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.