H.L. Mencken

Springfield Daily Republican/September 12, 1926

Modern Writes on Morality and Sex Fill Their Volumes with Pious Balderdash—Cult of Service Latest Line for Purveyors of Intolerance.

Since Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, published his celebrated letters to his morganatic son, in 1744, there has been no adequate book in English, of advice to young men. I say adequate, and the adjective tells the whole story. There is not, of course, a college president, or a boss Y. M. C. A. secretary, or an uplifting preacher in the United States who has not written such a book, but all of them are alike filled with bilge. They depict and advocate a life that no normal young man wants to live, or could live without ruin if he wanted to. They are full of Sunday school platitudes and Boy Scout snuffling. If they were swallowed by the youth of today the republic of tomorrow would be a nation of idiots.

I point to the obvious example of the volumes of so-called sex hygiene. If there is anything in them save pious balderdash then I have yet to encounter it—and in the pursuit of my dismal duties as a critic of letters and ideas I have read literally hundreds of them. All of them are devoted to promoting the absurd and immoral idea that the sexual instinct is somehow degrading and against God—that whenever a young man feels it welling within him it is time for him to send for a physician and perhaps even for a policeman. If he is moved to kiss his girl he is in grave peril. If he yields to the devil and actually necks her he is already halfway to hell.

What could be worse rubbish? The sole effect of it, assuming it to be believed, is to send the young reader into manhood full of preposterous fears and shames and to shut him off from one of the chief sources of human happiness. For life without sex might be safer, but it would be unbearably dull. There would be very little hazard in it and even less joy. It is the sex instinct that makes women seem beautiful, which they are only once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an ant hill.

Absurd Cult of Service

But it is not when they address young men as males, but when they address them as citizens that the current authors of such books achieve their worst nonsense. The absurd cult of Service, invented by swindlers to conceal their knaveries, is hymned eloquently in all of them. The chief aim and purpose of civilized man in the world, it appears, is to Do Good. In other words, his chief duty is to harass and persecute his neighbors. If he shirks it, then he is a bad citizen, and will go to hell along with the draft dodgers, tax evaders, atheists, and bachelors.

It seems to me that this highly dubious doctrine is responsible for much of the uneasiness and unhappiness that are visible in the United States today, despite the growing wealth of the country. Accepting it gravely, the American people have converted themselves into a race of nuisances. It is no longer possible, making a new acquaintance, to put any reasonable trust in his common decency. If he is not a policeman in disguise he is very apt to be a propagandist without disguise, which is even worse. The country swarms with such bores, and the chief aim of the current instruction in the duties of the citizen seems to be to make more of them.

No argument, I take it, is needed to show that this is an evil tendency. The happiness of men in the world depends very largely upon their confidence in one another—in A’s belief that B is well disposed toward him, and will do nothing intentionally to make him uncomfortable. But the whole purpose of the uplift is to make other people uncomfortable. It searches relentlessly for men who are having a pleasant time, according to their lights, and tries to put them in jail, or, still worse, to stir up their conscience. In other words, it tries to make them unhappy. It is an engine for the dissemination of the disagreeable. Seeking ostensibly to increase the number of good citizens, it only increases the number of bad ones.

High Value of Toleration.

But the young, it is argued, must be schooled in public spirit, else they will all become highwaymen, just as they must be schooled in virtue, else they will all become debauchees. That argument, in various mellifluous forms, is constantly heard. It constitutes the fundamental postulate of such organizations as the Y. M. C. A. and the Boy Scouts. To question it becomes a sort of indecorum and is commonly represented as a questioning of public spirit and virtue themselves. Nevertheless, it remains nonsensical. There is not the slightest evidence that the normal young American, deprived of his book of civics, would take to the high road, or that, deprived of his books of sex hygiene, he would set up practice as a roue.

The young come into the world, indeed, with a great deal of innate decency. It is their inheritance from the immemorial dead who fashioned and gave a direction to the delicate and complicated organism known as human society. That organism arose out of mutual good will, out of tolerance and charity, out of the civilizing tendency to live and let live. It emerged from the level of savagery by yielding to that tendency. The savage is preeminently his brother’s keeper. He knows precisely what his brother ought to do in every situation and is full of indignation when it is not done. But the civilized man has doubts, and life under civilization is thus more comfortable than it is in a Tennessee village or an African kraal.

If the young are to be instructed at all it seems to me that they ought to be instructed in the high human value of this toleration. They should be taught what they learn by experience in the school yard: that human beings differ enormously, one from the other, and that it is stupid and imprudent for A to try to change B. They should be taught that mutual confidence and good-will are worth all the laws ever heard of, ghostly or secular, and that one man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists. This teaching, I fear, is being neglected in the United States. We are hearing—and especially the young are hearing—far too much about brummagem utopias and far too little about the actual workings of the confusing but not unpleasant world we live in.

Honor and Morals.

I know of no course in honor in any American Sunday school, yet it must be plain that human relations, when they are profitable and agreeable, are based upon honor much oftener than they are based upon morals. It is immoral, in every rational meaning of the word, to violate the Volstead act, and it is moral to give the Polizei aid against anyone who does so. But what is the practical answer of decent men to those facts? Their practical answer is that such giving of aid is dishonorable. The law does not punish it; it rewards it. But it is punished swiftly and relentlessly by civilized public opinion.

My contention, in brief, is that there is room for a book showing why this is so—for a book of advice to young men setting forth, not what some ancient hypocrite of a college president or Y. M. C. A. secretary thinks would be nice, but what is regarded as nice by the overwhelming majority of intelligent and reputable men. In other words, there is room for a book of inductive ethics, based upon the actual practices of civilized society. Such a book, in the department of sexual conduct, would differ enormously from the present banal manuals. It would denounce as ignorable many of the acts they advocate and it would give its approval to others that they ban. And in the wider field of the relations between man and man it would differ from them even more radically. It would have little to say about ideals, but a great deal about realities.

Most boys admire their fathers and take their notions from them in this department. The boy who has a father who is a genuinely civilized man needs no advice from outside experts. Common decency will be in him when he grows up. He will not be afraid of women and he will not try to make over men. But vast herds of American fathers, succumbing to the Service buncombe, have ceased to be safe guides for their sons. Their practice is misleading and their counsel is dangerous. Thus the way opens for a counselor less credulous and more sagacious. Thus a vast market shows itself for the sort of book I have been trying to describe.