I was grasping for how to say something when it occurred to me that G.K. Chesterton had already said it (see #1). Trying to look it up, I was reminded how much else he said so very, very well. Indeed, one of his comments inspired this blog’s name:
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.
Enjoy!
- Dodging the question of “good.”
- How not to change the world.
- For revival of Philosophy.
- National vanity.
- Punishing virtue.
- News media.
- Bigotry.
- Clarity and obscurity.
- Why should science displace faith?
- On gun control?
Our popular modern debates are really a means “to shirk the question of what is good.” Thus we say we are “for progress,” which, said G. K. Chesterton, “logically stated, means `Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.'”
Likewise, regarding the sentiment “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lies the hope of the race, but in education” — Chesterton replies that this amounts to “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”
(From Human Life Review, 1988; further details lost)
“As G. K. Chesterton argued, as long as the vision of `heaven’ is always changing, the vision of earth will remain the same. Those who continually change their mind will never change their world.” (Peter C. Moore, Disarming the Secular Gods, 1989)
*
The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy, certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution . . . he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords.
There are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity.
Our commercialism does not punish the vices of the poor, but the virtues of the poor. It hampers the human character at its best and not merely at its worst; and makes impossible even the merits that it vainly recommends. Capitalism has prevented the poor man from saving more than it has prevented him from spending. It has restrained him from respectable marriage more than from casual immorality. It may be that Socialism threatens to destroy domesticity; but it is capitalism that destroys it. This is doubtless what is meant by saying that capitalism is the more practical of the two.
Everything in a newspaper that is not the old human love of altar or fatherland is the old human love of gossip.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.
In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all . . . it is the hard-headed stockbroker, who knows no history and believes no religion, who is, nevertheless, perfectly convinced that all . . . the priests are knaves.
A man . . . is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.
A man who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulae that everyone understands . . . . But if a young man really has ideas of his own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories unknown to the rest of the world.
*
Whenever a man says that he cannot explain what he means, and that he hates argument, that his enemy is misrepresenting him, but he cannot explain how; that man is a true sage, and has seen into the heart of the real nature of language. Whenever a man refuses to be caught by some dilemma about reason and passion, or about reason and faith, or about fate and free-will, he has seen the truth.
*
If a man has some fierce or unfamiliar point of view, he must, even when he is talking about his cat, begin with the origin of the cosmos; for his cosmos is a private as his cat . . . This explains the extraordinary air of digression and irrelevancy which can be observed in some of the most direct and sincere minds. It explains the bewildering allusiveness of Dante; the galloping parentheses of Rabelais; the gigantic prefaces of Mr. Bernard Shaw. The brilliant man seems more lumbering and elaborate than anyone else, because he has something to say about everything. The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving stones of the street he plods along . . . Because he is original he is always going back to the origins.
A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover.
Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of Drink — as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it is no sillier to say a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is a devil . . . In a little while we shall have them calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit of housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; and for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all the stationers’ shops by Act of Parliament.
* * * * *
“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 