"Mencken, HI - Homo Neanderthalensis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mencken H L)

such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple -- and
every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays
him.

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is
explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men
toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest
outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought.
It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city
proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But
the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it.
It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the
irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with
loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former
throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human
knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened
men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth -- a
Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences, demand
special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple
rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.

IV

What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two
sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two
genera -- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of
taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is
thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to
the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has
to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is
apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not
apprehended at all.

That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human
beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by
Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that
at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these
immortals, made in God's image, one of the greatest artists the human
race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned
he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable
beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of
the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in
the world, and would not be interested if they were told.

The fact saves good Ludwig's bacon. His music survives because it lies
outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond
violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it