Chapter II: The Pleasures of Buncombe (2)

There are some texts still in use which imply that it is never warm in the Arctic, but many have felt themselves compelled to present the following complicated explanation of Arctic summer temperatures (after stating that the old law does hold for three-quarters of the year): Practically all the heat comes from the sun, some arriving at any given spot directly in the form of light, some transported there by various agencies, such as winds, ocean currents. The amount of heat (light) delivered straight from the sun to a unit of the earth’s surface on a summer day depends primarily on how nearly vertical the sun is and for how many hours it shines; but secondarily it depends on other factors, such as clouds or dust in the atmosphere, the color of the surface the light rays strike, and so on. The resulting temperature, as observed either by a thermometer or by the human sensory organs, is further modified by how long a night, during which heat was lost, has preceded the day, and by how much “cold” was stored in that locality by the preceding winter. In some places that are mountainous, such as Greenland, this winter chill has been effectively stored in the form of snow, which not only throws back the light rays without giving them a chance to turn into heat but also neutralizes those that have become heat by using them to lessen its own cold; other places, such as the ocean, have also stored the “cold” effectively, and cancel the heat of the summer with great success. Therefore it is never very hot on mountains in the Arctic, nor on the ocean; and it is probable that if you spent a summer in a tent on an ice floe at the North Pole out-of-doors you would never observe a temperature higher than twenty degrees above freezing (say 50° or 55° F.) measured five feet above the ice. It would of course be much hotter if you put up a windbreak and then let the sun shine on a dark tarpaulin spread on the floe.

But there are in the Arctic, the explanation would continue, thousands of square miles of low land not very near either to mountains or to the sea. Over these it is far colder in winter than at the North Pole (because the air above the Pole is warmed by the heat radiated by the ocean up through the floating ice). Winter winds are therefore frequently warmer when they blow from the north than from some other direction, and in some places the coldest winds are southerly. This extreme cold makes a heavy precipitation impossible, and the average snowfall of the Arctic lowlands for twelve months is therefore less than the average snowfall of Virginia or Scotland. This little snow dissolves quickly in the spring, and after that the sunlight strikes a dark surface, which helps it turn into heat. Nor is there much cold stored anywhere near that can become effective to neutralize the sun. What cold had been stored up by the snow is gone, except as it is held in a little water on or near the surface. What has been taken up by the ground through last winter, and through the centuries, is securely imprisoned there; for the first few inches which thaw near the surface become an insulating blanket that confines the rest of the chill and makes it as powerless to affect the temperature of the air as if it were hundreds of miles away.

On the Arctic prairie that is remote from mountains or the sea, one factor, then, far overshadows all others in determining how hot any given day shall be. This is the quantity of heat received each hour from the sun at that place, multiplied by the number of hours. Now, at the Equator the sun can deliver heat no more than twelve hours out of every twenty-four, giving the tropical prairie an equal length of time in which to cool off. But on the prairie north of the Arctic circle the sun shines the whole twenty-four hours, delivering less heat per hour than at the Equator, but more per day, and without any night in which to cool off. There is, accordingly, a period in summer, varying in length according to where you are in the Arctic, during which the sun delivers to your locality about the same heat per day as at the Equator. _This is the rule_, for it is based on the broadest principles; the places where it does not work out are exceptions, for narrower or special reasons. And it is a fact that there are many places on and near the Equator where the hottest day in a hundred years does not equal the hottest days of the same century at many places in the Arctic that are equally high above sea level.

