Tendentious

All right, I have calmed down after yesterday's NFL rant, and I am working on my next column already. Something about medieval Korea, giant turtles, and military technology.

I am reading G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, which my sister gave me a couple of years ago and has a fascinating section on caveman art.

It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone.

That is such a clear, striking passage, perfectly innocuous and reasonable in its time, but one which now would be very close to controversial.