god, satan and homo tewler

chapter 1

“tewler” to “sapiens”

that completes all that is essential in the life of edward albert tewler, his deeds and significant sayings. but before this specimen human being can be put definitively into its place, in space, in time, among the stars, and finis written to this book, a few possibly exasperating comments have still to be made on the nature of the universe and the wisdom of the ages. the reader was warned of this in the penultimate paragraph of the introduction (q.v.).

certain types of homo tewler, functioning under the designations of philosophers, theologians, teachers and the like, are still regarded with an excessive awe and far too readily accepted at their own valuation by the great majority of our race. they are like business, firms, competing among themselves for a monopoly, but agreed in selling god, truth and righteousness into the tewler soul precisely as the proprietary medicine sellers sold their bottlefuls into mrs richard tewler’s body. not too confidently. most of them betray a doubt of their own reality by dressing up in strange apologetic garments, gowns, hoods, robes, the oddest tiaras, mitres, petticoats and the like, shaving their heads, growing vast unclean beards, as who should say, “i am peculiar. i am not a man but a divine medium.”

i ask you; a medium for what?

for philosophy? but can there be more than one single philosophy for sane humanity? and can that philosophy be so outside the limits of the human understanding that it is necessary to dress up like a gold coast witch-doctor to expound that high hokey-pokey? since poor rambling homo sub-sapiens began to put facts together and ask questions about them, he has been accumulating a vast disorder of answers, right, wrong and oblique. mostly they are oblique. his so-called “thinkers” were overtaken either by death or a conviction of indisputable tightness, before they had thought anything out. the history of human thought is essentially a history of human error, of a midden that has never been thoroughly cleaned. accumulation is the word for it. never in all recorded time down to this last syllable, has that mass been submitted to an honest, sustained, digestive process. its unassimilated chunks become “classics.” the student of philosophy doing “greats” or whatever pompous name is given to this stale resurrection pie, is introduced to a jumble of incompatible ideas, a mixture of bits from different jig-saw puzzles; incoherence as wisdom. our story of edward albert has shown reason why we still wait for a comprehensive clean-up. the little beast by the million blocks the way. but that clean-up has to come, if the transition to sapiens is ever to be attained.

and as with philosophy, so with religion. religion is the binding system of ideas and practices which holds a community together. obviously then, a healthy community can have only one religion, and now that distance has been abolished and mankind has become an interdependent world — wide community, there can be only one religion in the world. there can be no “religious toleration” in a sane world community. your community needs to be bound by a common understanding, and you cannot allow organisations of priestly kidnappers to attack the social solidarity because they have a church to sell.

the religion a world community needs is a very simple one. it cannot hold together without a dogmatic assertion of the supreme duty of outspoken truth, of the common ownership of the earth and the equal rights of man. so long, as people accept these fundamental dogmas, for dogmas they are, albeit vitally necessary dogmas, there is nothing to prevent folks elaborating whatever novel or antiquarian ceremonies or mythologies they have a mind for, or discussing in adult freedom any seditious ideas that occur to them. in a reasonably educated world, there would be no justification for suppressing the private sessions of the jewish khans or a hell fire club or adult baptism, or hitler’s astrologer or a celebration of the mass or a spiritualistic séance. so long as those who indulged in these oddities did not organise a propaganda of them and sell them to impair the general mental balance of the human community. but to tamper with the trustful minds of the young or the informative organisation of the world, is quite a different matter.

so we come to the problem of world teaching. this is certainly the most formidable problem ahead of us. for that old slattern, our mother nature, who has let one thing lead to another until we are now in a single world community, has neglected to give us any individual or collective drive for an education that will reconcile us to that conscious adaptation our situation demands. she has failed to mitigate our obstinate indisposition to learn. homo tewler may yet perish miserably en masse because of his fear of a plunge into reality. he holds on to his sinking ship; he looks at the dark waters and runs back to lock himself in his mental cabin with the sedatives the clerical salesman has persuaded him to trust. yet time and again men of exceptional penetration have attempted to launch a recognition of universal brotherhood, of a new generosity and a cooperative life upon the world, as the only possible salvation for our species. it is not a new realisation. now, indeed, it is finally urgent, but it has been plainly necessary to men of clear vision for scores of centuries. nineteen centuries ago, jesus of nazareth, last, most indignant and most revolutionary of the hebrew prophets, beating the money-changers and cursing the barren fig tree, was, so far as we can disinter his doctrine from subsequent accretions, preaching the gospel of human solidarity as his “kingdom of heaven”, and the socialist movement, before marx undermined it, was an equally disinterested drive towards a sane salvation of our tewler world.

