Nonsenseorship

by Unknown

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?