Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [114]
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it, I shall do my best to forget it.”
Holmes then develops a rather bogus theory about the brain being like an attic with a fixed capacity. “Depend upon it,” he concludes, “there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” This is too much for the good doctor:
“But the solar system!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently. “You say that we go around the sun. If we went around the moon, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
There is something magnificent about this carrying the principle of utility to its logical conclusion. And Holmes was right to insist that the only good reason for acquiring any knowledge, even of whether the earth goes around the sun or the moon, is its utility for the individual knower. But his idea of utility was too narrowly practical. Like Holmes, I know little about the physical sciences and am not curious to know more—pace Sir Charles Snow—but my lack of interest is due not just to their irrelevance to my professional needs but, more important, to my feeling that they aren’t useful to me in a broader sense, one which Holmes’s logic doesn’t recognize—they don’t appeal to my kind of mind and feelings. Others do find the physical sciences “useful” in this sense, as I myself find literature and history and philosophy “useful,” and so they are rightly concerned to know that the earth goes around the sun rather than the moon. (I do happen to have picked up that particular bit of information somewhere, but in general, when the solar system is on the agenda, I feel like echoing, “What the deuce is it to me?”)
One of the nicest touches in the characterization of Sherlock Holmes is that he is not entirely consistent even here. Dr. Watson’s well-known inventory of the great detective’s knowledge put “Nil” opposite Literature, Philosophy and Astronomy, while Politics was “Feeble,” Botany “Variable—well-up in belladonna, opium, and poisons; knows nothing of practical gardening,” and Sensational Literature “Immense.” This is all as one might expect, but there is one incongruous item: “Plays the violin well.” Doyle realized that, to be a man and not a monster, even the folk hero of applied science had to have at least one nonutilitarian interest, one skill of importance to him only because it fed his sensibilities. Cocaine was for Holmes another method of transcending the brute, confining realm of the Practical.
Sherlock Holmes’s attitude was American—Ben Franklin would have approved—but old-fashioned American. It is, of course, still widespread. Our colleges are still full of what Ortega y Gasset calls “barbarians of specialization”: historians who know all about medieval land tenure but never enter an art museum; economists who manipulate the tools of their trade with precision and refinement and get their non-economic ideas from The Reader’s Digest; political “scientists”—the quotes are intentional—whose literary tastes don’t differ from their butcher’s (Marx read Aeschylus once a year); English professors who have devoted a lifetime’s study to the Elizabethan sonnet and who haven’t read Auden or Baudelaire.[1] Our businessmen still are notorious for their lack of interest in arts and letters—they leave such kickshaws to their wives. Our politicians still are men of narrow culture; compare Eisenhower and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose antipathy to reading is well known, with such early presidents as Jefferson, Madison and the two Adamses. The liberal arts are still being displaced in our high schools and colleges by vocational courses: Teacher’s College,