GKC On Journalism

When you read the following quotes, you will be compelled to declare Chesterton a genius...and you will be right.  You may also be tempted to declare how "far ahead of the times" he was in his perceptions.  Here you will be wrong.  You see, it's not that Chesterton anticipated what WOULD BE...he recognized and defined what already WAS.  

Though we are prone to think all of life is so very much worse than it has ever been, the fact is, human nature was human 50 years ago, 280 years ago, and 3000 years ago.  If Chesterton's words are still applicable today (and they are!), then it is not so much because he was prophetic as he was awake.  Men will be men in every age.  

Sorry...I'll quit now.  The point of the post was to share Chesterton's words, not mine!

We may concede that politicians have done something towards degrading journalism.  It was not entirely done by us, the journalists.  But most of it was.  It was mostly the fruit of our first and most natural sin -- the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather than priests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from his audience, while a priest is a part of his.  The conjurer despises his congregation; if the priest despises anyone, it must be himself.  The curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer than the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are even stupider.  Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.  Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is more or less conscious of the difference...But the people know in their hearts that journalism is a conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and falsifies.  Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts: if it loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise.  --GKC, All Things Considered

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions.  We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding.  We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding.  Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth.  That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational, and it is also some thousand times more common.  But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles.  Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet."  They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all.  They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved.  Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual.  However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority." --GKC, The Ball and the Cross

There is another case of the thing that I mean.  Why on earth do the newspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other political assassination, call it a "dastardly outrage" or a "cowardly outrage"?  It is perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least.  It is perfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians going to the lions.  The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of being torn in pieces by two thousand people.  What the thing is, is not cowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked.  The man who does it is very infamous and brave.  But, again, the explanation is that our modern press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything, rather than appeal to right and wrong."  --GKC, All Things Considered

Testosterone Required, Part 2

In light of Tuesday's post, I thought I'd share a little wisdom from G.K. Chesterton about men and competition:

"It may be said that in masculine sports and games, there is definite emulation and eclipse.  There is indeed emulation, but this is only an ardent sort of equality.  Games are competitive, because that is the only way of making them exciting.  If anyone doubts that men must forever return to the ideal of equality, it is only necessary to answer that there is such a thing as a handicap.  If men exulted in mere superiority, they would seek to see how far such superiority would go; they would be glad when one strong runner came in miles ahead of all the rest.  But what men like is not the triumph of superiors, but the struggle of equals; and therefore, they introduce even into their competitive sports an artificial equality."

Talking Politics With Chesterton

There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable - personal government and impersonal government.  If my anarchic friends will not have rules - they will have rulers.  Preferring personal government, with its tact and flexibility is called Royalism.  Preferring impersonal government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.  Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at least, I know no more philosophic word for it.  You can be guided by the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other, or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess.

From G.K. Chesterton's delightful work (and his BEST, in my opinion!):  What's Wrong With the World

Chesterton on Education

The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think it was some sort of magic chemistry...

So begin the musings of Gilbert Keith Chesterton on modern education. He concludes that education is a method of transferring truth, and not only can we not transfer that which we do not possess, but we must do so authoritatively, not timidly.

I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does not teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long division; only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk pudding to tarts. I am not sure I believe in the derivation (of the word 'education' from the Latin)...but I am much more certain that I do not agree with the doctrine. There is, indeed, in each living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the whole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him about...But you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end to the matter.

Under Petticoat Government

"Most men, if they spoke with any sincerity, would agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage, is not so much being emotional as being unemotional. There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in anger is 'noli me tangere' [don't touch me]."

Chesterton claims that some call this "coldness of Chloe" by the name of dignity and some modesty, but then, somewhat oddly to my thinking, he says this: "Since we are talking here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes for emancipation, that it is common for the 'advanced woman' to claim the right to wear trousers;...whether female liberty is much advanced by the act of wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know...BUT it is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. When men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts - the long, trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern."

The "wearing a skirt on each leg" cracks me up no matter how many times I read it! And he does have a point about the garb of governing, though I would suggest that other symbolic meanings might be more foundational to the wearing of "petticoats" by judges, pastors, etc.

Best of all, he doesn't espouse the idea that men are rational, women are emotional...although he implies that we are at our terrifying worst when we are unemotional. As a "modern" pants-wearing Betty, I'm not sure what I think about his connecting womanly dignity with skirt-wearing, but I am sure that it will occupy my thoughts until I convince myself that he's wrong...:-)

Woman's Great Ideals

Thrift and Dignity are the two ideals to which women tenaciously cling and that are most misunderstood by men. The one can be interpreted as stinginess and the other as suppression. So says the revered G.K. Chesterton.

"Thrift is the really romantic thing...thrift is poetic because it is creative." Men, he argues, are somewhat cavalier about throwing money around and away, but "many a good housekeeper plays the game [of thrift] every day with ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but because she is magnanimous...she wishes her creative mercy to be over all her works."

"Thrift is part of that great idea of the woman watching on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred."

Woman's other ideal, Dignity, is set over against man's Rowdiness. "The woman has a fixed and very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are very many polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either fascinating women or obeying them." :-)

We are the stingy kill-joys, Ladies, and Mr. C. says both are necessary for the healthy function of home and society.

The Emancipation of Domesticity

"There must be in every center of humanity one human being...who does not 'give her best' but gives her all."

In What's Wrong with the World, Chesterton expands on his view of the role of woman in society. He argues that the modern view which says women were kept at home in order to oppress them and keep them narrow is ridiculous. "On the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad." Woman must be a cook....a schoolmistress....a house-decorator....a dressmaker....but not a competitive cook, schoolmistress, house-decorator, or dressmaker.

He argues that the woman's presence in the home is essential because, "[she] is generally shut up in a house with a human being [her child] at the time when he asks all the questions that are. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world."

He admits the drudgery and difficulty of the job, but maintains that it is certainly NOT "colorless or of small import to the soul," and those who believe it to be so are not even worth arguing with! "To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labor and holidays; to be Whitely [the owner of the first general goods store in London] within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute."

More to come. I love this guy.

The Mistake About Woman

When GK Chesterton sets out to expose the folly of feminism, he bemoans the loss of The Universalist. He suggests that Man (as in males) must be narrowly focused - The Specialist - because of his duty to work and support a family:

"What makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. ...each has not merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters. The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is outstripped by engineers yet more electrical."

Woman, on the other hand, who has traditionally been The Univeralist - a Jill-of-all-trades, so to speak - in striving to be The Specialist and make her way in the world of business and commerce, is actually reducing her role rather than expanding it. He brilliantly illustrates his point:

"Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one specialty; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs.

The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with fire; about which the strangest modern views seem to have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.

Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten."

So it is with woman. She seeks to be a pencil sharpener instead of a knife...to serve a single purpose instead of a dozen. In seeking "equality" with men, we are choosing monomania and cleverness over comprehensive capacity and wisdom. The tragedy of becoming specialists is that a specialist is required to "give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man 'his best' is! If he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountian pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God."

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."