G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a Catholic writer and political commentator from the United Kingdom. Although far from a household name, he does have a rather notable cult following a specific subsection of the Christian right.

The Good

• He was a stern fighter against the imperialism his home nation was engaging in.
• He hated eugenics, even writing an entire book, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State specifically to bash the concept.
• He is viewed as the man who rekindled interest in Charles Dickens.
• He was a stern critic of free market capitalism.
• He called out the prohibitionist movement in the United States.

The Bad

• He opposed giving women the right to vote and allowing them to work outside the home.
• Although he disliked Adolf Hitler, that doesn't mean he didn't support fascists more frequently than anybody should. Specifically, he was known as a supporter of Mussolini, and his newspaper openly gave its endorsement to Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Antisemitism

See the main article on this topic: Antisemitism

Chesterton's history of antisemitism is something that has been documented by several people, although the exact nature of it is up for debate. Christopher Hitchens, writing in The Atlantic notes that it is unfair to call him an antisemite in the sense that it is understand today, but still does argue he comes too close for comfort on many such occasions, as did several of his buddies, specifically noting how often Chesterton seemed to link things he didn't agree with back to the Jews in one way or another:

Then at last we come to the sordid but inescapable question: Why did GKC feel the imperative to drape that drooping English squire in that cringing Jew? I could have done it in one blow, and simply said that Chesterton wrote and believed that Englishmen, if they wished to be “chosen” as public servants like Sir Rufus Isaacs, should agree to wear a different national dress and thus to signify their apartness. This was the direct ancestor of the Yellow Star, even if applied more selectively, and it made the same point: Jews were a foreign nation and should have a state of their own. GKC was more of a Christian Zionist than an anti-Semite, let alone an exterminationist or eliminationist one. Thus, one cannot quite place him in the Yellow Star camp as we have come to think of it.

But he and his fellow Distributists and other stray reactionaries did get themselves on the wrong side of the debate about Nazism. And they did so, furthermore, because of self-imposed blinders in their own view of matters ethnic and ideological and confessional. For instance, in search of a good taunt, Chesterton decided that the Protestant Reformation was originally Jewish! And that the concept of a “Chosen Race” came to us as a Jewish one; and, not content with this, that it also descended through Protestantism. Thus, through an obsession with the Covenant with Israel had come “the great Prussian illusion of pride, for which thousands of Jews have recently been rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes.” So that the laugh, here, comes at the expense of the Jews.

This occasionally resulted in Chesterton saying the strangest things possible. For example, one particular column from late in his life saw him claiming that Hitler's idea that "a people that is God’s favorite and guided by him in a sense which he does not guide other and lesser peoples" is one he got "from the Jews." One could make the case that he was merely attempting to be clever, saying an idea from a famous antisemite is of Jewish origin, however, this put together with all the countless examples of Chesterton attempting to dismiss things he disliked as Jewish certainly makes the charitable option feel a tad strange, to say the least.

Many claims of Chesterton being an antisemite come down to something similar to what was mentioned above. There is always a potential for a sympathetic light — The American Chesterton Society even spent an entire issue of their magazine, Gilbert, exploring what it could look like to defend Chesterton against these accusations — but the implication is still present and can leave modern readers uncomfortable, a point they even concede:

It is, in fact, even more complicated now because we have to try to discuss it from the opposite side of the event which is the flashpoint for all discussions of anti-Semitism: the Holocaust. In light of that event, we can be tempted to read things into what Chesterton said about the Jews that simply are not there. And our narrow perspective can prevent us altogether from seeing what really is there.

The FAQ page from the society regarding Chesterton's opinion on the Jewish population makes a similar point, writing:

Yet critics claim the real and more serious issue is Chesterton’s lament about “the Jewish Problem.” When read out of context, and in a post-Holocaust age, this sounds like something Hitler might have complained about. After all, Hitler offered his Final Solution to his perceived Jewish problem.

However, when writing about “the Jewish Problem” — better called “the Jewish question” — Chesterton wasn’t implying that the Jews were a problem, as Hitler believed, but that they had a problem, namely that they were a nation without a country. They lacked a homeland. And Chesterton wanted to help them solve that problem, which is why, with support from Jewish friends, he became an ardent Zionist.

Fence lover

One of the most famous things Chesterton wrote is what has become known as "Chesterton's Fence," an idea that American Chesterton Society says he first wrote in his book 1929 The Thing with the following quote:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

In practice, this is little more than "everything happens for a reason." Although one should obviously be cautious about engaging in reforms and understand why institutions were created, the job is not on us to understand why a fence was put up so much as it is on the fence to be justified in the first place. It's a shifting burden fallacy, where the critic is expected to both make the argument in favor of something and prove it wrong while the advocate has no such responsibility.

Although this is far from Chesterton's fault, many have misused this through giving examples of people mindlessly tearing down fences which Chesterton said wouldn't apply. One article, for example, notes the infamous Four Pests Campaign in Mao's China as an example of this being violated, but Chesterton specifically said he chose the fence example because it was human made, writing:

The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.

Given that ecosystems are not made by man, they can't be applied to this analogy.

Dead people should vote

Long before Donald Trump was warning about the non-existent issue of dead people voting for Joe Biden, Chesterton was writing in favor of allowing dead people to vote, saying that, at the end of the day, that is what tradition is. Specifically, he wrote:

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.

The issue at hand is that it is near impossible to figure out what those who are dead would think of the issues that face civilization today because, you know, they're dead. Those in the United States are all too familiar with the various debates about what the Founding Fathers would think about America today and what their thoughts on contemporary issues would be. To use one of the more contentious examples, if they would have supported gun control today is highly debated, with some saying they would and others saying they wouldn't. To use Chesterton's metaphor, attempting to give these men the right to vote on modern issues would result in them filling out a ballot that would be near impossible for us in the modern day to understand.

It should also be noted that, on occasion, traditions are based on objective falsehoods. An old wives' tale, for example, is "an often traditional belief that is not based on fact," and several of them have been proven wrong. Some of them, such as that you should "starve a fever," are actually rather counterproductive to what you're supposed to do and even possibly dangerous.

Orwell on Chesterton

The worst aspects of Chesterton are not something that can easily be found through his writings, instead one needs to take a step back and look at the big picture in order to figure out what kind of man he truly was. George Orwell did exactly that in his essay "Notes on Nationalism," where he wrote the following about the man in question:

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealization of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it – as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine – had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous over-estimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as ‘Lepanto’ or ‘The Ballad of Saint Barbara’, make ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

External links

• Works by and about G. K. Chesterton on Wikisource