Conventional Lies of our Civilization - Max Simon Nordau

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nor in the teachings of the philosophers. The theories upon which their lives had hitherto been based were found to be erroneous, and consequently the latter had become illogical and without meaning. A weariness and hopeless dejection had consequently crept into the hearts of men; they could find no relief in their own resources nor in anything around them. They lost even the last vestige of faith in a possible improvement and committed suicide by thousands, unable to resist the ravages of the moral epidemic. That dismal time when the Roman Empire was tottering to its fall, and paganism in its death throes, is the only period in which we meet with the same depression, the same restless spirit of investigation and fault-finding, the same skepticism in superficial and pessimism in deep minds which characterize our own highly civilized age. But after all, there is a difference between the two periods; this hopeless despair of the future only attacked the aristocracy of mind, comparatively a few in ancient Rome, while the masses lived out their existence in stolid unconcern, looking upon the great tragedy of the age merely as an exterior, material misfortune. But in our time this pessimism lowers like a dense, black cloud over the vast majority of cultivated human beings. The difference therefore is more in extent than in kind—but extent is the very point that distinguishes an epidemic from a disease.

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      Whence comes this mental distress common to all civilized peoples? To what cause can we trace the development of this unparalleled irritation and embittering,, which prevails with such alarming severity among all the tinkers of an age which seems to offer even to the ​poorest, a wealth of material and intellectual pleasures, such as no monarch of former times was able to procure. The cause? It is identical with that which flooded the hearts of the later Romans with such utter disgust at the emptiness of life, that they sought refuge in self-destruction to escape from it. It is owing to the opposition between the world as it is, with all its phases of individual, social and civil life, and the way in which we now comprehend the significance of the universe. Every one of our actions contradicts our convictions, flouts them, gives them the lie. An impassible chasm separates that which we know to be truth, and the actual conditions of life under which we are compelled to live and carry on our individual and social existence.

      Our view of the world, that accepted consciously or unconsciously by all cultivated minds of the present day, is from the standpoint of natural science. We look upon the universe as a vast aggregation of matter, possessing the attribute of motion which reveals itself to us under the form of various physical laws, some of which we have discovered, defined and proved, while we are as yet only on the track of the rest—these laws we accept as immutable and without possibility of exception. The problem of the beginning and final destiny of things we have given up as impossible to be solved with the means of our organism. As a matter of convenience we have accepted as a provisory conclusion for certain trains of thought, the hypothesis that matter is eternal. The acceptance of this theory, the only purely arbitrary one in our system, serves to explain to us all the various phenomena of nature, while it does not contradict our comprehension of physical laws. It excuses us from accepting any theory in regard to an eternal will or intelligence, or as man has always designated it, God, which ​would have the disadvantage of forcing upon us, if we accepted it, a whole series of similar hypotheses, such as prophecy, the soul and immortality, all of which are incapable of proof, and can not be sustained by our reason, while at the same time they are in direct opposition to all the laws of nature, which we know to be fixed and unyielding facts. If we descend from the universe to our race, to man, we see in him, as a necessary consequence of our conceptions of material nature, merely a Jiving being, fitting perfectly into its allotted place in the ranks of living organisms, and governed in all things by the common laws of the organic world. We can discover no proofs of any special favors or privileges granted to man more than those enjoyed by every other animal or vegetable organism. We believe that the development of the human as well as of all other races, was perhaps first made possible by sexual selection, and certainly promoted by it; and that the struggle for existence, using the term in its most comprehensive sense, shapes the destinies of nations as well as of the most obscure individual and is the foundation for all forms of political and social life.

      This is our conception of the universe, our belief. Upon this base are founded all our principles, and our conceptions of justice and morality. It has become an elementary constituent part of our civilization. We inhale it with the air we breathe. It has become impossible to close our intellects against it. The pope who denounced it in his encyclical, was under its influence. The Jesuits try in vain to save their pupils from its taint, by bringing them up in an artificial atmosphere of mediæval theology and scholastics, as a marine animal is kept alive in an inland aquarium, by salt water brought from the distant sea; but they are already filled ​with it, they take it in as they read the posters on the walls, as they notice the manners of their associates, as they read their pious magazines and books, when they are buying a breviary—their whole mental and moral life is unconsciously permeated and colored by it; they have involuntary thoughts and perceptions, such as the man of the Eleventh Century never imagined, in vain do they try to perform the impossible—they cannot help being the children of this modern age and of its specific civilization.

      And, with this belief, we are obliged to live in the midst of a civilization, which allows one man, by the accident of his birth, to assume the most extensive rights over millions of his fellow-men, his equals in every respect and in many cases, his superiors; which pays homage to another who repeats words without any sense and makes purposeless gestures, as the visible incorporation of super-natural powers; which forbids a maiden in a certain station of life, to marry a handsome, blooming, powerful individual, but mates her with some unattractive, feeble and crippled being because he is her equal in rank, while the former belongs to a so-called lower class; which permits a healthy and strong laboring man to go hungry, while some sickly and incapable idler is surrounded by a superfluity which he is unable to enjoy. We, who believe that the human race has been evolved from some lower form of life, who know that all individuals without exception, are created, live out their lives and pass away, all in accordance with the same organic laws—we are obliged to kneel before a king; we are expected to reverence in him a being set apart from all ordinary laws and conditions, and are forbidden to smile when we read on the coins and in the official decrees of the Government that "by the grace of God," he is, what he is. We, convinced as we are, that every occurrence in this world is ​the result of certain irresistible and unchangeable physical laws, are yet compelled to look on while the Government pays certain priests, whose official duty it is, to conduct ceremonies with the declared purpose of exerting an influence upon events in this world, which can only take effect by a suspension or revocation of nature's laws; we are expected as occasion offers, to take part in some imposing mass or church service to beg for special favors from some mysterious, supernatural power, whose existence both nature and physical science refuse to recognize as possible, and we award a high rank in state and society to those persons who preside at these inconsistent mummeries. We believe in the powerful and beneficent effect of sexual selection, and yet we defend the modern conventional marriage, which, in its present form, directly excludes it. We acknowledge the struggle for existence as the inevitable foundation for all law and morality, and yet, every day we pass laws to uphold and perpetuate conditions which absolutely prevent the free exercise of our powers, and deny to the strong and those worthy of the fullest life, the right to make use of their strength, and we stigmatize their inevitable victory over the feeble, as a capital crime. Thus our whole system of life is based upon false principles which we have inherited from former ages, which are in direct and flagrant opposition to every one of our present convictions. The form and the spirit of our life as citizens are at constant and open variance. Every word that we speak, every action, is a direct lie against that which we acknowledge as truth in our hearts. Thus we are always parodying our own selves, and acting a perpetual farce, which wearies us to death, in spite of our being accustomed to it, which requires a constant denial on our part of every one of our most cherished beliefs and convictions, and which, in moments of ​introspection, fills us with disgust and contempt of our own conduct and of everything around us. We assume at every opportunity a costume that looks to our own eyes like a fool's jacket

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