THE SCHOOL FOR DICTATORS ·
25
PROFESSOR PICKUP
Would you do violence to human nature, Mr. Cynic? Please
don't forget that intellectual freedom has always been the privilege
of a restricted few, and presupposes a capacity for thought which the
masses will never possess. The masses can only receive their mental
nourishment in the form of pills, to be swallowed with their eyes shut.
THOMAS THE CYNIC
We are talking about two entirely different
things,
professor.
Education, even higher education, as has been amply demonstrated by
experience, is not in itself incompatible with servility. But let us not
stray too far from our subject. The point I wish to insist on now is
that education, even higher education, is not incompatible with cred–
ulity and superstition. I know a learned professor of mathematics who
trembles with fear
if
a black cat crosses his path on
his
way to the uni–
versity. In
his
case it is a reflex action which he cannot prevent and
laughs at as soon as the cat has disappeared. But the most dangerous
superstitions are the common ones which we do not even notice as
such. I would not be aware of many of them myself had they not
been pointed out to me by a friend of mine from Papua. He belonged
to one of the most backward tribes of Dutch New Guinea and was
sent by a missionary to a
De Propaganda Fide
college in Rome to
be emancipated from his native superstitions and given a Christian
education. He was, however, an ungrateful pupil. In spite of
his
lively intelligence, he never raised any objections to the religious
truths
of the Bible and the Church, and he seemed ripe to be sent
back to
his
tribe as a native missionary wl}en chance or Providence
willed it that one day, in the course of a visit to the Zoo of the Eternal
City,
his
eyes fell upon a magnificent old kangaroo. Now the kangaroo
was, and still is, the totemic animal of the tribe to which
this
young
man belonged, and
this
sudden confrontation with
his
sacred ancestor
in a foreign city produced an indescribable effect upon him. It was
impossible for
him
to doubt that a super-natural agency had been
at work. Obviously this was meant as a warning to him, to admonish
him
to remain faithful to his forebears. His Catholic masters, apply–
ing all the resources of Christian apologetics, sought to rescue their
young COJ:?.Vert from this reversion to superstition, but all their efforts
were
in
vain; and finally they had to show him the door of the sacred
college, where his presence had become a public scandal. Sad and
disconsolate, he wandered from city to city, and one day I met
him
by chance at the Zurich Zoo, where he was watching the kangaroos
in a state of great emotional excitement. We walked back to town
together, and in the course of conversation I revealed some vague
knowledge of the latest investigations of European anthropologists into
