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America is sometimes offered to us, even by Americans (who
ought to know better), as a moral example. There are indeed very real
American virtues; but this virtuous attitude is hardly one of them. And
if anyone wants to know what a welter of weakness and inconsequence the
moral mind of America can sometimes be, he may be advised to look, not
so much to the Crime Wave or the Charleston, as to the serious
idealistic essays by highbrows and cultural critics, such as one by
Miss Avis D. Carlson on "Wanted: A Substitute for Righteousness." By
righteousness she means, of course, the narrow New England taboos; but
she does not know it. For the inference she draws is that we should
recognize frankly that "the standard abstract right and wrong is
moribund." This statement will seem less insane if we consider,
somewhat curiously, what the standard abstract right and wrong seems to
mean--at least in her section of the States. It is a glimpse of an
incredible world.
She takes the case of a young man brought up "in a home where there was
an attempt to make dogmatic cleavage of right and wrong." And what was
the dogmatic cleavage? Ah, what indeed! His elders told him that some
things were right and some wrong; and for some time he accepted this
strange assertion. But when he leaves home he finds that, "apparently
perfectly nice people do the things he has been taught to think evil."
Then follows a revelation. "The flowerlike girl he envelops in a mist
of romantic idealization smokes like an imp from the lower regions and
pets like a movie vamp. The chum his heart yearns towards cultivates a
hip-flask, etc." And this is what the writer calls a dogmatic cleavage
between right and wrong!
The standard of abstract right and wrong apparently is this. That a
girl by smoking a cigarette makes herself one of the company of the
fiends of hell. That such an action is much the same as that of a
sexual vampire. That a young man who continues to drink fermented
liquor must necessarily be "evil" and must deny the very existence of
any difference between right and wrong. That is the "standard of
abstract right and wrong" that is apparently taught in the American
home. And it is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that it is not a
standard of abstract right or wrong at all. That is exactly what it is
not. That is the very last thing any clear-headed person would call it.
It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion
of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and
sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of
them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and
connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials.
To have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of
right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right
whatever; and to make certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute.
We need not be very surprised if the young man repudiates these
meaningless vetoes as soon as he can; but if he thinks he is
repudiating morality, he must be almost as muddle-headed as his father.
And yet the writer in question calmly proposes that we should abolish
all ideas of right and wrong, and abandon the whole human conception of
a standard of abstract justice, because a boy in Boston cannot be
induced to think that a nice girl is a devil when she smokes a
cigarette.
If the rising generation were faced with no worse doubts and
difficulties than this, it would not be very difficult to reconcile
them to the traditions of truth and justice. But I think the episode is
worth mentioning, merely because it throws a ray of light on the moral
condition of American Culture, in the decay of Puritanism. And when
next we are told that the idealism of America is to set a "standard" by
which England must transform herself, it will be well to remember what
is apparently meant by a standard and an ideal; and that the fire of
idealism seems both to begin and end in smoke.
Incidentally, I must say I can bear witness to this queer taboo about
tobacco. Of course numberless Americans smoke numberless cigars; a
great many others eat cigars, which seems to me a more occult pleasure.
But there does exist an extraordinary idea that ethics are involved in
some way; and many who smoke really disapprove of smoking. I remember
once receiving two American interviewers on the same afternoon; there
was a box of cigars in front of me and I offered one to each in turn.
Their reaction (as they would probably call it) was very curious to
watch. The first journalist stiffened suddenly and silently and
declined in a very cold voice. He could not have conveyed more plainly
that I had attempted to corrupt an honorable man with a foul and
infamous indulgence; as if I were the Old Man of the Mountain offering
him hashish that would turn him into an assassin. The second reaction
was even more remarkable. The second journalist first looked doubtful;
then looked sly; then seemed to glance about him nervously, as if
wondering whether we were alone, and then said with a sort of
crestfallen and covert smile: "Well, Mr. Chesterton, I'm afraid I have
the habit."
