This Simian World
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Clarence Day Jr. >> This Simian World
But one must reciprocate. For the maker of the Cosmos, as they see
him, wants noticing too; he is fond of the deference and attention
that simians pay him, and naturally he will be angry if it is
withheld;--or if he is not, it will be most magnanimous of him.
Hence prayers and hymns. Hence queer vague attempts at communing
with this noble kinsman.
To desire communion with gods is a lofty desire, but hard to attain
through an ignobly definite creed. Dealing with the highest, most
wordless states of being, the simians will attempt to conceive them
in material form. They will have beliefs, for example, as to the
furnishings and occupations in heaven. And why? Why, to help men
to have religious conceptions without themselves being seers,--which
in any true sense of "religious" is an impossible plan.
In their efforts to be concrete they will make their creeds amusingly
simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls
on Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first
pair? The Tree of Knowledge, of course. It appealed to the
curiosity of their nature, and who could control /that!/
And Satan in the Bible is distinctly a simian's devil. The snake, it
is known, is the animal monkeys most dread. Hence when men give their
devil a definite form they make him a snake. A race of super-chickens
would have pictured their devil a hawk.
XVII
What are the handicaps this race will have in building religions?
The greatest is this: they have such small psychic powers. The
over-activity of their minds will choke the birth of such powers,
or dull them. The race will be less in touch with Nature, some
day, than its dogs. It will substitute the compass for its once
innate sense of direction. It will lose its gifts of natural
intuition, premonition, and rest, by encouraging its use of the
mind to be cheaply incessant.
This lack of psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise;
for minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still,
can seldom or never be hushed to a warm inner peace.
One service these restless minds however will do: they eventually will
uncritically through the religions they themselves have invented.
But ages will be thrown away in repeating this process.
A simian creed will not be very hard thus to pierce. When forming
a religion, they will be in far too much haste, to wait to apply a
strict test to their holy men's visions. Furthermore they will
have so few visions, that any will awe them; so naturally they
will accept any vision as valid. Then their rapid and fertile
inventiveness will come into play, and spin the wildest creeds
from each vision living dust ever dreamed.
They will next expect everybody to believe whatever a few men have
seen, on the slippery ground that if you simply try believing it,
you will then feel it's true. Such religions are vicarious; their
prophets alone will see God, and the rest will be supposed to be
introduced to him by the prophets. These "believers" will have no
white insight at all of their own.
Now, a second-hand believer who is warmed at one remove--if at all
--by the breath of the spirit, will want to have exact definitions
in the beliefs he accepts. Not having had a vision to go by, he
needs plain commandments. He will always try to crystallize creeds.
And that, plainly, is fatal. For as time goes on, new and remoter
aspects of truth are discovered, which can seldom or never be fitted
into creeds that are changeless.
Over and over again, this will be the process: A spiritual
personality will be born; see new truth; and be killed. His new
truth not only will not fit into too rigid creeds, but whatever
false finality is in them it must contradict. So, the seer will
be killed.
His truth being mighty, however, it will kill the creeds too.
There will then be nothing left to believe in--except the dead seer.
For a few generations he may then be understandingly honored.
But his priests will feel that is not enough: he must be honored
uncritically: so uncritically that, whatever his message, it must
be deemed the Whole Truth. Some of his message they themselves will
have garbled; and it was not, at best, final; but still it will be
made into a fixed creed and given his name. Truth will be given his
name. All men who thereafter seek truth must find only his kind,
else they won't be his "followers." (To be his co-seekers won't do.)
Priests will always hate any new seers who seek further for truth.
Their feeling will be that their seer found it, and thus ended all
that. Just believe what he says. The job's over. No more truth
need be sought.
It's a comforting thing to believe cosmic search nicely settled.
Thus the mold will be hardened. So new truths, when they come, can
but break it. Then men will feel distraught and disillusioned, and
civilizations will fall.
Thus each cycle will run. So long as men interwine falsehoods with
every seer's visions, both perish, and every civilization that is
built on them must perish too.
XVIII
If men can ever learn to accept all their truths as not final, and if
they can ever learn to build on something better than dogma, they may
not be found saying, discouragedly, every once in so often, that every
civilization carries in it the seeds of decay. It will carry such
seeds with great certainty, though, when they're put there, by the
very race, too, that will later deplore the results. Why shouldn't
creeds totter when they are jerry-built creeds?
On stars where creeds come late in the life of a race; where they
spring from the riper, not cruder, reactions of spirit; where they
grow out of nobly developed psychic powers that have put their
possessors in tune with cosmic music; and where no cheap hallucinations
discredit their truths; they perhaps run a finer, more beautiful course
than the simians', and open the eyes of the soul to far loftier visions.
XIX
It has always been a serious matter for men when a civilization
decayed. But it may at some future day prove far more serious
still. Our hold on the planet is not absolute. Our descendants
may lose it.