there is-much to be learnt about the psychology of the animal we are, from the fate of these two initiatives. they were caught and crippled and destroyed by the sub-conscious malice of their first generation of disciples. paul took possession of jesus and smothered him in doctrinal christianity, and in a little while that noble beginning had sunken to the wangling of the “fathers.” it was not the galilean who triumphed over the pagan stoicism of julian. it was paul who conquered. it was the fundamental tewlerism of mankind that asserted itself against a precocious stirring of homo sapiens. in the same way marx imposed an orthodoxy upon the socialist impulse, and infected it with his own conceit, jealousy and arrogance.

corruptio optima, pessima. to-day the most evil thing in the whole world is the roman catholic church, whose shameless symbol is jesus the son of man, drooping, crucified and done for. wherever the catholic priest prevails, among the decadent pious french generals of the surrender, in croatia, in japan, in spain, in that spite-slum, eire, in italy, in south america, in australia, there you find malicious mischief afoot against the enlightenment of mankind. people have called catholicism a cancer of the human mind. but it is no such neoplasm; it is congenital; it is the organised front of that base heritage of the tewlers, from which we are seeking escape. it had no revelation; to claim a revelation is priestly impudence; it is the most natural religion possible, mean and muddle-witted, human to the dregs, pretending to be divine.

the communist party is the identical twin of catholicism. it is its little left brother, psychologically the same. inevitably the two work together for the same general frustration of human hope. they gratify the same resentful craving of the inferiority complex that we have traced throughout the life of our particular specimen. they arc; the same sort of animal as he. never shall life be better than my life! they insist.

in view of these two great betrayals, we may reasonably doubt the possibility of a world-wide common education that will raise and keep homo tewler above himself. whatever a few far-seeing people may attempt, it will surely be undermined and defeated by those who will come in and be brought into the great work. “you can’t expect humanity to pull itself up by its own shoe-straps,” tee-hees mr chamble pewter triumphantly. “forgive my sense of humour.”

but obstinate rebels exist who will not accept that. they argue, for instance, that already there has been at least one drive in this tewler world, the onset of what it is customary nowadays to call science with a capital s, which has so far evaded priestcraft or any sort of authoritarian suffocation. this science has revolutionised the material conditions of human life, and it behoves us to examine how it sprang up and what exactly it is. no miracle begot it. it had no founder. it began in a natural adlerian revolt against the overbearing religious dogmatisms of the middle ages. against their exasperating self-confidence, the recalcitrants, unable to take it meekly any longer, and casting about for some means of self-assertion, discovered to their delight certain incompatibilities between the teaching and facts, and summoned a new arbitrator, experimental verification, to justify their revolt. it is absurd to ennoble the driving force of that new movement. we cannot afford to sentimentalise science; roger bacon, so far as our knowledge of him goes, never said, “i love truth,” or “what noble thing can i do for my fellow — men?” or in a state of pious helpfulness, “let me discover something for the greater glory of god.” he did nothing of the sort; and anyhow the essential thing about him was something quite different; he lost his temper. he endured the philosophical assurance about him as long as he could, and then flung himself at a weak point, abusively and violently, and made the most of it. there was really no essential difference between the motives of roger bacon when he put out his tongue at the medieval aristotle and young master edward albert tewler when he put out his tongue at the serene self — satisfaction of the lion in the zoo.

galileo again, was no visitant from a higher sphere; he was as human as any of us. but the complacent finality of the church about everything in heaven and earth was too much for him. he published his forbidden book to make those who were set in authority 6ver him realise just what damned fools they were. he could not keep quiet. they argued with him, they made him recant and keep a civil tongue in his bead, but they knew and he knew that they knew. “all the same, it moves,” he jeered at their dignified efforts to nail the earth down again, the earth that copernicus and he had dislodged and sent spinning off round the sun for ever.