Few will deny the interest of the preceding facts; but, says the really sensible man, the world is full of interesting things, and we certainly have not room for them all in the textbooks, nor time for them all in the schools. The practical value of this curious Arctic lore is very small to the average man, who stays at home or, at the most, goes to Paris; though it is undeniably highly useful to those few individuals who travel to the Arctic and who want to know in advance what sort of weather to expect, warning them to take fly dope instead of furs if they are going on a Midnight Sun excursion to Fort Yukon. But even for the excursionist, facts are not an unmixed blessing. If you know about the heat and the mosquitoes in advance, you will not have the pleasure of discovering them; the fly dope may save you from stings, but it also spoils the after-dinner value of the tale about how foolish you were and how badly instructed _before you went north_, which sort of story is the only really satisfactory way of putting your listeners both firmly and pleasantly among the uninstructed where they belong. And even from their point of view, too much advance knowledge is rather a bore, for what is the drawing-room value of that which everybody has learned in school when compared with: “Jones, you know, the Famous Traveler, told me once that when he was in the Yukon, etc.”

Facts are tedious, anyhow, and we should think carefully before agreeing that the simple and edifying Greek rule shall go by the board. Consider just a few of the entertaining and instructive things, some of them with no mean character-building value, that would have to go, too.

_Item_: All the ideas would have to go that are similar to the familiar kindergarten ditty that has been sung by millions of little Americans and which goes something like this (there seems to be no standard version):

“Frosty little Eskimo,
In your house of ice and snow.”

and so on, till the final line:

“For in Greenland there is nothing green to grow!”

We might be able to salvage the house of ice and snow temporarily, though it is a bothersome fact that of something over 14,000 Eskimos in Greenland, by the last census, less than 300 had ever seen a snow house. But the “nothing green to grow” would not last very long under the combined attack of the unromantic geographers, who insist on pointing out weather bureau records, and the historians of Greenland, who will tell you that the country was a republic from 986 a.d. to 1261 (a good deal longer than the United States has yet been a republic) and a dependency of Norway and Denmark thereafter; that they had churches and monasteries administered from European archbishoprics (you may have seen the Greenlandic church ruins in the movies some years ago, as background for the King of Denmark hobnobbing with Eskimos). The historians will point out that a European civilization could not have existed in Greenland during the Middle Ages except for stock raising. The colonists had cattle, with as many as a hundred head in a single barn. They lived in considerable part on milk and milk products, and wove cloth from their own sheep, making garments which you can examine today through photographs in many books or study in the museum collections of Europe. Both cattle and sheep raising are now again practiced in Greenland, and have been for many decades. That means hay, and hay means meadows with that “something green to grow” which is denied by the kindergarten.

Such are the facts, but what of it? If we pressed them upon children while they were at the impressionable age, we would so change their mental picture of Greenland as to rob it of every charm it has so long had for us. What substitute would they find for the delicious thrills and chills that creep up and down our spines as we look with the mind’s eye upon a world of permanent white silence and peer into Greenlandic snow houses where Eskimos shiver (doubtless without their teeth chattering, else it would not be so silent) as they devour (again silently) the blubber that enables them to eke out their miserable existence. And then there is the character-building value of thinking what a marvelous thing is the human spirit that continues its fight against the powers of darkness and cold even up there on the frozen edge of the world. On the other hand, too, how fortunate we are who live in a country of warmth and green grass--and schools. Take away, if you must, the good old picture of the North that is always cold; but consider first what it is you are going to give our disillusioned children in its stead. Surely it will have to be something better than cow pastures and a few ruined churches. We already have at home enough of the one and many of the other.

_Teaching Through Educational Movies_: While our love for children makes us conceal from them anything that may be injurious to their welfare, the same affection leads us to strive for their instruction in whatever we consider beneficial. But in this field we are sometimes misled. I have in mind a special case, parents who were greatly incensed at a movie called _Nanook of the North_, which, although not true to the native life of the Eskimos, had been shown in their children’s school and recommended as true. But these parents were wrong, as will appear.

To begin with, the _Nanook_ story was at least as true as that of Santa Claus, of which those parents approved. It was the same sort of partial truthfulness, only greater. Real as well as Santa reindeer have horns, four legs, and are driven before sleighs in harness, though not such sleighs, quite, nor in such harness as the ordinary Christmas pictures show. They run on the ground, not through the air; they are very swift, though not quite so speedy as Santa’s. There are in the world old men, too, who would like to give a present to every child at Christmas if they could, though there is no old man that actually succeeds in doing it. Thus the Santa story, while fiction in a way, does represent truths.

