Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [113]
[3] I am indebted to Ralph T. Catterall, of the Virginia State Corporation Commission, for the following quotation from J. S. Mill’s Logic (Book IV, Chapter 5):
So many persons without anything deserving the name of education have become writers by profession, that written language may almost be said to be wielded by persons ignorant of the proper use of the instrument, and who are spoiling it more and more for those who understand it. Vulgarisms, which creep in nobody knows how, are daily depriving the English language of valuable modes of expressing thought. To take a present instance: the verb transpire...But of late a practice has commenced of employing this word, for the sake of finery, as a mere synonym of to happen...This vile specimen of bad English is already seen in the despatches of noblemen and viceroys: and the time is apparently not far distant when nobody will understand the word if used in its proper sense.
[4] Meyer Schapiro, of Columbia University, has pointed out to me that the division of this word, etymologically, should be “di-stinctive” since it comes from the Latin verb stinguere (to prick) plus the prefix dis (apart). It should logically be spelled “disstinctive”—in which case it could be divided to make the sense I’m after here—but language, as we know, is not logical. He also suggests that consulting a dictionary is like consulting a doctor in that what one wants to know is what is wrong (or right) and that it is the function of a dictionary, as of a doctor, to decide this for the patient-consulter.
The Triumph of the Fact
The western world has paid a good deal of attention to data ever since some unrecorded genius had the original idea of finding out whether a live person weighs more, less, or the same as a dead person, not by speculating on the Vital Principle and the Intrinsic Substance of the Soul, as described in Aristotle and the Church Fathers, but by weighing a condemned criminal before and after execution. The historical moment at which this unknown (and indeed fictitious) genius made his great intellectual leap might be called, had it existed, the end of the Middle Ages. But commonplace as this aspect of the scientific method has been for centuries throughout the West, it has achieved in the United States a unique importance. Our mass culture—and a good deal of our high, or serious, culture as well—is dominated by an emphasis on data and a corresponding lack of interest in theory, by a frank admiration of the factual and an uneasy contempt for imagination, sensibility, and speculation. We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information. Our popular novelists must tell us all about the historical and professional backgrounds of their puppets; our press lords make millions by giving us this day our daily Fact; our scholars—or, more accurately, our research administrators—erect pyramids of data to cover the corpse of a stillborn idea; our way of “following” a sport is to amass an extraordinary amount of data about batting averages, past performances, yards gained, etc., so that many Americans who can’t read without moving their lips have a fund of sports scholarship that would stagger Lord Acton; our politicians are mostly former lawyers, a profession where the manipulation of Facts is of first importance; we are brought up according to Spock, Gessell and the other Aristotles of child care; we make love according to the best manuals of sexual technique; and before we die we brief our wives with Donald I. Rogers’ Teach Your Wife to be a Widow (Holt, 1953, $2).
Soon after he started sharing quarters in Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes, young Dr. Watson was shocked to find that his brainy friend was an ignoramus:
Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naïvest way who he might be or what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant