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Homo Neanderthalensis

by H.L. Mencken

(The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925)

I

Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee
evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention
dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very
narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects
everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more
than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized.
 This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority,
 no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them,
 perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I
 should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of
 men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was
 at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they
 are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is
 worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire
 among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of
human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part
in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons
and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too
poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a
bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public
libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has
at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more
tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers,
sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do
with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the
fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of
the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with
immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble
stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority
of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's
possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by
them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever
heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their
hands.

II

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against
the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than
conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very
accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the
man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life.
Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is
recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no
man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they
propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man
infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then
by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in
them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the
ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often
attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their
followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is
on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance
cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as
surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely
the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their
comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men;
they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be
prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of
education; they themselves can't understand it. Ergo, its teaching must
be put down.

This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery.
Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something
going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a
small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and
then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an
armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a
French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority
is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive -- and a few are
enough to carry on.

III

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern.
 He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an unbearable
 burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search
 is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their
 aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what
 seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous
 education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern
 pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of
 chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic
 among the submerged -- and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other
 such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple -- and
 every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays
 him.

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is
explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men
toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest
outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought.
 It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city
 proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But
 the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it.
 It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the
 irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with
 loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former
throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human
knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened
men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth -- a
Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences, demand
special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple
rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.

IV

What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two
sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two
genera -- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of
taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is
thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to
the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has
to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is
apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not
apprehended at all.

That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human
beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by
Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that
at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these
immortals, made in God's image, one of the greatest artists the human
race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned
he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable
beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of
the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in
the world, and would not be interested if they were told.

The fact saves good Ludwig's bacon. His music survives because it lies
outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond
violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it
would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its
lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to
put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it,
and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of
playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and
railroaded to the calaboose.