Originally a comment on How his belief system drives him to do it, responding to a quotation from Chesterton.
G.K. Chesterton was a very engaging writer with a lovely prose style, but he was also a very shallow thinker who specialised in dressing up fallacies and bigoted prejudices in quaint costumes to make them seem attractive, and was very fond of clever syllogisms that were actually meaningless except to make him seem superior to everyone else around him. Examples?
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.
When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any.
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
Do you see his pattern? But even this I could live with if it wasn’t for his outright lying in order to defend his conservative political and religious beliefs. For instance:
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.
(Note: nice to see a man born in one of the wealthiest parts of London acknowledge all those contented peasants throughout history.)
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
(Note: this quote is especially galling because he was writing about the Book of Job.)
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
(Note: by this tortured reasoning, Chesterton convinces himself that a list of commandments that begins with “You shall have no other gods before me,” forbids all religious art, and forbids working on a certain day, is a liberal work. He also ignores that the Bible is full to the fucking brim with things forbidden. Just because the Top Ten List of Forbidden Things has only ten items, doesn’t mean that Leviticus doesn’t exist.)
Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.
[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.
(Note: this is about as cartoonish a straw man as you’ll ever see.)
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
(Note: this is an excellent example of Chesterton’s rhetorical style; write something outrageously, even obviously self-contradictory, and dress up the logical error as a witty verbal paradox!)
I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.
There are many more examples to choose from (Chesterton was quite prolific) but I think I’ve made my point…
A lot of writers I admire look up to Chesterton and I have to say I never really understood that. Many of the above quotes just remind of me of myself about five years ago: knowing you’re making a bad argument but trying to rationalize it anyway and cloak it in deepities.
“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”
Mistaking “impartiality” for “indifference” is the same as mistaking “disinterested” for “uninterested”. Seriously, there are people who think not knowing the proper meaning of words is clever?
Of course, few people are aware of what is in Leviticus, because Leviticus is one boring book! I re-read it a couple of years ago, and it is a terrible slog to get through. Most people stop after Noah’s ark, and then just start skimming a few marked passages that say what they like.
“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
Yeah! There’d just be people.
(Though I must admit a perverted liking for Lepanto and the Song Against Grocers…’God made the wicked grocer/ As a mystery and a sign/ That Men should shun the awful shops/ And go to inns to dine…’)
Wow, these are great lines for inane banter, especially for making fun of the ridiculous conservative position. You don’t even need to change the lines. They’re already caricatures.
Needs more puns, though. Definitely more puns. Like maybe:
So, basically, G. K. Chesterton was the Malcolm Gladwell of his era? ^^°
Ah, well. There’s a reason Chesterton’s fiction has better survived than his political writings. Also, nkrishna’s comment reminds me of what another controversial writer, Jorge Luis Borges (who was an avid reader of Chesterton), said about him: something about there being a deep undercurrent of pessimistic absurdism in GKC’s fantasy (and nearly-fantasy) tales, but that you could see the author steering resolutely toward optimism as if it was a matter of faith.
Or maybe:
Oscar Wilde could pull it off (though only with apparent contradictions). Maybe it’s just that this strategy can only work for someone who a) knows the difference between cliché and wit, and/or b) is part of the gadfly Left instead of the self-satisfied authoritarian Right.
See, he’s just has go all the way with the inanity. He’s so close!
Irène – ha! And yes.
This is actually a true- or true-ish- statement. Nearly all reforms produce a series of amendments and corrections before an acceptable situation is found. That isn’t an argument against reform but an argument for continual examination and reform.
He sounds like the Sphinx from Mystery Men:
Chesterton was good at superficial non sequiturs.
Chesterton put the trite in contrite.
ajb47: that comparison is an insult to Mystery Men. You will not that the quote you cite is more reality-based than any of the Chesterton quotes — at least it was referring to REAL things like balance and fighting.
Oscar Wilde could pull it off…
That’s because Oscar Wilde was a lot more honest and a lot more in touch with reality than Chesterton. And that, in turn, is probably because Oscar Wilde wasn’t PAID to be an obscurantist anti-rational git.
Wilde vs Chesterton? Give me Wilde any day.
I don’t think GKC could have said “I can resist anythin except temptation”. Too theologically dangerous.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Mystery Men.
I think some people might be curious about the good work he did if this is the bad. You’d have to be utterly humorless to not recognize the line about atheism depending on God as an excellent joke. (Speaking as an atheist Chesterton fan.)
Huh. I think it’s more the other way around. I think you have to have a pretty defective sense of humor to find that throwaway line “an excellent joke.” It’s not funny at all, it’s just pointing out an unremarkable obvious.
It’s a nice joke in that it’s structurally elegant and thought-provoking. I don’t know whether or not it’s funny, though I did laugh when I read it, possibly simply because of the mischievous provocation of it.
Praising or condemning these one-liners is kind of futile without knowing their context, since a bit of glibness is tolerable when a writer has gotten carried away with his topic. I can’t find the source of that line, but it’s amusing because it can be taken either at a literal level as smugly presuming the existence of god, or rather as arguing that atheists are defined to some extent by the thing they reject, perhaps happily so. Even if god doesn’t exist, that would to some extent give the notion of Him a kind of stature.
Chesterton came to religion quite late, as a way of coping with depression or despair apparently. When he writes about Catholicism, he generally seems to be less preaching dogma than using religion to construct a fairly idiosyncratic value system, in the way that people do with art or with more conventionally secular morality. I don’t doubt his faith exactly, but I think the definition of faith is by no means clear.
Ah well “nice joke” is milder than “excellent joke” you know. Sure, it’s elegant enough, but it’s also obvious. It’s not all that thought-provoking, for the same reason and because it’s been said approximately 9 billion times by now (and it can’t have been new when Chesterton said it).