Chesterton and the Moderns

“It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world. We leave you saying that nobody ought to join the Church against his will. When we meet you again you are saying that no one has any will to join it with. We leave you saying that there is no such place as Eden. We find you saying that there is no such place as Ireland. You start by hating the irrational and you come to hate everything, for everything is irrational.”¹

Many thinkers of the present age have raged against the chains of modernity. It is a far more limited group that has been able to laugh at them; fewer still have been able to laugh them off. In this paper, I contend that G. K. Chesterton is a member of that happy few. The master of paradox, best known for his Father Brown stories, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, and Orthodoxy, wrote an enormous body of work that is criminally underread today; in it can be found a refusal of a whole garden of the conclusions of the moderns which can, if read with care, be an antidote to many of the toxins of today’s philosophical milieu. In novel and nonfiction, prose, and verse, Chesterton provides a basis of escape from the iron laws of history and the skeletal hand of rational systems, offering a contrary message of man acting for the good of his fortress home opposed to the capitalist and socialist alike.²

Chesterton and the Absolute

“A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world.”³

The foundational flaw of all non-Christian philosophy is that it makes absolute that which is relative and by necessity either denies or attempts to relativize God; moderns are no exception. As things themselves, often those things absolutized are good, but when made absolute, they necessarily subordinate other, similarly good things and thus disorder creation.⁴ This unnatural warping of the created order cannot be sustained and, like a pendulum, absent a right understanding of the world, that which was suppressed becomes a dominant force. Examining this dynamic, Chesterton describes the modern world as “full of wild and wasted virtues” which, when apart, create incomplete depictions of the world, pitiless scientific truth and truthless humanitarian pity.⁵ Modern philosophy, to Chesterton, is a dead thing, illustrated by a pendulum swinging between failed views which has “substituted an idea of fatalistic alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth.”⁶ In contrast, Christianity is unique because it, through the absolutization of God, can hold the full strength of apparent contradictions and fundamental truths which Chesterton argues are felt fundamentally within the human heart, perhaps because the law of God is written upon the heart of man (Romans 2:12).

The truth of Christianity is illustrated by three related arguments. First, the critiques of Christianity are paradoxical, as can be seen by the contrasting criticisms that Christianity is too violent and yet simultaneously too weak.⁷ While not an impossible thing, Chesterton argues convincingly that this makes Christianity a strange thing. Second, Christianity, in its strangeness can explain both its own and instinctive paradoxes satisfactorily, e.g.: how “In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners,” and the instinct to cherish the memory of a martyr while burying a person who commits suicide in an unmarked grave because the martyr gives his life for a cause while the suicide gives up his life, which was not his in the first place.⁸ Thirdly, that the encapsulation of the fullness of human experience is a more beautiful view than that of those who absolutize things outside of God. While such systems may be internally coherent and complete, nonetheless, they are less beautiful and less desirable to inhabit.⁹ Faced with a hypothetical madman who believes in an overwhelming conspiracy against him, rather attempt to point out contradictions or improbabilities which can be rationalized away, Chesterton contends that the world would be brighter if it were not so, he contends that to be simply a man, rather than the hunted man, the conspiracist “would find [himself] under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”¹⁰ The answer to a totalizing view, to Chesterton, is generally not a philosophic treatise but the experience and recollection of the fuller life.¹¹

Such a view can be applied to many philosophies. To the rationalists and followers of scientism, the question posed is ‘would it not be more beautiful to live in a world where water can turn to wine?’ or to the Freudian ‘cannot the beauty of the sunset be more than an expression/suppression of the erotic?’ or to the Critical Theorist ‘would not the world be more beautiful if it were not ordered toward specific oppressions?’.¹² In short, if the cosmos of the theorist “is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos.”¹³ Juan Del Fuego, the former President of Nicaragua in the Napoleon of Notting Hill, illustrates Chesterton’s complaint to the world of the modern philosopher saying,

“My only objection is a quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue with the choice of the soul”¹⁴

Chesterton and Progress

“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.’”¹⁵

Chesterton’s novels some of his most compelling responses to the idea of progress, history, and inexorable change. His core response, as summarized above, is that such a claim is blatantly false. To demonstrate, he wrote a number of novels, combining a revolt against inevitability with his chosen weapons of absurdity and paradox. In effect, he says to the Hegelian, Marxist, and Progressive that his stories are truer than theirs.¹⁶ It is a romantic impulse.

