I stumbled across this post from 2022 by accident, but feel like it is a good time to repost it. It sparks recall of one of the histories’s great thinkers, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) G.K. slaughtered Clarence Darrow in an Oxford debate over the existence of God—Darrow took the negative position, naturally, an assertion that he had won debates maintaining many times. After the debacle, Darrow commented, in essence, “My hat’s off to him. He was better prepared and won fair and square.” He was thinking, I believe, “Holy cats! This guy is smarter than me!” Chesterton, sadly, is mostly known today by Americans because of the PBS series dramatizing his “Father Brown” mysteries, stories Chesterton published as a lark. He was much more than second-rate Arthur Conan Doyle.
I also am moved to repost this because it was the sole guest post offered by my late wife, best friend, business partner and inspiration, Grace Bowen Marshall, who suddenly perished this month in 2024. She occasionally commented here, but her real love was literature, especially British literature. In her introduction she wrote in part,
“The first chapter of his 1910 book “What’s Wrong With The World” was a ‘bright-light’ experience for me. Though hopelessly outdated in some 21st century factual respects, it is considered to be one of his more interesting works because Chesterton examines the human thought process and how it affects the outcomes of different kinds of problems, reminiscent of the “observer effect.” G.K. was, in 1910, much more trusting of science and medicine than we are now, e.g., and did not address 21st century thought-process issues like the scientists’ tendency to do something simply because they can without considering if they should. Here is an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton’s “What’s Wrong With The World.”
Ethics Alarms 
This is hard reading–at least for screen reading. I feel the impulse to print it out and annotate it.
Chesterton is still known to many–especially to (1) Roman Catholics, (2) Christians more generally, and (3) lovers of aphoristic wisdom.
“Chesterton’s Fence” seems to be the idea of his that has the most traction in the mind of the Great American Public. Often Chesterton’s Fence is mentioned on comment boards on the intertubez.
Listeners to Catholic Radio may hear Chesterton periodically quoted there, and referred to as “The Apostle of Common Sense.” Apparently that is also a book title by an admirer of his, Dale Ahlquist.
Chesterton is also the name of a town in Northern Indiana near the Indiana Dunes. Last I drove the turnpike it was one of the cities named in the signage for the exit to the Dunes region.
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In my humble opinion, people haven’t heard of Chesterton anymore because there are many aspects of “cultural literacy” that most people have never heard of. Former presidents, countries (there are nearly 200 of them), classical and opera composers, novelists, poets…where do we stop listing things that people haven’t heard of anymore.
E.D. Hirsch (still alive at the age of 97) has often reported that the k-12 curriculum has largely been emptied of content. It’s pretty clear that he’s correct. We must fight back! One blog post at a time.
Thanks for reading!
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Chesterton takes a comparison, squeezes a paradox out of it, and then presents the paradox as an insight. These are fun, but they’re doing rhetorical work in place of logical work. He’s making an argument about how we should argue, rather than an argument about anything. He’s telling us we need to discuss the social ideal without ever risking his own. The concrete things that would crystallize this passage would be something like: here is a specific social problem, here is my actual vision of the good, here is how that vision shapes what I think the remedy should be. Instead, he gives us the architecture of an argument without the building. Maybe he’s sharpening his points later, but for this section… two thumbs down.
The link to the whole essay is there. I think Grace picked that passage because of its relevance to ethics, but the rest of the essay is less abstract. Here’s one I like:
“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.”