The melancholy protagonist of Ginger Nuts and Almonds in a time Political and Revolutionary Upheaval, the unloved and almost celibate venereologist Dr. Arrius Maguire has all these qualities, apart from a capacity for laughter: a strong capacity for reason, circumspection, and the application of forethought, together with a respect for tradition. For his years, he was remarkably wise, on one occasion saying, "As a venereologist he had learned that many things were more attractive than genitals and the persons connected to them."
The Maguires' confessor, Father Chrysostom, reinforces the novel's foremost protagonist with support for his views, emphasising that if our society is to progress in keeping with our traditions, even the most talented individuals must be willing to sacrifice themselves, but only for genuine improvements, not for the sake of glorifying an ideology like that of the Bolshevik ruffians, a destructive counterweight to cultural and moral values that are righteous and conserving. As a pioneer in biology and sociology has maintained, since the incidence of natural selection has fallen, from long before historical time, upon the community and its traditions far more than upon the individual, and since the conditions under which the possibilities of the individual can be even qualitatively realised have been rarely forthcoming, it is not surprising that the level of possibility for both society and the individual itself has not been raised. Indeed, only too often there has been reversed selection, and the exceptional man has suffered from his exceptional endowments. With the terror unleashed by the encroachments of the Bolshevik ruffians such a reversal is dangerously imminent.
The bourgeois individualists of Mr. Deane's curiously inspired novel value their traditions, whereby the amount of experience available to the developing race is not constituted merely by the isolated and limited experiences of its members, but by their sum, by the ancestors and cultures who have made invaluable bequests to them that they must treasure, providing a bulwark against the evils of Bolshevik ruffianism. More and more of the past becomes directly operative in the present; further and further into the future can the aim of the present extend. In opposition the Bolshevik ruffians prefer to start from Year Zero, pretending that nothing of value from the past should be conserved. While the bourgeois traditionalists can agree with the Bolshevik ruffians that science and research still has much to discover and invent they also know they have learned much from a record of experiment after experiment. From a period so short and so empirical as that through which humanity has already lived in civilised communities, with nearly all of them being overturned at intervals that rarely exceeded centuries, it is impossible to deduce any general law of progress, but the capacity to do so is being developed, largely because of the tool of language and the written word. At least the failed civilisations of the past have been able to pass down to their successors something of an explanation or theory for their upheavals.
