A Cynic Looks at Life | Page 2

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,