Mencken on the Inferior Man and Progress

Mencken on the Inferior Man and Progress

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the inferior man and progress, pages 58-73. Below is an overview of his discussion on the inferior man and progress; my comments are in brackets.
    The inferior man is the natural enemy of progress, liberty, and justice. “[B]eing a natural slave himself, [the inferior man] is quite unable to understand the desire for liberty in his superiors. If he apprehends that desire at all, it is only as an appetite for a good of which he is himself incapable. He thus envies those who harbour it, and is eager to put them down.”
    For the inferior man, justice “is always unpopular and in difficulties under democracy, save perhaps that false form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the labourer more than his fair hire.” Moreover, “[t]he wars of extermination that are waged against heretical minorities never meet with any opposition on the lower levels. The proletarian is always ready to help destroy the rights of his fellow proletarian.” Mencken illustrates this with the use of the American Legion and the America Federation of Labor in the program against the Reds just after World War I. Another illustration is that “[t]he city workman, oppressed by Prohibition, mourns the loss of his beer, not the loss of his liberty.” [If the war on drugs is substituted for prohibition, the same is true today. How many are really concerned about the loss of liberties that the war on drugs has brought?] The inferior man, the proletarian, “is ever willing to support similar raids upon the liberty of the other fellow, and he is not outraged when they are carried on in gross violation of the most elemental principles of justice and common decency.” [As happens in the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer, war on Confederate monuments, and all the other wars that the elite who controls the U.S. government creates.]
    The “few genuine believers in liberty and justice survive, huddled upon a burning deck. Is it to be marvelled at that most of them, on inspection, turn out to be the grandsons of similar heretics of earlier times?” Mencken thinks not because it “takes quite as long to breed a libertarian as it takes to breed a racehorse. Neither may be expected to issue from a farm mare.”
    According to Mencken, the inferior man, the masses, opposes progress. He writes, “The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses. The notion that their clamour brought about all the governmental and social reforms of the last century, and that those reforms were delayed by the superior minority, is sheer nonsense.” He cites several examples of these reforms — most of which extends the government’s control over the masses and which the masses initially opposed. In Germany, the elite enacted various types of social legislation, such as workman’s insurance, minimum wage, and child labor restriction laws. The United States and other countries followed Germany’s example. However, the masses tended to oppose these acts. [Libertarians naturally oppose such laws as they reduce liberty by forcing people to do what they would not naturally do. Socialists naturally support such laws as they provide for the security of workers, which socialists consider liberty. Since these laws reduce liberty by giving the government more control over the masses and, therefore, less real liberty, the masses were standing for liberty against the elites, their betters as Mencken called them, who were extending their control of the masses via the government. Here Mencken seems to contradict his arguments about liberty and the masses. That Mencken would consider these laws as progress is amazing since he claims to be a libertarian. If he does consider these laws as progress and an extension of liberty, he needs to congratulate the superiors, the elites, for educating the uneducable. Now, the inferior man would strongly resist their repeal.]
    Mencken writes, “Public policies are determined and laws are made by small minorities playing upon the fears and imbecilities of the mob — sometimes minorities of intelligent and honest men, but usually minorities of rogues.” In agreement with Maine, Mencken notes that universal suffrage would have prohibited the use of industrial inventions and machines, such as the spinning-jenny, power looms, and threshing-machines. [Sir Henry Maine {1822-1888} was a British comparative jurist and historian.] Moreover, universal suffrage “‘would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; it would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.’” [As suffrage has been extended, the quality of political leaders has declined. First, the vote was given to Black males {1870}, next to women {1920}, and then to eighteen-year olds {1971}; along the way, the requirement to pay taxes was removed {1964}. Each time the quality of political leaders declined. The last Jeffersonian president was Cleveland {1885-1889 and 1893-1897}. Has not the time come to require voters to understand the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of their State and to pay a minimum but more than token direct tax? When voters had to meet these requirements, the country had much higher quality of political leaders.]
    In the United States, Mencken identifies democracy as leading to anti-vivisection and anti-contraception statutes, the licensing of osteopaths (which he considers a fraud), and restrictions on free assembly and free speech. [The police state laws enacted during the War on Terrorism has restricted assembly and speech, and the controllers of various internet sites, such as search engines and social media sites, have also restricted free speech. Also, Mencken’s attitude toward osteopathy appears like that of an inferior man. He does not understand it, and, therefore, fears it. Fearing it, he wants to suppress it as quackery. He has the same attitude toward chiropractic.]
    Mencken agrees with Lecky: “‘Nothing in ancient alchemy was more irrational than the notion that increased ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place government more and more under the control of the least enlightened classes.’” [William Lecky {1838- 1903} was an Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist.]
    Mencken explains the inferior man’s opposition to things that benefit him: “He is against it because it is complex, and, to his dark mind, occult — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity for taking in ideas, and thus propels him into the realm of the unknowable and alarming. His search is always for short cuts, simple formulae, revelation.” Continuing, Mencken adds “that all political platitudes and shibboleths [have] . . . one aim [and that] is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.”
    Also, Mencken condemns Fundamentalism, creationism, chiropractic, “osteopathy, Christian Science, spiritualism and all the other half rational and half supernatural quackeries with it” as food for the ignorant, uneducable masses. [Mencken was an evolutionist and believed that creationism was a myth and a superstition — and so was much of Christianity. Being uneducable, the inferior man believed in creationism. Now, most inferior men believe in evolution, and even more theologians are evolutionists. Moreover, Christianity is waning. Would Mencken congratulate the superior man for doing the impossible of educating the uneducable inferior man? As science learns more about paleontology and genetics, evolution becomes more untenable. Would this new information cause him to change his mind about evolution? Would he recognize that today evolution has become a religion based on a set of beliefs?]
    Mencken laments, “It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and disreputable. Of the sciences, as of the fine arts, the average human being, even in the most literate and civilized of modern States, is as ignorant as the horned cattle in the fields. What he knows of histology, say, or protozoology, or philology, or paleontology, is precisely nothing. Such things lie beyond his capacity for learning, and he has no curiosity about them. The man who has any acquaintance with them seems to him to be a ridiculous figure, with a touch of the sinister. Even those applied sciences which enter intimately into his everyday existence remain outside his comprehension and interest.” [Unfortunately, he is close to the truth. For this reason, the nefarious elite finds the common man easy to manipulate.]
    About learning, Mencken writes, “Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it. If the notions it turns loose descended to the lowest levels, there would be an uprising against them, and efforts would be made to put them down by law.” He warns against putting the fine arts into the common school curriculum because once the ignorant uneducable masses discover them, they will seek to suppress them. [Instead of suppressing the fine arts overtly, they supplant them with trash that is promoted as art, with the elite doing most of the promotion.]
    Mencken adds that “there is a great deal less of yearning for moral perfection than there is of mere hatred of beauty.” Continuing he writes, “Beauty fevers and enrages him [the inferior man] for another and quite different reason. He cannot comprehend it, and yet it somehow challenges and disturbs him. If he could snore through good music he would not object to it; the trouble with it is that it keeps him awake. So he believes that it ought to be put down, just as he believes that political and economic ideas which disturb him and yet elude him ought to be put down. The finest art is safe from him simply because he has no contact with it, and is thus unaware of it.”
    Moreover, “[t]he common man, as a matter of fact, has no yearning for moral perfection. What ails him in that department is simply fear of punishment, which is to say, fear of his neighbours. He has, in safe privacy, the morals of a variety actor.”
    In summary, human progress passes the inferior man. “Its aims are unintelligible to him and its finest fruits are beyond his reach: what reaches him is what falls from the tree, and is shared with his four-footed brothers. He has changed but little since the earliest recorded time, and that change is for the worse quite as often as it is for the better. . . . He is still a slave to priests, and trembles before their preposterous magic. He is lazy, improvident and unclean. All the durable values of the world, though his labour has entered into them, have been created against his opposition. He can imagine nothing beautiful and he can grasp nothing true. Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race.” “Such is the pet and glory of democratic states.”
    [Mencken seems not to recognize that of the betters, the upper class, the superior man, the elite, only a few love liberty. Most superiors love power more than liberty and use their intellect to feed their lust for it.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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