A Simple View of History

      In what many consider his greatest work, The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton ably exposes the fallacy of historical progressivism:  the idea that human civilization is, over time, one long march of progress from darkness to light, marked by ever-increasing refinement of religion from superstition to the crowning achievement of atheism.  Such a view of history requires that the human being, in his earliest stage of being human, be something more or less like the caveman of the popular imagination:  that gruff, grunting Troglodyte, whose first invention is a club with which he knocks unconscious his woman so that he might then the more conveniently drag her around by the hair.  It rarely occurs to moderns to wonder whether this cartoon figure has any basis in fact; it rarely occurs to moderns to even wonder whether we have many facts to go on.  The fact is, we have very little to go on.  But what we do have, little as it is, lends not an ounce of credence to such a view.

      To illustrate this reality, Chesterton takes the reader down into the depths of a cave in France, a place first discovered by moderns (a Catholic priest and a young boy of his parish), only a few generations ago.  And there these two found evidence of the prehistoric activity of humans.  This activity can only be described as art:  numerous renderings on the cavern walls of the figures of animals, drawn with a high note of realism, as if from the gaze of a practiced observation.  We have no reason to believe that the earliest human males clubbed their wives, but we have very good reason to believe that the earliest humans were artists. 

      It did not take long, though, for the progressivists to view these figures on the wall of a cave, drawn by prehistoric humans, and come up with some quite fanciful theories that help keep the ideology of progressivism alive and well.  The drawings were “obviously” some sort of superstitious totem or fetish:  drawing the animals magically aided man on the hunt to snag his prey.  Or, perhaps, along the same vein, the drawings were the first rendering of idolatry.  Chesterton, wiser by far, takes the healthy agnostic view that maybe no theory of explanation is necessary at all, given the dearth of information about humans before the coming of writing.  Maybe the only “theory” we can see here is the humble recognition that prehistoric man drew pictures on walls of caves for pretty much the same reason that moved in like fashion men of ancient Sumer and Egypt, of classical antiquity, of the middle ages, or of the modern era – the artistic urge, something that has always marked the presence of the human in the world. 

      With this historical illustration, Chesterton begins his exposure of the very fanciful, and baseless idea, or theory, or perhaps best, ideology, that human civilization is roughly a long but steady pilgrimage of progress.  Thus, any signs of commendable human behavior among the earliest humans must be interpreted to fit the pattern of progressivism’s theory:  early religion, for example – and like art, religion seems to have been something rather natural to humans of the past – had to have been a mass of darkness, superstition, fear-ridden, etc.  Only slowly did man “develop” a more urbane polytheism of the pagan out of the terror of animism, out of the placation of un-nameable spirits. And then slowly, there moved among men a higher, deeper understanding that the gods are One.  Monotheism, then, was a short step away from the final “revelation” that there really is no god, except for man’s potential, with progress, to make himself divine. 

       But this all militates against the facts that we do have:  that the rough nomad has almost always co-existed with the more urbane city-dweller; that some highly developed, technocratic societies housed within themselves views of very hideous gods or demons whose lust for human torture and sacrifice was insatiable (as was the case with the Incas and Aztecs of the “new world” and Carthage of the old); that amongst some of the most ancient – and in modern times “primitive” – peoples was a sort of dim memory of a God above all gods and perhaps, really, the only God; that even in the most flagrant idolatry of some peoples – like the ancient Greeks – there was this nagging, lurking suspicion that the building up of the pantheon was not getting to the root of things and was disturbed by the speculations of philosophers about the One Good, the First Cause, and so on.  Rather than being a late advance toward atheism, monotheism has the air about it of being something fallen away from – its haunting memory, pushed into the background, but still lingering in the thoughts of men most ancient as well as modern.  It would break through to the surface in something like the attempt of the Egyptian king Akenaton to proclaim only one god whose sign is the sun; or when Christian missionaries would meet some of the peoples of very traditional tribes – different tribes of Native North Americans, the Aborigines of Australia, etc. – and would be shocked to learn that these seemingly time-bound peoples of the past not only had an idea of the One, but often even had a name for Him; or, and most spectacularly, when a man, later named Abraham, of a very idolatrous, polytheistic people broke with the rather new practices of proliferating gods and goddesses and rediscovered and followed Yahweh into the desert to establish a people solely devoted to One, True God.

      The modern man of scientific outlook believes that the advance of science – most clearly evidenced in technological development – is synonymous with civilization.  History says otherwise.  As man was always an artist, so he was always religious and early on most probably monotheistic, we believe, if we go by the few facts about prehistory that we do have.  On occasion the darkest of religions has flourished in the highest developed societies, and some of the “simplest” of peoples have held on to some idea of monotheism.  And so the whole theory of progress, of the steady triumph of science vanquishing, by degrees, the “darkness” of religion, is exposed as a kind of re-telling of the cartoon of caveman-beating-his-wife.