Books: Nonsenseorship
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G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship
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They dread a Censor most for fear his appetite will grow by what it
feeds on. They know that the Lord Chamberlain began by exorcising
obscenity from the English theatre and ended by banning so fiercely
Puritanical a play as "Mrs. Warren's Profession" because it admitted
the existence of brothel-keeping as a business and by shutting up such
innocent merriment as "The Mikado" because its jocularity might offend
the (at the moment) dear Japanese.
Most American playwrights would derive a certain enjoyment from
watching a posse of citizens in wrathful pursuit of one of those
theatrical managers who are big brothers to the trembling crones that
totter up to you on the _Boulevard des Italiens_ and try to sell
you a few obscene postal-cards. But most American playwrights would
feel a genuine apprehension lest such a posse, confused in its values
and its mission, might then turn and lock up Eugene O'Neill because of
the rough talk that lends veracity to "The Hairy Ape" or because of
the steady scrutiny which has the effect of stripping naked the
unhappy creatures of his play called "Diff'rent."
They would be perfectly willing to co-operate with a State official
appointed to prevent the use of naughty words on the American stage,
but they darkly suspect that he would then require every heroine to
bring a letter from her pastor and would end by interfering with all
plays which suggested, for instance, that government had been known,
from time to time, to prove corrupt, wealth to become oppressive and
law, on rare occasions, to seem just a wee bit unjust. They are minded
to resist any supervision of the theatre's manners for fear it might
shackle in time the theatre's thought. Today or tomorrow they may be
seen temporizing or at least negotiating with the forces of
suppression in any community, but they are really seeking all the time
to frustrate those forces. And will so seek ever and always, law or no
law. It was just such frustration they were seeking when after a
season of ruined heroines (and ruined managers) they all gravely sat
down in April, 1922, and drew up a panel of 300 pure-minded citizens
from which a jury could be called to pass on any play complained of.
And they have the comfort of knowing that any such supervision, today
or tomorrow, legalized or roundabout, mild or incessant, is bound to
be superficial, spasmodic and largely formal. They know that in the
long run the theatre in each day and community, will manage somehow to
express the taste of that day and community. They know that it is
among the sweet revenges of life that the o'er-leaping censor always
defeats himself.
They derive a curious comfort from the story of the reviewer for a
Boston journal who once described a musician as remaining seated
through a concert in the pensive attitude of Buddha contemplating his
navel. It is a story within whose implications lies all that has ever
been said, or ever will be said, about censorship. The copy-readers
and make-up men, it seems, could see nothing especially infamous in
their reviewer's little simile. As poor George Sampson said of the
outraged Mrs. Wilfer's under-petticoat: "We know it's there." At all
events, the offending word passed all the sentries and was printed as
written, when, too late, it caught the horrified eye of the
proprietor. At the sight of so crassly physical a term in the chaste
columns of his own paper, he rushed to the telephone at the club and
called up the managing editor. That word must come out. But the paper
was already on the presses. Even as they spoke, these were whirling
out copy after copy. Too late to reset? Yes, much too late. But was
there not still some remedy which would keep at least part of the
edition free from that dreadful word? Wasn't it still possible to rout
out the type at that point, to chisel the word away and leave a blank?
Yes, that was possible. So the presses were halted, the one word was
scraped out, the presses whirred again and the review, with a gape in
the line, went up and down Beacon Street. Whereat Boston that night
shook with a mighty laughter--the contented laughter of the
unregenerate.
THE ORACLE THAT ALWAYS SAYS "NO"
[Illustration: The Periscope of the Author of the Mirrors of Washington
is turned toward the Great Negative Oracle.]
THE AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON"
Has anyone ever stopped to think what the nonsenseorship would do to
our suppressed desires? A little while ago suppressed desires were
one's own affair. One fondled them in the skeleton closet of his
consciousness and was as proud of them as anyone with a haunted house
is of his right, title and interest in a ghost.
They proved to him that though he went to church on Sunday and was
respectably married to only one woman, he was really beneath his
correct exterior a whale of a fellow, who might have been, had he but
let himself go, a Casanova or at least a Byron. He patted himself on
the back for keeping unruly instincts in subjection. He applauded
himself for what he might be and for what he was. He got it coming and
going. It was a pleasant age.
