Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  The Universe

  From the Smart Set, Oct., 1922, pp. 142–44

  ASTRONOMERS, it seems to me, dispose in too cavalier a manner of the notion (so often revived in the Hearst Sunday newspapers) that there may be life on planets other than the earth, and even on certain stars. Uranus and Neptune, they say, are too hot; Mercury is too hot on one side and too cold on the other (what of the regions where the two climates meet?); Venus suffers from the same defect; Mars lacks air and water; Jupiter is covered with a cloud of steam; so is Saturn; as for the moon, it has no air. But all these objections simply beg the question, for the most they prove (and in the case of Mars and Venus there is doubt even here) is that the planets of the solar system cannot support the sort of life that the earth supports—to wit, life based upon unstable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Is there any reason for believing that no other sort of life is possible? If so, then I have never heard of it. To me, at least, with my facile fancy, it is quite easy to imagine living forms composed, not of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, but of platinum, tantalum, rhodium and tungsten, none of which melts at less than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I go even further: I can imagine living beings whose bodies are not solid, but liquid—as, in fact, ours are, all save a small part. Or even gaseous. If the Lord God Almighty, by combining carbon and the three gases, can make an Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, I see absolutely no reason why he cannot make a monad of helium and fluorine. Here I, too, make a gratuitous supposition: I speak of a monad, i.e., of a definite cell. But why should life be the exclusive function of cells? Isn’t it possible to imagine living beings without definite form? The whole interstellar space, in fact, may be full of them, and their cavortings may be the cause of some of the phenomena observed by Dr. Einstein. There may be sun-worms that flourish as contentedly in the terrific temperature of the sun as a Bierfisch flourishes in a keg of Löwenbräu. There may be supermen on Neptune and Uranus with skulls of fire-brick and bowels of asbestos. It is neither probable nor improbable: we simply do not know. But it is certainly not impossible.

  Even without abandoning the carbon concept of living matter we may easily conceive of life on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, to say nothing of the moon. If Jupiter and Saturn are surrounded by clouds of visible steam, then they cannot be quite as hot as certain astronomers assume, for visible steam is steam that is hovering about a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit: above that it becomes as transparent as air. There are plenty of low organisms, even on the earth, that are able to survive a bath of live steam for a considerable time; on Jupiter and Saturn they may be able to survive it long enough to grow up, love, marry, beget and decay. As for the absence of air and water on Mars and the moon, it is a deficiency of very small importance. If the Martians need hydrogen and oxygen, as we do, they may get both out of the solid crust of their planet—as we’d probably try to do if all the rivers ran dry and the air began to grow too thin for us. Many low organisms exist without free oxygen, and there are probably some that get along with little, if any, hydrogen. The extreme cold of some of the planets—running down, perhaps, to absolute zero, or minus 273 degrees Centigrade—offers an obstacle of even less importance. It is very probable that there exist on earth today a number of primitive forms of life that could survive this temperature: a Scotsman could do it if whiskey did not freeze at minus 130. Thus I incline to suspect that some of the planets may swarm with life, just as the earth does, and that it is just as useless and obscene as it is here. The theory that the earth is improved by its fauna—to such a degree, indeed, that it is the special care and concern of Divinity—is one that I find myself unable to subscribe to. The most charming spots on earth, in fact, are precisely those in which living creatures, whether insects or men, are rarest.

  The Boons of Civilization

  From the American Mercury, Jan., 1931, pp. 33–35

  “WHAT we call progress,” said Havelock Ellis, “is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.” The thought is so obvious that it must occur now and then even to the secretary of the Greater Zenith Booster League. There may be persons who actually enjoy the sound of the telephone bell, but if they exist I can only say that I have never met them. It is highly probable that the telephone, as it stands today, represents more sheer brain power than any other familiar invention. A truly immense ingenuity has gone into perfecting it, and it is as far beyond its progenitor of 1880 as a battleship is beyond Fulton’s Clermont. But all the while no one has ever thought of improving the tone of its bell. The sound remains intolerably harsh and shrill, even when efforts are made to damp it. With very little trouble it might be made deep, sonorous and even soothing. But the telephone engineers let it remain as it was at the start, and millions of people suffer under its assault at every hour of the day.

  The telephone, I believe, is the greatest boon to bores ever invented. It has set their ancient art upon a new level of efficiency and enabled them to penetrate the last strongholds of privacy. All the devices that have been put into service against them have failed. I point, for example, to that of having a private telephone number, not listed in the book. Obviously, there is nothing here to daunt bores of authentic gifts. Obtaining private telephone numbers is of the elemental essence of their craft. Thus the poor victim of their professional passion is beset quite as much as if he had his telephone number limned upon the sky in smoke. But meanwhile his friends forget it at critical moments and he misses much pleasant gossip and many an opportunity for vinous relaxation.

