"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
— H. L. Mencken: Notes On Journalism. Chicago Tribune (19/9 1926)
"That the moralist—in whatever disguise—can give us as much trouble as the politician—in whatever disguise—is certain. But of course it may be as a politician that he is found to have disguised himself! Or the politician may disguise himself as a moralist—that is very bad indeed, when the politician does that! But in whatever form this interfering personage may turn up, there is one thing about which you may be perfectly certain; and that is, that the old crude humanist or humanitarian values of good and of bad will not be found in his repertory of annoyance. If that were so we should not have to bother about him very much, There is no advertisement value today—luckily for the artist (if not for other people)—in the simple-hearted good and bad of the old morality." (s. 129)
Lewis skrev i 1934 og det var før Nazismen, før ungdomsoprøret og før internettets forfladigelse ... demokratisering af viden og man kan ikke lade være med et spekulere over, om ikke han ville have smilet nostalgisk og længselsfuld ved tanken om sin tids moralister, hvis han havde haft den tvivlsomme fornøjelse af møde vores.
Halvfems år er længe siden. Dengang kom det moraliserende tryk oppefra, så at sige, med den enorme tyngde af kristent vraggods efterladt af en døende Guds herboende repræsentanters teologiske krampetrækninger. Længslen, den romantiske (som også senere var identisk med den nazistiske/kommunistiske), efter værdier og orden censurerede og begrænsede med referencer til historien og teologien og resonerede stadig af en stemning i folkedybet med bund i et stadig fælles folkeligt traditions- og tankegods. Politikeren og moralisten var ofte — eller kunne være — en og samme persen.
"Our contemporary moralists are of many kinds. But there is one respect in which they remarkably resemble one another: for all, starting from the premise of our autonomous nature, seek to rob us of artistic as of political freedom, in the name of this, that, or the other Law." (s.130-131)
Selvom meget er ændret og moralisten er kørt ud på et sidesporet og vel hægtet helt af og står tilbage som en kuriøsitet, mest af alt fordi trykket ikke længere er et, som kommer oppefra, og fordi politikeren i den grad i den sammenhæng er irrelevant i sin inkarnation som karakterløs taburetklæber (kan man forestille sig nogen i enhver større sammenhæng mere irrelevant karakter end f. eks. Mette Frederiksen?), så er de vist ikke længere en og samme person. Måske fordi der ikke længere, for andet end nogle få meget umoderne idealister, er andet at sælge en skattelettelser og had mod fremmede.
Det moralske tryk har vi fornøjelsen af at se komme nedefra i skikkelse af folkelig forargelse som oftest udspringer af et eller flere individers eller gruppers sentimentalt funderede meget personlige vildfarelser. Det er uden fundament i både religiøs, filosofisk eller faktuel henseende, men udsprunget af tilfældige følelser inspireret af lige så tilfældige begivenheder. Det er forargelsen som drivkraft, ikke den religiøse på Guds vegne, den er forbeholdt islamisterne, men den dybt personlige ideosynkratiske, som udspringer udelukkende af følelser og stemninger. Den er sentimental i sin natur. Humanismens endegyldige sejr.
Det mest forfærdende men også komiske eksempel er, hvordan talløse skarer for kun få år siden rejste sig fra dybet villige til at lægge klodens skæbne — for så vidt som den overhovedet er truet — i hænderne på en mentalt forstyrret svensk teenager, hvis hysteriske anfald i fuld offentlighed tillagdes en betydning som bedst kan sammenlignes med den betydning der i dybt religiøse kredse tillægges mirakler som stigma eller brændende buske.
"Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness."
Så selvom resultatet vel er det samme - seeking to rob us og artistic as of political freedom - er resultatet et andet og langt mere skræmmende, alene fordi det er sentimentalt og dermed tilfældigt, ustadigt, omskifteligt.
Omtrendt som humøret hos et forkælet og lettere hysterisk barn. Gad vide hvordan man ville have håndteret sådan et på Wyndham Lewis' tid?