The most potent of these stories is The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which opens on a disenchanted England, devoid of war, national character, and humor. The government is selected by lottery, but has little function, as factious rivalry and belief in general has died in the intervening years.¹⁷ The prophets of the twentieth century, who had seen trends and extrapolated them into infinity had been cheated (as had the prophets of the nineteenth). But in this milieu, a humorist, Auberon Quin, is selected king, and, without belief and for a joke, demands that others play along and establishes fiefdoms within the neighborhoods of London. While most understand (and ignore or deplore) the joke, Adam Wayne, a child when the scheme is initiated and later the lord of Notting Hill, believes in the particular virtue of his home as kingdom, particularly Pump Street which commercial interest, aims to demolish. Through his dedication, the military brilliance of the last historian of the last war, and the advantage of geography, Wayne not only defends his fief from incursion and extracts benefits, but also ignites patriotism in all belligerents of the conflict, moving feudal London from farce to fact.

Chesterton’s answer to dialectic is division. Unlike Hegel, who sees the world as thought which has divided itself and which is in the process of realizing it is all one, Chesterton compares the undivided and the divided and shows that it is in distinctiveness that romance is found. While history runs backward to feudalism (which would run contrary to Hegel, and subsequent thinkers like Marx), the core of the story is not that such a shift is inevitable, it is that patriotism and a natural love for one’s own is a better life than undifferentiated monotony.

Another interesting feature of the story is the closing chapter in the aftermath of a battle against a Notting Hill grown decadent and the dialogue between Adam Wayne and Auberon Quin where Quin reveals to Wayne that the project of neighborhood kingdoms was a joke, and Wayne replies that what once was amusement has become actual and concludes that the two are opposites, satirist and serious, opposites which are simultaneously reconciled in humans (as opposed to characters/tropes played in the book). Wayne describes their traits as compatible, saying: “Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.”¹⁸ There is no synthesis, health is found in simultaneous engagement with both, with the world needing the duo, to serve as a reminder of the strength of both currents (the importance of maintaining the full strength of simultaneous apparent opposites returns again).

Also along this line, The Ball and the Cross is the story of two men determined to duel to the death and a society determined that the world is past such conflict — where history has progressed past dogma and entered rational humanism where non-aggression and tolerance have been established. Through a series of hijinks, the two combatants, forced into alliance in their quest to safely duel, begin to understand that the two of them are both relics of an age of conflict, and their conflict is a threat to the order, so carefully established, and thus must be established — “if the British Public once catches us up, the British Public will prevent the duel” — but first they must be caught by the forces of history.¹⁹ After a series of encounters with the police and philosophers of various types, they end in the final destination, a lunatic asylum, and then a country become asylum.²⁰ Concluding with a climatic surreal clash between Professor Lucifer, the two men, and the erasure of every trace of their existence, the dogmatists are triumphant over the last trick of the devil in a attempted mutual martyrdom in revolution against their imprisonment (and the atheist is, if not explicitly converted, at least has a heart softened). This conclusion, mirroring the comparison between the suicide and the martyr, is backgrounded by every person they have met on their travels similarly imprisoned, their conflict being such an event that it must be erased from history and declared lunacy because the alternative is a refreshing of belief.

Other works by Chesterton with similar themes include The Flying Inn, with a similar critique of scientific progress combined with a facilitated acceptance of Islam on the basis of shared agreement on tee-totaling, in which two men defy the force of progress and defend the past of English drinking and community, eventually triumphing over apparently inevitable development; Tales of the Long Bow, a collection of short stories that build into an overarching narrative of localist/distributive defiance of capitalist development; and Manalive in which Innocent Smith, using the power of the absurd, shocks the denizens of an inn into a more romantic view of life.²¹

The conflict within these stories is what drives the war against the apparently inexorable. The stories are not of movements but of men, sometimes alone, sometimes with partners in defiance of the rational (and sometimes demonic) in favor of the sane.²² It is the bold, the believing, and those who will fight for those beliefs who can triumph, despite the trajectory that the world may be on. This conflict is not a good in itself, but a method toward good which can only be found through engaging (though whether swords are necessary will vary).

