then, why
did so many Jews refuse? Why did so many prefer to be robbed, exiled,
and sometimes murdered?
The answer given by philosophical historians is that they were a
noble people, and preferred death to heresy. But this merely begs
the question. Is it actually noble to cling to a religious idea so
tenaciously? Certainly it doesn’t seem so to me. After all, no human
being really _knows_ anything about the exalted matters with which
all religions deal. The most he can do is to match his private guess
against the guesses of his fellow-men. For any man to say absolutely,
in such a field, that this or that is wholly and irrefragably true and
this or that is utterly false is simply to talk nonsense. Personally, I
have never encountered a religious idea—and I do not except even the
idea of the existence of God—that was instantly and unchallengeably
convincing, as, say, the Copernican astronomy is instantly and
unchallengeably convincing. But neither have I ever encountered
a religious idea that could be dismissed offhand as palpably and
indubitably false. In even the worst nonsense of such theological
mountebanks as the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, Brigham Young and Mrs. Eddy
there is always enough lingering plausibility, or, at all events,
possibility, to give the judicious pause. Whatever the weight of the
probabilities against it, it nevertheless _may_ be true that man, on
his decease, turns into a gaseous vertebrate, and that this vertebrate,
if its human larva has engaged in embezzlement, bootlegging, profanity
or adultery on this earth, will be boiled for a million years in
a cauldron of pitch. My private inclination, due to my defective
upbringing, is to doubt it, and to set down any one who believes it as
an ass, but it must be plain that I have no means of disproving it.
In view of this uncertainty it seems to me sheer vanity for any man to
hold his religious views too firmly, or to submit to any inconvenience
on account of them. It is far better, if they happen to offend, to
conceal them discreetly, or to change them amiably as the delusions
of the majority change. My own views in this department, being wholly
skeptical and tolerant, are obnoxious to the subscribers to practically
all other views; even atheists sometimes denounce me. At the moment,
by an accident of American political history, these dissenters from
my theology are forbidden to punish me for not agreeing with them.
But at any succeeding moment some group or other among them may seize
such power and proceed against me in the immemorial manner. If it ever
happens, I give notice here and now that I shall get converted to their
nonsense instantly, and so retire to safety with my right thumb laid
against my nose and my fingers waving like wheat in the wind. I’d do it
even to-day, if there were any practical advantage in it. Offer me a
case of Rauenthaler 1903, and I engage to submit to baptism by any rite
ever heard of, provided it does not expose my gothic nakedness. Make it
ten cases, and I’ll agree to be both baptized and confirmed. In such
matters I am broad-minded. What, after all, is one more lie?
5
_The Disabled Veteran_
The science of psychological pathology is still in its infancy. In
all its literature in three languages, I can’t find a line about the
permanent ill effects of acute emotional diseases—say, for example,
love affairs. The common assumption of the world is that when a love
affair is over it is over—that nothing remains behind. This is
probably grossly untrue. It is my belief that every such experience
leaves scars upon my psyche, and that they are quite as plain and quite
as dangerous as the scars left on the neck by a carbuncle. A man who
has passed through a love affair, even though he may eventually forget
the lady’s very name, is never quite the same thereafter. His scars
may be small, but they are permanent. The sentimentalist, exposed
incessantly, ends as a psychic cripple; he is as badly off as the man
who has come home from the wars with shell-shock. The precise nature
of the scars remains to be determined. My own notion is that they take
the form of large yellow patches upon the self-esteem. Whenever a man
thinks of one of his dead love affairs, and in particular whenever
he allows his memory to dredge up an image of the woman he loved,
he shivers like one taken in some unmanly and discreditable act.
Such shivers, repeated often enough, must inevitably shake his inner
integrity off its base. No man can love, and yet remain truly proud. It
is a disarming and humiliating experience.
6
_Patriotism_
Patriotism is conceivable to a civilized man in times of stress and
storm, when his country is wobbling and sore beset. His country then
appeals to him as any victim of misfortune appeals to him—say, a
street-walker pursued by the police. But when it is safe, happy and
prosperous it can only excite his loathing. The things that make
countries safe, happy and prosperous—a secure peace, an active trade,
political serenity at home—are all intrinsically corrupting and
disgusting. It is as impossible for a civilized man to love his country
in good times as it would be for him to respect a politician.