The Amateur Immigrant: Mackay

Stevenson spends several pages on one person, who is a fascinating character. I will try to cut it down to blog-size, but it would be a shame to lose anything of this odd and unsettlingly familiar man.

We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the name of Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying the elements of a corporation... Mentally, he was endowed above the average. There were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto, like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater... When he began a discussion he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads... With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. "The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now or tomorrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope."

He too drank, but did not acknowledge the fact; when he once made a fool of himself getting very drunk, by strength of will he "suppressed all reference to his escapade."

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness....

He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me to task--a novel cry to me--upon the overpayment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produce a mere fancy article. Mackay's notion of a book was Hoppus's Measurer.

Stevenson tried to argue that material production was to produce leisure to pursue happiness, which literature provides richly, but Mackay denied it: "The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with food. 'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom and the top.'" He debated through teatime so he had to go hungry, which he had more than enough good humor to find funny himself.

Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world from him. "Damn my conduct!" said he. I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, 'Can I drive a nail?'" And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-engines.

That degree of hostility towards the humanities can be found in high tech, though it predominates only among system administrators, and "bellyful of corn and steam-engines" would be replaced by "videogames and CPUs." In my experience, most tech workers would agree with Mackay that the humanities belonged to another world, but they would first have to be told that world exists as something other than the soft options and Studies programs they saw at college. Mackay was enough a part of the old culture that he had "most of the elements of a liberal education," but it is different now: as a senior in biology told me at UM, he had not had a paper assigned to him since he was sixteen. With few exceptions, Americans who train in the practical sciences or engineering have no conception of what has been withheld from them. Of course I have met a handful of exceptions, though either their liberal education has come by birth, because one or both parents are professors in the humanities, or, as in my case, their tech career was a change in direction after a liberal arts education. What is saddest, many are Mackays by training, not nature, being quick to appreciate the true humanities when introduced to them. I have not found tech workers to be as grim as Mackay, except some system administrators, who anyway have the most noxious tech workers in their number (cf. Slashdot). Mackay in rejecting letters seems to have done more harm to himself than befalls those who merely grow up without them:

...[He] was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. And further, there seemed a tendency among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality.

One other thing joins Mackay to the tech worker:

Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sort of poor human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness to dissect and criticize even so small a matter as the riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.