Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories - Chesterton was also a consistent antisemitic, prone to tedious defenses of Catholic orthodoxy.
To be honest, though, my favorite thing about Chesterton are his aphorisms: only Wilde is more quotable. Gopnik has found some great ones ("The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, but to make settled things strange") but he left out a few of my favorites ("Art is limitation. The essence of every picture is the frame." or "Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world." or "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.") But if I had to pick just one Chesterton quote it would be this one:
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
That quote captures one of the unexpected discoveries of modern neuroscience, which is that our emotions are essential aspects of cognition. As people like Antonio Damasio have discovered, the absence of emotion doesn't lead to pure reason or a more rational set of decisions. Instead, not being able to experience our feelings leads, as Chesterton surmised, to a peculiar form of sociopathy.
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I used to get furious when people would object to getting emotional about issues. I used to think it was ignorance on their part, that they were unaware that our emotions set our priorities. After all, nobody bothers to argue about something nobody cares about.
Later I came to understand it as a dirty trick, accusing someone of letting his emotions cloud his thinking, while the very attack is driven by the accusers emotion.
What really bugs me is that our educators -- kindergarten through college -- never clued us in. Matter of fact, many of them used this very dodge.
I'll have to track down that Adam Gopnik article.
I'm not sure how well the charges against Chesterton actually hold up. He was anti-Semitic, as can be seen in the otherwise enjoyable novel Man Alive; and he tended to exoticize people of African and Asian decent, as can be seen here and there in the Father Brown mysteries.
But by the standards of 1910, Chesterton's prejudice was pretty mild stuff. Honestly, almost every white male writer in 1910 was a raving bigot.
Chesterton was also an anti-suffragist, but in this matter he has no excuses. In his youth, he was actually a suffragist and a self-proclaimed liberal, and he ought to have known better.
Chesterton's most enjoyable book on Catholicism is probably Orthodoxy, although The Ox That Roared is also a strong contender, with its remarkable discussion of why Catholicism must respect the findings of scientific research. Some of his other theological and political works, such as What's Wrong with the World, are much more of a mixed bag.
For reasoning about the reasonableness of emotion, nothing beats Martha Nussbaum's doorstop-sized tome "Upheavals of Thought."
She cites D'Amasio as well.
The whole world is at war: emotions against reason, feminine against masculine, spirituality against materialism. Everyone chooses a side and projects their insufficiency onto the proponents of their own missing half. Carl Jung's active imagination holds a key to this problem. It allows free imaginiative play of the emotions and images, with the reasoning, judging ego suspended and watching like an interested on-looker. Then the thinking conscious mind interacts with what the imagination and emotions produce, questioning, understanding, interpreting how this can apply to the lived experience of the individual. You can "feel" the neuron pathways opening up across your brain as this process strikes at the very duality of our nature bringing healing and transcendence. Chesterton is such a quotable author because his work always does this to your mind.
I suspect your assertion that GK Chesterton was anti-semite is a second-hand slander. It is at least untrue by the standards of 1910 or any other time.
If he did have the audacity to typify peoples or religions he, unlike the most politically correct, acknowledged both the imperfections and the corresponding necessities of prejudice. From my reading, I have seen consistent compatibility with the fact that Chesterton believed a Jew is the Redeemer of the world.
An anti-semite? Ridiculous. A defender of orthodoxy? Scandalously so.
We had looong debates on Chesterton's alledged anti-semitism and racism for his Wikipedia article going back to 2005.
Since unsupported controversial assertions eventually get hammered out through debates like these, this more or less stable paragraph in the Wikipedia artile is probably accurate: