These few individuals fought back with courage and spirit, opposing "superstitution" with "rationalism" and "free thought" and "science." In one way or another, each had to suffer for his stand.
I offer here the history of one, "a small soldier in the cause of free enquiry" - his description of himself. He was not from a wealthy family, but was poor, and a teacher of the best sort, whose passion had always been - and remained - to inspire the young into useful lives free from the tyrannies of ignorance, and ready always to follow any fact whithersoever it might lead.
He was in a small town, where public opinion was in total subjection to religion. He began to teach the children under his care the new "knowledge" - that all of humanity had descended from animals - and after reprimands, lost his job. The girl he had hoped to marry said she would stand by him, but succumbed to pressures from her family. He was sustained by his conscience, and taught himself carpentry, and with great difficulty - for most of the people of the town shunned him - earned a precarious living. After a time the priests made even this impossible. He had to leave his home town, and went to a big city, where his history was not known. He was able to get work as a carpenter. He accumulated a library offering the "new knowledge," works of free thought of all kinds, works of science, some to do with genetics, which was a field in which rapid advances were in fact being made. The library he offered to fellow spirits, particularly young people, of which there were far more in this city than there could be in a small place where "everybody knew everybody else." More than once, his library, his opinions, his fearless conversations with anyone who would listen, caused visitations from local religious representatives. Once his library was burned by local bigots. He had to move his home twice. He did not marry. He lived for sixty years in poverty and alone, sustained always by the belief that he was in the right, and that "the future will absolve me" and "I have stood for the truth."
This stand by him and a few other brave spirits who were open to the mental currents and discoveries of the time, some of them true and valuable, but generally sloganised by a derisive populace as "If you want to be a monkey no one is stopping you!" was in fact the beginning of a successful and widespread movement to destroy the stranglehold of this particularly destructive religion over large parts of Shikasta—in some places it had maintained an absolute tyranny for hundreds of years.
This man, in his old age, going to the shops, or sitting on a bench in the sun, would be harassed by children, and sometimes adults, shouting, "Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!" And he would smile at them, his back held very straight, his head up, fearless, sustained by Truth.
JOHOR: Agent 20, asked for a report, contributed this.
I am in a large city in the Isolated Northern Continent, with extremes of rich and poor. This is a living area, where tall buildings house innumerable people. All the men, and many of the women, leave during the day, to work. The poverty here is not of the extreme kind, a fight to eat and keep warm, but of the variety common in the affluent areas of Shikasta: a great deal of effort goes into maintaining a certain standard of living, which standard is arbitrarily dictated by the needs of the economy. Family life has broken down. Couples seldom stay together for long. The children, left to fend for themselves from an early age, and given little affection, form gangs, and soon become criminal. Much expert thought is given to this problem, and its solution is frequently announced to be a greater parental attention to the young. Exhortations to this effect are made by authority figures, but with little result.
An interesting aspect is that stories of idealised family life are continually shown on the various propaganda media, but these are from past epochs, and are hard to relate to the present day, yet they are very popular. The contrast between the warmth and responsibility shown by adults in these tales, and what can be observed every day, adds to the cynicism and alienation of the young.
It is of little use to approach these gangs of children - who of course very soon become young adults - as an individual. As an individual, my scope is limited.
To approach the adults, particularly the mothers, has better results, but it is often too late.
Sometimes I have wondered if among the many thousands of families crammed into these towering buildings, there is one with the moral energy or even the conviction to bring up their young as well as an animal would.
And I am not talking of the cruelty that is hidden here, physical and mental, inflicted even on infants, but of an indifference, a lack of interest.
I live in a room in an old house in a street adjacent to the acres of bare asphalt where the tall buildings are crowded. Rare indeed to find a garden, or trees, but my room, on the ground floor, overlooks a little patch of earth where some flowers grow. There are two trees, one smallish and one well grown.
The woman who has the room across the hall tends the flowers and keeps cats. Like many women she makes a great deal of pleasure and interest for herself out of very little.
A she-cat she took in one cold night gave birth to four kittens. She gave three away. The she-cat, already old, died. There was one cat left, a black-and-white female, pretty and engaging but stupid. I think she was even feebleminded. She slept nearly all the time, was timid, and kept herself indoors. When she came on heat, she mated with a large black cat who had made it clear to the other cats that this garden was his territory. The woman believed him to have a home, but fed him when he seemed hungry. She did not want him in her room, but when the female had her first litter of two kittens, a tabby male and a black female, the father asked to come in so persistently that she allowed him, and he would sit by the box where the family was, and call to the little mother cat, and sometimes lick the kittens.
The woman was intrigued by this paternal behaviour, and called me in to see it. We called the female cat his "wife" - with a smile, but sometimes the woman showed embarrassment, with a laugh that was shame for the human race.
The little black-and-white cat was a good mother as far as the feeding went. And she kept the kittens clean. But she seemed unable to instruct them in the use of a dirt box. It was the male cat who did that. He took them to the box, made them sit in it, and rewarded them with a male version of the "trill" that a female cat uses to encourage offspring. He would give a gruff purr that sounded humorous to us, and then lick the kittens.
He was not at all handsome. We believed him to be very old, since he was bony, with torn ears and a poor coat, in spite of the feeding he was getting in this new home, for that was what it had become. He was not importunate, or greedy. He would wait for our return from somewhere, and then, his yellow eyes on our face, like an equal, he asked with his demeanour to be let in.
As for food, he waited, sitting quietly to one side while his "wife" ate never much, but thoughtless of her kittens, as if she hardly noticed them crowded at the dish with her. When she was filled, she went at once to her box. The male cat waited until the kittens had finished, and then he came in and ate. Often there was not much left, but he did not ask for more. He licked the dish clean, sat with the kittens, or watched them curl up around each other, and crouched near them, on guard.