it is very important for our purpose here to recall this essential resentful tewlerism of the scientific initiative, because then we can realise that great truths can and do emerge and increase without the agency of great minds, exalted discoverers or the like, through a quite ignoble recalcitrance. it was tewler insubordinate against tewler in authority. scientific progress oozes out of the general substance of tewlerism, and its outstanding personalities, so liable to deification, are a hindrance rather than a help.

but this does not explain why these new expansions of the human outlook were not presently seized upon and exploited and betrayed by some creed-maker like st paul, followed up by the usually inevitable priesthood. for that we must account in some other way. it is not so very difficult to do that. science began differently. it began less as a public teaching than as a hobby. and it did not invade more than a limited part of the field of modern life and thought, and that was a part of the field remote from the primordial scuffle for pride and power. it began completely out of politics, and it raised no objections to current religious and social life. the royal society, like the academia dei lincei, was a society of gentlemen amateurs who met unobtrusively and exchanged their sceptical observations, their entertaining centuries of inventions and so forth, and published their philosophical transactions more or less privately. in those days they did not use the word “science.” it was natural philosophy and natural history they talked about.

the royal society was a toy for charles ii, and it was only as the nineteenth century unfolded that mankind realised that this pet tiger cub was growing into a rather formidable monster. it stuck its claws through the gaiters of bishop wilberforce with great effect, when he launched a tewleresque kick at it. it was that memorable encounter of “soapy sam” and grandfather huxley at the british association meeting which made the “conflict of religion and science” a fighting issue. then it was that the great vested interest of anglicanism, which, in spite of the resistances of nonconformity and dissent, had been selling the hanoverian church-and — state system to the variegated population of the british empire very successfully, took alarm, and the competing nostrum — sellers of roman catholicism and the bible-reading sects, made common cause with it. this young tiger was biting mouthfuls out of the creator! a creator was an integral asset in their common equipment; they could not have him eroded and damaged; they could not do without him.

it is plausible to liken science to a young tiger in this way, but that comparison needs to be qualified. science may claw or bite upon occasion, but essentially it is the product of a protean anonymous power, and if in certain circumstances it took on the appearance of a dangerous assailant, it eluded any definitive suppression by its extraordinary lack of centralised organisation. it had no head to strike off, no sanctum to burn. there were no consolidated funds to be seized. it arose from the world-wide natural recalcitrance of the human mind. it was here. it was there. like a dawn. and wherever it spread, the critical spirit in man was stimulated and encouraged to further insubordination.

so the struggle against science is not so much an attempt to uproot and end something tangible and uprootable, as a world-wide disposition on the part of the great vested interests that overshadow our lives and sell us god, government and war today, to prevent an undesired and unexpected illumination reaching die general mass of mankind.

in this they have succeeded to a disconcerting extent. you have been told how a sample young englishman, fifty years after darwin, could dispose of his relationship to tarsius and the apes with an oafish guffaw, still believing that he and all things were made, as one might mould clay, by a personal god rather resembling mr myame but with a whiter and woollier beard, a little muddled in his identity with an extremely mawkish saviour who was also his son, a phosphorescent pigeon intervening. (“mystery of the holy trinity,” comes an echo from edward albert. “‘ands off sacred things! ‘oly! ‘oly! ‘oly! people won’t tol’rate you saying things like that, and if god was anything like what he used to be, you’d be struck dead for it instanter”)

which belated outbreak of edward albert’s is exactly why i write with ruthless precision here. the words i have used describe christian doctrine unconventionally but exactly as it is presented by the church and christian art. if my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time.he or she was shocked. the doctrine of the trinity is, i repeat, atrocious nonsense. yet all over the english-speaking world, children’s minds are still being paralysed by the injection of this same atrocious nonsense. you can hear the bland voices of the parsons in the british broadcasting corporation’s children’s hour, telling the old bible stories as truth, telling of real angels and real miracles, of resurrections and marvels of the utmost absurdity, lying deliberately to earn their livings.