Similarly with the movie, _Nanook_. There are Eskimos in Hudson Bay where the picture was taken, and the people you see on the screen are Eskimos, which is more realism, right from the start, than you have ever had in a Santa Claus picture. The country you see, too, is the real Hudson Bay. True enough, not even the coldest month up there averages as cold as _Nanook_ tells you the whole year averages (35° below zero), but then you must have something exceptional in a movie or it would not impress. You are told, too, that the Hudson Bay Eskimos still hunt with their primitive weapons, and this is justified. For it would spoil the unity of the picture to tell the truth about the weapons, though it is an interesting fact in itself that the forefathers of the Eskimos shown on the screen have had guns for generations, as the Hudson’s Bay Company has been trading into the Bay since 1670. Moreover the titles do not actually say that the Bay Eskimos hunt with primitive weapons _only_, so you can take it any way you like. Doubtless the producer meant nothing more than to say that the children (who are certainly Eskimos) still play at hunting (which would be hunting of a sort) with bows and arrows.

No real Eskimos, in my belief, ever hunted seals through the ice in the manner shown in the picture, nor do I think a seal could be killed by that method unless he were a defective. But it is true that certain Eskimos in other parts of the Arctic (about half of all there are) do know how seals can be killed through ice. That the Hudson Bay Eskimos, with whom our producer had to deal, did not know such methods was no fault of his, and he would have been deficient in resource if he had allowed that to stop him. Neither are there libraries in Hudson Bay where he might have borrowed a book that described the method so he could have studied it up and taught it to the local natives. There he was with an expensive movie expedition, the picture just had to be taken, and audiences in the South would demand to be shown what they had heard of--Eskimos sealing through the ice. And so a method was developed (perhaps by the Eskimos themselves along lines roughly indicated by the director) which photographs beautifully and gives as much feeling of enlightenment to an audience as if it showed the real technique that does secure seals.

I have gone to _Nanook_ many times for the purpose of observing the audiences. In several cases some movie fan has noticed that the seal ostensibly speared in the picture is stiff and dead, clearly planted there. But that, it seems to me, is all the realism you could expect in a play. You would not demand that Fairbanks really kill all his adversaries, though you do appreciate seeing a bit of good swordsmanship. And in _Nanook_, what seal but a dead one could possibly be expected to allow himself to be speared in the manner shown?

Another thing I have found _Nanook_ audiences complaining about is that they had heard somewhere that Eskimo snow houses are warm and comfortable, while the _Nanook_ picture shows the occupants shivering as they strip for going to bed, and there are clouds of steam puffing from their mouths and nostrils. These erudite fans are still more troubled when they see the movie title which says that the Eskimos must always keep their snow house interiors below freezing to prevent them from melting, for they have read a book by someone who has lived in a snow house and who has explained the principles of physics by which, when the weather is cold enough outside (and no weather was ever quite so cold as the _Nanook_ country is supposed to be), the snow does not melt though it is comfortably warm inside--say, as warm as the average British or Continental living rooms in winter. But the answer is simple, and the producer is quite justified by it: An Eskimo snow house is too small for inside photography, and the light might not be good enough. So to get the best light and plenty of room for the camera man, half the house was cut away (like the “sets” you see in the movie studios), and the poor Eskimos were disrobing and going to bed out of doors. But it would have spoiled the picture to introduce such technical details. Hence the producer had to explain the shivering people and their visible breathing by the harmless pretence that snow house interiors have to be colder than freezing to prevent the walls and roof from thawing.

And so on for the whole picture.

It was the very fact just stated and others like them which made my friends angry. That may have been because the realities of the picture were not so charitably interpreted to them as we have done above. It is possible to make the same facts look a good deal worse if you try.