As I also have the habit, and have never been able to imagine how it
could be connected with morality or immorality, I confess that I
plunged with him deeply into an immoral life. In the course of our
conversation, I found he was otherwise perfectly sane. He was quite
intelligent about economics or architecture; but his moral sense seemed
to have entirely disappeared. He really thought it rather wicked to
smoke. He had no "standard of abstract right or wrong"; in him it was
not merely moribund; it was apparently dead. But anyhow, that is the
point and that is the test. Nobody who has an abstract standard of
right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar. But he
had a concrete standard of particular cut and dried customs of a
particular tribe. Those who say Americans are largely descended from
the American Indians might certainly make a case out of the suggestion
that this mystical horror of material things is largely a barbaric
sentiment. The Red Indian is said to have tried and condemned a
tomahawk for committing a murder. In this case he was certainly the
prototype of the white man who curses a bottle because too much of it
goes into a man. Prohibition is sometimes praised for its simplicity;
on these lines it may be equally condemned for its savagery. But I
myself do not say anything so absurd as that Americans are savages; nor
do I think it would matter much if they were descended from savages. It
is culture that counts and not ethnology; and the culture that is
concerned here derives indirectly rather from New England than from Old
America. Whatever it derives from, however, this is the thing to be
noted about it: that it really does not seem to understand what is
meant by a standard of right and wrong. It is a vague sentimental
notion that certain habits were not suitable to the old log cabin or
the old hometown. It has a vague utilitarian notion that certain habits
are not directly useful in the new amalgamated stores or the new
financial gambling-hell. If his aged mother or his economic master
dislikes to see a young man hanging about with a pipe in his mouth, the
action becomes a sin; or the nearest that such a moral philosophy can
come to the idea of a sin. A man does not chop wood for the log hut by
smoking; and a man does not make dividends for the Big Boss by smoking;
and therefore smoking has a smell as of something sinful. Of what the
great theologians and moral philosophers have meant by a sin, these
people have no more idea than a child drinking milk has of a great
toxicologist analyzing poisons. It may be a credit of their virtue to
be thus vague about vice. The man who is silly enough to say, when
offered a cigarette, "I have no vices," may not always deserve the
rapier-thrust of the reply given by the Italian Cardinal, "It is not a
vice, or doubtless you would have it." But at least the Cardinal knows
it is not a vice; which assists the clarity of his mind. But the lack
of clear standards among those who vaguely think of it as a vice may
yet be the beginning of much peril and oppression. My two American
journalists, between them, may yet succeed in adding the sinfulness of
cigars to the other curious things now part of the American
Constitution.
I would therefore venture to say to Miss Avis Carlson that the quarrel
in question does not arise from the Yankee Puritans having too much
morality, but from their having too little. It does not arise from
their drawing too hard and fast a line of distinction between right and
wrong, but from their being much to loose and indistinct. They go by
associations and not by abstractions. Therefore they classify smoking
with vamping or a flask in the pocket with sin in the soul. I hope at
least that some of the Fundamentalists will succeed in being a little
more fundamental than this. The men of Tennessee are supposed to be
very anxious to draw the line between men and monkeys. They are also
supposed by some to be rather too anxious to draw the line between
black men and white men. May I be allowed to hope that they will
succeed in drawing a rather more logical line between bad men and good
men? Something of the the difference and the difficulty may be seen by
comparing the old Ku Klux Klan with the new Klu Klux Klan. The old
secret society may have been justified or not; but it had a definite
object: it was directed against somebody. The new secret society seems
to have been directed against anybody; often against anybody who drank;
in time, for all I know, against anybody who smoked. It is this sort of
formless fanaticism that is the great danger of the American
Temperament; and it is well to insist that if men must persecute, they
will be more clear-headed if they persecute for a creed.
from Generally Speaking, Dodd & Mead, 1929
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