The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Cosmic Secretariat,” by H.L. Mencken

Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

Mencken cannot believe in an omniscient and loving God. He looks around at the rampant chaos and cruelty and scorns the hoops people must jump through in order to believe that God takes any interest in us at all. His is a ferociously logical mind.

I suppose every generation has a wackjob fundamentalist fringe element but boy are they LOUD right now. They don’t feel fringe. They feel centralized. I think a lot of this is because of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Of course. And as anyone who has watched any reality TV will realize, it is the most obnoxious person who gets the most screen-time. Fundamentalist Christianity today has taken a swerve to the radical which would have been foreign even in Mencken’s time. And he was already clocking some of the more ridiculous developments, the fundamentalist obsession with alcohol and sex, the prudishness, the know-nothing-ness approach to science (as witnessed in the “Monkey Trial”), the campaigns against pornography and prostitution, all of which Mencken thought was ridiculous. Let pornography and prostitution go. It hurts no one. He couldn’t stand moralizing do-gooders. Of all of the quotable things that Mencken said (and he could barely write a sentence without saying something memorable), perhaps the most famous is his definition of “Puritanism”: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

With all of his conservative practical-mindedness, and sometimes outright radical-right stances, you can see why today’s right-wing nut cases want nothing to do with Mencken. He’s too darn intellectual, he uses too many big words, what the hell is a “secretariat”? He makes fun of their sacred cows. He taunts them about their absurd prudery. He doesn’t even find them to be worthy opponents. He thinks they’re silly. I make fun of these people because I’ve experienced first-hand how hostile these people are to … the intellect, something I hold dear. I make fun of them because they are easy targets, because they deserve it, and because they represent everything I despise. I look forward to the eventual (and inevitable) implosion. Not explosion. They don’t have enough substance for that. But the implosion is coming and in many cases it is already occurring. Of course it will crop up again in another generation: there will always be a disparity in intellect, and there will always be those who are hostile to others who … know shit. We have a long anti-intellectual tradition in America, and in many ways that’s good, but in many other ways it is bad bad news. This fight has been going on since our inception, only it takes different forms and outlets.

So here, in this essay, Mencken takes on the unquestioned assumption (relatively modern) that God is good, and that He cares what happens to us. Mencken literally cannot understand how anyone could believe such nonsense. Not if they have eyes in their heads! So Mencken wrestles with the idea that God cares, thinks it has no substance, and then comes up with an alternate theory.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Cosmic Secretariat,” by H.L. Mencken

The argument from design, once the bulwark of Christian apologetics, has been shot so full of holes that it is no wonder it has had to be abandoned. The more, indeed, the theologian seeks to prove the wisdom and omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by the evidence of divine incompetence and stupidity that the advance of science is constantly turning up. The world is not actually well run; it is very badly run, and no Huxley was needed to labor the obvious fact. The human body, very cunningly designed in some details, is cruelly and senselessly bungled in other details, and every reflective first-year medical student must notice a hundred ways to improve it. How are we to reconcile this mixture of finesse and blundering with the concept of a single omnipotent Designer, to whom all problems are equally easy? If He could contrive so efficient and durable a machine as the human hand, then how did He come to make such botches as the tonsils, the gall bladder, the ovaries and the prostate gland? If He could perfect the elbow and the ear, then why did He boggle the teeth?

Having never encountered a satisfactory – or even a remotely plausible – answer to such questions, I have had to go to the trouble of devising one myself. It is, at all events, quite simple, and in strict accord with all the known facts. In brief, it is this: that the theory that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority. Once this concept is grasped the difficulties that have vexed theologians vanish, and human experience instantly lights up the whole dark scene. We observe in everyday life what happens when authority is divided, and great decisions are reached by consultation and compromise. We know that the effects at times, particularly when one of the consultants runs away with the others, are very good, but we also know that they are usually extremely bad. Such a mixture, precisely, is on display in the cosmos. It presents a series of brilliant successes in the midst of an infinity of failures.

I contend that my theory is the only one ever put forward that completely accounts for the clinical picture. Every other theory, facing such facts as sin, disease and disaster, is forced to admit the supposition that Omnipotence, after all, may not be omnipotent – a plain absurdity. I need toy with no such blasphemous nonsense.