A Convivial Chap Led Easily Astray: On G. K. Chesterton

I was introduced to Chesterton by way of the perhaps unlikely combination of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, who jointly dedicated Good Omens to him, "a man who knew what was going on.". He's also Fiddler's Green, from Sandman -- down to the sword-cane, rotundity, paradoxes, and booming laugh.

I greatly enjoy The Man Who Was Thursday (I find that the denouement still works, if you've never read it), Orthodoxy, and some others, and he was my first exposure to distributism.

Oddly, I've always felt that he shared with Pratchett the pathological wittiness that makes him hard to read at length: he's so damn pithy every sentence that after a while I just overload.

Chesterton has experienced quite a revival over the past couple of decades. The is even a Chesterton Society devoted to honoring his legacy. Given his impact on the early 20th century, the bigger surprise is not the revival but the fact that he became so quickly forgotten in the first place.

I enjoy both his fiction and nonfiction. He introduced me to distributism, an economic system that I have become a strong advocate for. He had a lot to say about Catholicism that I have found very insightful.

Yet I have always known that he had his flaws. He was a blowhard, and he admitted as much. The charges of anti-Semitism need to be acknowledged. The writer Dawn Eden, who credits Chesterton in part with her conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, has recently been tweeting about how she has continued to wrestle with this aspect of Chesterton.

GK Chesterton was an absolute, sparkling genius, beloved by friends and enemies alike. Petty modern writers may huff all they want, but this will not change.

To me, the least interesting or useful thing a modern biography of a historical figure can do is audit the things they said in their time and decide which of them we would consider problematic today.

There are some very interesting quotations of his from his Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton), e.g.,:

> [My position] was always called Anti-Semitism; but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. ... my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter; and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more rational to call it Semitism.

and

> In the same place he proposed the thought experiment that Jews should be admitted to any role in English public life on condition that they must wear distinctively Middle Eastern garb, explaining that "The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land."

and finally

> In The Judaism of Hitler… Chesterton made much of the fact that the very notion of "a Chosen Race" was of Jewish origin, saying in The Crank: "If there is one outstanding quality in Hitlerism it is its Hebraism" and "the new Nordic Man has all the worst faults of the worst Jews: jealousy, greed, the mania of conspiracy, and above all, the belief in a Chosen Race."

Have I traveled back in time? I swear I saw this exact story and comments a day or so ago, but HN is telling me they're only a few hours old. Specifically it says OP is 3 hours old (including in a private tab on a different browser). Hitting the "past" link suggests it's 3 days old. Did someone s/days/hours/ somewhere?

Chesterton is mostly in the US public domain now (and wholly PD in death plus 70 regions), so we’ve got a decent selection of his work available for free at Standard Ebooks. I have a soft spot for The Club of Queer Trades if you’re looking for a recommendation.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/g-k-chesterton

All of the references scattered through the game "Deus Ex" lead me to buying "The Man Who Was Thursday" - they added a lot of colour to that game and provided hints to how the story was going to play out.

I read a page years ago mentioning in detail the enormous number of well-known 20th C figures inspired or called-to-action by Chesterton. Can't find it now, but this mentions a few -

https://thefinalprojectchesterton.wordpress.com/the-influenc...

Hitchcock, C.S. Lewis, Tolkein, Orwell, EF Schumacher etc. Maybe most remarkably, Chesterton's 1909 essay on Indian self-determination/nationalism gave Gandhi the idea of fighting for it himself.

I've never thought his fiction compared at all with his non-fiction. A bit like Werner Herzog in that way–they're so good, fascinating, skillful at interpreting the real world in their works, it's a shame when their skills are restricted to a made-up story. Yet people often act as if Stevenson only wrote fiction, or Nietzsche's best is Zarathustra, or Chesterton's best The Man Who Was Thursday!

(I've only read a small part of his huge output.. but) My favourite of his books maybe is Heretics, on some contemporary trends and errors of thought—Shaw, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, nihilism etc. It's just brilliant, and very funny, like most of his stuff, though more so. Endlessly re-readable. Also What's Wrong with the World. His Autobiography. Full of wonderful bits.

Most of his books are collections of his newspaper articles, some good, some amazingly good. All worth reading. All Things Considered, Alarms and Discursions, Come to Think of It, All is Grist etc.

There are a series of biographies, all of remarkable penetration. Stevenson, Shaw, Blake, St Francis, St Thomas etc. As if biography was his unique gift. He somehow gets inside his subjects to an astounding degree. Varied Types has about 15 short pieces on contemporary/recent figures, e.g. the first is on Charlotte Brontë.

I love the first half of Orthodoxy—before it (unsurprisingly) gets too Christiany. I find his usual brilliant arguments often turn into very lazy, stupid ones where his religion is the topic. But every writer has their blind spots.

An example of GKC being very funny while very serious: Even The Everlasting Man, about Jesus, has its moments of brilliance (from my atheist perspective). From its first chapter The Man in the Cave, about our prejudices vs what we actually know about early humans:

'So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, "Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him," the novelist's readers would be very disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large portraits of cows on the drawing-room wall.'

pre-WWII British literature is knee^h^h^h^helbow deep in casual antisemitism. Graham Greene, Stella Gibbons, John Buchan... they all got in on the act.

Of course, there were plenty of writers who didn't fall into this trap, but I grew up reading my Dad's knackered Penguin paperbacks and hit this kind of thing often enough to find it unsurprising if endlessly gross.

I don't really buy the whole "let astray" thing. Either Chesterton had rare penetration of thought, combined with half-witted bigotry that all his own, or you think he was so dim he couldn't identify stupid arguments put to him as an adult. You can't have credulous and analytic at the same time.

It's interesting to read some of Chesterton's more dated opinions in works like "What's Wrong With The World." Consider his take on feminism: one key fear was that a part of it was just a way to exploit more people in the workforce. He was, indeed, quite skeptical of "the workforce" generally, observing with wonder that never before had so many people been working for another man's business, dependent, instead of his own independent good. We see his remedy for many of these ills through his distributivist philosophy where he proposed "three acres and a cow" for every family. And in that, I do admire his passion, the strength of his convictions to support the good:

"I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed."

How well placed have these fears proven? Of what merit is his revolution? Many decades later, it's quite clear that if if you gave everyone who became an adult three acres in the middle of nowhere, most would sell them and move to the city, and even those who stayed behind would surely sell the cow. Working for others is what's normal now; seriously working your own land for staple foods almost unthinkable. In no doubt this was aided much by gains in productivity.

And women's equality, of course, is rightly feted. Yet surely this shadow he foresaw was quite real, and still afflicts us, as we complain bitterly of inequality. The little girl may still, from time to time at least, find her hair shaved to combat lice — not quite so much because she has a dirty home, but because her mother is not free and leisured. Indeed, she works two jobs, without a father, and rent within our cities is far too dear — though homeowners must share much of the blame with landlords, this time.

wow that is one clickbaity title, not gonna fall for it