Meanwhile, those who subscribe to the progressive philosophies, given their conflict with a genuine human nature, always fall prey to failure, and are forced into active suppression of natural humanity. In essence, to Chesterton, the ultimate heresy of modernity is this: “altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul.”²³

Chesterton and Tradition

“But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”²⁴

It would be incorrect to call Chesterton a Conservative, but his view of tradition is much higher than few other than the conservatives themselves. For Chesterton, tradition “is the democracy of the dead.”²⁵ The collective wisdom of the past is not something to be dismissed lightly, especially when the reason for the its original existence is not known (a heuristic commonly known as Chesterton’s Fence).²⁶ Additionally, tradition, even when not understood for its purpose, is not seen Chesterton as hostile, because the relationships between action and reaction do not, in his view, require a scientific explanation — the real world being more fairy tale than clockwork machine, relationships do not require the formation of a complete mental connection to understand them.²⁷ Further, repetition of old tradition is insufficient given the fallen nature of man, constant vigilance is the only sufficient guard against degradation. While tradition has a place, and a valuable one at that, merely having a vote is not sufficient to win an election.

This position is deeply tied to his view of progress. For Chesterton, the default direction of progress is downward because of the human condition of fallenness. As such, the difference between the conservative and the progressive is, to some extent, illusory because both are backsliding, one by naivety and the other by negligence.

Chesterton and Capital

“The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house on to 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 civilization.”²⁸

The view of the progressive and the conservative as ending in similarly bad ends is paralleled in Chesterton’s conception of economics and his critique of modern economics. In What’s Wrong With the World, he articulates a conflict between two individuals both attempting to remedy the modern conditions of poverty and waste generated by the destruction of the commons, public houses, and inns “to increase the private wealth of about six or seven men.”²⁹ These two men are Hudge and Gudge. Hudge is an enterprising philanthropist who builds up tenement housing as a temporary fix to poor living conditions, with the aim of helping the poor, while Gudge opposes the development as insufficient and undesirable and aims to see the people the way they were before. The people, lacking true homes in both conditions, have inconclusive attitudes.³⁰

The problem comes then in two places. First, Gudge, the conservative, by the time the battle between him and Gudge is completed, now wants to conserve the very things that he meant to uproot, and Hudge, in his opposition to Gudge, has made the temporary accommodations which were meant to be replaced by the home into the ultimate project, and made the vices of the stopgap virtues.³¹ The ultimate flaw in the projects of both Hudge and Gudge is that “neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself.”³² In effect, rather than looking to the good of man, the progressive becomes caught up in the progress that he has begun and aims to continue in the path that he is taking, and the Conservative has similarly failed to begin with an idea of the good, and has rather stuck with things the way they are.

Rather than either of those two paths, Chesterton argues that the true desire of man is to have a home, something which has been lost since Eden. Contrasting this pursuit of home are individualism and collectivism; where individualism and capitalism are typified by no man, or perhaps very few men having a home and collectivism or socialism, where homes are shared and owned by no one. In both, what is missing is the particular home, and modernity specifically has taken that home from man and all of modernity exists to rationalize the taking, be it the capitalist in defense of the market which turned him out or the socialist who dreams of a world where no one owns houses at all, the result is a still homeless man. Whether conditions would improve under socialism or industrialism, the true desire of man is still unmet.³³ Chesterton’s solution is a radical reordering of the political and economic order.

Chesterton Outlining Sanity

“The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house---this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind.”³⁴

In order for men to have homes, Chesterton endorses an economic system called distributism, more simply described as peasant proprietorship in which families are able to own their own homes, exercise their own natural authority, and live in healthy communities. To some extent this is inevitable, as things like marriage and parental authority are institutions natural to the human person, but even so, those functions are hindered significantly by modernity, especially modern economic conditions.³⁵ For example, conditions for accumulation and mass wealth require renting, while peasant proprietorship has the advantage that “the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.”³⁶

To resolve this, the state and family, the individual and collective, must be given the full force of their respective spheres, and the division between the two must be made correctly. This view is yet again similar to the way that Chesterton posits Christianity as having the full force of paradoxical virtues. Thus, the error of socialism is in mistaking that there are distinct realms, and treating communal laundries as equivalent to communal kitchens, when in the laundry there is no exercise of creativity, while in cooking there is art; the modern continued strengthening of government has then led to continuous decline of family by comparative neglect and failures of discernment.³⁷ Meanwhile, the conservative has done too little to help the poor and foster conditions suited to domesticity. If the conservative who claims to value the family is to mean it, that statement must be proven through sacrifice sufficient to enable the poor to have homes which they currently cannot. Otherwise, the status quo failures will cause revolt and socialism. The solution is the vast distribution of property

“We can now only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation.”³⁸

This view, so forcefully put, is moderated in the appendix to What’s Wrong With the World, where Chesterton notes that he does not believe that the hour is so late as to require total revolution, and such distribution might be able to be done at moderate speed. Such a policy could be argued to have come about during the Thatcher administration with the right-to-buy scheme, though certain differences are also apparent.³⁹ Namely that the buying was still at cost, so only some could gain access, that the quality of housing continued to vary wildly, and often failed to meet the Chestertonian ideal of a castle. It is also certain that Chesterton himself fancied the idea of revolution, as it is not only his nonfiction works envisioned a revolutionary shift, but his fictional works did as well, with The Tales of the Long Bow culminating in an agrarian uprising in favor of mass distribution of property.⁴⁰ This book is also interesting because it is a series of short stories in which common phrases seen to be impossible like ‘I’ll eat my hat,’ ‘when pigs fly,’ and ‘set fire to the river Thames’ all become true, implying, at least on some level, that the level of change envisioned is extreme, to the degree that it seems impossible. Nevertheless, Chesterton sees no reason to falter at the sight of an obstacle in the direction of the good, when the alternative is to go in a bad direction and thus labored not only to triumph over modernism, but also to restore a home for man in the economic, philosophical, and religious realms.

Bibliography

Barfield, Owen. Romanticism Comes of Age. Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1944. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.187934.

Beckett, Andy. “The Right to Buy: The Housing Crisis That Thatcher Built.” Society. The Guardian, August 26, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis.

Chesterton, Gilbert. Manalive. 1912. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1718.

---------. Orthodoxy. 1908. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16769.

---------. Tales of the Long Bow. 1925. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69185.

---------. The Ball and the Cross. 1909. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5265.

---------. The Napoleon of Notting Hill. 1904. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20058.

---------. The Secret of Father Brown. 1927. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70175.

---------. What’s Wrong with the World. 1910. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1717.

Kingsnorth, Paul. “Donald and the Pincer.” Substack newsletter. The Abbey of Misrule, November 7, 2024. https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/donald-and-the-pincer.

Footnotes

1. Gilbert Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross (1909), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5265. ↩

2. For the most direct look at Chesterton’s objections to the moderns of his time, read Heretics where Chesterton endeavors on this project explicitly.

   Another key element of his project was a war against the apathy and agnosticism of his time and the replacement of an interest in the good with an interest in the efficient. That discussion is mostly outside the scope of this paper. ↩

3. Gilbert Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16769.

   This quote articulates a similar critique of Popper’s methodological critique, but where Popper uses science as the sound method for determining truth (functionally, but not literally, as science can only disprove theories, not prove them) Chesterton offers loveliness as a way to compare between two air-gapped philosophies. ↩

4. For example, human freedom from absolute domination by earthly rulers is a good thing, but human freedom as absolute, over and above obligation to God, family, and country as in liberalism is detrimental to the human person. Similarly, sexuality has a place in the created order, but when it is placed as absolute over all other facets of life as it is under a Freudian philosophy, conclusions and results are unsatisfactory.

   Chesterton himself makes this argument in Orthodoxy: “The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality. Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was bad.”

   This parallels the thought of Herman Dooyewerd and is distinct from dialectical thought in that it is not generative. Where the pursuit of health (thesis) creates something unhealthy (antithesis) the end result is sickness, not a synthesis. ↩

5. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

   It is interesting that in the section quoted, the event that triggered the division of virtue was the Reformation. I would speculate that Protestant agreement with this statement would largely be related to divide between the Magisterial Reformation and the ‘Radical’ Reformation traditions. ↩

6. Gilbert Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1717.

   To take an example from slightly later in the passage: “Thus, mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect called Materialists declared for a short time that there was no soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science is now maintaining that there is no body.” ↩

7. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. ↩

8. Ibid. ↩

9. This is not to say that the systems are perfectly air-tight, or that Chesterton does not use insufficiency of beliefs in argument as well. For example, Father Brown’s method of detection is explicitly not scientific and shows the inadequacy of the so called ‘scientific method of detection’ which is based on getting outside of human experience and treating man as if he is alien rather than human (“Science is a grand thing when you can get it” but in criminology “it’s actually suppression of what we know”). Instead, Fr. Brown tries to replicate the state of the criminal until he is “thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions” because the human condition of fallenness, while more keenly understood by Fr. Brown than others, is a universal, but distinctly nonscientific experience.

