Ambrose Bierce - A Cynic Looks at Life
A >>
Ambrose Bierce >> A Cynic Looks at Life
[Transcriber's note: _ is equivalent to italics markup.]
LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 1099
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
A Cynic Looks at Life
Ambrose Bierce
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright, 1912, by
The Neale Publishing Company
Reprinted by Special Arrangement With
Albert and Charles Boni, New York
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A CYNIC LOOKS AT LIFE
CIVILIZATION
I
The question "Does civilization civilize?" is a fine example of _petitio
principii_, and decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization must
needs do that from the doing of which it has its name. But it is not
necessary to suppose that he who propounds is either unconscious of his
lapse in logic or desirous of digging a pitfall for the feet of those
who discuss; I take it he simply wishes to put the matter in an
impressive way, and relies upon a certain degree of intelligence in the
interpretation.
Concerning uncivilized peoples we know but little except what we are
told by travelers--who, speaking generally, can know very little but the
fact of uncivilization, as shown in externals and irrelevances, and are
moreover, greatly given to lying. From the savages we hear very little.
Judging them in all things by our own standards in default of a
knowledge of theirs, we necessarily condemn, disparage and belittle. One
thing that civilization certainly has not done is to make us intelligent
enough to understand that the contrary of a virtue is not necessarily a
vice. Because, as a rule, we have but one wife and several mistresses
each it is not certain that polygamy is everywhere--nor, for that
matter, anywhere--either wrong or inexpedient. Because the brutality of
the civilized slave owners and dealers created a conquering sentiment
against slavery it is not intelligent to assume that slavery is a
maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples (for example) where the slave
is not oppressed. Some of these same Orientals whom we are pleased to
term half-civilized have no regard for truth. "Takest thou me for a
Christian dog," said one of them, "that I should be the slave of my
word?" So far as I can perceive, the "Christian dog" is no more the
slave of his word than the True Believer, and I think the
savage--allowing for the fact that his inveracity has dominion over
fewer things--as great a liar as either of them. For my part, I do not
know what, in all circumstances, is right or wrong; but I know that, if
right, it is at least stupid, to judge an uncivilized people by the
standards of morality and intelligence set up by civilized ones. Life in
civilized countries is so complex that men there have more ways to be
good than savages have, and more to be bad; more to be happy, and more
to be miserable. And in each way to be good or bad, their generally
superior knowledge--their knowledge of more things--enables them to
commit greater excesses than the savage can. The civilized
philanthropist wreaks upon his fellows a ranker philanthropy, the
civilized rascal a sturdier rascality. And--splendid triumph of
enlightenment!--the two characters are, in civilization, frequently
combined in one person.
I know of no savage custom or habit of thought which has not its mate
in civilized countries. For every mischievous or absurd practice of the
natural man I can name you one of ours that is essentially the same. And
nearly every custom of our barbarian ancestors in historic times
persists in some form today. We make ourselves look formidable in
battle--for that matter, we fight. Our women paint their faces. We feel
it obligatory to dress more or less alike, inventing the most ingenious
reasons for doing so and actually despising and persecuting those who do
not care to conform. Almost within the memory of living persons bearded
men were stoned in the streets; and a clergyman in New York who wore his
beard as Christ wore his, was put into jail and variously persecuted
till he died.
Civilization does not, I think, make the race any better. It makes men
know more: and if knowledge makes them happy it is useful and desirable.
The one purpose of every sane human being is to be happy. No one can
have any other motive than that. There is no such thing as
unselfishness. We perform the most "generous" and "self-sacrificing"
acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines of
least reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of human
happiness is worth having; nothing else has any value.
The cant of civilization fatigues. Civilization, is a fine and beautiful
structure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral, but it is built
upon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part in all
its pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the
ungenerous tropics, for there the people will not contribute their
blood and bones. The proposition that the average American workingman or
European peasant is "better off" than the South Sea islander, lolling
under a palm and drunk with over-eating, will not bear a moment's
examination. It is we scholars and gentlemen that are better off.
It is admitted that the South Sea islander in a state of nature is
overmuch addicted to the practice of eating human flesh; but concerning
that I submit: first, that he likes it; second, that those who supply it
are mostly dead. It is upon his enemies that he feeds, and these he
would kill anyhow, as we do ours. In civilized, enlightened and
Christian countries, where cannibalism has not yet established itself,
wars are as frequent and destructive as among the maneaters. The
untitled savage knows at least why he goes killing, whereas our private
soldier is commonly in black ignorance of the apparent cause of
quarrel--of the actual cause, always. Their shares in the fruits of
victory are about equal, for the chief takes all the dead, the general
all the glory.
II
Transplanted institutions grow slowly; civilization can not be put into
a ship and carried across an ocean. The history of this country is a
sequence of illustrations of these truths. It was settled by civilized
men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and a half
centuries, with unbroken communication with the mother systems, it is
still imperfectly civilized. In learning and letters, in art and the
science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of
Europe.
