What's Wrong With the World

"Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform."

I just finished reading three GK Chesterton books. It all started out quite harmlessly. I was reading too much Nietzsche & Bowden, and I was looking for an antidote. After-all anyone who declares “God is Dead”, and then goes absolutely mental and dies, like our dear friends Friedrich & Johnathan, must have some faults. And so I stumbled upon a Critique of the Nietzsche mind-virus in the form of one GK Chesterton.

I started out reading one of his classics, “Orthodoxy”, and upon finishing it felt compelled to read two more, “The Everlasting Man” & “What’s Wrong With the World”. It is from this latter book I wish to share some choice quotes as I find many an old thought to be just as relevant today as when they were originally uttered.

Let me start with the ending of this book which rings true even in today’s politics:

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader’s ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that the Socialist and the Capitalist are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other’s hands is not an everlasting coincidence. The Capitalist, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; the Socialist, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of anarchy. The Capitalist wants women-workers because they are cheaper; the Socialist calls the woman’s work “freedom to live her own life.” The Capitalist wants steady and obedient workmen, the Socialist preaches teetotalism—to workmen, not to the Capitalist—the Capitalist wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms against tyranny; the Socialist proves from Tolstoy that nobody must take arms against anything. The Capitalist is naturally a healthy and well-washed gentleman; the Socialist earnestly preaches the perfection of the Capitalist’s washing to people who can’t practice it. Above all, the Capitalist rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore the Socialist, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.

I do not know whether the partnership of the Socialist and the Capitalist is conscious or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man homeless. I only know I still meet him walking the streets in the gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his because he has never been in it.

On the Cult of the Future:

I shall not hesitate to maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age... Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.

On Oligarchy, Plutocracy & “Property”

…And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people... If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.

The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either blood or manners...

I am well aware that the word “property” has been defied in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s.

On Socialists & Conservatives

Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother, and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery, they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before. While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially the stings…

…The Conservative says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown; the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown at present there isn’t any family life to preserve. But the Socialist, in his turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether he would preserve the family life if there were any; or whether he will try to restore it where it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. The Conservative sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that do not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that do not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of them is the original ideal question, “Do you want to keep the family at all?” If the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family. He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a preference for the private house and a man for the public house. He must manage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does not mean soft and yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child who shall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea of independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for information and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any more in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur; and the Socialist must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying the family, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing up all children as the children of the state—like Oliver Twist …

… What chance have any of these ancient arts and functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman is out working and the man isn’t; and the child is forced by law to think his schoolmaster’s requirements more important than his mother’s? No, The Capitalist and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists who will give it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must “shell out,” as the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any Radical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdens much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation.

Chesterton certainly was a paradoxical writer, for he gives his snark to all sides on all issues, well ok, other than Catholics, he loves them. I highly recommend reading his books to give you a hot & new, yet old, take on the issues facing our modern world. Chesterton sucks you in on each page and he never relents on giving his view of modernity a solid verbal whipping. You can find his writings (and pretty much any book you ever imagined!) for free on this highly illegal Serbian book server, libgen.rs.

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