Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture
Preface

Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937) is a great forgotten Australian. He was one of the world’s pioneering anatomists, an authority on human evolution, and a renowned, if controversial, amateur archaeologist/anthropologist. He wrote numerous scholarly and popular works, founded a leading edge medical and social science school at University College of the University of London, and was made a fellow of the Royal Society and a knight of the realm. Yet today his name is virtually unknown in the land of his birth, partly no doubt because he lived most of his life in Britain – although he traveled widely and often revisited his homeland, not least significantly when he was hugely instrumental in setting up anthropology as an academic discipline in Australia.

Elliot Smith is worth remembering, and I hope that this little book will help in that respect. It is not a biography as such, but rather a history of the man and his ideas put in the context of his life and times, with the major focus on his much contested theory of the diffusion of culture, which put Egypt as the fountain-head of human civilization, the centre from which major elements of civilization were spread by the migration of peoples and ideas. I want to revisit his writings, robust and challenging, but always scientific in their methodology ; to see them in the light of contemporary events – such as the exciting archaeological discoveries of the early twentieth century and the catastrophic First World War – and to look at the way people reacted to his theories. I do not wish to put forward any hagiographical or total defence of his position; but at the same time I believe that some redressing of the intellectual balance is required. His diffusionist model may not have become – as it at one stage seemed to promise to become – the ruling paradigm in anthropology, but nor has it been conclusively refuted, despite being much ridiculed in some academic circles. Elliot Smith didn’t win his debate – although he contended to the end against such heavyweights as Bronislaw Malinowski that it was winnable. Rather than being refuted by systematic research, it is contendable that the discourses of anthropology and archaeology simply moved on to other issues and embraced other methodologies. Many central ideas raised by Elliot Smith and co-diffusionists such as W. J. Perry were essentially side-stepped and never really subjected to sustained scrutiny. Elliot Smith would have been the first to welcome such scrutiny. Scientific progress, he always said, was a matter of offering hypotheses and testing them rigorously, and he always professed himself more than willing to accept conclusions that contradicted his own suggestions. My overall message is that Elliot Smith’s prodigious labours and fertile ideas – so long unfairly caricatured and stereotyped in the ethnological literature – deserve considered reassessment.

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Arnold Toynbee
History and Religion

Arnold Toynbee’s views on religion were conditioned by his world historical theories, as expressed in his monumental Study of History. His religious faith intensified in later life after some traumatic life events (most notably the loss of a son through suicide and his divorce from his first wife Rosalind); and also after personal mystical experiences. The later volumes of his Study and other works from the 1950s were frankly more mystical than his earlier works. His opinions also became steadily more ecumenical in tone, ultimately embracing all major religions.

This can be illustrated from an examination of two works from the 1950s: An Historian’s Approach to Religion (1956) and Christianity Among the Religions of the World (1958). The first, short book was based on the Gifford lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh in 1952 and 1953. Toynbee was an inveterate giver of public lectures, as well as an incredibly productive (some think over-productive) writer. This dated from his more impecunious early days, and an enduring memory he had of his father’s financial difficulties. Toynbee himself achieved his brilliant University career only by winning scholarships, and he never afterwards missed an opportunity to earn money by giving public speeches and lectures (he toured the US many times basically to make some money) and by writing for newspapers and magazines. He never became financially secure until the brilliant success of D.C. Somervell’s abridgment of the first six volumes of the Study in 1946, and perhaps he was never really secure in his mind about his financial safety. He had an almost visceral anxiety about being poor.(This was a constant source of friction with Rosalind, who as a Carlilse aristocrat, whose family homes included Castle Howard, was – at least in her husband’s eyes – too spendthrift).

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Alec Vidler
On Christian Faith and Secular Despair

Born in Rye, Sussex, son of a shipping businessman, Alec Vidler ( 1899-1991)was educated at Sutton Valence School, Kent, read theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge (B.A. 1921),then trained for the Anglican ministry at Wells Theological College. He disliked Wells and transferred to the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, Cambridge, an Anglo-Catholic community of celibates, and was ordained priest in 1923. He retained a life-time affection for the celibate monkish life, never marrying but having a wide range of friends, including Malcolm Muggeridge, who was at Selwyn with him. Muggeridge’s father was a prominent Labourite and Vidler imbibed leftist sympathies in that circle. His first curacy was in Newcastle, working in the slums. He soon came to love his work with working class parishioners and was reluctantly transferred to St Aidan’s Birmingham, where he became involved in a celebrated stoush with the bishop E. W. Barnes, himself a controversialist of note. Vidler’s Anglo-Catholic approach to ritual clashed with Barnes’s evangelicalism. Vidler began a prolific career of publication in the 1920s and 30s. In 1931 he joined friends like Wilfred Ward at the Oratory House in Cambridge, steeping himself in religious history and theology, including that of Reinhold Niebuhr and “liberal Catholicism”. In 1939 Vidler became warden of St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden (founded by a legacy from Gladstone) and also editor of the leading Anglican journal Theology, which he ran until 1964, exerting considerable progressive influence across those years. He also facilitated a number of religious think-tanks in these, and later, years. In 1948 he was appointed canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where he set up “his own unofficial theological college, which comprised middle-aged ordination candidates known as ‘the Doves’, or, less charitably, ‘Vidler’s Vipers’”. In 1956 he was invited to become Dean of King’s College, Cambridge. He lectured in divinity and plunged into college life, attempting to combat the increasingly aggressive secularity of the student body: “The beard, the flashing eyes, the black shirt, the white tie, all bring Alec irresistibly to mind, striding along King’s Parade… In these last years he remained a doughty controversialist and one glimpsed the almost puckish spirit of someone who was never a respecter of persons”. He retired to Rye in 1967, leading an active life (mayor of Rye for some years), his beard and long habit making him a conspicuous figure. He died in 1991.

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Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
Pundit to Pilgrim

Today’s generation, I suppose, has largely forgotten Malcolm Muggeridge (although it should be said that there is a journal, The Gargoyle, dedicated to him, that a Muggeridge Society exists and that his religious writings flourish , especially in the United States). I remember him vividly as a TV pundit of the 1970s and 80s. His TV presence was compelling. He was pungent, scathing, mordant, sarcastic, sceptical, iconoclastic, curmudgeonly, but also capable of being totally charming, witty and cuttingly intelligent. His gnomic appearance – great domed head, bulbous nose, wide mouth – had a slightly clownish aspect. His voice was unmistakeable but how to describe it? Resonating, close to gravelly, absolutely clear enunciation, the voice of an orator or debater, and he endlessly orated and debated, as well as producing, in his own words, a torrent of words for publication. As obituarists remarked, he had an unerring capacity to puncture pomposity; and he spent his life ridiculing authority. He was a rabid critic of modern western civilization, of capitalism, materialism and moral vacuity, as also of all totalitarian regimes and ideologies, Fascist, Marxist, whatever. He is sometimes cited as a pungent social critic, but there is something missing. It is thoroughgoing social analysis. His judgments are often absurdly sweeping, often paradoxical and inconsistent. Take his book The Thirties, finished, appropriately enough, in an army training camp as the world readied for World War 2. It is a fascinating, readable and amusing book, with wonderful pen portraits of the politicians and public figures of the age. But almost everything and everyone is reduced finally to the absurd. As history (for which he professed contempt ) it is highly problematical, to say the least.

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