you choose to call it? Was it not written, "The child is censor to the
man?" Well, if it was not it ought to have been, and it is now. Consider
the child as it arrives in the family. Forthwith there is not merely the
One Subject which may never be mentioned. There are a hundred subjects.
A guard is upon the lips. The little ears must be kept pure.
Now, when we set up the establishment of democracy we did take a child
into our household. I have discussed elsewhere [Footnote: Chapter V,
_Behind the Mirrors_] the parentage of this infant born of Rousseau and
Thérèse, his moron mistress. The public mind is a child mind because
in the first place the mob mind of men is primitive, youthful and
undeveloped, and again because by the wide diffusion of primary
instruction, we have steadily increased the number of persons with less
than adult mentality who contribute to the forming of public opinion.
In the nature of the case, fifty per cent. of the public must be
sub-normal, that is, youthful mentality. We have reached down to the
level of nonsense for our guide. That is why we call it in this book the
nonsenseorship.
Every one who has watched the growth of a child's vocabulary has
observed that it learns to say "no," many months, perhaps more than a
year, before it ever says "yes." An infant which took to saying "yes"
before it did "no" would violate all precedents, would scandalize its
parents, and would grow up to be a revolutionist. It would have an
attitude toward life with which men should not be born and which parents
and society would find subversive. On the instinct for saying "no" rests
all our institutions, from the family to the state. It should exhibit
itself early and become a confirmed habit before the dangerous "yes"
emerges.
Besides, the child needs to say "no" long before it needs to say "yes."
Foolish parents feed it mentally as they feed it physically, out of
a bottle. If it had not its automatic facility of regurgitation, both
mental and physical, it would suffer from excesses. Its "no" is its
mental throwing up.
The public mind is still in the no-saying, the mental regurgitative
stage. But is not that ideal for the nonsenseorship? Does a censor ever
have need of any other word but "no"?
I have now established the convenience of an oracle whose answer "no"
can always be foreseen; and the fitness of the child mind for saying
"no," as well as the perfect adaptation of the single word vocabulary to
the purposes of the nonsenseorship.
One of the important ends which a "no" always serves is maintaining the
_status quo_. We all cling precariously to a whirling planet. We
hate change for fear of somehow being spilled off into space. The
nonsenseorship of the child mind is splendidly conservative. The baby in
the habit of receiving its bottle from its nurse will go hungry rather
than take it from its mother or father. Gilbert was wrong. Every child
is not born a little radical or a little conservative.
Reaching down for the child mind in society, with some misgivings, we
have been delighted to find it the strongest force making for stability.
An amusing thing happened when Mr. Hearst some years ago sought readers
in a lower level of intelligence than any journalist had till then
explored. To interest the child mind he employed the old device of
pictures, his favorite illustration portraying the Plunderbund.
Now, persons who thought the cartoon of the Plunderbund looked like
themselves, viewed the experiment with alarm. But Mr. Hearst was right.
He proved to be as he said he was, "our greatest conservative force."
The surest guardians of our morals and of our social order are
precisely Mr. Hearst's readers, who learned the alphabet spelling out
P-L-U-N-D-E-R-B-U-N-D. They watch keenly and with reprobation in Mr.
Hearst's press our slightest divagations.
De Gourmont, writing of education, asks: "Is it necessary to cultivate
at such pains in the minds of the young, hatred of what is new?" And he
says it is done only because the teacher naturally hates everything that
has come into the world since he won his diploma. But no; De Gourmont
is mistaken. It is because we teach the young what it is socially
beneficial that they should learn, having regard also for their aversion
to novelty, to the bottle from any other than the accustomed hands.
And we find in the child mind--and foster it by education--"the will to
believe," that great American virtue. It requires an immense "will to
believe" to grow up in the family and in society, looking at the elders
and at all that is established, and accepting all the information that
mankind has slowly accumulated and which teachers patiently offer. If
the young once doubted, once thought--but unfortunately they do not!
Anyway, we do find in the child mind, which forms the nonsenseorship,
the "will to believe,"--of immense social utility.
Now, the "will to believe"--like teeth which decay if not used upon
hard food, or muscles which grow flabby if they have not hard work to
perform--must be given something for its proper exercise. In a chapter
on "The Duty of Lying," in his brilliant book _Disenchantment_, Mr. C.
E. Montague shows what may be done with "the will to believe," developed
as it has at last been. "During the war the art of Propaganda was little
more than born." In the next war, "the whole sky would be darkened
with flights of tactical lies, so dense that the enemy would fight in a
veritable 'fog of war' darker than London's own November brews, and the
world would feel that not only the Angel of Death was abroad, but
the Angel of Delusion too, and would hear the beating of two pairs of
wings." And what may be done with the "will to believe" in time of war
has immense lessons for the days of peace. A British Tommy, quoted by
Mr. Montague, summed the moral advantages up: "They tell me we've pulled
through at last all right because our propergander dished up better lies
than what the Germans did. So I say to myself: 'If tellin' lies is all
that bloody good in war, what bloody good is tellin' truth in peace?'"
What "bloody good" is it, when you have ready to hand the well-trained
"will to believe," which those who censored reason for its social
disutility set up as the most serviceable attribute of the human mind?
I think I have written enough to prove that the child mind at the bottom
of nonsenseorship is the effective base of stability. But the heart of
man desires also permanency. Is there reasonable assurance that we shall
always be able to keep the guiding principles of our national life, the
nonsenseorship, a child mind?
It is true that we have reached as far down, through our press and
through our public men, to the levels of the low I. Q. as it is
practicable to go, until we grant actual children and not merely mental
children an even larger share than they now have in the forming of
public opinion; for this is, as you know, "the age of the child."
And no great further advance is likely to be made in the mechanical
means of uniting the whole 100,000,000 people of this country in a
24-hour a day, 365 days a year, mass meeting. The cheap newspaper,
the moving picture, instant telegraphic bulletin going everywhere, the
broadcasting wireless telephone, and the Ford car, have accomplished
all that can be hoped toward giving the widely-scattered population the
responsiveness of a mob.
But though perhaps we may never lower the I. Q. of the nonsenseorship,
no further triumphs being possible in that direction, there is no reason
why education, what we call "creating an enlightened public opinion,"
should not always maintain for us the child mind as it now is with all
its manifold advantages.
Somewhere in Bartlett there is, or ought to be, a quotation which reads
like this: "The god who always finds us young and always keeps us so."
That is education; it always finds us young and always keeps us so.
It catches us when our minds are merely acquisitive, storing up
impressions and information; and it prolongs that period of acquisition
to maturity by always throwing facts in our way. Its purpose is not
to "sow doubts," far from it, for that would have for its ideal mere
intelligence and not social usefulness. It develops instead the "will
to believe," and this serves the needs of the propagandists, who, as Mr.
Will H. Hayes is reported to have said of the movies, "shake the rattle
which keeps the American child amused so that it forgets its aches
and pains." We may safely trust education to keep the American
mind infantile, merely acquisitive and not critical. And thus the
nonsenseorship seems sure to be perpetuated, and we reach the ideal of
all the ages, society in its permanent and final form. Here we are, here
we may rest.
These considerations persuade me at least that we should make the
utmost sacrifices for so perfect a social means as we now have. Let the
nonsenseorship invade the secret closets of our personality and rummage
out our most cherished suppressed desires. Let us have nothing that
we may call our own. For my part, I shall spend the proceeds of this
article upon one of the new social police, a psycho-analyst.
End of Project Gutenberg's Nonsenseorship, by G. G. Putnam and Others