But no charity is needed, and only a proper understanding of the case, to reconcile any parent to a movie like _Nanook_ and to its presentation in the school. For the Eskimo, properly understood, is really the grown-up’s Santa Claus. We love the world of the imagination. Santa, fat, jolly and generous, portrays certain things and qualities as we would like them to be. But in the world of fancy we need contrasts; ugliness as well as beauty, wickedness as well as goodness. For the proper effect, we need not only Heaven, but Hell also. It may be pleasant to think how fortunate you will be if you go to Heaven, but that is nothing compared to the satisfaction you get from a reasonable prospect of being able to keep out of Hell.

What we mean, then, is that the Eskimo is really a sort of reversed Santa; and that since Hell has begun to fade, the Arctic is our best substitute. For somehow grown people, even those who cannot visualize Hell, seem to be able to believe not only that Hudson Bay is in the Arctic but also that the Arctic averages thirty-five degrees below zero, as the picture says the Hudson Bay country does, and that it has all the other distressing attributes.

In fact, the Arctic, peopled by Eskimos, is much more practical for our purposes than any inferno ever was when peopled by tormented spirits. No picture of spirits ever gets us like one of a wretched flesh-and-blood Eskimo who shivers from one year’s end to the other. Away up there, crouched in his foul, unventilated house, drinking oil, he has a power to make us remarkably contented with poor lodgings, a careless landlord, and meals at Childs’. In our little backyard with its one wretched tree we think with a pleasant compassion of the stunted little Arctic Mongol who has never seen even a bush. And then, to make his usefulness complete, we remember in summer when we are perishing with the heat that Nature has her compensations! She mercifully sees to it that her chilled children of the snows shall at least escape sunstroke and the after effects of too much Coca-Cola.

And how could you get these and other similar benefits from the Eskimo and the Arctic if you did not encourage such pictures as _Nanook of the North_, and the books that correspond? And what better time than the impressionable years of childhood in which to acquire ideas that are going to have such high consolatory and moral values later?

* * * * *

Perhaps, Gentle Reader, you had arrived at the truth about Truth before you saw this treatise. If so, you will know, or you may have guessed by the trend of this inquiry, that neither side is going to have it all its own way. At first Truth (in the sense of facts) seemed to be getting the worst of it, being so frequently immaterial, inexpedient, even immoral, and nearly always in such bad taste. But the last argument from geography has shown the merits divided, with, generally speaking, the “practical” advantages in favor of the facts, but the idealistic ones against them. We are likely to feel here an immediate concern that in a crass and materialistic age the “practical” side will prevail. Not necessarily, for we may be able to show the higher practicality of idealism.

We will admit now, partly to save the trouble of a formal canvass, that the rest of the argument from the schools will go, on the whole, against us; or, rather, against the conclusions deduced. The fact is, our position is not really at all what it has seemed to be. We keep another, and so far unhinted, solution in reserve.

* * * * *

_A Glance over the Other Studies_: A critical study of psychological teaching would not go against the preceding conclusions from history, physiology, geography, and the educational movies, but in fact decidedly in their favor, more especially as the newer developments have tended so strongly toward an undesirable, and, in fact, degrading materialism. Psychoanalysis and especially behaviorism come near being a total loss from the point of view of character-building. But chemistry has scarcely any bad aspects unless you happen to be a pacifist, objecting to gunpowder and poison gas. But even so, what is that when measured against soap, a product of chemistry on which rests that perfect cleanliness revered today even beyond godliness? Physics, too, is on the right side, especially those theories of it that are neither so puzzling that the ordinary man can make nothing of them, or else are clear in statement but seemingly lead to impossible conclusions--which can, nevertheless, be experimentally verified. For it is so valuable to be able to lay one’s hands somewhere on views that seem either silly or impossible and can nevertheless be proved. Reasoning from them gives such force to analogous religious views which it does not happen to be possible to verify.

