Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PDF Archaeology Cultural Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia Robin Coningham Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Archaeology Cultural Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia Robin Coningham Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Archaeology Cultural Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia Robin Coningham Ebook Full Chapter
https://textbookfull.com/product/climate-refugees-in-south-asia-
protection-under-international-legal-standards-and-state-
practices-in-south-asia-stellina-jolly/
https://textbookfull.com/product/transforming-heritage-practice-
in-the-21st-century-contributions-from-community-archaeology-
john-h-jameson/
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
https://textbookfull.com/product/gods-heroes-and-their-story-
tellers-intangible-cultural-heritage-of-south-india-1st-edition-
v-hari-saravanan/
https://textbookfull.com/product/culture-conflict-and-the-
military-in-colonial-south-asia-first-south-asia-edition-gavin-
rand-editor-kaushik-roy-editor/
https://textbookfull.com/product/south-asia-in-world-history-1st-
edition-gilbert/
https://textbookfull.com/product/constitutional-foundings-in-
south-asia-kevin-yl-tan/
https://textbookfull.com/product/lead-in-glassy-materials-in-
cultural-heritage-1st-edition-bouquillon/
Archaeology, Cultural
Heritage Protection and
Community Engagement
in South Asia
Edited by
Robin Coningham
Nick Lewer
Archaeology, Cultural Heritage Protection and
Community Engagement in South Asia
Robin Coningham · Nick Lewer
Editors
Archaeology, Cultural
Heritage Protection
and Community
Engagement
in South Asia
Editors
Robin Coningham Nick Lewer
Durham University Coral Associates Ltd
Durham, UK Skipton, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019
Chapters 1, 5 and 12 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further
details see license information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
Preface
v
vi Preface
1 Introduction 1
Robin Coningham and Nick Lewer
vii
viii Contents
12 Conclusion 165
Robin Coningham and Nick Lewer
Index 187
Notes on Contributors
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Harmony (2015) and Justice and Statecraft (2017). His research inter-
ests are Buddhism, Politics, Ethics and Violence.
Zahra Hussain is an architect and cultural geographer based in
Pakistan. Her research focuses on architecture and sustainable develop-
ment particularly in the Mountain Communities of Northern Pakistan.
She leads the Laajverd Visiting School Program that is invested in doc-
umenting, preserving and incorporating local architectural pattern lan-
guage in contemporary mountain architecture.
Shahnaj Husne Jahan is Professor of Archaeology and the Director
of the Center for Archaeological Studies at the University of Liberal
Arts Bangladesh. She has been excavating the archaeological site of
Bhitargarh in Bangladesh since 2008 and developed a blend of strategies
to stimulate public interest in archaeological heritage preservation and
management.
K. Krishnan is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of
Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at
the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, India. His publi-
cations are in the field of ceramic petrology, archaeometallurgy, ethnoar-
chaeological studies, South Asian Prehistory and early historic urbanism.
Ram Bahadur Kunwar is Chief Archaeological Officer in the
Government of Nepal’s Department of Archaeology. Head of the
Excavation Branch, he has led archaeological projects throughout Nepal,
lectures on Nepali history, culture and archaeology and has published
widely on these subjects. Mr. Kunwar represents the Government of
Nepal in the Japanese-Funds-in-Trust for UNESCO project within the
Greater Lumbini Area.
Anouk Lafortune-Bernard is a Ph.D. student affiliated to Durham
University’s UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Ethics and Practice
in Cultural Heritage. Her research focuses on the social and economic
impact of cultural heritage. She has done most of her research in South
Asia, including sites in Nepal, Sri Lanka and India.
Nick Lewer was Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the School
of Government and International Affairs, Durham University and is now
Director of Coral Associates Ltd. He has worked widely in South Asia
focusing on community engagement, dialogue processes, education and
project monitoring and evaluation.
Notes on Contributors xi
Fig. 1.1 Map showing the location of South Asian case studies 4
Fig. 2.1 Plan of the archaeological site of Bhitargarh 23
Fig. 2.2 Excavations demonstrating the presence of archaeological
monuments within gardens at Bhitagarh 26
Fig. 2.3 Performance of Satya Pirer Gan during the Bhitargarh Festival 29
Fig. 3.1 The Bindu Sarovar at Sidhpur 39
Fig. 3.2 Replica of the Rudra Mahalaya Temple’s Kirti Torana
at the Bindu Sarovar Museum 40
Fig. 3.3 The Bindu Sarovar Museum 41
Fig. 4.1 Plan of the archaeological site of Kuragala 47
Fig. 4.2 The Muslim ‘Torana’ beside the rock-cut steps to Kuragala 49
Fig. 4.3 The Department of Archaeology’s signboard at Kuragala 51
Fig. 5.1 Map of key heritage and archaeology sites within
the Greater Lumbini Area 62
Fig. 5.2 Plan of the archaeological site of Dohani with geophysical
survey overlay 65
Fig. 5.3 Samai Mai Shrine at Dohani archaeological site 70
Fig. 6.1 Medieval city of Lo Manthang with its earthen wall 81
Fig. 6.2 Abandoned truck next to chortens (stupas) outside
Lo Manthang 83
Fig. 6.3 Community engagement and reconstruction activities at
Lo Manthang 86
Fig. 7.1 Mahadevi Temple at Lumbini, birthplace of Lord Buddha 97
Fig. 7.2 Industrial plant near Lumbini 98
Fig. 8.1 Map of the Gojal Valley 106
Fig. 8.2 LVS tea session with women 112
xiii
xiv List of Figures
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
R. Coningham (*)
Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: r.a.e.coningham@durham.ac.uk
N. Lewer
Coral Associates Ltd, North Yorkshire, UK
e-mail: nick.lewer@coralassociates.org
1.1 Introduction: Context
Home to one-third of the world’s human population, South Asia has a
corresponding richness of cultural heritage with 44 properties inscribed
on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and thousands of protected national
properties. Although strikingly rich, South Asia’s cultural heritage is a
non-renewable resource and there have been a series of tragic, high pro-
file events, which have irreversibly damaged that heritage.
Less visible within media reports is the equally concerning widespread
grassroots destruction of South Asia’s heritage monuments, cityscapes
and landscapes caused by increasing pressure from agriculture intensifi-
cation and resource extraction as well as the spread of modern urbaniza-
tion, industrialization and investment in mega-infrastructure. The balance
between heritage and development has been successfully reached at a
number of sites but this is not always the case and there are many exam-
ples of irreversible damage. These range from the impact of the Orange
Metro Line along Lahore’s Grand Trunk Road in Pakistan and aspects
of the reconstruction of Kathmandu’s skyline after the 2015 Gorkha
Earthquake (Coningham et al. 2018) to the recognition that over 50%
of Buddhist sites in Pakistan’s Charsadda District have been damaged
by illegal digging as have two thirds of Buddhist archaeological sites in
Anuradhapura District in Sri Lanka (Coningham and Young 2015: 96).
Motivated by this context, over 180 experts and professionals from a
wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, conservation, architec-
ture, heritage management, development, planning and economics from
across South Asia and beyond along with local stakeholders, including
community members, site managers, army, police and policymakers met
in Kathmandu at the Heritage at Risk 2017: Pathways to the Protection
and Rehabilitation of Cultural Heritage in South Asia between 4th and
7th September 2017 to discuss contemporary issues of the protection of
heritage during natural disaster and conflicts, but also accelerated devel-
opment. The event was sponsored by the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council’s Global Challenges Research Fund (AHRC-GCRF-
AH/P005993/1), with support from UNESCO Kathmandu, ICOMOS
(Nepal) and the Department of Archaeology (Government of Nepal).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
1.2 Approaches
There is a causal relationship between heritage, local people and their
well-being. As a result of this bond, local communities and indigenous
peoples are often committed custodians of World Heritage sites, where
they play an important, and sometimes overlooked, role in the stewardship
of the biocultural diversity of their environments. (Brown and Hay-Edie
2014: 5)
4 R. CONINGHAM AND N. LEWER
Fig. 1.1 Map showing the location of South Asian case studies
might we help them achieve this?’. The balance between site protection
and community needs and interests can give rise to tensions. For exam-
ple, when sites may be linked to community agricultural livelihood or
religious practice, or when funding objectives and priorities do not mesh
with community needs and perceptions of site importance, or when the
local community has no connection with the culture of the site to be
protected and sees it only as a resource.
1.3 Issues and Themes
We have identified the following conceptual and operational issues, ques-
tions and themes which inform the backdrop to this book.
1.3.1 Terminology
The terminology associated with this subject is wide, and definitions of
community engagement vary depending on context. These include:
• Surveys and mapping to understand the social fabric and social cap-
ital in a local community associated with an archaeological site. This
includes categorizing community identity groups and key stake-
holders and analysing the relationships between them for connec-
tors and dividers;
• Identifying outside stakeholders (regional, national and interna-
tional) and mapping their relationships and interests in the archae-
ological site as well as assessing resources and capacities they might
have;
• Constructing a framework of community engagement to ascertain
who might be involved, and how, in the maintenance and protec-
tion of a site.
1.5 Book Content
Chapter 2 is written by Shahnaj Husne Jahan, who explores Bangladesh’s
national cultural heritage and then takes Bhitargarh as a case study to
present how micro-heritage tourism can become an effective tool to
improve social benefits and participation for the protection and safe-
guarding of the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Her chapter will illus-
trate strategies for community-based outreach programmes to promote
sustainable tourism as well as to stimulate public interest in micro-
heritage preservation and management for socio-economic development
of the community. To achieve a balance between income-generation,
sound management of heritage and community involvement in heritage
tourism, the collaboration of all stakeholders is paramount.
In Chapter 3, K. Krishnan and Vrushab Mahesh focus on the design
and development of the Bindu Sarovar Museum at Sidhpur in the Indian
State of Gurarat. A sristhal or pious place, Sidhpur is considered one
of the holiest Hindu sites to perform shradha or post-funerary rites for
1 INTRODUCTION 11
References
Albert, M. T., Richon, N., Viñals, M. J., & Whitcomb, A. (Eds.). (2012).
Community Development Through World Heritage. World Heritage Papers No.
31. Paris: UNESCO. http://whc.unesco.org/en/series/31.
Brown, J., & Hay-Edie, T. (2014). Engaging Local Communities in Stewardship
of World Heritage: A Methodology Based on the COMPACT Experience. World
Heritage Papers No. 40. Paris: UNESCO.
Burkey, B. (1993). People First: A Guide to Self-Reliant Participatory Rural
Development. London: Zed Books.
Carman, J. (2000). Theorising a Realm of Practice? Introducing Archaeological
Heritage Management as a Research Field. International Journal of Heritage
Studies, 6(4), 303–308.
Chambers, R. (1997). Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London:
Intermediate Technology Publications.
Coningham, R. A. E., Acharya, K. P., Davis, C. E., Weise, K., Kunwar, R. B.,
& Simpson, I. A. (2018). Look Down, Not Up: Protecting the Post-disaster
Subsurface Heritage of the Kathmandu Valley’s UNESCO World Heritage
Site. In L. A. Bracken, H. Ruszczyk, & T. Robinson (Eds.), Evolving
Narratives of Hazard and Risk: The Gorkha Earthquake, Nepal, 2015 (pp.
159–181). London: Palgrave.
Coningham, R. A. E., & Young, R. L. (2015). The Archaeology of South Asia:
From the Indus to Asoka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14 R. CONINGHAM AND N. LEWER
Cooke, B., & Kothari, U. (Eds.). (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny?
London: Zed Books.
Crooke, E. (2010). The Politics of Community Heritage: Motivations, Authority
and Control. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2), 6–29.
Getty Conservation Institute. (2009). Conserving Heritage In East Asian Cities:
Planning For Continuity and Change. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation
Institute. http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/teach-
ing/management.html.
Global Heritage Fund. (2010). Saving Our Vanishing Heritage: Safeguarding
Endangered Cultural Heritage Sites in the Developing World. Palo Alto: Global
Heritage Fund.
Gould, P. (2016). On the Case: Method in Public and Community Archaeology.
Public Archaeology, 15(1), 5–22.
Gould, P. (2018, forthcoming). Empowering Communities Through Archaeology
and Heritage: The Role of Local Governance in Economic Development.
London: Bloomsbury.
Kothari, A., Camill, P., & Brown, J. (2013). Conservation as If People
Also Mattered: Policy and Practice of Community-Based Conservation.
Journal of Conservation and Society, 11(1), 1–15. http://www.conserva-
tionandsociety.org/article.asp?issn=0972-4923;year=2013;volume=11;is-
sue=1;spage=1;epage=15;aulast=Kothari.