  It is not only hard to imagine a world without telephones; it becomes downright impossible. They have become as necessary to the human race, at least in the United States, as window glass, newspapers or aspirin. Every now and then one hears of a man who has moved to some remote village to get rid of them, and there proposes to meditate and invite his soul in the manner of the Greek philosophers, but almost always it turns out that his meditations run in the direction of Rosicrucianism, the Single Tax, farm relief, or some other such insanity. I have myself ordered my telephone taken out at least a dozen times, but every time I found urgent use for it before the man arrived, and so had to meet him with excuses and a drink. A telephone bigwig tells me that such orders come in at the rate of scores a day, but that none has ever been executed. I now have two telephones in my house, and am about to put in a third. In the years to come, no doubt, there will be one in every room, as in hotels.

  Despite all this, I remain opposed to the telephone theoretically, and continue to damn it. It is a great invention and of vast value to the human race, but I believe it has done me, personally, almost as much harm as good. How often a single call has blown up my whole evening’s work, and so exacerbated my spirit and diminished my income! I am old enough to remember when telephones were very rare, and romantic enough to believe that I was happier then. But at worst I get more out of them then I get out of any of the other current wonders: for example, the radio, the phonograph, the movie, and the automobile. I am perhaps the first American ever to give up automobiling, formally and honestly. I sold my car so long ago as 1919, and have never regretted it. When I must move about in a city too large for comfortable walking I employ a taxicab, which is cheaper, safer and far less trouble than a private car. When I travel further I resort to the Pullman, by long odds the best conveyance yet invented by man. The radio, I admit, has potentialities, but they will remain in abeyance so long as the air is laden and debauched by jazz, idiotic harangues by frauds who do not know what they are talking about, and the horrible garglings of ninth-rate singers. The phonograph is just as bad, and the movie is ten times worse.

  Of all the great inventions of modern times the one that has given me most comfort and joy is one that is seldom heard of, to wit, the thermostat. I was amazed, some time ago, to hear that it was invented at least a generation ago. I first heard of it during the War of 1914–18, when some kind friend suggested that I throw out the coal furnace that was making steam in my ho
use and put in a gas furnace. Naturally enough, I hesitated, for the human mind is so constituted. But the day I finally succumbed must remain ever memorable in my annals, for it saw me move at one leap from an inferno into a sort of paradise. Everyone will recall how bad the coal was in those heroic days. The patriotic anthractie men loaded their culm-piles on cars, and sold them to householders all over the East. Not a furnaceman was in practise in my neighborhood: all of them were working in the shipyards at $15 a day. So I had to shovel coal myself, and not only shovel coal, but sift ashes. It was a truly dreadful experience. Worse, my house was always either too hot or too cold. When a few pieces of actual coal appeared in the mass of slate the temperature leaped up to 85 degrees, but most of the time it was between 45 and 50.

  The thermostat changed all that, and in an instant. I simply set it at 68 degrees, and then went about my business. When ever the temperature in the house went up to 70 it automatically turned off the gas under the furnace in the cellar, and there was an immediate return to 68. And if the mercury, keeping on, dropped to 66, then the gas went on again, and the temperature was soon 68 once more. I began to feel like a man liberated from the death-house. I was never too hot or too cold. I had no coal to heave, no ashes to sift. My house became so clean that I could wear a shirt five days. I began to feel like work, and rapidly turned out a series of imperishable contributions to the national letters. My temper improved so vastly that my family began to suspect senile changes. Moreover, my cellar became as clean as the rest of the house, and as roomy as a barn. I enlarged my wine-room by 1000 cubic metres. I put in a cedar closet big enough to hold my whole wardrobe. I added a vault for papers, a carpenter shop, and a praying chamber.

  For all these boons and usufructs I was indebted to the inventor of the thermostat, a simple device but incomparable. I’d print his name here, but unfortunately I forget it. He was one of the great benefactors of humanity. I wouldn’t swap him for a dozen Marconis, a regiment of Bells, or a whole army corps of Edisons. Edison’s life-work, like his garrulous and nonsensical talk, has been mainly a curse to humanity: he has greatly augmented its stock of damned nuisances. But the man who devised the thermostat, at all events in my private opinion, was a hero comparable to Shakespeare, Michelangelo or Beethoven.