Going ahead thus to canvass the rest of the grade school and high school sciences (for we have inadvertently progressed on our argument a little beyond the grades before we knew it) we shall come to the provisional conclusion that about forty per cent of the truths of education are good and should continue to be encouraged, about forty per cent are bad and should be ignored or suppressed, and the remaining twenty per cent are all right in themselves but too complicated and should be reserved for those who continue their education into the universities.

Since our love and care prompt us to make the education of our children their best and most logical preparation for the life which we admire, it is not really necessary for our present examination to go beyond the common and high schools, for they are a sort of abstract or synopsis of the world as we both think it is and want it to be. Still it will do no harm to take another case or two.

In politics, for instance, would you want the whole truth told about every candidate? You can test that out with a few simple reactions. When it was whispered around, for instance, that Harding was partly of negro descent, was it your first inclination to try to discover if the charge were true or not? On the contrary, you almost certainly took no thought of truth or falsehood, but were offended and angered by the bad taste and poor sportsmanship of whoever it was that started the yarn. In the case of Wilson, would you have favored it (even as a Republican) if there had been openly circulated some of the things which (as a Republican) you firmly believed about him? Bad sportsmanship again, and bad taste; you would not have done it and are glad no one did. Even in the case of so innocent a thing as President Theodore Roosevelt’s bad eye, said to have resulted from a boyish sparring bout, would you, as a Democrat this time, have favored any campaign use of it whatsoever? Once more, bad sportsmanship, bad taste, an emphatic no.

In the August, 1927, number of _Harper’s Magazine_ Dr. Joseph Collins, famous as a physician in all literary circles, had an article on _Should Doctors Tell the Truth?_ It will not take a reading of that article, nor anything but a backward glance of the mind over our own experiences, to make us agree with him when he says: “The longer I practice medicine the more I am convinced that every physician should cultivate lying as a fine art.” Nor do we quarrel with the general conclusion that while a physician should tell the truth in certain cases, lying is usually the kinder, the safer, and therefore the better way.

And what of the every day social relations that are more important than our business or professional contacts to most of us? Consider the one remark: “How well you are looking!” Can you imagine the sort of place this world would be if that little exclamatory sentence, or its equivalent, were not working overtime in every country? I know my own case. Ever since I can remember the declaration: “You are looking better than when I saw you last,” has cheered me greatly. It was not till a year or two ago that it first struck me that if this had been uniformly true all these years I ought to be looking remarkably well by now. But even so, I am still able to take a little comfort in this serial fiction.

In view of the benevolent nature of the many sample reticences we have considered, all of which and many more like them are sure of a heavy vote in their favor could this nation, or any other civilized country, be polled on the subject--in view of this and much more that could be said in favor, is it not rather strange that most of us have allowed ourselves to fall victims to that cynical outlook on life which considers the deceiver, almost necessarily, wicked? You see how absurd that is, particularly if you think back over the cases of your own deception. As a child you may have deceived your parents occasionally to get out of a licking; but far oftener, I am sure, you did it to save their feelings, so they would not be offended or worried--on the well-known and sound principle that “what you don’t know don’t hurt you.” And, in later life, was it not usually the same? In school you bluffed partly for marks, of course, but very often, almost oftener than you realized, to save the feelings of a kindly teacher who trusted you and would have been so disappointed had he known. In married life, too, you deceive, oftener than not (I am sure the married will agree) to save the feelings of the other party. In fact, the conjugal relation calls for the highest known percentage of benevolent reticence. There are, for instance, certain situations that do not seem to irk the technically aggrieved parties, even when they know about them, so long as they are able to keep up the appearance of not knowing. And what is more, that public which always takes an interest in the marriage relations of other people, does not think it reprehensible for the technically aggrieved party to know about the dereliction and still do nothing, so long as he does not know that the public knows he knows.

In fact, next in importance after the systematic deception of children by parents, comes the amiable deception of husband and wife by each other. That is not only in the nature of things, but proper according to the highest standards, since the family is the social unit and the home the strong citadel of our institutions.