Bold Yet Sensible

Today, as in every day and age, there is no shortage of bold voices...just turn on talk radio...or any news network. What is often lacking in the loud exchange of ideas today is a dose of good common sense and depth of thought. The spirit of our day is tethered to political correctness and a hearty relativism...as long as the opinions expressed meet these two criteria and potentially evoke outrage in some quarter of society (preferably Christianity), then bring on the microphones, baby!

G.K. Chesterton was one of those bold voices in his era whose thoughts were simultaneously counter-culture, provocative, deep, logical and...mostly right! In his book, What's Wrong with the World, he critiques the culture that he sees emerging from the "zeitgeist" of his own day. As the book's title implies, he is decidedly unimpressed, primarily because he anticipates the consequences of these ideas.

Chesterton addresses the "Mistake About..." the Man, the Woman and the Child, bookended by sections titled "The Homelessness of Man" and "The Home of Man." Admittedly, there are moments when I don't understand Chesterton...I could attribute that to his superior intellect, or any number of deficiencies on my behalf, but quite frankly, I think maleness, coupled with a consumption of copious amounts of cigar smoke and beer in the public houses, are prerequisites for full understanding. Therefore, I will be content with a modest apprehension of his ideas!

In a chapter titled, Folly and Female Education, he writes:

"I am often solemnly asked what I think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new ideas about female education. There never has been even the vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong place. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football; boys have school-colors, why shouldn't girls have school-colors; boys go in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hundreds to day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford - in short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches - that is about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing at all....There is nothing but plodding, elaborate and elephantine imitation. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet there is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have not promoted among girls. It is all part of a silly subjugation; there must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is already a nuisance round the neck of a man."

When asked if he preferred to revert to the "elegant" female of the Victorian age, he replies, "Emphatically, yes. I am by no means sure that even in point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man."

Chesterton believed that the fight for woman's equality was really a destruction of true femininity, and extracted from society a delightful necessity...the universalist (which I'll explain in another post).

"That she may be a queen of life, she must not be a private soldier in it....The elegant female still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may be everything in the country...This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity."