Our Instinctive Idiocies
As often as anything is said to my neighbor, Wilcox, about the suffering brought by hot weather to the tenement districts, his remark is, ‘Yes, but they don’t mind it as you or I would.’ This response is as prompt to act as the flare of a safety-match, and something more certain. What is more, he has been repeating it for twenty years and he will — in common with some thousands of his brethren who conceive it the whole duty of man to vote the straight ticket and send their sons to college —go on repeating it for twenty more, if he lives.
Switchboard minds. Press a given button and get a given buzz. They would keenly resent the suggestion that they are doing business with the same office furniture that their fathers used. They would just as keenly resent the suggestion that they are not doing business with the same mental furniture that their grandfathers used. They do so in print, and they do so across their own dinner-tables. Now, it is inconceivable that they should do this on purpose. Nobody except a reformer (he asks nothing better) makes a spectacle of himself voluntarily. I suspect, therefore, that the reason lies deeper: that it is a bread-and-butter reason to be searched out of patrons, clientèles, customers, and pay envelopes, and that honestly lovable folks who go on rehearsing such stupefying inanities as that ‘luxuries give employment to the working-class,’ do this not so much because people repeat themselves as because types do.
This was borne in upon a reluctant intellect by an episode at Narragansett Pier. A young undergraduate, marooned there for the summer, ventured to ask the New York woman whose two little sons he was tutoring, whether it had ever occurred to her that the possession of weath entailed a responsibility. ‘Of course it has,’ said she. ‘People are always trying to get it away from you.’ Being a sanguine youth, he tried again, explaining that what he meant was social obligations. ‘I think,’ quoth the dame with some complacency, ‘ that I entertain as much as any woman in New York.’ It was suddenly and blindingly clear that a woman of that social stratum could be counted on for such an indiscretion to a degree which robs betting of all sportsmanship.
Similarly, ‘No young man should marry until he has $100,000 in the bank,’ is the dictum of a venerable money-changer who has spent his life (and the lives of some hundreds of others) in the accumulation of several times that sum. He considers the figure a modest one for a starter. The same gentleman has also been heard to remark, during a discussion of the smoke nuisance, that people who object to smoke should live at Tarrytown or in Montclair.
A chief of police is putting himself on record as opposed to ‘ violence ’: —
‘I stand for law and order. If I had the authority I would shoot down these strikers like dogs.’
And a brother of his craft thus expounds his theory of the administration of justice: —
‘I don’t care whether you can hold these people morally responsible or not. I don’t care whether they are actually guilty or not. It is necessary to make an example of some one; and you must punish the man you can get hold of.’
In lighter mood, we have this question, asked by a skeptical pedagogue: ‘Did Giovannitti write those poems which are published under his name?’ It is insidiously intimated to him that the said verses were written in collaboration by Dr. Van Dyke and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. ‘No! really? ’ says he, vastly tickled. ‘I suspected all along that they could n’t have been produced by an Italian labor agitator. He! he! What amusing hoaxes these literary people do hatch!’
These are the lapses which sweeten and solace the souls of radicals, and fill them with a wild and mystical joy. Not the less because, when asked what the joke is, no amount of explaining will convey a shadow of the humor to the unconverted. For the fun is this: Ten men are running a race. They are running with tremendous earnestness, for at the end of the course lie money, fame, influence, and position. Suddenly, one of the ten, guessing that the true goal lies in precisely the opposite direction, wheels and runs just as hard that way as the other nine are running the other. . . . From the radical wing of the bystanders goes up a roar of delight. The rest chime in more gingerly: there is a joke on somebody, just where is uncertain. It might be on the nine they are backing. One can never be sure.
It was an eminent neurologist who proposed, as a remedy in an industrial dispute which had thrown eleven thousand women into idleness, that the whole eleven thousand go into domestic service. He dwelt at length on his efforts to secure competent servants. The trifling circumstance that all of the strikers were non-English-speaking aliens, innocent of Anglo-Saxon cookery, seemed to him readily surmountable; and yet he was quite miffed at the suggestion that his view of the industrial unrest was that of a gentleman chiefly impressed with the difficulty of keeping cooks.
Genealogically, of course, all speeches of this calibre derive from poor Marie Antoinette’s unfortunate suggestion that the people eat cake. But I suspect their ancestry of being even more ancient.
The first axiom in social geometry is that dead radicals are honored, not because they were radicals, but because they are dead. Also, it follows that they would never be honored at all if the issues which made radicals of them were not as dead as they are. We will cheerfully, even piously, raise a monument to the revolutionary patriot of 1776; nor, at the dedication exercises, will we neglect to launch platform lightnings at the revolutionist of 1914, without even remotely suspecting that he may be a patriot as well. A revolutionist may find it expedient to wear a disguise, but a patriot never.
Let me confess that I am patiently awaiting the satirist who will recite the painful adventures of some venerated hero of the anti-slavery days who, horribly to the chagrin of his worshipers, espouses the cause of—let us say — militant sufTragism or the I.W.W. Instantly, all the cosy, hen-roost society which has been showering him with eulogy, enraptures the revolutionists by committing an instinctive idiocy on a gigantic or community scale, as thus: —
‘Poor old man. He is beginning to break up. Curious! The reformer must take up with a bad cause rather than none at all. Abolition was humanitarian. But this is nothing more than lawlessness.’
Is it possible that this is why a prudent custom discourages the erection of monuments to popular heroes until after they are safely entombed? That a community should have pre-indorsed in aes triplex ‘ the regrettable vagaries of a noble mind’ which has, in senility, turned to live issues, is an embarrassment too distressing to contemplate.
Bench, press, and pulpit reek with this common brand of picayunanimity. A magistrate, measuring off sentences on the ribbon-counter method, thus delivers himself: ‘Even if the shot which killed this woman was fired by the police, her death was caused by the strikers,’ — the ingenious logic of which is only equaled by the subtle wit of the next: —
MAGISTRATE: What is this man charged with?
OFFICER: Your Honor, he was arrested for free speech.
Mrs. Pankhurst’s adventures at Ellis Island polished this gem of purest ray in an editorial setting: —
‘Her crimes arc crimes against humanity. Let her be admitted into the country and then hang her.’
Is there any doubt that this citizen would have voted on the side of respectability for the preservation of ‘ law and order’ in the Sanhedrin of 33 A.D.?
Extreme was the delicacy and finesse of a letter penned to a newspaper by an estimable citizen who lamented the breaking up of the sex-taboo. After attacking the attitude of the men of recognized standing in the community whose endorsement ‘lent an air of respectability to these debates,’he continues, —
‘Yet in order to protest against this, we are forced to do the very thing we wish to prevent, namely, — discuss it.’
He had made the fascinating discovery that whether you swim with the current or against it, you keep going in the same direction. This was encouraging. If he kept at it faithfully, there were good hopes that more things might be revealed to him.
Unsearchable are the processes of the stand-pat mind. In Ibsen’s Ghosts, Pastor Manders remarks that Oswald is growing to look like his father. Mrs. Alving, nervously resenting a supposed reference to the sensual curves around her son’s mouth, hastens to object that on the contrary she thinks Oswald has quite a clerical cut of mouth. ‘Yes,’ assents the clergyman innocently, ‘I have noticed the same type of mouth among my colleagues.’ Around this dialogue has always raged the dispute: Do people in real life ever so egregiously give themselves away?
Do they? It was a rich old dean, known to be a heavy investor in southern cotton mills, whose pulpit had been usurped the Sunday previous by a brother clergyman who had preached economic reforms. So the incumbent felt called on to discourse of Mistaken Enthusiasms. And this (minus the suave intonations which small pica and large caps would be powerless to convey) was his peroration, verbatim: —
‘Conspicuous among the mistaken enthusiasms of our time, dearly beloved, is a zeal, no doubt sincere but not the less surely misdirected, to alleviate, all too precipitately, the sufferings of the poor. Now poor there must always be. And they must always suffer. It is a discipline which it were ill for them to forego. Nor should we be too hasty in relieving that material suffering when our chief dread should be speerichule destichushun.’
Now while I am aware that there are those who will not fail to point out that when an ecclesiastical shareholder cautions his flock against too precipitate relief of the sufferings of the poor, churchgoing is not nearly so tedious as a derelict generation is prone to suppose, my aim is merely to indicate how the stand-pat mind can deliver itself of the most amazing nonsense, the most transparent knavery, all in the serene assurance that it is uttering inspired wisdom. Like the rich old cleric, these gentry suppose themselves to be discussing the rights of man, when all they are discussing is the rights of stockholders. It would appear, therefore, that when a rogue is determined to hang himself, the only necessary precaution is to be sure that he has plenty of rope.
The mayor of a city attacked for its admitted political corruption relieves his mind (and his conscience) in this wise: —
‘ Whenever I hear an honest but mistaken ’ (reformers are always, please notice, ‘mistaken’) ‘advocate of reform say that this is an extremely wicked town, unclean and vicious to a marked degree, I feel called on to deny the charge and to administer strong rebuke. But even though the city were as black as it is painted, those who talk about it would be doing it harm rather than good. Is it right to conceal defects? I answer, Yes! The Scripture says: “ Charity shall cover a multitude of sins.” ’
The italics, be it said, are his own.
By allowing the stand-pat mind to interpret, you are rewarded with a unique brand of New Testament exegesis, and one which, you suspect, accounts for more soft spots in our social apple than it is flattering to suppose. Meanwhile, for their quality of pure, lyric ecstasy, let me record two masterpieces of the instinctive idiocy as it flowers on the veranda of a summer hotel.
FIRST MATRON: What book are you reading?
SECOND MATRON: A book by Miss Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil.
FIRST MATRON: DO you read such things?
SECOND MATRON: I surely do. They are not agreeable, to be sure, any more than attending to the needs of a sick person, but they are very necessary. You may borrow the book if you wish.
FIRST MATRON: NO. I don’t think I shall read it. After all, what can Miss Addams know about such things? She has never been married.
A thread of logic which discretion bids us not give too rude a pull. The other remark (wirelessed across the intervening wicker chairs and tables in one of those abrupt rhythmical lulls of the conversation which occur in crowded assemblies) gives an intimate view of the processes of the employing mind. Thus the philanthropist: ‘My fatherin-law, who could hire a valuable man for less money than anybody I ever knew, used to say, “A man ought to be worth twice what he is being paid.” ’
A truce to the estimable folks (the sort who gravely assure you that the Social Democratic party in Germany ‘does not include the “ best people”’) who make these stumbles in their innocence and their ignorance; a truce to them, a stifled chuckle perhaps; but a smile and a compassion that understands and sympathizes, that knows their hearts are right. It was written that they should mistake stagnation for stability, that they should mistake their outraged prejudices for moral conviction. It was written that they should strike out blindly and wound themselves and those most dear to them. Comparatively harmless, too, are their weapons, rummaged out of the common arsenal of mediocrity. But when officialdom —courts, constabularies and congresses—begins to bow down to a god of horse-sense, with the accent on the horse, the joke of the stand-pat mind threatens to change to grim earnest.
The stand-pat mind only knows how to do one thing: sit on the lid. This posture it is impossible to maintain for any considerable length of time, and on the willingness to climb down gracefully and in season depend the chances of saving whatever is worth saving in the life and institutions which are marked for change.
It is doubtful if any one fully comprehends this fact of history until he has stood in the midst of the struggle himself and watched how the fighting went. Then nothing could be more clear. There has been one thing, and one thing only, happening since the beginning of the world: a battle between the party of obstruction and the party of change. The party of obstruction is foredoomed to make one tactical blunder after another, as the apostle knew when he sang, ‘He hath blinded their eyes.’ This hopelessness, this initial futility, of the programme of repression, once comprehended, is the most profoundly encouraging lesson of worldhistory. Repression has invariably been tried, and it has invariably failed. The young man, who has fought and been worsted in his first encounter, thinks, ‘Lo, I alone am left,’ until the prophet shows him that the mountain is full of chariots and horsemen.
In all the pictures of Christ before Pilate, there has always been one presentation lacking. Mihailov, the painter in Anna Karenina, portrayed a Christ who pitied his judge: ‘As one sees him, Pilate does not appear a bad man, but an official to the bottom of his heart, utterly ignorant of what he is doing.’