  XX. QUACKERY

  Christian Science

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 28, 1927

  IN more than one American State, I gather, a Christian Science practitioner is forbidden to accept fees from the faithful. That is, he may not accept fees as fees. If a grateful patient, cured of cancer or hydrophobia by his sorcery, tips him $5 or $10, it is apparently all right, but if he sends in a bill he may be jailed for it. What could be more idiotic? Either the citizen of this great Republic is a free man or he is not a free man. If he is, then he has a plain right, when he is ill, to consult any medicine man he fancies, and quite as plain a right to pay that medicine man for his services—openly, without impediment, and according to a scale satisfactory to him. If that right be taken away, then one of his essential liberties is taken away—and the moment a Christian Scientist begins to lose an essential liberty, then all the rest of us begin to lose ours.

  The fact that a certain section of medical opinion supports the existing laws is surely no argument for their justice and reasonableness. A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things. A physician, however learned, has no more right to intrude his advice upon persons who prefer the advice of a Christian Scientist, a chiropractor or a pow-wow doctor than he has to intrude it upon persons who prefer the advice of some other physician.

  Here, I hope, I shall not be suspected of inclining toward the Eddyan buncombe. It seems to me to be pure balderdash. I believe that the services a Christian Science practitioner offers to his customers are no more valuable than the service a footwash evangelist offers to a herd of country jakes. But the right to freedom obviously involves the right to be foolish. If what I say must be passed on for its sagacity by censors, however wise and prudent, then I have no free speech. And if what I may believe—about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor-oil, or God—is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.

  It is constantly argued by the proponents of legislation against quacks that it is necessary for the public safety—that if it is not put upon the books, the land will be ravaged by plagues, and that the death-rate will greatly increase, to the immense damage of the nation. But in all this there are a great many more assumptions than facts, and even more false inferences than assumptions. What reason is there for believing that a high death-rate, in itself, is undersirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object?

  I believe that the quack healing cults set up a selection that is almost as benign and laudable. They attract, in the main, two classes: first, persons who are incurably ill, and hence beyond the reach of scientific medicine, and second, persons of congenitally defective reasoning powers. They slaughter these unfortunates by the thousand—even more swiftly and surely than scientific medicine (say, as practised by the average neighborhood doctor) could slaughter them. Does anyone seriously contend that this butchery is anti-social? It seems to me to be quite the reverse. The race is improved as its misfits and halfwits are knocked off. And life is thereby made safer and cheaper for the rest of us.

  The section of medical opinion that I have mentioned stands against these obvious facts. It contends that the botched and incompetent should be kept alive against their will, and in the face of their violent protests. To what end? To the end, first, that the rest of us may go on carrying them on our backs. To the end, second, that they may multiply gloriously, and so burden our children and grandchildren. But to the end, mainly, that hordes of medical busybodies, unequal to the strain of practise, may be kept in comfort.

  Every now and then one of these busybodies, discovering that some imbecile woman is having her child treated for a fractured skull or appendicitis by a Christian Scientist, fills the newspapers with clamor and tries to rush the poor woman to jail. A great sobbing ensues: it appears at once that it is the duty of the government (i.e., of certain jobholders) to rescue children from the follies of their parents. Is that duty real? If so, then let us extend it a bit. If it arises when a foolish mother tries to cure her child of diabetes by calling in a healer to read nonsense out of “Science and Health,” then doesn’t it arise equally when another foolish mother feeds her darling indigestible victuals? And if bad food is sufficient reason to summon the Polizei, then what of bad ideas?

  The truth is that the inhumanity of Christian Science mothers is grossly exaggerated. They are, in the main, exactly like other mothers. So long as little Otto is able to yell they try home remedies—whether castor oil or Christian Science is all one. But when it becomes plain that he is seriously ill, they send for the doctor—and the ensuing hocus-pocus is surely not to be laid at their doors. What is the actual death-rate among the offspring of Christian Scientists? If it can be proved to be more than 5% above the death-rate among the infant patrons of free clinics I shall be glad to enter a monastery and renounce the world.

  As a lifelong patriot and fan for human progress I should rejoice if it were five times what it is. Is it desirable to preserve the lives of children whose parents read and take seriously such dreadful bilge as is in “Science and Health”? If so, then it is also desirable to cherish the children of parents who believe that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will
turn into a snake. Such strains are manifestly dysgenic. Their persistence unchecked would quickly bring the whole human race down to an average IQ of 10 or 15. Being intelligent would become a criminal offense everywhere, as it already is in Mississippi and Tennessee. Thus a genuinely enlightened State would endow Christian Science and chiropractic on eugenic principles, as our great universities already endow football. Failing that, it is the plain duty of statesmanship to let nature take its course.

  Chiropractic

  From DIVES INTO QUACKERY, PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 217–27.

  First printed in part in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 8, 1924, and in part in the Chicago Tribune, Feb. 13, 1927

  THIS preposterous quackery flourishes lushly in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even many chiropractic “hospitals.” The morons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebræ upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord—in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.