Witchcraft, New Style
I
OVER the protests of my wife, who acts for me in matters religious and charitable, I resolutely declined to attend a sermon on ‘A Sane Mind in a Crazy World’ by America’s most affluent preacher. As one who has lost fourteen friends from suicide in four years, I feel like doing my own moralizing on whatever madnesses there be.
Insanity, I read, is irrationality evidenced by antisocial behavior. A thrifty peasant, picking up bits of string, was judged mad by his neighbors, and under the pressure of public opinion became so, since he was a social being and could not stand alone. Yet those same neighbors would have judged him equally mad if he had refused to salvage usable lengths or balls of string. The difference between sanity and madness appears to be merely one of degree, and dependent upon the scale of values obtaining in one’s immediate environment. Between collecting bits of string and old bottles there is surely no great gulf, yet a Gullah Negro who did not salvage bottles with which to decorate the graves of his departed kindred would be esteemed crazy by his folk, and some pleasant dilettantes spend their days searching for old bottles to add to their already expensive collections.
Recently I concluded that an excellent way for an indigent man to find lasting aid and comfort would be for him to take a sack of stones from one bank to another and attempt to deposit them at the teller’s window. He could say, in all innocence, that his pretty pebbles were more durable and in themselves more valuable than greenprinted slips of paper. Of course he would be shown out by the guards; but if he kept at it, going from one bank to another, he would soon become a nuisance, be jailed, and adjudged a harmless lunatic; after which his economic problem would be at an end, since the State will take better care of him insane than it will of him sane. From which one could deduce that it is insane for the jobless poor to remain sane in a society which has arrived at so irrational a system.
II
There was a time when estimable white persons, sane by all canons of their time, persecuted to the death insane individuals whom they called witches and wizards. In so doing they passed irretrievable judgment upon beings whose behavior was incomprehensible to themselves; instead of taking the long and painful course toward comprehension of these oddities, they took the short cut toward the gallows and ducking pond, their warrant being an idea of right behavior so fixed that it never occurred to them to question its righteousness.
The human brain is the curliest, most convoluted thing in nature, and likewise the trickiest in its manifestations, such logical powers as it possesses being ever at the mercy of tradition, superstition, and mob opinion. Thus it is comparatively easy to teach individuals the most compelling absurdities, so that Indian widows immolate themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands, maidens go blissfully to feed the sacred crocodile with their tender flesh, planters destroy their cotton, and unemployed men endure hunger in the midst of plenty, all of them convinced that their absurd behavior is somehow noble and acceptable to the gods they have been taught to worship.
Progress seems to be a process of exchanging old witchcrafts for new. In the central shrine of one of the most expensive modern witchcrafts, brisk acolytes in white suits write numbers in chalk on a blackboard, under certain sets of cabalistic letters which, like the hieroglyphs of Egyptian priests, make no sense to the masses. Instantly, by the modern magic of electricity, these numbers are transferred to Detroit or San Francisco and are there chalked on similar boards. Observing the figures, men go forth in ecstasy or gloom, sometimes even to destroy themselves, because, forsooth, values are falling amid discouraging plenty. A little while, and posterity will see that we, too, like the witch-hunting Puritans of old, live in the grip of delusions. We set up a Moloch with all modern conveniences to whom zealots sacrifice themselves rather than confess failure in the money rites of our economic religion.
From physics to politics, from the stars to the clods, it seems clear that ideas are the basis of our uncertain values and the roots of our shaky systems. This table under my hand is not a hard-surfaced three-dimensioned entity; no indeed, it is a whirling mass of molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, deutrons, neutrons, X-rays, Gamma rays, and God knows what else, all dancing in mad confusion in four dimensions — perhaps more. My dull fingers feel not those eternal vibrations; but that is merely because my sensory powers are so restricted. The table is a delusion acceptable to me as a hard, dependable fact of life only because I am a clumsy, three-dimension mortal.
I am reasonably successful in ordering my life with relation to my table; but by no means all the idea-values which circumstance me are equally dependable. The table delusion is not likely to floor me, but the gold delusion, which is of a piece with it, has floored many of my friends and may end by flooring me to the point where I shall not have a relatively dependable table to my name. But obviously the gold delusion cannot down me to the point of coffining, as long as I comprehend that it is a delusion and that all the other idea-values by which I live are also likely to be found out as frauds in the end.
III
Gold is a neat example of an ideavalue to which men cling desperately against heavy odds. In a day when gold is not as popular in the arts as it was in Queen Vic’s time, when even gold teeth are no longer considered the height of fashion, when platinum rules the mode in both jewelry and hair, the benighted sovereignties of this earth, which are themselves idea-values of recent origin as history runs, pay more for the relatively useless yellow metal than ever before. This they are doing at the expense of their citizen taxpayers, who are nevertheless denied the pleasure of handling gold, if there be pleasure in metallic contacts. Why this sovereign absurdity? Ah, my friends, because gold is the one thing of ‘ours’ that ‘others’ want more than they want all else. And what can the others do with this gold when they get it? Put it in storage, of course.
The ancients were more sensible. At least they put gold on display, for such delight as man could get in that dingy time. Civilization produces more absurd delusions than barbarism; the more complex thought becomes, the more and grosser errors it perpetuates. Even in America, late comer among the nations, our pioneers were too smart to hire folks, in one and the same year, to plough up cotton in one part of the country and plant trees in another. This absurdity remained to be consummated in the same age which had discovered how to make boards from cotton and rayon cloth from wood. Our very cleverness in substitutions defeats us in due course and time, pushing us into activities which negative one another. We are a frustrated people, splashing greatly as we drown in the sea of plenty because our moral lungs were developed for survival in scarcity. Old virtues have become vices, old realities have become myths, old delights have become crimes.
At least the ancient had a visiting acquaintance with the golden calf, and the dancing girl wore her golden bangles, not only because they represented her fortune, but also because they gave her delight. She antedated by centuries the sovereign state, the gold standard, and the national hoard; yet human delight in gold is the source of man’s universal want for it; and so, to complete the absurdity of letting a pleasant vanity brake the wheels of trade, it is now arranged to keep gold from the public, hoarding it in cellars where it lies cased in humble wooden boxes between trips under the decks of ships. If this be not wizardwork, what is it?
IV
Our preacher of the day saith, drawing his warrant from another ideavalue somewhat outmoded, that the world is ‘crazy.’ By definition, it is too large an order. Obviously the world cannot be crazy, since it makes its own rules as to what constitutes correct social behavior and calls mad those who do not abide by its rules. The preacher himself is mad, and I likewise. While the shreds of a sense of humor still cling to me, I intend to visit this good man in his study and propose that we form a League for the Promotion of Insanity, the object being to swamp the government with the expense of taking care of so many of the population in asylums that it will not have the means to take care of so many others in what are naively called ‘self-liquidating projects,’ which, if successful, can be so only by increasing production at a time when increased production is a burden.
China, Egypt, and Rome discovered long since that dynasties were better preserved by building tombs than by freeing slaves. Hence the pyramids. A tomb is perhaps the only work of man’s hands which does not enter into future production.
Our insane league has certain prime, practical advantages. There is nothing like such fierce opposition to building hospitals as there is to clearing away slums, unless the latter can be done with federal money, in which case even landlords cheer progress. Those who occupy hospitals are mostly ultimate consumers, contributing next to nothing to the overloaded markets of the world. Under this plan, whenever more than half the population had been incarcerated, it would be in order for legislators to vote the insane out of the hospitals and the sane in, whereupon the world would wag on about as before.