Art thus satisfactorily disposed of, religion was next “explained” in terms of sex. The moral conscience was abolished (another illusion) and “amuse yourself” proclaimed as the sole categorical imperative. The theories of Freud were received in intellectual circles with acclaim; to explain every higher activity of the human mind in terms of incest and coprophily came to be regarded not only as truly scientific, but also as somehow virile and courageous. Freudism became the realpolitik of psychology and philosophy. Those who denied values felt themselves to be rather heroic; instinctively they were appealing to the standards which they were trying, intellectually, to destroy.
Meanwhile the men of science are finding that the crude materialism of their predecessors is a hypothesis that will not work. Our apostles of scientific truth find themselves the apostles of what will soon be universally regarded as a fallacy.
But the influence of these ci-devant “scientific” deniers of value has not been wide. In most human beings the intuitive sense of values is too strong to be seriously affected by intellectual arguments, however specious. They are revolted by the denial of values; they insist on interpreting the world in terms of high and low. Unfortunately, however, they are apt to make mistakes and to call things by the wrong names, labelling “high” what should rightly be low, and “low” what ought to be high. This falsification of the standard of values is a product, in our modern world, of democracy, and has gone farthest in America. It is much more dangerous than the mere denial of values, because it is much more popular. To most men and women the denial of values is horrible; but the falsification of them so as to square with democratic prejudices is pleasant and flattering. Let us examine Mr. Kalbsfleisch’s advertisement and try to discover the direction in which standards have been perverted and the methods of falsification employed.
The democratic hypothesis in its extreme and most popular form is that all men are equal and that I am just as good as you are. It is so manifestly untrue that a most elaborate system of humbug has had to be invented in order to render it credible to any normally sane human being. Nowhere has this system of humbug been brought to such perfection as in America. Take the case of Mr. Kalbsfleisch. He is an undertaker. The trade he practises has never enjoyed great esteem; for, although it is a necessary trade, it cannot be said to call for high intellectual or moral qualities in its practitioners. Mr. Kalbsfleisch and his fellows have realised and resented this failure on the part of humanity to esteem them.
Being good democrats, they want to insist on their equality with the admittedly best people. They begin by altering the name of their trade. The word “undertaker” has base associations. They therefore coin a new locution and style themselves “morticians.” “Mortician” is a word that rhymes with such highly reputable words as physician, mathematician, academician, politician—not to mention Titian. What’s in a name? Much. From having been undertakers and mere tradesmen, the morticians have become artists and members of an almost learned profession.
Having emended their name, the morticians proceed to exalt and magnify their calling. They do this in a very simple, but eminently effective way: by insisting on the Service which they render to Humanity.
The notion of Service is fundamental to Christianity. Jesus and his greatest followers have proclaimed the spiritual importance of Service and have exhorted all men and women to be the servants of their fellows. The morticians, and with them all the Business Men of America, are as whole-heartedly enthusiastic about Service as was ever St. Francis or his divine Master. But the activities which they designate by the word “Service” happen to be slightly different from those which the Founder of Christianity called by the same name. For Jesus and St. Francis, Service connoted self-sacrifice, abnegation, humility. For the morticians and other American Business Men, Service means something else; it means doing profitable business efficiently and with just sufficient honesty to keep out of jail. American Business Men talk like St. Francis; but their activities are indistinguishable from those of the money-changers and the sellers of doves whom Jesus expelled from the Temple with a whip of small cords.
The money-changers and the bird-hawkers protested, no doubt, that they were serving humanity as well as, and even better than, their aggressor. “What we do,” they must have argued, “is useful and necessary; society finds us indispensable.” It is on the same ground—that they perform necessary jobs well—that American Business Men claim to be doing Service, and Service of the highest value. They overlook the significant historical fact that all the valuable things in life, all the things that make for civilisation and progress, are precisely the unnecessary ones.
All scientific research, all art, all religion are (by comparison with making coffins or breakfast foods) unnecessary. But if we had stuck to the merely necessary, we should still be apes. According to any proper standard of values, the unnecessary things and the unnecessary people who are concerned with them are much more important than the necessary ones. By exalting the merely necessary to an equality with the unnecessary, the American Business Man has falsified the standard of values. The service rendered by a mortician or a realtor has come to be regarded as the equivalent of the service rendered by an artist of a man of science.
Babbitt can now honestly believe that he and his kind are doing as much for humanity as the Pasteurs and the Isaac Newtons. Kalbsfleisch among his silk-lined caskets knows himself to be as good as Beethoven. Successful stockbrokers, certain that Business is Religion, can come home after a day of speculation on the Exchange, feeling as virtuously happy as Buddha must have felt when he had renounced the world and received his great illumination.
In every part of the world and at all times the vast majority of human beings has consisted of Babbitts and peasants. They are indispensable; the necessary work must be done. But never, except at the present time, and nowhere but in America, have the necessary millions believed themselves the equals of the unnecessary few. In Europe the ancient standards still persist, the ghost at least of the old hierarchy survives.
The rich parvenu may despise the man of science for his poverty; but he still feels humble before his knowledge, his superior intelligence and his disinterestedness. That technique of humbug, by the employment of which successful stockbroking may be made to seem as valuable and noble an occupation as scientific research or artistic creation, has not yet been perfected in Europe, it has hardly been invented. True, there are many people who would like to see the technique introduced, ready-made and perfected, from across the Atlantic. I trust, and I am even moderately confident, that they will be for ever disappointed.
Meanwhile, on the Western side of the Atlantic the progressive falsification of values steadily continues. So far, what has happened is this: preciousness has been attributed to things and people previously regarded as possessing small value. But in certain parts of the Union the innumerable necessary men are preparing to move a step farther. Not content with attributing the highest possible value to themselves, they are denying it to the unnecessary few; the majority has sovereign rights.
What was previously held to be high is now being disparaged. The mental and moral qualities, the occupations and diversions of the greatest number are regarded as the best, the sole permissible; the qualities and occupations of the few are condemned. Stupidity, suggestibility and business are held up as supremely precious. Intelligence, independence and disinterested activity—once admired—are in process of becoming evil things which ought to be destroyed. In Tennessee and other remote provinces the crusade against them has already begun. It remains to be seen whether this further perversion of values will affect the rest of the continent.
NEW YORK
Now that liberty is out-of-date, equality an exploded notion and fraternity a proven impossibility, republics should change their mottoes. Intelligence, Sterility, Insolvency: that would do for contemporary France. But not for America. The American slogan would have to be something quite different. The national motto should fit the national facts. What I should write under America’s flapping eagle would be: Vitality, Prosperity, Modernity.
Let us begin with the last, modernity. Modernity in this context may be defined as the freedom (at any rate in the sphere of practical, material life) from customary bonds and ancient prejudices, from traditional and vested interest; the freedom, in a word, from history. Change is accepted in America as the first and fundamental fact—and accepted, not as other peoples have accepted it, as an evil to be combated by the organisation of a stable society, by the making of things too strong and solid for time to be able quickly to devour, but as a good, as the foundation and key of practical life. Most things in this modern land are provisional, made to last only till something better, or at any rate something newer, shall appear to take their place.
All through the country the houses have an air of impermanence; the landscape, wherever the hand of man has touched it, looks sketchy and unfinished. The factories are perpetually renewing themselves; half their profits are ear-marked for the expenses of this chronic rejuvenation. Forty-year old locomotives, having the strange and almost fabulous aspect of Tertiary monsters, still rumble over European rails. A respectable American railway company