— Wyndham Lewis: Is Satire Real? In: Men Without Art, New York 1934
— H. L. Mencken: Notes on democracy, New York 1926.
“Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft music. There was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below; there was only a dulcet twittering from above. Democratic man thus began as an ideal being, full of ineffable virtues and romantic wrongs—in brief, as Rousseau’s noble savage in smock and jerkin, brought out of the tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands. The fact continues to have important consequences to this day. It remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale—that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort of superiority—nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and more enamoured enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!”
— H.L. Mencken: Notes on Democracy. New York 1926. ch. 1
“The capacity for discerning the essential truth, in fact, is as rare among men as it is common among crows, bullfrogs and mackerel. The man who shows it is a man of quite extraordinary quality—perhaps even a man downright diseased. Exhibit a new truth of any natural plausibility before the great masses of men, and not one in ten thousand will suspect its existence, and not one in a hundred thousand will embrace it without a ferocious resistance. All the durable truths that have come into the world within historic times have been opposed as bitterly as if they were so many waves of smallpox, and every individual who has welcomed and advocated them, absolutely without exception, has been denounced and punished as an enemy of the race. Perhaps “absolutely without exception” goes too far. I substitute “with five or six exceptions.” But who were the five or six exceptions? I leave you to think of them; myself, I can’t…. But I think at once of Charles Darwin and his associates, and of how they were reviled in their time. This reviling, of course, is less vociferous than it used to be, chiefly because later victims are in the arena, but the underlying hostility remains. Within the past two years the principal Great Thinker of Britain, George Bernard Shaw, has denounced the hypothesis of natural selection to great applause, and a three-times candidate for the American Presidency, William Jennings Bryan, has publicly advocated prohibiting the teaching of it by law. The great majority of Christian ecclesiastics in both English-speaking countries, and with them the great majority of their catachumens, are still committed to the doctrine that Darwin was a scoundrel, and Herbert Spencer another, and Huxley a third—and that Nietzsche is to the three of them what Beelzebub himself is to a trio of bad boys. This is the reaction of the main body of respectable folk in two puissant and idealistic Christian nations to the men who will live in history as the intellectual leaders of the Nineteenth Century. This is the immemorial attitude of men in the mass, and of their chosen prophets, to whatever is honest, and important, and most probably true.
But if truth thus has hard sledding, error is given a loving welcome. The man who invents a new imbecility is hailed gladly, and bidden to make himself at home; he is, to the great masses of men, the beau ideal of mankind. Go back through the history of the past thousand years and you will find that ninetenths of the popular idols of the world—not the heroes of small sects, but the heroes of mankind in the mass—have been merchants of palpable nonsense. It has been so in politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other department of human thought. Every such hawker of the not-true has been opposed, in his time, by critics who denounced and refuted him; his contention has been disposed of immediately it was uttered. But on the side of every one there has been the titanic force of human credulity, and it has sufficed in every case to destroy his foes and establish his immortality.”
— Mencken: Meditation on Meditation. In: Prejudices, Third Series.]
“Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastnesses and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men—men who always receive it at second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth—that error and truth are simple opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of to-day does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the fourth century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic. Perhaps this statement is a bit too sweeping. There is, year by year, a gradual accumulation of what may be called, provisionally, truths—there is a slow accretion of ideas that somehow manage to meet all practicable human tests, and so survive. But even so, it is risky to call them absolute truths. All that one may safely say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated that they are errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb too. The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school teachers.”
— Mencken: Footnote on Criticism. In: Prejudices, Third Series]
“Such tests arise inevitably out of democracy—the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob emotions. In private life no man of sense would think of applying them. We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which he maintains his own. All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion. is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, of self-respect, it is cruelly hard. But if he is, like Harding, a numskull like the idiots he faces, or, like Cox, a pliant intellectual Jenkins, it is easy.
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.”
— H. L. Mencken: Bayard vs Lionheart. July 26, 1920. En kommentar til valget mellem Harding og Cox.
