"Mencken, HI - Homo Neanderthalensis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mencken H L)

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