Germs may do them out of it. A chestnut fungus springs up, defies
us, and kills all our chestnuts. The boll weevil very nearly baffles
us. The fly seems unconquerable. Only a strong civilization,
when such foes are about, can preserve us. And our present efforts
to cope with such beings are fumbling and slow.
We haven't the habit of candidly facing this danger. We read our
biological history but we don't take it in. We blandly assume we
were always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even
be considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance
certain religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe
in Easter should still believe this. For the facts are of course
this is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and
infirmity must be paid for in full.
If mankind ever is swept aside as a failure however, what a brilliant
and enterprising failure he at least will have been. I felt this
with a kind of warm suddenness only today, as I finished these
dreamings and drove through the gates of the park. I had been
shutting my modern surroundings out of my thoughts, so completely,
and living as it were in the wild world of ages ago, that when I
let myself come back suddenly to the twentieth century, and stare
at the park and the people, the change was tremendous. All around
me were the well-dressed descendants of primitive animals, whizzing
about in bright motors, past tall, soaring buildings. What gifted,
energetic achievers they suddenly seemed!
I thought of a photograph I had once seen, of a ship being torpedoed.
There it was, the huge, finely made structure, awash in the sea, with
tiny black spots hanging on to its side--crew and passengers. The
great ship, even while sinking, was so mighty, and those atoms so
helpless. Yet, it was those tiny beings that had created that ship.
They had planned it and built it and guided its bulk through the
waves. They had also invented a torpedo that could rend it asunder.
It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless
universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling
star: but even so--and all the more--what marvelous creatures we are!
What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is
a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians!
It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A
universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is--blind
or not--a good world to live in, a promising universe.
And if there are no other such accidents, if we stand alone, if all
the uncountable armies of planets are empty, or peopled by animals
only, with no keys to thought, then we have done something so mighty,
what may it not lead to! What powers may we not develop before the
Sun dies! We once thought we lived on God's footstool: it may be
a throne.
This is no world for pessimists. An amoeba on the beach, blind and
helpless, a mere bit of pulp,--that amoeba has grandsons today who
read Kant and play symphonies. Will those grandsons in turn have
descendants who will sail through the void, discover the foci of
forces, the means to control them, and learn how to marshal the
planets and grapple with space? Would it after all be any more
startling than our rise from the slime?
No sensible amoeba would have ever believed for a minute that any
of his most remote children would build and run dynamos. Few
sensible men of today stop to feel, in their hearts, that we live
in the very same world where that miracle happened.
This world, and our racial adventure, are magical still.
XX
Yet although for high-spirited marchers the march is sufficient,
there still is that other way of looking at it that we dare not
forget. Our adventure may satisfy /us:/ does it satisfy Nature?
She is letting us camp for awhile here among the wrecked graveyards
of mightier dynasties, not one of which met her tests. Their bones
are the message the epochs she murdered have left us: we have learned
to decipher their sickening warning at last.
Yes, and even if we are permitted to have a long reign, and are not
laid away with the failures, are we a success?
We need so much spiritual insight, and we have so little. Our
telescopes may some day disclose to us the hills of Arcturus, but
how will that help us if we cannot find the soul of the world? Is
that soul alive and loving? or cruel? or callous? or dead?
We have no sure vision. Hopes, guesses, beliefs--that is all.
There are sounds we are deaf to, there are strange sights invisible
to us. There are whole realms of splendor, it may be, of which
we are heedless; and which we are as blind to as ants to the call
of the sea.
Life is enormously flexible--look at all that we've done to our
dogs,--but we carry our hairy past with us wherever we go. The
wise St. Bernards and the selfish toy lap-dogs are brothers, and
some things are possible for them and others are not. So with us.
There are definite limits to simian civilizations, due in part to
some primitive traits that help keep us alive, and in part to the
mere fact that every being has to be something, and when one is a
simian one is not also everything else. Our main-springs are fixed,
and our principal traits are deep-rooted. We cannot now re-live
the ages whose imprint we bear.
We have but to look back on our past to have hope in our future:
but--it will be only /our/ future, not some other race's. We shall
win our own triumphs, yet know that they would have been different,
had we cared above all for creativeness, beauty, or love.
So we run about, busy and active, marooned on this star, always
violently struggling, yet with no clearly seen goal before us.
Men, animals, insects--what tribe of us asks any object, except
to keep trying to satisfy its own master appetite? If the ants
were earth's lords they would make no more use of their lordship
than to learn and enforce every possible method of foiling. Cats
would spend their span of life, say, trying new kinds of guile.
And we, who crave so much to know, crave so little but knowing.
Some of us wish to know Nature most; those are the scientists.
Others, the saints and philosophers, wish to know God. Both are
alike in their hearts, yes, in spite of their quarrels. Both
seek to assuage to no end, the old simian thirst.
If we wanted to /be/ Gods--but ah, can we grasp that ambition?