The Age of Credulity

     From The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, a collection of essays printed in paperback in 1969, before the author's conversion to Christianity, comes this superb analysis of mass man's proneness to accepting anything, no matter how absurd.  I shouldn't accuse mass man so harshly without first noting that he is usually preceded in parade by the self-styled intellectuals.  Muggeridge is concluding an article on the hyping of Air Force pilot Claude Eatherly into a pacifist saint.  The story that the purveyors of mendacity, that is, newspapers, radio, television, and the silver screen, wanted to believe and wanted everybody else to believe was that Mr. Eatherly was a distinguished soldier so sickened by his part in the bombing of Hiroshima that he turned to a life of crime, in the fashion of a modern martyr, to cause people to notice and listen.  The truth turned out to be a good deal more edifying, if you really want to learn about the tangles of that jungle called the human heart.  Eatherly was annoyed at not having played a bigger part in Hiroshima, or not being recognized for his role.  He then tried his hardest to be assigned to the experimental bombing at Bikini.  He cheated on the exam, and was tossed out of the service with an honorable discharge.  Then he went home to his wife, and got involved in some kind of criminal plot to bomb Havana.  He drank a lot, drifted into crime, and was basically a worthless lout, in and out of the VA mental wards and prison, when he was visited by a newspaper reporter, who stretched his story a wee bit, and then someone else came along and stretched it some more, and the rest, alas, is what we call history.  Anyway, here is Muggeridge's conclusion:

     "It has long been my opinion that the most appropriate name for the times in which we live would be the Age of Credulity. . . . Science (the very word has undergone a singular distortion; meaning originally a condition of knowing, it has come to signify particular branches of knowledge), which purports to inculcate skepticism, has surrendered the human mind to a degree of absurdity which would have astounded a medieval scholar and made an African witch doctor green with envy.
     "In the now little read short stories of O. Henry there are two con men -- Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker -- who regard it as unethical to sell gold bricks to farmers because it is too easy.  Had these two worthies had the advantage and pleasure of reading Mr. Huie's The Hiroshima Pilot, [a book exposing the nonsense], they would have realized that, compared with the fine flower of our Western intelligentsia, farmers are a hard sell. . . ."

     I'll sign on to that.  Let's see, now:

     I was a boy once, and have watched children playing, all my life long.  I was taught that boys and girls are different, in ways that I'd come to find sometimes frustrating but usually delightful, and that bit of folksy wisdom jived with what I saw of them.  But now I am supposed to believe that in every culture known to man, at every stage of technological development, and often quite independent of one another, boys invent rough games, organize themselves into teams or gangs, and worship heroes, and that this is all a matter of cultural conditioning and could be completely otherwise; but when some grown man wants to dress up as a bride and saunter down the aisle with another grown man, and sow seed where seed don't go, now that is natural, nay, absolutely determined by the jeans, I mean genes.  I can't believe that.

     When I was a kid, people used to call it a "tragedy" if a child lost his mother or father, by death or divorce.  That seemed about right to me; I knew a couple of those kids.  But now one of my colleagues, a nominal Catholic, unmarried, has adopted a healthy little boy to raise as her own, without a father.  I am supposed to believe that this is a wonderful thing, and throw a party.  I can't believe it, as I cannot believe that our children of divorce and of shacking up are just fine, not hurt by it, no, not a bit.  It would take a long and tedious post for me to recount what divorce and shacking up has done to just the families of our five or six closest friends in Canada; but I am supposed to ignore all of that, and believe, with a toss of the head, that marriage would have been worse.  I have seen, closely, marriages that were terrible; and I have seen rotten husbands and wives grow even worse because of the possibility of divorce.  I have seen them go on and make other people's lives miserable, like free radicals ranging through the system.  I am supposed to ignore it, and believe, just believe.

     It's a lovely day out there, and I am going to spend some of it picking blueberries.  I could go on and on, listing the absurdities I can't bring myself to believe: that the purpose of our schools is to educate; that Catholics generally wish there would be more young priests; that Hillary Clinton loves her country; that soccer is a greater game than football; that Europe is not dying; that it is a wonderful thing to know that a movie like The Sound of Music (recently requested by my 14-year-old son) not only would not be made now, but could not be made; that people who believed in chastity in my parents' generation are just like the Taliban; that marriages of nitpicking duty-sharing are superior to marriages of complementary gifts and gratitude; that kindergarteners ought to know about sodomy; that a 120-pound girl lifeguard could save me if I were sinking; that men who stay at home to take care of their children will be fulfilled in their manhood and will be well-treated by their wives, who will work to earn money so that their husbands can have all the good things they would like for themselves and the family; that higher education is not a bloodsucking cheat; that a city without children is a great place to live; that anybody who drives a car with an automatic transmission, uses a clothes dryer or an air conditioner, lives more than a few miles from work, or owns a house of more than 500 square feet per occupant may be an "environmentalist" qualified to tell everybody else what to do about global warming; and so on.  Perhaps you all can add a few items of your own.

Comments

[Bobby Winters]

>>Bobby, I enjoyed your article and I'm glad you enjoy teaching your current crop of students. Perhaps those students who have been protected from physical risk will blaze new trails by having the intellectual and moral courage to take other types of risk? <<

That remains to be seen. In some cases, those who've protected them from physical risk follow them into adulthood as "helicopter parents" to keep them from taking intellectual risks. Trying and failing but surviving has a value much greater than many might think.

[Milton Stanley]

You've written an outstanding essay--made an unpopular but true and much-need point quite well.

I do, however, want to point out a typo in the paragraph beginning with "I was a boy once..." You've used the word "jived" when surely you must have meant "jibed".

Peace.

[Joe Long]

"Perhaps those students who have been protected from physical risk will blaze new trails by having the intellectual and moral courage to take other types of risk?"

Cultures the world over have generally presumed that those types of courage are intertwined...indeed, at some level they have to be, because showing moral courage sometimes leads to physical risk. Physical courage, I think, is a necessary-but-not-sufficient for the others. A man might be physically brave and turn out to be a moral coward - but how could a man be morally brave, but a physical coward? "Here I stand, I can do no...OUCH! Okay, okay, 'Uncle'!"