'Some Obvious and Useful Truths in a Few Words'

“None of the axioms of wisdom which recommend the ancient sages to veneration, seem to have required less extent of knowledge or perspicacity of penetration, than the remarks of Bias, that [Greek: oi pleones kakoi], ‘the majority are wicked.’” 

The enviably named Bias of Priene was a sixth-century B.C. Greek about whom we know little with certainty except that the saying most often attributed to him will never be mistaken for flattery and is unlikely ever to be refuted. His judgment of humankind is grimly realistic. In Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laërtius writes: “And the people of Priene dedicated a precinct to him, which is called the Teutameum. His apothegm is: Most men are bad.”

 

In the passage at the top, Dr. Johnson assumes Bias’ verdict on humanity is self-evident. Writing in The Rambler on this date, November 19, in 1751, he asks: “What are all the records of history, but narratives of successive villanies, of treasons and usurpations, massacres and wars?” Johnson echoes a well-known passage in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, written a quarter-century later:

 

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquillity over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. In private life, he was an amiable as well as a good man.”

 

Gibbon mock-laments the absence of horrors during the reign of Antoninus, Roman emperor from 138 to 161. When times are good – relatively speaking – a historian has little to write about. Gibbon also concedes that the “native simplicity of [Antoninus’] virtue” was “a stranger to vanity or affectation.” How boring. How unlike almost any other national leader who comes to mind.

 

Johnson praises the pithiness of Bias’ maxim and writes: “[T]he excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare and abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truths in a few words.” Among the “benefactors of mankind” is, Johnson writes, he “who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind.” It makes sense that an aphorism is likely to linger in the mind longer than an argument drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason.

 

In his Midnight Maxims (Mirabeau, 2021), Theodore Dalrymple writes: “Concision is to the mind as cleanliness is to the body.” In Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime (Encounter Books, 2020), David Pryce-Jones writes of Dalrymple:

 

“The prose has two registers, one of which is controlled mockery of the many who ought to know better; and the other is the warning that things are awful and we have yet to see how much more awful they will become. In many respects he is the Charles Dickens of the modern age.”