But now is he permitted to have his own secret museum of virility? I
speak only of the sex which has my deepest sympathy.
No. The nonsenseorship regards him with suspicion. He must go and have
even that part of him which lies below the level of his consciousness
dragged forth by experts in the interests of society, and if there is
anything hidden in him which might not be exhibited on the movie
screens, he must have it sublimated. He cannot even have suppressed
desires. He cannot be a devil of a fellow even to himself. He cannot
be his own censor any longer, he must submit himself to outside
censoring, to the nonsenseorship.
It all came about this way. First to establish divine right somewhere
in modern government, the doctrine was set up that the public mind was
infallible. Thereafter, naturally, attention centered on the public
mind. What was it that it had this wonderful quality of always being
right? Experience showed that it was not a thinking mind. Since it was
not, then the thinking mind was anti-social.
Then our very best American philosophers, and some French ones, for
the support of mass opinion, developed a system which set forth that
reason always led you into traps and that the only mind to trust was
the irrational, instinctive or intuitional mind. Thus the
nonsenseorship, with excellent philosophic support put the ban upon
thinking. Now, I do not contend that many suffer seriously from this
restriction. For, after all, thinking is hard work and may cheerfully
be foregone in the general interest.
But does the nonsenseorship rest content with its achievement? If the
instinctive part of us is so important, let us have a look at it, says
society; perhaps something anti-social may be unearthed there. A
Viennese explores this area of the mind. He discovers what society
would forbid, merely hidden away. Civilization has merely pressed it
into dark corners, as the law has crowded the blackjack artist into
alleys and dens of thieves. The psychic police are put on our trail.
They must nab every suppressed desire and send it to the reform school
for re-education into something beautiful and serviceable. We may not
be unhappy, neurotic, mad; our complexes must be inspected. We must
suppress our reason, we may not suppress our desire; the
nonsenseorship says so, and to persuade us, its experts offer us the
reward of health and greater usefulness if we make this further
surrender.
Now, although as I have said we let reason go at the behest of the
nonsenseorship without so much as a word of protest, we do not give up
our suppressed desires so easily and without a fight.
As a result we see the nonsenseorship in a new light. We feel it more
keenly now than ever before. It is revealed as the Procrustean bed
which cramps us up until we ache inside. If there is anything the
matter with us, if we are introverted, introspective, neurotic,
complicated, have too much ego or too little ego, are dyspeptic, sick,
sore, inhibited, regressive, defeated or too successful, unhappy,
cruel or too kind, if we differ ever so slightly from the enforced
average, it is because censorship presses upon us. And the cure for
censorship is more censorship. Have your psychic insides censored; if
you would be a perfect 36 mentally and morally, with the Hart,
Schaffner & Marxed soul which modern society wills that you shall
have, conform not only without but within, and be "splendidly null"! I
think it is the sudden realization that just a little more of
individuality, our hidden individuality, is threatened, which makes
the nonsenseorship irk us now as it never did before.
The race has always had it, but in the beginning it was a crude and
simple thing, troubling itself only with externals. A woman whose
official duty it is to look after the virtue of the movies in
Pennsylvania or Ohio, will not permit on the screen any suggestion
that there is a physiological relation between a mother and a child.
This method of protecting the race has its roots back in the primitive
mind of mankind. When men really did not understand how children came
about, births were catastrophic. A woman at a certain moment had to
disappear into the wilderness; she came back having found a baby under
a cabbage leaf. Any contact with her while she was making her
discovery might bring pestilence and death to the tribe.
We still believe in the pestilence even if we no longer have faith in
the cabbage leaf. The lady censor of Ohio or Pennsylvania is the tribe
driving the pregnant woman into the wilderness. On the whole the tribe
did it better than we do; it only removed the offender and the mental
life of the little community went on just as before. We keep the
offender amongst us and close our minds. Our simple ancestors covered
no more with the fig leaf than they thought it necessary to hide; we
wear the fig leaf over our eyes: that is the nonsenseorship.
Mr. Griffith recently brought out a cinema spectacle called "Orphans
in the Storm," which presented many scenes from the French Revolution.
