Rudyard Kipling is another of my favorite authors. If you haven’t read Kim or Just So Stories you have a real treat coming (The Cat that Walked by Himself). More seriously, today I was thinking about what it means for something to be inevitable – odd what some folks will waste their time doing – and I was reminded of Kipling.
Some background… In school I was offered the opportunity to practice my penmanship by copying text onto specially formatted paper.
The text consisted of short maxims extolling virtues and the teachings of the Christian God. I didn’t know it then, but those lines of text were the evolution of the copybook headings of the eighteenth century. They were sayings like: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, or “You reap what you sow”. There were many others but I don’t specifically remember them, so I guess that as a child I didn’t pay close enough attention to them. I probably needed to copy them a few more hundred times. Actually, I was much more concerned with keeping my cartridge pen from blotting the paper, or smearing the not yet dry ink with my hand. Ball point pens were not allowed until 6th grade and pencils were for scratch work only.
Back to Kipling… Just after the First World War, he wrote a wonderful poem about the inevitability of more than just increasing entropy, gravity, electric charge repulsion, death, and taxes.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
This was written nearly a century ago, and in my mind it plays well today – interesting. I strongly suspect that a living generation of Americans is going to learn these lessons first hand. While I don’t expect it will be so, humans living a nasty, brutal, and short life would certainly rhyme pretty well with history.