Re: Egalitarianism?
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Originally Posted by Marulus
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G.K. Chesterton was one of the great apostles of egalitarianism, a thing he proudly enounced. While I agree with him in many other issues, in this one I don't. He may be excused though by the fact that he lived in England at times when social injustice there was at appalling levels. However, I think he mistook some level of social justice (which there must be) with egalitarianism, that is, with an almost metaphysical outlook that all people need to be absolutely equal in just about everything. Not in a Marxist sense, because he was not a Marxist.
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Here is an interesting critique of G.K. Chesterton by George Orwell in his essay, The Christian Reformers.Orwell discusses Chesterton's populism:
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Finally - and in a way this is the most interesting group - there are those who admit the injustice of present-day society and are ready for drastic changes but reject Socialism and, by implication, industrialism. As long ago as 1911 Hilaire Belloc wrote his very prescient book The Servile State, in which he foretold that capitalist society would soon degenerate into something resembling what afterwards came to be called Fascism.
Belloc's remedy was the splitting-up of large property and a return to a peasant proprietorship. Belloc's friend, G. K. Chesterton, made this idea the basis of a political movement which he called Distributism. Chesterton, a convert to Catholicism, had the mental background of a nineteenth *century radical, and his desire for a simpler form of society was combined with an almost mystical belief in democracy and the virtues of the common man.
His movement never gained a large following, and after his death a few of his disciples drifted into the British Union of Fascists, while others looked for a remedy in currency reform. Nevertheless, his doctrines reappear, essentially unchanged, in T. S. Eliot's idea of a Christian society." The significance of Chesterton is that he expresses in a simplified - indeed, a caricatured - form, certain tendencies that exist in every Christian reformer.
The specifically Christian virtues are likeliest to flourish in small com*munities, where life is simple and the family is a natural unit. Therefore the tug of Christian thought, even in those who admit the necessity for planning and centralised ownership, is always away from a highly com*plex, luxurious society, and towards the mediaeval village. Even a writer like Professor Macmurray, who can accept Russian Communism almost without reservations, wants people to live in what he calls `a workaday world', where life will not be too easy.
Mediaevalism, as it is presented by Chesterton, or even by Eliot, is not serious politics. It is merely a symptom of the malaise which any sensitive person feels before the spectacle of machine civilisation.
But Christian thinkers who are more realistic than Chesterton still have to face an unsolved problem. They claim, rightly, that if our civilisation does not regenerate itself morally it is likely to perish - and they may be right in adding that, at least in Europe, its moral code must be based on Christian principles. But the Christian religion includes, as an integral part of itself, doctrines which large numbers of people can no longer be brought to accept.
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And from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism :
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Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as `Great is Diana of the Ephesians'. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it - as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine - had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to every-day life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous over-estimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing that he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say against imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
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Monday, June 2nd, 2008
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