Where is the painter who will show us in the face of a bystander — perhaps shrewd and plucky Luke, or Joseph of Arimathea, ‘just man’ and secret sympathizer — the mind in which, through all the gloom and terror of the scene, there flickered a subconscious guess, a prophetic sense of what all this was to mean: arbitrary authority defeating itself by the very instruments of oppression; that Pilate and his like are the fools of time, the obstinate blunderers who are fated to set the hourhand of the world ahead by the simple act of setting it behind. . . . One can suppose Luke, even in the trouble of that hour, exclaiming under his breath and in the vernacular of to-day: ‘ Good Lord, what fools Pilate and Caiaphas will look to the next generation!’ . . . From the verdict of posterity there is no appeal. And if there is one thing certain in the whole struggle for liberty, it is that its enemies are fated to blunder by the very fact that they are its enemies.
Such are our instinctive idiocies in the historical scale. In the social scale of their merely personal perpetrations I can a tale unfold.
It chanced that a famous modern revolutionist was lecturing informally to a hallful of young men, — settlement-workers, university instructors, journalists, and a dramatist or two, — on the various programmes of radicalism. During the quiz at the end, an earnest, rosy-faced boy, evidently seeking a light which had not yet burst in upon him, rose and queried: —
‘You say that you find people are naturally good — only that our scheme of society makes them bad. I was taught, on the contrary, that a baby, for instance, is bad, and that something must happen to it before it becomes good, — baptism.’
Over the assemblage went that tightening of neck-muscles which accompanies the resolution of the wellbred not to titter. But the laugh would not be quenched; it rippled over the hall, and, in the midst of it, a greatgreat-grandson of Jonathan Edwards of Calvinist memory commented with a twinkle of glee: —
‘The doctrine of original sin has made its appearance among us. In a gathering like this I should say that it amounted almost to a “social error.’”
Here was a group of young men more than averagely keen on religion (though more concerned with its practice than its theory), and the idea of the individualistic method of saving their souls struck them instinctively as comic. It is true they were more interested in souls than in anything else in the world, but the souls they were interested in were not their own, — perhaps the surest method of getting them saved.
And so I can foresee a time when there will be a new kind of social error; when it will be considered as bad form to commit one of these instinctive idiocies as it is now to eat pie with a knife, and when the considerate hostess who formerly used the wrong fork to countenance the guest who had used the wrong fork, will, when an instinctive idiocy is uttered at her table, counter with another of the same stripe in order to let the blunderer down gracefully. Thus, when her guest has the misfortune to remark, ‘The trouble with the working-class is that they have too many children,’ — good manners will require the hostess to respond, ‘Yes. It would be better, far, far better, if most of them had never been born.’ — And courtesy bids the other guests affect to heed the slip no more than if their unlucky fellow had quaffed out of his finger-bowl.
As yet this new conception of etiquette is imperfectly established, the result being that you get such painful situations as this: —
GUEST: We all know that race-mixture produces a hybrid. Are n’t all these immigrants coming over here going to ruin the country?
HOST: Ask that question of the next Indian you meet.
In a revolutionized social order, I contend, such brutality on the part of a host will be unheard-of; in such stumbles of a purely social nature, the untutored will be shielded from mortification.
That the commission of these instinctive idiocies should altogether cease in the era of that new dawn is no more to be expected than to be desired. Once the taste for this sort of humor has been formed, ordinary jokes fail to satisfy. These have a richer flavor. Strong food. They pillory whole types and classes and betray the secret hypocrisies of the colossally smug. They transform the reading of the daily papers from a penitential but necessary chore into a carouse of unbridled delight. Why should any one pay ten cents for a cut-and-dried funny paper when the instinctive idiocies of the scribes and pharisees drench every page of the one-cent and two-cent daily prints with a humor so sardonic and so deadly? It does, to be sure, sometimes turn a trifle grim, as when the president of a national bank announces, —
‘What we need is a good, stiff panic. When they’ve starved a while they may be glad to stop striking and work for what they can get.’
Yet while I am prepared to admit that the foregoing is not an excruciatingly funny joke, I do say that it is best to learn how to laugh. At least, it is better to laugh than to swear.