“you talk like the village atheist,” protests bishop tewler, being as upper-class and socially subtle as he knows how. “all that, we understand quite as well as you do, is just a series of time-honoured stories, dear bewtiful old symbols.” the village atheist was often the salt of the village; and i am proud to rank with him. i had rather jest with him at the public house than dine at the bishop’s palace and be lubricated. have the common people been told that these tales are just symbols? and what do they understand them to symbolise?

when we think of readapting mankind to a world of unity and cooperation, we have to consider that practically all the educational machinery on earth, is still in the hands of god-selling or marx-selling combines. everywhere in close cooperation with our nationalist governments, the oil and steel interests, our drug salesmanship and so forth, the hirelings of these huge religious concerns, with more or less [allegiance?] and loyalty, are selling destruction to mankind.

to those italics i will return after a paragraph or so. plainly if the mind of the world needs urgently to be reconditioned, this is on the face of it a very dismaying state of affairs. and it is not even a practicable suggestion merely to utter the magic word “science.” is it really science we have in mind when we think of a reorganised and mentally reconditioned world? or are we taking the advancement of science merely as the sample of the process of sustained free rationalisation, a process capable of a much wider extension to human affairs in general?

science, as we know it now, gathers prestige as its scope extends, and as the need for experimental teamwork and rapid interchanges increases, it seems to be losing much of its early immunity from interference and perversion. it does not hold power but it creates it now in enormous volume. it has completely revolutionised war, but it has not abolished it. a hundred years ago and scientific research was still mainly a free private activity and science could get along as. that, now it cannot do so. now it is open and exposed and continually more vulnerable, and every salesman in the world is trying to attach it and profit by it. but he still finds a difficulty in its essentially protean quality.

the attitude of militant germany to science is peculiarly interesting. the bulk of the german people has been disciplined to acquiescence for centuries. that rebellious factor which breaks out in new discoveries and creative inventions has been well nigh drilled out of them. on the other hand, as part of their disposition to subservience, they have a greater respect for scientific achievement than any other people, with the possible exception of the new russians. they want to capture it and make it their own. so that they will follow up and do more with suggestions and leading ideas that come to them from abroad than almost any other people the theory of national socialism, and especially its intense racialism, is pseudo-scientific. homo tewler var. germanicus is far less hostile on principle to knowledge and new ideas than are the pluto-christian democracies.

the group of adventurers, bored by inferiority, who, with such remarkable success, have been selling the world death by unending totalitarian var, and incidentally having a glorious time, have no use for the religious appeal. they find it a dead appeal. they get better results by producing pseudo-scientific generalisations. relativity is taboo in germany, possibly because hess and hitler, the joint authors of man kampf, were unfitted to understand it, and so were embittered by it, but mainly because its main exponent was a jew, it was, they declared, not “nordic.” and in the place of it we were presented with genuine “nordic” physics. in hess–hitler-land nordic archaeology, nordic biology and so forth are replacing real archaeology, real biology, etc. in russia the left priesthood of communism is attempting a similar strangulation of intellectual life by selling cheap substitutes. prolet-art, we hear of, and proletarian chemistry. and a biological worker finds himself driven into exile, to avoid a harsher fate, because “darwinism” is represented as infringing in some way upon that sacred mystery, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

so far from extending itself into the realms of government and general creative direction, science as such may be already shrinking back into a subservient position. the continuance of the present scientific process is by no means secure from without or from within. we have seen it assailed and appropriated from without. within, the specialist, with the mentality of a greek slave, develops an increasing hostility to the irritating, autocratic-spirited outsider who exasperates him by the broader sweep of his views. he will extinguish him if he can. he will block his interrogative intervention in research organisation. he will take refuge under the wing of authority. the doors of the royal society in the days when it was dominated by free-thinking, free-speaking gentlemen have stood open to disturbing ideas, but with the increase in specialisation, there is an increasing disposition for the new sort of scientific worker to appropriate and canalise for hit own satisfaction the prestige accumulated by the old.

