Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“When groups translate their instinct to struggle into a fight, they’re doing a natural thing. Not necessarily a useful or a necessary one—but a normal one. It’s much more abnormal for you, Mollie, to believe that people—as dishonest and prejudiced and ill-willed as you know they are—can institute a permanent peace, than it is abnormal for them to start killing each other. Being a ‘pacifist’—in the face of human nature as of this date—is about as sensible as insisting that all men ought to be immediately made millionaires, or that every ditchdigger should become a scholar. We just aren’t good enough for peace, yet. We’ve got to make ourselves that good, someday—but the day isn’t here! We still think we can make other people behave, without first establishing an integrity of our own—and we still think that will bring peace. It won’t. Peace isn’t a legislative, an economic, a legal, or a political accomplishment. It’s strictly a matter of total human nature—and human nature is still in the slums, mostly. Every human woe stems back to the individual’s unwillingness to face truth, understand and accept it, and to be responsible for his acts in the light of that acceptance. We’re in kindergarten at that sort of behavior—as I was explaining to Jimmie on the business of morals the other day.”

Mollie sighed. “I know what you mean, Willie. Sometimes I get resigned. Like Anne Lindbergh. I just think this Nazi horror is the future—ugly and inescapable. ”

“What about that?” someone else said.

Mr. Corinth smiled. “The wave of future? It’s medieval! Barbaric! Every Nazi concept is one that has already been found wanting—and discarded. For instance, the ancient Hebrews tried conquest, city-smashing, salt-sowing, race snobbery, and race purity. The rest of the world never forgave them for it. The Nazis ape the old Jews in many ways. And the Germans will probably pay the same price for their egomania.

“Waves of the past keep rolling back, to threaten the precarious progress of mankind; the belief that such waves represent an inescapable future is the purest form of superstition. Superstition’s strong stuff. But it does not understand progress, and so, will not accept it. Nazism isn’t the wave of the future, Mollie. It’s that old black superstitious curse rolled up again. It may, indeed, roll over you and me. If it does, then men will have to emerge again from it and start all over. As they have had to do before. You see, we’re all superstitious.”

“ I’m not,” Mollie said. “Not a bit.”

“Oh, yes, you are. You’re not superstitious about cats and ladders, maybe. You know that water is hydrogen and oxygen, and whatnot. But you’re superstitious about—well, say, sex and love. Being a spinster. Mr. Wilson is superstitious about the New Deal.

Jimmie, here, a very enlightened guy, is superstitious about his personal, private behavior. You see, our ideals, as we call them, are apt to be prejudices, or mere notions.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mollie said.

“Well, take an ideal. Take decency—since I’ve been haranguing Jimmie about it recently. We all want to be decent. Try to be. Well, for one thing, decency changes. What was decent in Elizabeth’s court is indecent now. What we print in advertisements would have been shameful in that court. Decency is a human notion that isn’t even stable. And truth pays no attention to it—ever. If you think a particular truth is indecent, and examine it, you will find either that your own attitude is inconsistent with fact, or else that a human fault was at the bottom of the indecent truth. So, you can change your attitude—if that was the error—or go to work on the fault—if that’s your inclination. But in the latter case you have to know it was a fault—which is a big order. Because what’s right for one person is wrong for another, and what’s decent in one situation is indecent in another.

“ Every fact, every truth, depends upon some broader truth beneath it; and you can chase back the whole concept of decency to the point where you see that its existence in our heads is a matter of expediency, entirely. Every ideal is an expedient, at bottom. The man with the noblest expedients has the noblest life. Even mathematics is an expedient system. Beneath each system is a truer math. Under the geometry of Euclid lies that of Einstein. Under that, still another, broader, truer system, which Einstein himself is trying to discover. The life of the human animal is a conflict. The life of the human soul is a search. For truth. That’s all evolution is—figures growing more aware, fighting forever toward still further awareness, with every means at their disposal. Are you really so surprised that the fight breaks out on the low levels of war, when so many people these days are so distracted from their fundamental purposes?”

Mr. Wilson said scornfully, “You preach a good sermon, Corinth.”

“And you’re a heretic,” the old man laughed. “I believe in people.”

“So do I. And if men like you would quit perplexing and inflaming them, we could get somewhere with America.”

The old man’s lips twitched a little. “Mmmm. You’re getting us well along toward the slave status of a second-rate nation governed by the Nazi supermen. They really intend to do it, you know. That—or ruin us. I just happen to prefer ruin. You can rebuild where the plant is wrecked. Getting the people out of chains is harder. After all, only those who have no self-respect are afraid to die.”

Mr. Wilson scowled. “Haven’t you got it backwards! Isn’t it easier to be an alarmist when there’s no grave danger than it is to keep your feet on the ground?”

“That’s an error all you plantigrade chaps make! It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep your feet on the ground and do nothing risky, Wilson, than it is to pull ’em out of the mud and start doing a job that involves—or may involve—blood and toil and tears and a God-awful sea of sweat.”

“You sound like Willkie,” Mr. Wilson said bitterly.

“What’s the matter with Willkie?”

“What was the matter with Benedict Arnold?”

“He was a traitor to his country,” Mr. Corinth said amiably.

“In my opinion, Willkie betrayed his party, his country, himself, and the dignity of being a man!”

“Because he was loyal to the truth?”

“Because he sold himself out to Roosevelt.”

Mr. Corinth scratched his head. “I don’t get it. I do remember, though, Wilson, the last election. I recall you out haranguing the state with your customary cold eloquence. I remember you in the parade—and I remember when Willkie stopped here. You were damned near as hoarse as he was, at the time! I must confess, I didn’t think much then of the frog-voiced prophet of your party. I believed he was going to undo the things that Roosevelt did for his countrymen because they had to be done. The expedient things.

There’s nothing wrong with expediency, as I was saying, as long as the underlying motive for it is okay. I thought Willkie lacked it. Anyway, Wilson, he wasn’t deceiving you about foreign policy at that time, was he? He said he was for aiding England, didn’t he? He told you he was against Hitler, didn’t he? And he hasn’t changed, has he? He went over there and saw for himself, in spite of the bombings, didn’t he? Have you been in England lately? Do you pretend to talk with authority about England? Well, Willkie does pretend to—and he has the right. He still disagrees with the New Deal, and says so with brilliance and violence, doesn’t he? Just what the devil has he betrayed?”