Learning to Love Our Neolithic Neighbours

By Joseph Pearce|February 3rd, 2023|Categories: Christianity, History, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors

Contempt of neighbour takes many forms. One such form is chronological snobbery, in which we turn up our supercilious “progressive” noses at our ancestors. The past is deemed as inferior to the present and the people of the past are ipso facto inferior to those who happen to be alive today.

Contempt of neighbour takes many forms. We can turn up our supercilious noses at our neighbours because of their skin colour or because of their poverty or simply because they do things differently or see things differently. The way in which globalists treat those in the poor parts of the world is a case in point. Aid is given on the condition that Africans abandon their “backward” ways and adopt the decadent ways of the rich.

Another form of quasi-racism is chronological snobbery in which we turn up our supercilious “progressive” noses at our ancestors. The past is deemed as inferior to the present and the people of the past are ipso facto inferior to those who happen to be alive today. Our ancestors can be dismissed contemptuously as bigots who have a moral perspective different from ours, the assumption being that we are obviously right and that they are in consequence obviously wrong. We are “enlightened” whereas our ancestors live in the “dark ages”.

This might puzzle those of us who consider Homer, Dante and Shakespeare to be superior to any twenty-first century authors, or who consider Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to be superior in wisdom to any contemporary philosophers; or, for that matter, those of us who see Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as superior to any contemporary composers, or Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael to be superior to contemporary artists. Such reactionary and retrogressive thinking will win no sympathy from the “progressive” elites who are calling for these very giants of the past to be “cancelled” from education and therefore from our collective memory.

The sort of chronological snobbery which dismisses the past as inherently inferior motivated H. G. Wells to write his bestselling Outline of History a century ago. Hilaire Belloc responded by writing a “companion” to Wells’ history which exposed Wells’ ignorance. At around the same time, G. K. Chesterton wrote The Everlasting Man, a response to Wells’ history, which exposes Wells’ arrogance.

In the opening chapter of Chesterton’s book, which is entitled “The Man in the Cave”, Chesterton challenged the supercilious assumptions which animate modern man’s attitude to his neolithic neighbours. Alluding to the way that the caveman is presumed to have been a bestial brute, he questioned the attitude which cast our ancient ancestor as some sort of ape man who would think nothing of cracking the skulls of countless wives when he got tired of them. Chesterton suggested that we should lay such prejudice to one side in order to look at the actual evidence to be found in the cave. He asked that we look at “the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club”:

[I]t will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what the real evidence is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard’s Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs.

On the contrary, what was found in the cave, adorning the walls, was art. “They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist.” (Perhaps it should be noted that we need to look much closer to home to find real caves containing cracked skulls and the skeletons of the slaughtered. We will find such caves on the sites of Nazi concentration camps, or Soviet gulags, or Cambodian killing fields, or, even closer to home, in the biological waste bins outside hospitals and abortion mills. Perhaps our “progressive” friends should consider the plank in their own eye before presuming to see a mote in the eye of their “primitive” neighbours.)

In insisting that we look at the facts and nothing but the facts in order to arrive at the truth and nothing but the truth, Chesterton exposes the prejudice and presumption of “progressivism” and espouses a love of neighbour which is unknown to the quasi-racists who feel themselves to be superior to their ancestors. “The brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of the ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.”

Going further, Chesterton questioned whether the cave man was really a cave man, in the sense that he lived in a cave. If he lived in homes made of wood or some other perishable material, no evidence would remain. All that’s left is the surviving evidence to be found in remote places impervious to the elements and the ruins of time. All that remains is the evidence in the cave, which might merely have been the artist’s studio or the art museum and not necessarily the dwelling place of our not so remote ancestors:

The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in the caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground.

Insisting that we need to understand our neolithic neighbours as being remarkably similar to ourselves, Chesterton contended that “every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone”. He was and is a “creature truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature”.

We can only learn to love our fellow men if we are prepared to treat them as our equals. We need to look them in the eye and see them as brothers. We cannot take the “progressive” quasi-racist approach of seeing ourselves as Nietzschean Übermenschen and our neighbours as Untermenschen. Mindful, as Chesterton reminds us, that “art is the signature of man”, we should see our signature on the walls of the cave as much as we see it on the walls of the art museum. We and our neolithic neighbours are one. We are one people under God.

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The featured image is “Stone Age. Detail 1” (between 1882 and 1885) by Viktor Vasnetsov, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.