   Gilbert Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown (1927), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70175. ↩

10. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. ↩

11. While describing the interaction of virtues in Christianity as a pitched battle, Chesterton avoids falling into the trap of Romantic absolutization of conflict/passion, by recognizing that while irreconcilability is apparent, reconciliation is possible because the division is subordinate to Christian truth. ↩

12. One interesting question to the Hegelian based on this might be ‘would it not be more beautiful if distinction were beauty, and the world were on a journey to become ever more distinct?’ an idea explored both in Orthodoxy (“It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.” Ibid.) and in the neighborhood kingdoms which form the core of The Napoleon of Notting Hill. A continuous theme of many of Chesterton’s works is a love of particularism. ↩

13. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. ↩

14. Gilbert Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20058.

    The particular context of this quote is in the hypothetical London, 1984 that the Napoleon of Notting Hill is set in, a form of government has developed where the king is selected by lottery after the discovery that democracy is a superstitious perfunctory given the equality of man in reason and in foolishness (this seems to be a potential end state of liberalism, though some of the arguments resemble Hobbes justification of monarchy against democracy). The quote is the former President of final living nation’s reaction to the justification of this form of government. (Not to footnote a footnote, but is a fun fact that some speculate that George Orwell’s book 1984, had its title inspired by this work.) ↩

15. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World. ↩

16. To the conservative, he would likely be inclined to point to the existence of stories themselves as the foremost critique of their thought. ↩

17. See footnote fourteen for the discussion of Nicaragua in this novel. ↩

18. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. ↩

19. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross.

    Their conflict brooks no synthesis, no mediation, one man must win and the other die for honor. ↩

20. This has certain significant parallels to C.S. Lewis’ book, That Hideous Strength where a mental institutions is used to enforce the will of modern science/demonic influence. ↩

21. In one compelling episode, Smith threatens his friend with a firearm in order to show the smallness/insufficiency of nihilistic/materialist philosophy and says the following after his friend wishes not to be shot in the head: “The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not “the Will to Live.” What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute. I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses. It was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life, whatever that is.”

    Gilbert Chesterton, Manalive (1912), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1718. ↩

22. Some works, like The Man Who Knew Too Much and Tales of the Long Bow culminate with movements that war for the good, but that is never the bulk of the narrative. ↩

23. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World. ↩

24. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. ↩

25. Ibid. ↩

26. The original source for this is not yet in the public domain or my library. This heuristic also allows for alteration given understanding of the situation. For example, you can stop cutting the ends off the roast if it is discovered that the reason why the ends were cut off in the first place was because the roast would otherwise not fit in grandma’s oven, but you are now using a larger one. ↩

27. For more on this concept, see Owen Barfield’s interrogation of the concept of scientific law as a concept. He argues that it smuggles in unsupported concepts, and that law is incoherent absent authority, and that even the concept of civil law is a relatively recent development in human governance, with Hebraic law as divine commandment and Greek law being accumulated tradition, binding universal abstract law being something established only in Rome. The concept then transferred to science by Bacon is argued to be a reintroduction of the concept of form at a new level after scholastic thought was rejected.

    Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age (Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1944), 34—38, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.187934. ↩

28. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World. ↩

29. Ibid.

    Other criticisms involve the consumptive nature of capitalism in contrast to the romantic nature of thrift and saving: “Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste,” and the removal of distinction from the sexes (a topic that warrants a paper itself). ↩

30. Ibid. ↩

31. “The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown; the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown at present there isn’t any family life to preserve. But Hudge, the Socialist, in his turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether he would preserve the family life if there were any; or whether he will try to restore it where it has disappeared.”

    Ibid. ↩

32. Ibid. ↩

33. Ibid.

    Such concerns are also apparent in more modern thinkers such as Paul Kingsnorth who argue that both international capitalism and progressivism burn social bonds at both ends, liquidating social bonds for increased GDP and progressive politics. See:

    Paul Kingsnorth, “Donald and the Pincer,” Substack newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, November 7, 2024, https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/donald-and-the-pincer. ↩

34. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World. ↩

35. For example, he says that “it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say) that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed”

    Ibid. ↩

36. Ibid. ↩

37. Chesterton believes that both family and state are natural institutions which are emergent from the nature of man, and thus must be dealt with appropriately and strengthened as well, rather than struggled against: “Here are two institutions that have always been fundamental with mankind, the family and the state. […] But it is true to say that while anarchists would end both, Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother, and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing” ↩

38. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World. ↩

39. Andy Beckett, “The Right to Buy: The Housing Crisis That Thatcher Built,” Society, The Guardian, August 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis. ↩

40. Gilbert Chesterton, Tales of the Long Bow (1925), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69185. ↩