Now it was not long ago that we Americans were all rather proud of the
French Revolution. We had had a revolution of our own and we thought
with satisfaction that the French had caught theirs from us. We were
as pleased about it as the little boy is when the neighbor's little
boy catches the mumps from him. He sees an enlargement of his ego in
the swollen neck of his playmate.
All that is changed now. Mr. Griffith picturing the triumphant mob in
Paris had to fill his screens with preachments against Bolshevism,
which had as much to do with his subject as captions about the rape of
the Sabine woman would have had to do with it. It is as if the little
boy had been taught to believe that by never saying the word mumps, he
could save his playmate from tumefying glands.
Soon some committee of morons which attends to the keeping of our
intellects on the level with their own will exclude from the schools
all histories which contain the words "the American Revolution." We
must call it the War for American Independence. That is putting the
fig leaf over our eyes. That is the nonsenseorship.
But before we decide whether or not we shall refuse to yield up our
suppressed desires as we have surrendered our reason to it, with the
approval of our leading philosopher, Mr. William James, let us
consider some of the advantages of the nonsenseorship. Perhaps it will
prove worth while to give up this little internal privilege.
First there is the simplicity of consulting the so-called public mind.
The favorite aphorism of the politician and his friend and spokesman
the editor is: "The public is always right upon a moral issue." This
means that if the politician or the propagandist can present a
question to the people in such a way that he can win his end by having
the public respond in the negative, he is sure of success. It is as if
society depended for its guidance upon the word of an oracle, a great
stone image, out of which the priests had only succeeded in producing
one response, a sound very much like, "No." The trick would consist of
so framing your question that the word "no" would give you approval
for your designs. That is the art of laying before the public a "moral
issue" upon which it is inevitably right.
Suppose, in a society ruled by the stone image, you wanted to make war
upon your neighbor. You would frame your question thus: "Shall we
stand by idly and pusillanimously while our neighbor invades our land
and rapes our women?" This is a moral issue of the deepest sanctity.
You would present it. The priests would do their little something
somewhere out of sight. From the great stone image would come a bellow
which resembled "No." You would have won on a moral issue and would
then be licensed to invade your neighbor's territory and rape his
women.
Now you will perceive certain advantages in an oracle which can only
say one word. You know in advance what its answer will be. Suppose the
great stone image could have said either "yes" or "no." Suppose its
answer had been "yes" to your righteous question? It would have been
embarrassing. You could no longer say with such perfect confidence,
"It is always right upon a moral issue."
Suppose you were capital and you desired to reduce wages. You would
not go to the temple and say, "Shall we reduce wages?" That would not
be a moral issue upon which the answer would be right. You would ask,
"Shall we tamely acquiesce while the labor unions import the Russian
revolution into our very midst?" The great stone voice always to be
trusted on moral issues would thunder, "No."
Or suppose you were labor; for my oracle is even-handed--and you
wished to extend your organization--you would go to the temple and
propound the inquiry, "Shall we be eaten alive by the war profiteers?"
The always moral voice would at least whisper "No"
It will be observed that in consulting the oracle whose answer is
known in advance, the only skill required consists in so framing the
question that you will get a louder roar of "no" than the other side
can with its question. If you can always do this you can say with
perfect confidence that old granite lungs "is always right upon a
moral issue."
That is the art of being a great popular leader.
Would anyone exchange a voice like that as a ruler for the wisdom of
the world's ten wisest men? We laugh at the Greeks for their practice
of consulting the oracle at Delphi and rightly, for our oracle beats
theirs which used to hedge in its answers and leave them in doubt.
Ours never equivocates; we know its answer beforehand, for the public
mind is compounded of prejudices, fears, herd instincts, youthful
hatred of novelty, all easily calculable.
It has been my duty for many years to tell what public opinion is on
many subjects. My method, more or less unconscious, has been to say to
myself, "The public is made up largely of the unthinking. Such and
such misinformation has been presented to it. Such and such prejudices
and fears have been aroused. Its answer is invariably negative. The
result is so and so." It is thus that judges of public opinion
invariably proceed. They do not find the popular will reflected in the
newspapers. They know it as a chemist knows a reaction, from
familiarity with the elements combined. At least such a mind is highly
convenient.
And after all who does make the best censor, or nonsenseor or whatever
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.
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