I følge Jyllands-Posten i dag, viser en undersøgelse som regeringens burkaudvalg har fået foretaget, at antallet af kvinder i Danmark som jævnligt ifører sig denne, helt sikkert ikke særligt populære klædedragt, er 0,000001%. Det er jo et lidt abstrakt størrelse at forholde sig til, så man kunne også bare sige at tallet er tre. Tre, som i lidt flere end halvdelen af fingrene på din ene hånd.
Langt værre(!) står det til med en anden heller ikke så populær klædedragt, for undersøgelsen viste at der er mellem 5000% og 6500% flere som jævnligt ifører sig niqab. 5000% er måske også et lidt svært tal at forholde sig til, så lad os bare sige at tallet er mellem 150 og 200. Heraf er lidt færre end halvdelen (60-80) danske kvinder, der er konverteret til islam.
En smule intelligens er der tilsyneladende til stede i dansk politik, for JP skriver:
“Foreholdt undersøgelsens resultater mener Venstres integrationsordfører, Karsten Lauritzen, at det nu er svært at sætte lighedstegn mellem brugen af niqab og kvindeundertrykkelse.
»Jeg er overrasket over, hvor mange danske konvertitter, der er. Man kan ikke sige, at de er mere undertrykte end folk, der frivilligt går ind i Scientology eller Moon-bevægelsen. Jeg har svært ved at sige, at de ikke gør det frivilligt,« siger Karsten Lauritzen.”
… og det har han jo nok ret i. Anderledes forholder det sig hos de konservative, hvor Henriette Kjær føler trang til at udtale sig og det slippe hun ikke heldigt afsted med:
“»Spørgsmålet er, hvorfor de har taget dragten på. Man skal da være lidt underlig, hvis man frivilligt tager burka eller niqab på. Der må stadig være et element af tvang i det, ellers er det en provokation,« siger politisk ordfører Henriette Kjær (K).”
Ræsonnementet i ovestående er følgende: Hvis nogen skulle have lyst til at foretage sig noget som ikke også Henriette Kjær har lyst til at foretage sig, så er der kun tre muligheder. Enten er de “underlige” fordi de gør det eller også er de blevet tvunget til det eller også gør de det for at provokere, hvilket også må siges at være frivilligt og så er de stadig underlige. Denne måde at tænke på kaldes også enfoldighed – at man ikke kan forstå at nogen skulle have andre ønsker for livet og verden end ens egne.
Men dermed er morskaben ikke ovre. Dansk Folkeparti, som med undersøgelsen har måtte se deres hjerteblod blive noget fortyndet, kæmper det bedste de har lært for ikke at tabe ansigt. Det lykkedes ikke:
“»Jeg synes, at det er et højt tal. Jeg havde faktisk forventet, at det var lavere, når man hører nogle af de kritiske røster, der har været fremme. Vi er først og fremmest principielle modstandere af, hvad burkaen og niqab står for. Det er vi, uanset om der er tale om 1 eller 5.000 kvinder med niqab,« siger Martin Henriksen, medlem af Dansk Folkepartis gruppeledelse.”
“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place,” sagde Mencken engang for længe siden og det kan der unægteligt være noget om.
Et højt tal? Hvad ville et lavt tal have været? Vi er nede i de størrelser hvor der er 3-5 gange så mange selvmord årligt. Der er 2-3 gange flere dræbte i trafikken årligt. Der er adskillige gange flere nynazister i Danmark. Der går flere dømte drabsmænd rundt i samfundet end der går kvinder med niqab eller burka! Ha! Der går endda flere ikke-dømte drabsmænd rundt i samfundet end der går kvinder med burka!
Tager man ikke et nyt standpunkt når ens formodninger viser sig ubegrundede afsløres det at der kun er tale om fordomme, men man havde måske heller ikke ventet så meget andet. I hvertfald siger den opmærksomhed som er blevet denne beklædningsgenstand til del og som Martin Henriksen stædigt fastholder – alt til trods – helt ned til om det så drejede sig om en enkelt person, en del om hvilke motiver som ligger bag.
— Undersøgelse: Tre burkakvinder i Danmark, Jyllands Posten, d. 12/1 2010