Not long ago I found myself flipping through a biography of John Harvey Kellogg, the impresario of dry breakfast cereal. It was a very dull book. But it had all the necessary materials for a good one—an old-fashioned Lytton Strachey sort of biography, full of ludicrous contrasts and lurid scenes and catty, sniping humor. Like Edison and Bell, Kellogg was one of those geniuses, half skeptical, half credulous, who seemed to appear out of nowhere during the turn of the last century. All of them combined an experimental temperament with a lunatic energy. In Kellogg’s case, alas, the result was not the lightbulb or the telephone but the yogurt enema.
A general history of American enthusiasm—Transcendentalists, Shakers, Christian Scientists, followers of the late Dr. Hubbard—would be a worthy object for a historian. There is no mania—vegetarianism, pantheism, temperance, anti-smoking, eugenics, racism, sexual abstinence—with which Dr. Kellogg was not associated in his day. Practically the only cause he ever disclaimed was the Seventh-Day Adventist religion of his youth, and then only because the authorities grew tired of him.
In our own speculatively impoverished age, I am afraid the most visible American cult is the anti-tariff one. Its house organ—its Adventist World or Muhammad Speaks—is, of course, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, of which I am a dedicated reader. Though I am never entirely certain the authors know what tariffs are; their frightened language suggests Piglet’s immortal description of a Heffalump as “A huge big—well, like a—I don’t know—like an enormous big nothing.”
The problem with the WSJ types, most of whom are well meaning, is that they do not understand what economics is. They think that it is a hard science, like chemistry or (better yet) electrical engineering, with established, perhaps even immutable laws which can be proved by clearly discernible relationships between input and output. This attitude is an old and pernicious one. Keynes knew better. Economics, he told Roy Harrod, his pupil and future biographer, was indeed a science, but only if you can imagine that in, formulating his laws, Newton had assumed that “the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple’s motives, on whether it is worth while falling to the ground, and whether the ground wanted the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth.” And, he might have added, whether the tree had noticed that its apple-bearing capacity had significantly declined relative to its rivals, to say nothing of whether the tree might toss off its apples with perverse glee simply because the editors of the Wall Street Journal find it annoying.
It is a great mistake to assume that there is something incongruous about cultists behaving scientifically. Indeed, their mistake is usually the opposite one. It is the cultist who, presented with the evidence of Ecclesiastes, feels that he must discover the reason why the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong; who, after plotting the relative distribution of bread and riches against Gross National Wisdom and Understanding, respectively, thinks he has hit upon the inverse causal relationship between them; and who assumes that men of skill who lack favor are simply ignorant of the latest OECD recommendations. This is why one should never agree to argue with cultists on their own terms; it means tacitly acknowledging that their facile reasoning bears any relation to sense, when it is really just magical thinking.
Some years ago Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest published a long-ish essay called “Sod the Public,” which they described as a “consumer’s guide” to the various ways in which the average Briton was being shafted by idiotic advertisements, poor design, planned obsolescence, the metric system, and many other evils. Much of it was practical and, by their standards, apolitical:
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ʟɪɢʜᴛ sᴡɪᴛᴄʜᴇs: When carrying a tray, you used to be able to put the light on with your wrist or elbow (and also sometimes open the door catch in the same sort of way), but now you have to put the tray on the ground.
I for one would welcome an updated list for modern American consumers. One worthy entry would be the decline of children’s toys. Has anyone else noticed that Lego sets have gotten smaller while having more pieces and requiring more time to assemble, in addition to being far more expensive? The basic units of Lego construction in a large-ish set are no longer 2×2 and 4×2 colored bricks, which in my childhood were clearly meant (and always were) repurposed after the model on the box had been built and taken apart. Now a comparable set contains thousands of microscopic pieces; they are engineering projects that require adult attention spans but child-sized fingers. Worse still, they no longer come with instructions. Instead, children are directed to use the Lego app and follow along with video, PDF, etc.
The consultant responsible for the no-instructions thing was probably the same one who came up with those menus that can only be consulted by taking a picture of something that looks like a Pac-Man ghost after a serious car accident. Consultants, by definition, know nothing about the actual enterprises in which their clients are engaged but a great deal about what used to be known as the Microsoft Office “suite” of “tools” (notice how these people always mix their metaphors?). Their so-called expertise always comes to the same thing: lowering costs by depriving the consumer of something hitherto recognized as essential.