Little, B., & Shackel, P. (Eds.). (2007). Archaeology as a Tool of Civic
Engagement. Lanham: AltaMira Press.
Moshenska, G., & Dhanjal, S. (Eds.). (2011). Community Archaeology: Themes,
Methods and Practices. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Oakley, P. (Ed.). (1991). Projects with People: The Practice of Participation in
Rural Development. Geneva: International Labour Office.
Perkin, C. (2010). Beyond the Rhetoric: Negotiating the Politics and Realising
the Potential of Community-Driven Heritage Engagement. International
Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2), 107–122.
Sapu, S. (2009). Community Participation in Heritage Conservation. In
Conserving Heritage in East Asian Cities: Planning For Continuity and
Change. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. http://www.getty.
edu/conservation/publications_resources/teaching/management.html.
Schmidt, P. (2017). Community-Based Heritage in Africa: Unveiling Local
Research and Development Initiatives. London: Routledge.
Schmidt, P., & Pikirayi, I. (Eds.). (2016). Community Archaeology and Heritage
in Africa: Decolonizing Practice. London: Routledge.
Silva, K., & Chapagain, N. (Eds.). (2013). Asian Heritage Management:
Concepts, Concerns and Prospects. London: Taylor and Francis.
Smith, L., & Waterton, E. (2009). Heritage, Communities, and Archaeology.
London: Duckworth.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their
church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March;
The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran
by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers
of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels
by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians,
Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be
permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic.
Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of
taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be
found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice.
The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice,
has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength,
and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of
manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts”
naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be [139]specified by
written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech.
Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every
man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are
international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of
preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea
Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed
to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were
almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial
fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An
islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a
common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would
hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as
the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next
morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful
breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-
rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler
Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his
ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their
winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman
adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the
primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received
their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously
abstained from purloining, or even [140]touching, any article of their
ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba
and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive
the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the
motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on
the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice
manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly
attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the
whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat
under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and
relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman
methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty.
They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but
refuse to submit to evident injustice.
[Contents]
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and
too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of
Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has
condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of
man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed
that “every nation makes its [143]gods the embodiments of its own
ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is
better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the
moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly
prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is
equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can
be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral
characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted
doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God
seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic
license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend.
The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the
omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human
nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture
nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a
voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with
every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The
God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate
share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma,
nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an
“unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The
most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the
supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic
Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the
cruel murder of a [144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The
doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments
and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of
predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by
their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous
act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an
eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of
immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the
eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even
children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no
doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants,
only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a
doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so
atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it
would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its
insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in
danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such
infamies to their creator.
[Contents]
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit
of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and
scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and
Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The
worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children
and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the
[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded
fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots
could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty
“sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to
himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-
Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the
Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent)
ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments
of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage
duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates,
and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that
power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian
citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no
place in that code of revealed ethics.
[Contents]
E.—REFORM.
[Contents]
CHAPTER XII.
TRUTH.
[Contents]
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments
of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the
theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are
wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming
influence of theological education. The baseness of the
“unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;”
and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral
characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of
theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child
like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose
propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the
dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian
civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically
pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as
persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities
[149]of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the
offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child
of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is
revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the
cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every
appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the
joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.
“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his
mother in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use
asking her to call [150]again and stay for supper? She could not help
seeing that we were tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult
her, you know.” “Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she
cannot believe?”
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize the
advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent
Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
“They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the
philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the
simplest countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction
from the language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to
appreciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,”
confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately
hinted that they could tell it every time.”
[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.
and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the
French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance,
and can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not only
of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their
Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the
absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of
reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a world-
renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic a
systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life
subverted the basis of physical health. [155]
says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture
of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the
world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian
dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into
disease or candor into hypocrisy.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires
still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of
Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many
of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental
abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign.
It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years
the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of
the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the
mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a
galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not
only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists,
astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide
historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an
inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days
of Horace and Pliny would [158]have been thought disgraceful to the
obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the
face of the entire Christian world.
[Contents]
E.—REFORM.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom
of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human
science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says,
“have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested