Just the Facts, Ma'am

Finding a new (old) essay by Dwight Macdonald I've never read before is always an event in my life. The fact that Macdonald wrote voluminously on just about every subject that caught his critical eye makes the search for all of his individual pieces that much harder. In the essay "The Triumph of the Fact" he examined how facts have gradually come to dominate Americans' lives, at the expense of some rather more precious things:

"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."

He begins this wide-ranging (11,000+ word) essay by pointing out something that can be found in the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, that will come as something of a shock to fans of the Benedict Cumberbatch television series or the Guy Ritchie films:

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 of the Copernican theory and of the composition of the solar system. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled around the sun appeared such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“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.”

Macdonald then asserts that "Holmes's attitude is American" - but of the old fashioned kind, like Ben Franklin's. Dr. Watson, a physician, was a perfect foil to Holmes's kind of intelligence, relying on the collection of facts to back up his conclusions. Watson is, after all, the amanuensis who wrote all the Holmes stories (with the considerable help of Arthur Conan Doyle).

But Macdonald isn't trying to change anyone's mind about the genius of Sherlock Holmes. He is trying to demonstrate how our American preoccupation with facts is eclipsing another approach to the world around us. As to Holmes's willful ignorance of the Copernican solar system, Macdonald goes so far as to agree with him:

"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?”)(1)

Holmes is purely a work of fiction, but in creating him, Doyle did something to detective fiction that transformed it completely. It's no accident that an American writer, Poe, invented the detective story, "the only literary genre" Macdonald asserts, "whose point is the discovery, by scientific method, of a Fact (whodunit?)". But the circumlocutions through which Holmes arrives, as if by a miracle, at the solution of the most mysterious crimes are in defiance of the common rules of crime detection. His famous powers of deductive reasoning are the fruit of lightning inspiration, insight, imagination. The route he follows in order to arrive at a solution to the most seemingly complex problems can't be mapped - if it could, then anyone could be a Sherlock Holmes by simply following the same steps. That is the scientific method. Yet Watson discovers that his flatmate at No. 221b, Baker Street has abundant practical knowledge on some subjects, but it is undisciplined and "unsystematic," whereas his knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, literature, and politics is nebulous. Though he seems to possess vast intellect, Holmes is not, strictly speaking, much of an intellectual. He is demonstrably closer to being an artist.

As Macdonald concludes,

A hunter looks at a wood in one way, an artist in another. The latter’s eye takes in every twig, branch, trunk, shadow, color, highlight, etc. The former’s eye also records all this data, but his mind rejects everything except the particular Fact (brown fur, speckled feathers) it is looking for. The hunter knows what he will see (or rather, what he hopes he will see) before he looks. Since the artist’s aim is to render the wood in itself and as a whole (he may do it by three lines, as in a Chinese landscape, or by a Dutch proliferation of detail) his problem is how to be conscious of everything. The hunter’s problem is just the reverse: to be conscious of only what he has decided, in advance, to see. The same distinction could be made between the way a Wordsworth looks at a field and the way a farmer looks at it.

We Americans are hunters rather than artists, a practical race, narrow in our perceptions, men of action rather than of thought or feeling. Our chief contribution to philosophy is pragmatism (pragma is Greek for factum); technique rather than theory distinguishes our science;[9] our homes, our cities, our landscapes are designed for profit or practicality but not generally for beauty; we think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies; our scholars are strong on research, weak on interpreting the masses of data they collect; we say “That’s just a fact” and we mean not “That’s merely a fact” but rather “Because that is a fact, there is nothing more to be said.”

This tropism toward the Fact deforms our thinking and impoverishes our humanity. “Theory” (Greek theoria) is literally a “looking at” and thence “contemplation, reflection, speculation.” Children are told: “You may look but you mustn’t touch,” that is, “You mustn’t change what you look at.” This would be good discipline for Americans, just to look at things once in a while without touching them, using them, converting them into means to achieve power, profit, or some other practical end. The artist’s vision, not the hunter’s.

One of the things that Macdonald wrote that I remember most often is his debunking the Latin saying "De gustibus non est disputandum" or "There's no arguing about taste." Macdonald asked the simple question, "if you can't arvue about taste, what CAN you argue about?" You can't argue with facts. It's why so many people probably prefer them to expressions and demonstrations of taste. 

(1) Then there was George Bernard Shaw's argument: "I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."