For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we
are indebted to the Old World; the errors and mischiefs are of our own
creation. We have originated little, because there is little to
originate, but we have unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited
systems of former ages and other countries--receiving them at second
hand, but making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the
national belief in their novelty. Novelty! Why, it is not possible to
make an experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology,
or in morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again.
The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that our
fathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the power,
the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century, but
of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the
preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "reverend
pile," the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle the
mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top
courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? The
American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in
England's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser
glory of his own country.
The English, are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the
virtues are solely the product of intelligence and cultivation--a rogue
being only a dunce considered from another point of view--they are our
moral superiors likewise. Why should they not be? Theirs is a land, not
of ugly schoolhouses grudgingly erected, containing schools supported by
such niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will
consent to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the
state and by centuries of private benefaction. As a means of dispensing
formulated ignorance our boasted public school system is not without
merit; it spreads out education sufficiently thin to give everyone
enough to make him a more competent fool than he would have been without
it; but to compare it with that which is not the creature of legislation
acting with malice aforethought, but the unnoted out-growth of ages, is
to be ridiculous. It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western
prairie, its right-angled streets, prim cottages, and wooden a-b-c
shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped with the clustered
domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges, the very names of
many of whose founders have perished from human record, as have the
chronicles of the times in which they lived.
It is not only that we have had to "subdue the wilderness"; our
educational conditions are adverse otherwise. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will
not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and
a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer
and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?
I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an
aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization;
I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do hold that a system
under which most important public trusts, political and professional,
civil and military ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated
men--that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is
not an altogether faulty system.
It is a universal human weakness to disparage the knowledge that we do
not ourselves possess, but it is only my own beloved country that can
justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum of the impotents and
incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge whatsoever. It was an
American senator who declared that he had devoted a couple of weeks to
the study of finance, and found the accepted authorities all wrong. It
was another American senator who, confronted with certain hostile facts
in the history of another country, proposed "to brush away all facts,
and argue the question on consideration of plain common sense."
Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we
attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to
make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds
general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.
Every patriot believes his country better than any other country. Now,
they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it
follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to
be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
manifestation--it is fond of killing--patriotism would be well if it
were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling
that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us over
the border to quench the fires and overturn the altars of our neighbors.
It is all very pretty and spirited, what the poets tell us about
Thermopylae, but there was as much patriotism at one end of that pass as
there was at the other.
Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the
interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the
fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.
The Western hoodlum who cuts the tail from a Chinaman's nowl, and would
cut the nowl from the body, if he dared, is simply a patriot with a
logical mind, having the courage of his opinions. Patriotism is fierce
as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.
III
There are two ways of clarifying liquids--ebullition and precipitation;
one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them
to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that seems
to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely
separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our
social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to
appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is
the good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it to
come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical
means to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they
fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours is
bearing crab-apples. If the body politic is constitutionally diseased,
as I verily believe; if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no
remedy. The fever must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the
rest. One does not prescribe what time alone can administer. We have put
our criminals and dunces into power; do we suppose they will efface
themselves? Will they restore to _us_ the power of governing _them_?
They must have their way and go their length. The natural and immemorial
sequence is: tyranny, insurrection, combat. In combat everything that
wears a sword has a chance--even the right. History does not forbid us
to hope. But it forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against
us. If history teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the
majority of mankind is neither good nor wise. When government is founded
upon the public conscience and the public intelligence the stability of
states is a dream.
In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have
abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and
better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed
itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this
universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places of
the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations
cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and
populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast of
national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down
to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I
submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.
It can be spared--this Jonah's gourd civilization of ours. We have
hardly the rudiments of a true one; compared with the splendors of which
we catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of
tallow candles. We know no more than the ancients; we only know other
things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little
that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted _elixir vitae_ is the art of
printing. What good will that do when posterity, struck by the
inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is
printed? Our libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.
Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as a
scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so
differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and feeling;
which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it a
reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is
offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American
plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of
renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the
presidential chair and every laundress in exile.
I have not a "solution" to the "labor problem." I have only a story.
Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none
in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those few
whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their
foolish fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as
divine law; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of
time. Amongst the utterances of this man was one command--not a new nor
perfect one--which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise that
they have given it a name by which it is known over half the world. One
of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is
such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that
any nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and
adversity that will surely come to it. When a people would avert want
and strife, or, having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble
commandment offers the only means--all other plans for safety or relief
are as vain as dreams, as empty as the crooning of hags. And behold,
here is it: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them."
What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen
into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory
and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business
is business"; you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist by whose
desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way of
answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb
amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to
the labor problem" as there are among you those who can not coherently
define it--do you really think yourselves wiser than Jesus of Nazareth?
Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for
dealing with evils besetting nations and souls? Have you the effrontery
to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to
obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue
the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes,
your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speeching, marching and
maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you
it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
blood and your pick-pocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
into the sea.
THE GIFT O' GAB
A book entitled _Forensic Eloquence_, by Mr. John Goss, appears to have
for purpose to teach the young idea how to spout, and that purpose, I
dare say, it will accomplish if something is not done to prevent. I know
nothing of the matter myself, a strong distaste for forensic eloquence,
or eloquence of any kind implying a man mounted on his legs and doing
all the talking, having averted me from its study. The training of the
youth of this country to utterance of themselves after that fashion I
should regard as a disaster of magnitude. So far as I know it, forensic
eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way as to make them pass
for more than they are worth. Employed in matters of importance (and for
other employment it were hardly worth acquiring) it is mischievous
because dishonest and misleading. In the public service Truth toils best
when not clad in cloth-of-gold and bedaubed with fine lace. If eloquence
does not beget action it is valueless; but action which results from the
passions, sentiments and emotions is less likely to be wise than that
which comes of a persuaded judgment. For that reason I cannot help
thinking that the influence of Bismarck in German politics was more
wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple Graves.
For eloquence _per se_--considered merely as an art of pleasing--I
entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always
pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style is to
writing--good and pleasant enough in its time and place and, like
pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common sense.
Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient
foundation in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition
of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues. For I take it that
the Ciceros, the Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O'Connells, the Patrick
Henrys and the rest of them--pets of the text-bookers and scourges of
youth--belong in either the one category or the other, or in both.
Anyhow I find it impossible to think of them as highminded men and
right-forth statesmen--with their actors' tricks, their devices of the
countenance, inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having
nothing to do with the matter in hand. Extinction of the orator I hold
to be the most beneficent possibility of evolution. If Mr. Goss has done
anything to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans shall
cease from troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of his race.
"What!" exclaims the thoughtless reader--I have but one--"are not the
great forensic speeches by the world's famous orators good reading?
Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and
refining pleasure from them?" I do not: I find them turgid and tumid no
end. They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing. In
order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is seldom
permitted to forget: that they were addressed to the ear; and in
imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator himself,
uttering his work. These conditions being fulfilled there remains for
application to the matter of the discourse too little attention to get
much good of it, and the total effect is confusion. Literature by which
the reader is compelled to bear in mind the producer and the
circumstances under which it was produced can be spared.
NATURA BENIGNA
It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great
disasters occur, as memory witnesseth. Nor are the forces of nature
inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have known.
The situation is this: we are tied by the feet to a fragile shell
imperfectly confining a force powerful enough under favoring conditions,
to burst it asunder and set the fragments wallowing and grinding
together in liquid flame, in the blind fury of a readjustment. Nay, it
needs no such stupendous cataclysm to depeople this uneasy orb. Let but
a square mile be blown out of the bottom of the sea, or a great rift
open there. Is it to be supposed that we would be unaffected in the
altered conditions generated by a contest between the ocean and the
earth's molten core? These fatalities are not only possible but in the
highest degree probable. It is probable, indeed, that they have occurred
over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized forms of
life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin anew. Slow? On
the stage of Eternity the passing of races--the entrances and exits of
Life--are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following one another
with confusing rapidity.
Mankind has not found it practicable to abandon and avoid those places
where the forces of nature have been most malign. The track, of the
Western tornado is speedily repeopled. San Francisco is still populous,
despite its earthquake, Galveston despite its storm, and even the courts
of Lisbon are not kept by the lion and the lizard. In the Peruvian
village straight downward into whose streets the crew of a United States
warship once looked from the crest of a wave that stranded her a half
mile inland are heard the tinkle of the guitar and the voices of
children at play. There are people living at Herculaneum and Pompeii. On
the slopes about Catania the goatherd endures with what courage he may
the trembling of the ground beneath his feet as old Enceladus again
turns over on his other side. As the Hoang-Ho goes back inside its banks
after fertilizing its contiguity with hydrate of China-man the living
agriculturist follows the receding wave, sets up his habitation beneath
the broken embankment, and again the Valley of the Gone Away blossoms
as the rose, its people diving with Death.
This matter can not be amended: the race exposes itself to peril because
it can do no otherwise. In all the world there is no city of refuge--no
temple in which to take sanctuary, clinging to the horns of the
altar--no "place apart" where, like hunted deer, we can hope to elude
the baying pack of Nature's malevolences. The dead-line is drawn at the
gate of life: Man crosses it at birth. His advent is a challenge to the
entire pack--earthquake, storm, fire, flood, drought, heat, cold, wild
beasts, venomous reptiles, noxious insects, bacilli, spectacular plague
and velvet-footed household disease--all are fierce and tireless in
pursuit. Dodge, turn and double how he can, there's no eluding them;
soon or late some of them have him by the throat and his spirit returns
to the God who gave it--and gave them.