SYMBOLS AND FETISHES
HERALDRY dies hard. It is of purely savage origin, having its roots in the ancient necessity of tribal classification. Before our ancestors had a written language their tribes and families found it convenient to distinguish themselves from one another by rude pictures of such objects as they knew about, with improvements by the artist of the period—the six-legged lion, the two-headed eagle, the spear-point lily and the thistle-with-a-difference. The modifications were infinite; accessories developed into essentials and the science of heraldry was evolved, to explain what the pictures were and expound their meaning. Like the priests and the medicine men of all times, and the lawyers and all other professionals of our time, heralds were swift to discern a profit in complicating their fad with an unthinkable multitude of invented additions and technical shibboleths intelligibleto nobody but themselves; and to-day, when the entire scheme has long ceased to have any practical relation to the lives of men and the polity of nations, there are in Europe high officers of government charged with the duty of its exposition and conservation, and with the custody of its ludicrous muniments and paraphernalia. And men and women accounted intelligent and modest are proud of devices owing their origin to barbarism, their signification to the thrifty ingenuity of drones and leeches and their perpetuation to the same naked and unashamed vanity as that of men who decorate their breasts with “orders” and “crosses” certifying their personal merit.
Where these things exist as “survivals” their use is at least a supportable stupidity; but in America, where they come by cold-blooded adoption essentially simian, they are offensive. Many of the devices upon the seals of our states are no less ridiculous than those used (or the use of any) by some of our “genteel” families to hint at an illustrious descent. Our national coat-of-arms itself is almost enough to make a self-respecting American forswear his allegiance. From a shield with an eagle on it we have developed an eaglewith a shield on it. We may call it the American eagle, but it is the same old bird that tore the heart out of Gaul and the gall out of Carthage; the same that has whetted his bloody beak upon the bones of a thousand tribes now extinct; the same that was fearfully and wonderfully drawn in berry-juice upon rocks to glad the vanity of the shock-headed cave-dweller when the browsing mammoth was flushed with rose in the dawning of time.
Says one writing of the “Stars and Stripes”:
“The American flag is an emblem not only of freedom but of civilization; and as such, it ought to be beloved and worshiped by all who live under it or who in any wise receive the benefit which it confers on mankind.”
That is a pretty fair sample of what one can be brought to feel by inability to think without confusion. Human nature presents no more striking characteristic than the tendency to neglect the substance and consider the shadow; to forget the end, in contemplation and approval of the means; to substitute principle for action and ceremony for principle;to attribute to the symbol the virtues of the thing symbolized. It evidently did not occur to the patriotic gentleman who wrote the quoted sentence, and much else in the same spirit, that the flag being only an “emblem” of freedom and civilization (our kind of freedom and civilization, by the way) is not at all entitled to the love and worship that he solicits for it; these should go, not to the flag, but to the things of which it is an emblem—to freedom and civilization. His idolatrous tendency and his truly heathenish confusion of mind are still further shown in his reference of “the benefit which it” (the flag, observe) “confers on mankind.” His is a typical utterance: the vestigial idolatry of the cave-dweller and the sylvan nomad is still strong in the race, and flag-worship is one of its most reasonless manifestations. Everywhere and always in these days of war we hear and read words about the flag which a thinking human being would be ashamed to utter of an actual beneficent deity. There is no room whatever for doubt that what the average patriot acclaims and honors is the actual colored silk or bunting, not what it represents. To the conception of abstractions he comes unfitly equipped, but he can see a tinted rag. I donot know that any harm comes of his fetishism; it is noted merely as an interesting and significant phenomenon—one of a thousand proving the brevity of our advance along the line of progress toward enlightenment. It is of a piece of the average human being’s more or less sincere respect for truth, justice, chastity and so forth, not as practicable means to the end of human happiness, but as things creditable and desirable in themselves, even when subversive of their actual purpose by promoting misery.
Let the flag flap, and let “our ill-starred fellow citizens” who are unable to get a firm mental grasp on what it stands for knuckle down upon their knees before it and lift the voice. But, God bless them! how they would be shocked to observe the indifference with which it is regarded by soldiers in battle! One of the sharpest and most righteous rebukes I ever got from high authority was for permitting my color-sergeant to flaunt his gaudy symbol in the face of a battery. To civilian orators and poets the flag is sacred; to the intelligent soldier it is merely useful: it marks the battle line, preserves the unity of the regiment and “inspires” the soldier that is unintelligent.
A singularly disagreeable instance of fetishism is related of the Hon. William Jennings Bryan. While in Tokio, the story goes—among his admirers—he purchased a stool upon which Admiral Togo had sat at a Shinto ceremony. The story has it that the sale was reluctantly made, for the stool had been long a sacred object before it was newly consecrated by contact with the person of the renowned sailor; but the custodians did not feel at liberty to disappoint so illustrious an American as Mr. Bryan. On learning this, the great man magnanimously returned it and contented himself, as well as he could, with a common chair upon which Togo had sat in a restaurant.
It is disagreeable to think of Mr. Bryan in the character of a sycophantic souvenir hunter. It is disagreeable to think that even the humblest and obscurest American citizen can have so little self-respect. Anthropolatry is but a shade less base and barbarous than that other primitive religion, fetishism; and the two, as in this instance, are often in coexistence. No superstition seems ever wholly to die. Both these are rife and rampant in the civilization of to-day, and one can name, offhand, a dozen of their customary manifestationsby persons who would be shocked by the revelation of their close relationship to the shagpate cave-dweller, the remoterpithecanthropos erectus, and, at the back of them both, the quadrumanal arborean with a vestigial swim-bladder.