plainly science as we know it and so far as it is represented by societies, endowments, chairs, honours, titles, museum collections and the like, can be subjugated and replaced by a parody of itself, and it holds out little promise in itself of fresh and vigorous initiatives in the present human riddle. but the question takes on an entirely different complexion if it is realised that, as i have already been hinting, what we call science, with its bundle of “ologies”, is merely the first harvest of a much wider system of mental motivations which still remains protean, elusive, in the face of systematic opposition, and capable now of rapid destructive processes among our staggering and obsolescent institutions, destruction that will in itself lay bare the broader realities upon which alone world reconstruction can be based. or to put it in other phrases, there is reason to hope that that same proteus of insubordination which liberated science, may give us — not a further extension of science and fresh “ologies”, but something greater, a kindred thing, para-science, the next stage of human liberation, world understanding and world revolution, the dawn of sapiens.

this new thrust of the rebellious proteus may be expected to seek and find its own implements and methods in the replacement of the world muddle of homo tewler by the awakening will of sapiens. one thing towards which it is moving even now is the renascence of law upon a world scale. like medical practice, the legal organisation has been corrupted by the protective professionalism of the old order of things, yet law, even bad, old-fashioned law, rigidly enforced, is an instrument for liberty. the man under law is a man protected from arbitrary violence; he knows clearly beforehand what he may do and what he may not do, and the advance of freedom wherever it has existed in the world has gone on concurrently with the declaration and maintenance of rights. even our edward albert and his evangeline struggled to express something they called their “rights” of the case, and it is a hopeful augury of revolution that there should be even now a formulated declaration of rights approved of by a growing number of intelligent and resentful people, and resisted, actively or passively, by every existing government on earth. for governing gangs and classes everywhere know what that declaration means for them. it offers a fundamental law for a touted and reciviiised world, into which their pomps and pretensions will be dissolved, and as the old order of things becomes more and more plainly an intolerable confusion of enslavement and frustration, it will be the sole means of uniting and implementing a thousand storms of resentment. what possible rival can it have? fraudulent imitations and falsifications may help the diffusion of its suggestions rather than binder its establishment. given only a few desperate men, sick with disgust at the tediums and pretences of the tewler life, and bored to fury by the vistas of aimless, incessant and finally suicidal bloodshed ahead of them, in which they personally can expect no gratification, and there is no reason now why they by the measure of any previous human experience should not put a new face upon reality very rapidly indeed. they need not be idealists nor devotees nor anything of that sort. if they belong to the school of mr f.‘s aunt in david copperfield it is enough. “i hate a fool,” said the old lady.

the collaboration of these exasperated men will find infinitely more powerful means of ousting old ideas by new ones than any previous revolutionaries. the acts of the apostles were vocal, pedestrian and storm-tossed, and christianity seeped and changed about the roman world through a long and confusing adolescence and was one thing here and another there; it took centuries to penetrate the countryside (pagani) or reach the frontiers; even the marxist propaganda was an affair of books, periodicals, smuggled leaflets, slogans, small lecturing nuclei; but modern mechanism now, as it has developed in the last third of a century, gives all that is needed for a simultaneous diffusion of the same essential ideas and the immediate correction of differences, from end to end of the earth. even an opposition suggestion spreads at lightning speed, as the german propaganda shows, and quite a small number of men in earnest and in unison could wrench the whole world into acquiescence with a unifying fundamental law.

and when we think of reconditioning the mind of mankind, we need not be dismayed by a vision of ill-lit stuffy classrooms and millions of half-trained teachers struggling with blackboard and tattered text-book to “teach” scores of millions of children. in a world of plenty all that will be different, and modern apparatus — radio, screen, gramophone and the like — affords the possibility of an enormous economy of teaching ability. one skilful teacher or demonstrator can teach from pole to pole, just as toscanini can conduct brahms for all the world to hear, and at the same time go on record for our children’s children. all this “canned teaching” will provoke mr chamble pewter’s rich sense of humour. i doubt if that will deter those angry rebels who have got their hands upon the levers, and are determined to let the children see and hear and know and hope. not in any mood of love or that sort of thing, but because they hate the pomp and glories of incapable authority.

and hard upon the revolt in teaching and the sweeping — away of the irritating private localised and nationalised controls of universal interests, may come the establishment of a great framework of ordered and recorded knowledge throughout the world. at present such encyclopaedias as our world possesses are in the hands of unscrupulous salesmen, they are a century and a half antiquated and blinkered in outlook, but the facilities afforded by microphotography, modern methods of multiplication, modern methods of documentation, open up the clear possibility of putting all the knowledge in the world, brought right up to date, within easy reach of every man everywhere on earth, within a couple of days. that is no fantastic dream; it is a plain and calculable enterprise now to throw that net of living consciousness over all our planet. (here in the most untimely fashion edward albert tewler intervenes with raucous screams of “bawls! i tell you. bawls.”) once the new plant has struck root it will be very difficult to be#t it down again. it will give far more satisfaction to the elementary needs of homo tewler than the old stuff, which was not only inadequate and frustrating but humiliating. it will be like horse-radish, which grows again from any torn shred wherever it has once been grown.

it may be that we want a new word for a system of knowledge-distribution that alms only to inform and put everything that is known within the reach of every individual man, mr h.d. jennings white would sweep away the word “education” altogether, as a tainted word, and have us talk of eutrophy, good nourishment of body and mind, and then let free men decide. a eutrophic world from which priest and pedagogue have been swept as unnecessary evils is quite within the range of human possibility.

moreover, when we canvass the possibilities of a break towards the light and “sapiens”, there is another important factor in the process of mental liberation that must be brought into our accounting, and that is revolt from within. these tewler priesthoods, the more they dominate, the more they must awaken the spirit of insubordination in those whose role is mainly acquiescence.

the catholic priesthood has never sat lightly and easily upon the lives of common men, and wherever the level of education has risen to a general elementary literacy, there has been revolt. catholicism has produced the bloodiest revolts in history. wherever the catholic church has been in complete control of education, the final outcome has been a revolution at once bloodthirsty and blasphemous. the lands have risen in a state of infuriated ingratitude to hunt priests and desecrate and burn churches. mrs nesta webster ascribes this to the direct activity of satan, and possibly she is right. perhaps he does not exert himself so much in protestant and pagan countries because they can be considered damned already. but this reaction has been so invariable in the past, it has occurred in so many countries, that it seems for instance a fairly safe bet that in quite a short time the faithful in ireland, bored to death by a too intimate control of their minds, their morals and their economic life, may be shooting their priests exactly as they used to shoot their landlords, and through practically the same wholesome exasperation of their inferiority complex.

but it seems probable that this lack of submissiveness is not peculiar to the flock. the shepherds also must feel the stirring of satan in their souls. much of this is hidden from the enquiring outsider. what his fellow-cardinals think of the encyclicals of the current pope, for instance, is wrapped in the darkness of their discretion, but up and down the body of the church there is and always has been a certain restiveness, and in this time of universal mental stress there is likely to be more. the chief critical attacks that have strained and broken the solidarity of the great imposition in the past have come from churchmen.

even in the days before constantine the great, when a definite credo became a plain necessity to substantiate the bargain between church and state, christian controversy was chiefly internecine. there was no definite arraignment of the new teaching from any of the philosophical teachers of the schools of alexandria or the university of athens, in spite of the provocative snarls of such christians as tertullian. they did not think that there was anything in christianity worthy of argument. down the ages the typical source of trouble has been the undistinguished man within the church reading the scriptures and irritated by the assumptions and interferences of his superiors. he made trouble because he wanted to make trouble. and today now more than ever a collapse behind this formidable facade of catholicism is possible. the church may feel a chill of doubt about the future and take to professing liberal and democratic ideals, and that may liberate a number of smouldering recalcitrants grimly determined to make their ecclesiastical superiors mean what they say.

another thing that may weaken this still arrogant opposition to any release of sapiens may be a great social and monetary storm that will wash away its financial foundations. priests out of work can forget their sacred calling and authority with remarkable rapidity. they are, as a class, soft-handed and sedentary, and it is possible that many of the younger ones may be interested and reconditioned for educational work. throughout the social fabric the work of the essential revolution is not a simple implacable conflict but rather a miscellaneous release and reorientation.

we are dealing here with a number of factors whose force and relative importance are practically incalculable. from them there may or may not emerge a federated world, a common fundamental law, an economically unified planet, an organised and properly implemented world education. but until homo tewler has got thus far in the balance and control of his incoherent resistances and egotisms, it is preposterous, it is ridiculous, to call him homo sapiens. that is simply flattering a disagreeable and suicidally backward animal to its own extermination.