 Dedication of what's wrong with the world. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Benjamin J. Thompson, rabidquill.com. What's wrong with the world? By Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Dedication. To C. F. G. Masterman M. P. My dear Charles, I originally called this book what is wrong, and it would have satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of social misunderstandings that arose from the use of that title. Many a mild lady visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, I have been doing what is wrong all this morning. And one minister of religion moved quite sharply in his chair when I told him, as he understood it, that I had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me, I cannot conjecture. But I know of what I accuse myself, and that is, of having written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what is wrong, and no mistake. It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life, a most creepy and enviable accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even if it achieves its object, which is monstrously unlikely, can only be a thundering gallop of theory? Well, I do it partly because I think you politicians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals, but more because you will recognize the many arguments we have had, those arguments which the most wonderful ladies in the world can never endure for very long, and perhaps you will agree with me that the thread of comradeship and conversation must be protected because it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred. It must not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. It is exactly because argument is idle that men, I mean males, must take it seriously, for when, we feel, until the crack of doom shall we have so delightful a difference again? But most of all, I offer it to you because there exists not only comradeship, but a different thing called friendship, an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which please God will never break. Yours always, G.K. Chesterton. End of dedication. Read by Benjamin J. Thompson, rabidquill.com. Chapter one of What's Wrong with the World. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Benjamin J. Thompson, rabidquill.com. What's Wrong with the World? by Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Part one, The Homelessness of Man. Chapter one, The Medical Mistake. A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of population, decrease of crime among congregationalists, growth of hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts. It ends with a chapter that is generally called the remedy. It is almost wholly due to this careful, solid, and scientific method that the remedy is never found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder, the first grade blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease. The fallacy is one of the 50 fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the social organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man has a biped, 50 men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about young nations and dying nations, as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility. They might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature, which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new mustache. Nations consist of people. The first generation may be decrepit, or the 10,000th may be vigorous. Similar applications of the fallacy are made by those who see, in the increasing size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in subtlety of the parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether an empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its old age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is what we have before us. The habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug. Now, we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown, and that for an excellent reason, because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less, but it will not, in some creative rapture, send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it. But social science is by no means always content with the normal human soul. It has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist will say, I am tired of being a Puritan. I want to be a Pagan. Or, beyond this dark probation of individualism, I see the shining paradise of collectivism. Now in bodily ills, there is none of this difference about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine, but he certainly wants health. No one says, I am tired of this headache. I want some toothache. Or, the only thing for this Russian influenza is a few German measles. Or, through this dark probation of Qatar, I see the shining paradise of rheumatism. But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies. Are often ultimate conditions as states of health, which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr. Bellock once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth. Yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw, property is not a tooth but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency, and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Salivi would honestly like to have eugenics, but I would rather have rheumatics. This is the arresting and dominant fact about social discussion. That the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree about the evil. It is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood, but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who would be even more indignant if it were strong. The social case is exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not disagree like doctors about the precise nature of the illness while agreeing about the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public house. It would be precisely in front of the good public house that our painful personal fraca would occur. I maintain therefore that the common sociological method is quite useless, that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloging prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty, but it might be another business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We all disapprove of prostitution, but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness, but what is national sanity? I have called this book What is Wrong with the World, and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right. End of Chapter 1, read by Benjamin J. Thompson, rabidquill.com. Part 1, Chapter 2 of What's Wrong with the World. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Read by Benjamin J. Thompson, rabidquill.com. What's Wrong with the World by Gilbert Keith Chesterton Wanted an Unpractical Man There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless and useless arguments of philosophers. I mean the joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg. I am not sure that properly understood it is so futile and inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those deep metaphysical and theological differences on which the chicken and egg debate is a frivolous but a very felicitous type. The evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in the vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ that had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school of thought, to which I personally adhere, would be not unworthily typified in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten bird, the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our mental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of our mental chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at. Not with a gun, but with a life bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is this. That the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic occurrences, recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mere egg and bird pattern. They are in different mental worlds. Leaving the complications of the human breakfast table out of account, in an elemental sense the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness. Forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men in working institutions. That is, we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus, or the swan of Avon, or whatever we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubtful and even morbid. Poison enters the embryo of everything, and our politics are rotten eggs. Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence. Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking, before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating. That we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry rearing, before we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics. But I know that this primary pursuit of the theory, which is pursuit of the aim, exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning. A school of which Lord Roseberry is representative, has endeavored to substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the motive of politics, a general coherency or completeness in the social system which has gained the nickname of efficiency. I am not very certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the matter, but as far as I can make out, efficiency means that we ought to discover everything about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy, the fancy that when things go very wrong, we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say that when things go very wrong, we need an unpractical man. Certainly at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning, but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning. It is then necessary to drop one's daily agnosticism, an attempt to rerun cognizier causes. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handyman may mend it, but if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it. And in some extreme cases, no one but the man, probably insane, who invented your flying ship could possibly say what was the matter with it. Efficiency, of course, is futile for the same reason that strongmen will power and the Superman are futile. That is, it is futile because it only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no philosophy for incidents before they happen. Therefore, it has no power of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over. If it is to begin, it must be in the abstract, right or wrong. There is no such thing as backing a winner, for he cannot be a winner when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side. One fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the murder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making people lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maitre Link is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as Messers Cross and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Roseberry, being a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an Orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when they have been affected, and inefficient until they are affected. A man who thinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist, for he must always be looking back. If he only likes victory, he must always come late for the battle. For the man of action, there is nothing but idealism. This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires. Each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon, people forget what the man really wanted first, and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium of piss-aller. Now, this sort of pliability does not merely prevent any heroic consistency. It also prevents any really practical compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two litigants who cannot both get what they want, but not if they will not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish, who almost clamor for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of self-effacement. From such meaner motives than those of such admirable women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular education but think it hopeless to work for it, who desire total prohibition but are certain they should not demand it, who regret compulsory education but resignedly continue it, or who want peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our statesmen were visionaries, something practical might get done. If we ask for something in the abstract, we might get something in the concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word compromise contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word, promise. Moderation is not vague. It is as definite as perfection. The middle point is as fixed as the extreme point. If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer as a common sense compromise to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the plank tips up. My common sense ends just before that instant. The pirate's common sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as hard as any geometrical diagram, as abstract as any theological dogma. End of chapter 2, read by Benjamin J. Thompson, rabidquill.com. The New Hippocrite. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Jordan. What's Wrong with the World? by G.K. Chesterton. Part 1, Chapter 3, The New Hippocrite. But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvement, merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary, that anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen, it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf. As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of Hippocrite. The old Hippocrite, Tartuffe or Peck Sniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The New Hippocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. The Reverend Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares nothing for creeds but only for education. Meanwhile, in truth, the wildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul. The Reverend Smith of the Church of England explains gracefully with the Oxford Manor that the only question for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools, while in truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these Reverend Gentlemen do themselves wrong. I think they are more pious than they will admit. Theology is not, as some suppose, expunged as an error. It is merely concealed like a sin. Dr Clifford really wants a theological atmosphere, as much as Lord Halifax, only it is a different one. If Dr Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly for Catholicism, something might be done for them. We are all, one hopes, imaginative enough to recognise the dignity and distinctness of another religion like Islam or the Cult of Apollo. I am quite ready to respect another man's faith, but it is too much to ask that I should respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political bargain and make-believe. Most nonconformists, with an instinct for English history, could see something poetic and national about the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when he does the rational British statesmen that they very justifiably get annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity could admire Dr Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he is simply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him. But indeed, the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved us from fanaticism, but it does not even do that. On the contrary, it creates and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself. This is at once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader's attention to it with a little more precision. Some people do not like the word dogma. Fortunately, they are free and there is an alternative for them. There are two things and two things only for the human mind. A dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point. A prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten while a man should not be eaten is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should be eaten is a prejudice, which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now, a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last, but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern vagueness in losing and separating men, as in a mist. It is not merely true that a creed unites men, nay, a difference of creed unites men, so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Muslim and chivalrous crusader must have been nearer to each other because they were both dogmatists than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr Campbell's Chapel. I say God is one, and I say God is one, but also three. That is the beginning of a good, quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity, as such, because it was his temperament, and he would turn up later with 333 persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would turn the Muslim into a monist, a frightful intellectual fall. It would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose, like the dong, they would appear again. The Christian, a polytheist, and the Muslim, a pan-egoist. Both quite mad and far more unfit to understand each other than before. It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men. It does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. Soatory can walk up to the very edge of socialism if he knows what is socialism. But if he is told that socialism is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why then he keeps out of its way, and quite right too, one can meet an assertion with argument, but healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. I am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for disliking the Japanese civilization. Do you surrender as a weapon is the very worst spirit of the East? But certainly there is no force so hard to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer, the force that always yields and then returns, such as the force of a great impersonal prejudice, such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Against this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen to fads and not to be infected by diseases. In short, the rational human faith must armour itself with prejudice in an age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this, that prejudices are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump into each other, whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creed is a collective thing and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a private thing and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our existing divisions, they keep out of each other's way. The Tory paper and the radical paper do not answer each other, they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cart and thrust before a common audience, has become, in our special epoch, very rare. For the sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never interrupts, he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and division. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy for the whole objective modern party combatants is to charge out of eShot. The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal. In dealing with this I will try to be as little transcendental as is consistent with reason. It is enough to say that unless we have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused since evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past, the new tyrants will invoke the future. Evolution has produced the snail and the owl. Evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a kafir to work underground. He will soon become an underground animal, like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas. He will soon be a deep sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions. Conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off the slave. Knock the slave until he forgets the fetters. To all this plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate answer is that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the perfect man who is not there. The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate sanity of man, says scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the son of man, says scripture, who shall judge the quick and the dead. Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions. Rather, a doctrine alone can cure our dissensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly, what abstract and ideal shape in state or family would fulfill the human hunger, and this apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not. But when we come to ask, what is the need of normal men? What is the desire of all nations? What is the ideal house or road or rule or a public or king or priesthood? Then we are confronted with a strange and irritating difficulty, peculiar to the present time, and we must call a temporary halt and examine that obstacle. Chapter 4 The Fear of the Past The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened, and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen, which is, apparently, much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great-grandfather, but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder objectively under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the 19th century for the novel of the past, Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the 20th century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin. Late on a winter's evening two horsemen might have been seen. The new story has to begin. Late on a winter's evening two aviators will be seen. The movement is not without its elements of charm. There is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again, the fights that have not yet happened, of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd. But when full allowance has been made, for this harmless element of poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness, but a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened, and the jingo is contemptible not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and emblazements of the crusades is a reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea, and many Norman nose pieces wear as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the crusades was a charge. It was charging towards God the wild consolation of the braver. The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a route, a retreat, a flight from the devil who will catch the hindmost. It is impossible to imagine a medieval knight talking of longer and longer French lances with precisely the quivering employed about larger and larger German ships. The man who called the Blue Water School, the Blue Funk School, uttered a psychological truth which the school itself would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from imperial enterprises than the fact that they were always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong, driving us, as it was said, to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war was a feather in his cap, and so it was, a white feather. Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments, I feel also in our rush toward future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time. It is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather, it is a fear of the past, a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold, so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate, so many great efforts of monumental building, or of military glory, which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the street of by and by, where stands the hostelry of never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes. The past I find already covered with ineligible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself. The past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this, that men invent new ideals, because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back. Now in history there is no revolution that is not a restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this. That all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case. The originality of Michelangelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great medieval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement, which many would count the most anarchic of all, is in this sense the most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the French revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. The sans-culates believed, as their name might imply, in a return to simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past. Some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason, man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pinpoint with imbecility, which some call nirvana. Tomorrow is the Gorgon. A man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly, he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological scientists, with their excruciating eugenics, are turned to stone. The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified and the Eugenists somewhat amusing statues. But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless and rather morbid generation, and they maintain a strange silence about them, sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of their history books. For example, they will often tell you, in their praises of the coming age, that we are moving on towards a United States of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally in Roman and essentially in medieval times. They never admit that the international hatreds, which they call barbaric, are really very recent. The mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great rising of the poor against the rich. But they never rub it in that France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself. Read any 30 or 40 pages of pamphlets advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old popes or emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays and poems in praise of social democracy and see how many of them praise the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal ruins are, to the modern, only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do. It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of the successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man, in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals, one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been savored by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the 48? Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we decline, in a marked manner, to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to sociologists or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and past the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstripped the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing. This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future. 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. We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been. He cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I especially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong one of the first things that are wrong is this the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond. They are always saying you can't put the clock back. The simple and obvious answer is you can. A clock being a piece of human construction can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society being a piece of human construction can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb as you have made your bed so you must lie on it, which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable please God I will make it again. We could restore the hip-tarkey or the stagecoaches if we chose. It might take some time to do and it might be very inadvisable to do it but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim. The freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan. If that should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would eliminate some evils, for instance the unnatural sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems to be the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles. We could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city-state that Mr. Beat was an Englishman or Mr. Dylan a Desperado any more than you could persuade a Hampshire village that the village drunkard was a teetotaler or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clampham should declare its independence. I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe, and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merrily because they have been used. End of The Fear of the Past. Recording by David Lorimer, Van Cleave, Kentucky, January 13, 2009. DLorimer.blogspot.com The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them, by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. If a man says that the young pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was prevented is always impregnable, and the only perfect king of England was he who was smothered. Exactly because Jacobitism failed, we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion, we cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief or incidental. Few people realise how many of the largest efforts, the facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design, and come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the two largest facts of modern history – the Catholic Church and that modern growth rooted in the French Revolution. When Four Knights scattered the blood and brains of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise what the brains of Saint Thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice, and his reason was simple, because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself subjudice. The kings were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society, we cannot affirm definitely, because the Church never was a supreme church. We only know that in England, at any rate, the princes conquered the saints. What the world wanted we see before us, and some of us call it a failure. But we cannot call what the Church wanted a failure, simply because the Church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had not yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do no wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral, a performance which I recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of churchgoing. But the discovery was made, and Henry VIII scattered Becket's bones as easily as Tracy had scattered his brains. Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried. Plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the Church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned, not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular, not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly if the Church failed, it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time, hostile elements had certainly begun to end long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things, it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the medieval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Alba Genzies, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at all, until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth, that the great ideals of the past failed, not by being outlived, which must mean overlived, but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather, mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Volmi was the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have indeed destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies and created a free peasantry in almost all Christian countries, except England, of which we shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed to its imitators in England, Germany and America. The first of these was the idea of honourable poverty, that a statesman must be something of a stoic. The second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it was that men like Rob Speer and Murat were ardently admired. The best answer is that they were admired for being poor, poor when they might have been rich. No one will pretend that this ideally exists at all in the out-politique of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is actually based on exactly the opposite argument. It is based on the theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines entirely supports this theory, I am not now inquiring, but certainly it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political corruption. 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. Some of our political houses are parvenued by pedigree. They hand on vulgarity like a coat of arms. In the case of many a modern statesman, to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is perilous for a politician. It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about with the revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of state, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English politics, if there is any admirer of existing English politics, will really pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted or even attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. The French have indeed continued the tradition of revealing secrets and making scandals. Hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we. Not in sin, but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might have happened in England. It is exactly the second trial that would have been legally impossible. But indeed, if we wish to realise how far we fall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to test it is to note how far we fall short, even of the republican element in the older regime. Not only are we less democratic than Danton and Condocé, but we are in many ways less democratic than Coussuel and Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needy middle-class people compared with Air Rothschilds and Roseberries. And in the matter of publicity, the old French monarchy was infinitely more democratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his children or paring his nails. The people possess the monarch as the people possess Primrose Hill. That is, they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays, a cat may not look at a king, unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free for criticism, it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference comes to something uncommonly like this. 18th-century tyranny meant that you could say the K of B R R D is a profligate. 20th-century liberty really means that you are allowed to say the king of Brentford is a model family man. But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great medieval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England, it is not that we have carried out too literally or achieved with disappointing completeness, either the Catholicism of Beckett or the equality of Marat. Now, I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of 10,000 other cases. The world is full of these unfulfilled ideas, these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins. Rather, it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery. End of The Unfinished Temple. Recording by Jordan. Chapter 6 The Enemies of Property But it is for this a special reason that such an explanation is necessary on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copy book maxim is carried out, there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun, and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfill the law than to destroy it. It is true of both the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored purity. Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the Virgin Martyrs began defiantly to practice purity, that they rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost. It can be proved from every legend, from Cinderella to Whittington, by every poem, from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against France, not because she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule. What horrified them was that the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, was the type of all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the old atom. But its fulfillment, almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new, as the new Jerusalem. But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals, because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity. They have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice. They have wearied of waiting for it. Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these old ideals, but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle of domesticity, the ideal house, the happy family, the holy family of history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is, like the Church and like the Republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfill it, because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting to be let into it. Now, if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations or the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man, it may truly be said, is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them, to be half controlled by the fluty plays, or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions. The conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on an old envelope or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero out of an envelope would be almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of art. But the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men, the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions, the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man, but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden. And though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist because he has chosen. The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors he admires, but he can paint his own house with what color he chooses. And though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits, properly with limits that are strict and even small. 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 Rothschilds 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 peoples. When they remove their neighbor's landmark they also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular. Anyone who destroys the shape by giving him more land is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith's garden, the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate. Just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem. End of The Enemies of Property. The Free Family. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. What's Wrong with the World? by G. K. Chesterton. Part 1 Chapter 7 The Free Family. As I have said I propose to take only one central instance. I will take the institution called the private house or home, the shell and organ of the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice for all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the speculations about its animal origin and the details of its social reconstruction. I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It is a necessity for mankind. It is, if you like to put it so, a trap for mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any one contrive to talk of free love, as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he drew an angel down and had to walk about forever with a seraph on a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences that nature has attached to sex. And it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover. He is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual. The cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Then surrises the necessity for some prolonged system of cooperation, and then arises the family in its full educational sense. It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say it is older than law and stands outside the state. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning that the state has no authority over families. That state authority is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases of family joys and sorrows the state has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the law should not interfere as that the law cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near, as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones. And the real pains and pleasures of the family form a strong instance of this. If a baby cries out for the moon the policeman cannot procure the moon, but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so close to each other as husband and wife or a mother and children have powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it would not give back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain lecture. And what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect mother. The mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children. In such relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where the law may operate this difficulty is constantly found as many a bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heart because her husband has already broken her head. The state has no tool delicate enough to de-raccinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family. The two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal pen-knife in between them. The man and the woman are one flash, yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic intimacy types of government have little or no effect. It is happy or unhappy by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under the Republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in Siam would not have done much toward freeing the Siamese twins. The problem is not in marriage, but in sex, and would be felt under the freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has not believed in freedom in this manner but rather in a more or less lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this book I am not concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in which I myself believe, the great European tradition which has made marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie, a thing not normally to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It is perhaps most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind in walking. The principle is this, that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death. The joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him. The glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea-bath. And the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender. In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it except for necessity or honor. It is then that the institution upholds a man and helps him onto the firmer ground ahead. Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite another matter. It is amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or at least an ignominy. The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice, for twenty minutes at a dance or for twenty years in a marriage. In both cases the point is that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement, and anarchy, or what some call liberty, is essentially oppressive, because it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper and then have to shout the last half of it, because the other party was floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for incompatibility of temper, I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Neil Donnelly. What's Wrong with the World? by G.K. Chesterton. Part 1, Chapter 8. The Wildness of Domesticity. In the course of this crude study, we shall have to touch on what is called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal, the difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of modern movements of the sort called advanced has led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I have already spoken, the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman and a motor car in which to wander looking for others. It also implies money for maintenance. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other peoples. And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern problem plays is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict. That is a hard day's work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase, why should woman be economically dependent upon man? The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't, except in the sense in which she is dependent upon her. The hunter has to tear his clothes, there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish, there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere pretty clinging parasite, a play thing, et cetera, arose through the somber contemplation of some rich banking family in which the banker at least went to the city and pretended to do something while the banker's wife went to the park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers interviews the authors, while the other interviews the clerks, is one of them economically dependent, was hotter, a pretty parasite clinging to Stoughton, was martial, a mere play thing for a snail aggrove. But of all the modern notions generated by a mere wealth, the worst is the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine. Outside is adventure and variety. This is indeed a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows that his own house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of servants by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage of romance is open to him when the street's outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's tamest adventure may end in a police court. If he smashes a window, he can pay for it. If he smashes a man, he can pension him. He can, like the millionaire in the story, buy a hotel to get a glass of gin. And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all advanced and progressive thought, we have almost forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind. For the truth is that to the moderately poor, the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment, or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes, he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself. It gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an ABC tea shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house, while I am sure that this would not be permitted at this Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant, you must drink some of the wines on the wine list. All of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house in a garden, you can try to make hollyhock tea, or convolvulous wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man, the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling, or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar, or from music hall to music hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not. He is living a highly irregular life under the dull and often oppressive laws of such places. Sometimes he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars, and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music halls. Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress, and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only picnic at home. And now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty as the working model for the present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man a free home of his own or not, at least we should desire it. And he desires it for the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he expects to get. He wants, for instance, a separate house. He does not want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in the commercial race to share one wall with another man. Similarly, he might be forced in a three-legged race to share one leg with another man. But it is not so that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again, he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a railway train is not a house because it is a house on wheels and a flat is not a house because it is a house on stilts. An idea of earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and independence is a part of this instructive human picture. I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man desires a woman and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a chair below him. He wants an objective, invisible kingdom, a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men. I do not say that there are not exceptions. There may be saints above the need and philanthropists below it. Opelstein, now he is a duke, may have got used to more than this, and when he was a convict, may have got used to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody. That is what I assert without apology. Now, in modern England, as you eagerly point out, it is very difficult to give nearly everybody houses. Quite so. I merely set up the decideratum, and ask the reader to leave it standing there while he turns with me to a consideration of what really happens in the social wars of our time. And of the wildness of domesticity. The history of hodge and gunge. This is a Librebox recording. All Librebox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit Librebox.org. What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton. Part 1. The Homelessness of Man. Chapter 9. History of Hodge and Gunge. There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us say, two noble and courageous young men of pure intentions, and if you prefer it, noble birth. Let us call them hodge and gunge. Hodge, let us say, is of a bustling sort. He points out that the people must, at all costs, be got out of this den. He subscribes and collects money, but he finds, despite the large financial interests of the hudges, that the thing will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot. He therefore runs up a row of tall, bare tenements, like beehives, and soon has all the poor people bundled into their little brick cells, which are certainly better than their old quarters, insofar that they are weatherproof, well ventilated, and supplied with clean water. But Gudge has a more delicate nature. He feels a nameless something lacking in the little brick boxes. He raises numberless objections. He even assails the celebrated hodge report, with the gudge minority report. And by the end of a year or so has come to telling hodge, heatedly, that the people were much happier where they were before. As the people persevere in both places, precisely the same air of dazed immiability, it is very difficult to find out, which is right. But at least one might safely say that no people ever liked stench or starvation, as such, but only some peculiar pleasures entangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive Gudge. Long before the final quarrel, hodge v. Gudge, and another, Gudge has succeeded in persuading himself that slums and stinks are really very nice things. That the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is what has made our England great, and that the smell of open drains is absolutely essential to the rearing of a Viking breed. But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in hodge? Alas, I fear there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life grow every day more and more lovely in his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed of defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens or infamous asbestos stoves begin to shine quite sacredly before him, merely because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the aid of eager little books by socialists, that man is really happier in a hive than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping total strangers out of your bedroom, he describes as brotherhood. And the necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare say he calls effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this, that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more indefensible slum landlords, while the other has come to treating as divine the sheds and pipes, which he only meant as desperate. Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carleton Club. If you mention poverty to him, he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice, something that is conjectured to be, do him good. Nor is Hodge more happy, for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard, and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we shall all sleep in one universal bedroom. And he lives in a garden city, like one forgotten of God. Such is the lamentable history of Hodge and Gudge, which I merely introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding, which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of the rookery, men are put into a tenement, and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery. But I am neither a Hudgean nor a Gudgean, and I think the mistakes of these two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact. They arose from the fact that neither Hodge nor Gudge had ever thought, for an instant, what sort of a house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal, and therefore were not practical politicians. We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask, taking this need as typical of all such needs, why he hasn't got it. And whether it is in any philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in some philosophical sense it is his own fault. I think in a yet more philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy. And this is what I have now to attempt to explain. Burke, a fine rhetorician who rarely faced realities, said I think that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining, for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant proprietorship, that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is only lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent while the landlord does a little work, and I am not concerned with the defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists almost everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that this, the state of small possession, is attacked everywhere today. It has never existed among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We have therefore to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the natural human creation, especially in this country. Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden, but he always knew or thought he knew what he was looking for. Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos. His house waits for him, waits deep in slow Norfolk rivers, or sunning itself upon Sussex Downs. Man has always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this book, but in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the earth. He has always lost his way, but now he has lost his address. Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies, or in other words, under the pressure of Hodge and Gudge, the average man has really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts, and his efforts therefore grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a house of his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably Christian. Under various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the streets, which is called individualism, or to the workhouse, which is called collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more carefully in a moment, but it may be said here that Hodge and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of state ownership, they will forbid in the cow on grounds of humanitarianism, 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 will 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 latter newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr Gladstone, a Mr Littleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelling, an Ackland, and the other paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr Gladstone, a Mr Littleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelling, an Ackland. If this is not being governed by families, I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by an extraordinary democratic coincidences. End of The History of Hodge and Gudge, recorded by Craig Campbell in Appleton, Wisconsin in 2009. But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the aristocracy. But with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the last of the true oligarchies of Europe, and why does there seem no very imminent prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is simple, though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of the aristocracy often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions. The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong. Generally speaking, the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad traditions. It does not preserve anything except game. Who would dream of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might as well look for an old costume. The god of the aristocrats is not tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you wanted to find an old world Norwegian headdress, would you look for it in the Scandinavian smart set? No. The aristocrats never have customs. At the best, they have habits like the animals. Only the mob has customs. The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this, that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the past and with the present that they gape with a horrible hunger for the future. But whatever else the great lords forgot, they never forgot that it was their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were on the side of the reformation against the church, of the wigs against the stewards, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of the manufacturing system against the operatives, and, today, of the increased power of the state against the old-fashioned individualists. In short, the rich are always modern. It is their business. But the immediate effect of this fact upon the question we are studying is somewhat singular. In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning and discovered that the public things, which for 800 years he had used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and savagely abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven men. One would think he might have been annoyed at this in many places he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the army that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the soldiers. The six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So, whenever a 17th century noble was caught pulling down a peasant's fence and stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I or James II, which at that moment perhaps wore a cross expression, and thus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan lords created the commonwealth and destroyed the common land. They saved their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying ship money by taking from them the plough money and spade money, which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized this aristocratic habit. You prosecute the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common, but leave the larger felon loose who steals the common from the goose. But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is, they reasoned with the goose. They explained to him that all this was needed to get the Stuart Fox overseas. So in the 19th century, the great nobles who became mine owners and railway directors earnestly assured everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a newly discovered economic law. So the prosperous politicians of our own generation introduced bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with their own babies, or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not, as you would suppose, howled out by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as socialism, for an aristocracy is always progressive. It is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night, for they are trying to live tomorrow. End of oppression by optimism. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Barry Holdsworth. What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton, Part 1, Chapter 11. The Homelessness of Jones Thus the future of which we spoke at the beginning has, in England at least, always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the name of progress. The destroyers of the Abbeys took away his bread and gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white pebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his original rural life, and promised him instead the golden age of peace and commerce inaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now they are taking away the little that remains of his dignity as a householder and the head of a family, promising him instead utopias which are called appropriately enough, anticipations or news from nowhere. We come back, in fact, to the main feature which has already been mentioned. The past is communal, the future must be individualist. In the past are all the evils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future is pure despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday I know I was a human fool, but tomorrow I can easily be the superman. The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually kept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had meant his married life to begin. This man, Jones let us call him, has always desired the divinely ordinary things. He has married for love, he has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat, he is ready to be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly debars him from the home, and he has to take his meals in the front garden. A passing philosopher, who is also, by mere coincidence, the man who turned him out, pauses and leaning elegantly on the railing, explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of nature, which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher, who turned him out, happening to call at these lodgings with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real life of mercantile endeavour. The economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle and goes to the workhouse. The philosopher, who turns him out, happening at that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse, assures him that he is now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind. He is in an equal scientific, socialistic commonwealth, owned by the state and ruled by public officers. In fact, the commonwealth of the sublime future. Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asks for so little and has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes of worlds and systems. He has been offered Eden and Utopia and the new Jerusalem and he only wanted a house and that has been refused him. Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English history. The rich did literally turn the pour out of the old guest house onto the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern wage slavery assuring them all the time that this was the only way to wealth and civilisation. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the convent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved with gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As he entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porch of industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay into darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven. And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to enter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender into unseen hands his children, his small possessions, and all the habits of his fathers. Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old openings of Puritanism and industrialism can be discussed later, but there can be a little doubt, I think, that if some form of collectivism is imposed upon England, it will be imposed as everything else has been by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to administer collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism. In some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them. It will not be so hard as some innocent socialists seem to suppose to induce the honorable Tom Noddy to take over the milk supply as well as the stamp supply at an increased salary. Mr Bernard Shaw has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councils because they are free from financial timidry. Now the English ruling class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be quite ready to be the administrator of Sussex at the same screw. So William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. We, that is the aristocracy, are all socialists now. But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main contention is that, whether necessary or not, both industrialism and collectivism have been accepted as necessities, not as naked ideals or desires.