These aren’t exact new thoughts, but versions of them have been expressed hereabouts of late, and G. K. Chesterton puts them amusingly and very quotably. So I quote, again, from What’s Wrong With The World? Which I’ve decided is altogether more amusing than Orthodoxy, with longer stretches of complete sanity which, when that grows stale, is punctuated by protests against women’s suffrage and such.
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 pis-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.
And:
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.
And:
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.
{ 15 comments }
Timothy Scriven 01.02.11 at 12:31 am
There’s a Chesterton craze sweeping the internet at the moment. He seems to be Very Much In Vogue. Does anyone have any theories as to why?
John Holbo 01.02.11 at 12:43 am
It must be because Obama is obviously Sunday, from “The Man Who Was Thursday”.
No, seriously. I hadn’t noticed any recent uptick, apart from myself. As I’ve said, I’ve been on a Chesterton kick since last year – reading a dozen or so books at this point: but not that boring Father Brown stuff. (I’ll probably try it again and decide it’s great.) His novels are great. His literary criticism – the Dickens book, for example – is great. His journalism is 24 karat gold-plated boffo and great. He’s great!
There’s always someone doing this thing I’m doing right now because Chesterton a persistent dark horse, come-from-behind favorite and all-around-contrarian darling to the point of trend-sucking concern that one is but one of the herd, alas. I always thought it was a bit tiresome until I caught the bug myself.
Brainz 01.02.11 at 2:14 am
I love Eugenics and Other Evils. Coming from a disability studies point of view, it’s great to see how somebody can build an argument against eugenics that’s based in racism and anti-semitism. It’s hard to imagine, post-1945, how somebody could do that, but Chesterton is well up to the challenge.
And Thursday may be my all-time favorite novel.
Josh 01.02.11 at 8:05 am
Brian, have you read GKC’s book G.F. Watts? You can read the whole thing for free online. Lovely stuff and, to use Holbo’s taxonomy, very sane.
joar 01.02.11 at 11:28 am
Not sure about any uptic but if the case then his copyright horizon (1936 + 70) might be one cause.
Eli Rabett 01.02.11 at 2:49 pm
As Eli says to Ms. Rabett just before he proposes to get blind drunk, moderation in all things including moderation
TheSophist 01.02.11 at 5:51 pm
Zizek is, of course, a big Chesterton fan. If Prof. Holbo ever sits down for a cup of tea with his Slovenian great white whale, there would be at least one area of pleasant agreement in the discussion.
phosphorious 01.02.11 at 6:19 pm
“Zizek is, of course, a big Chesterton fan. . .”
Is that a point in favor of Zizek, or against Chesterton?
Adam Roberts 01.02.11 at 7:22 pm
“His literary criticism – the Dickens book, for example – is great.”
Isn’t it, though? One of the best things written about Dickens.
Another Roger 01.02.11 at 10:04 pm
Here’s another rather aposite GKC quote from Orthodoxy:
“No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?”
Re his appeal he is almost a blogger avant a lettre great at clever aphorisms and short articles – less convincing in longer formats.
John Holbo 01.03.11 at 12:36 am
“Zizek is, of course, a big Chesterton fan. If Prof. Holbo ever sits down for a cup of tea with his Slovenian great white whale, there would be at least one area of pleasant agreement in the discussion.”
I know! This is partly what the Zizek paper I am working on right now is about. But it’s important that I confess that my differences with Zizek are 2 parts narcissism of small differences, 1 part small differences, and 1 part big differences.
Matt 01.03.11 at 12:50 am
As Eli says to Ms. Rabett just before he proposes to get blind drunk, moderation in all things including moderation
Seneca made this point in one of his letters. He might well not have been the first, but I suspect it’s stolen from there.
Tim Wilkinson 01.03.11 at 10:59 am
The first quote really has two distinct parts:
1. the long-run (though catastrophic), moral-psychological people forget what the man really wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself; and
2. the short-run (though diachronic), quasi-mathematical One can only find the middle distance between two points if the two points will stand still.
The first point is very closely related to the phenomenon of belief-fixation: rather than acting as perfect Bayesian evidence-processors, constantly maintaining and updating a web of proposition/credence pairs, along with their evidential interdependencies, we instead (bahave as if we) assign credences of 1 or 0 – i.e. belief or disbelief – to many propositions, and sometimes even give them a privileged quasi-foundational (unrevisable) status.
One response to this is the horrific fudge of contextualism in epistemology, which accepts this consequence of our cognitive limitations as unremarkable (psst! even justifiable) and quietly – quietistically – changes the subject to a conceptual tidying-up exercise, pausing only to make occasional two-stepping forays into normative epistemology (first philosophy) with the odd solution to the problem of skepticism, etc.
There are no doubt good explanations for why we do this, if not exactly good reasons (a rejection of evidentialism underlies the Harman-Kripke puzzle of intransigence). At the most fundamental level, it is probably unfeasible for any entity to be a good Bayesian with a data set of anything approaching the degree of complexity that’s likely to be adequate to our general-purpose informational requirements. (Gilbert Harman made this kind of point in the 70s, and more recent work in complexity theory suggests that a rigorous proof is likely to be applicable – solving at least some kinds of Bayesian network has been shown to be NP-hard).
Michael Bratman’s work on plans and intentions – pragmatics in a non-linguistic sense – may have some relevance at a similarly informal level to Harman’s work in epistemics, and this is not surprising since beliefs and credences as well as desires or preferences are implicated in any human planning process. Indeed, Bayesian theory was developed as a theory of decision, not just of credence, so Chesterton’s observations form a natural enough complement to the epistemological point.
Relevant to the second point in a tangential or collateral kind of a way is Keynesian beauty contest to which btw Zizek alludes, to no very memorable effect, in First as Tragedy.
The way Chesterton describes the issue leaves it a bit unclear where exactly the problem lies, though – certainly his example of the impossible settlement: an arrangement between two litigants who…will not even tell us what they want isn’t really made out clearly enough so as to show why we aren’t instead looking just at a convergent haggling process (it isn’t necessarily important that one remembers where one started out in such a process).
One kind of distortion in terms of outcomes could be due to an asymmetry in concessions; but that’s not what GKC is considering here.
Instead it’s something more like the idea that in making a concession, one alters one’s prior ranking of outcomes (to be thoroughly unChestertonian about it). This could happen for psychological reasons similar to the ‘forgetting what you orginally wanted’ idea, but also in part because of a more external kind of constraint built into the space of viable plans and the feasible paths along which political action can proceed. Compromise may close off the possibility of attaining the ideal (at least without a good deal of backtracking), by moving one a considerable distance along a different pathway. Some of the recent-ish discussions of utopian thinking on CT, and of the best v good type of issue, is relevant here.
BlaiseP 01.04.11 at 2:27 am
In his age and the uncertain years that followed, Chesterton was certitude wrapped in the gilding of Jesuitic eloquence. My father was a pastor and I have become a connoisseur of sermons over the years. Chesterton led me to a brief and tempestuous fling with Catholicism from which I’ve never quite recovered.
Chesterton’s certitudes were never all that certain for they were all second-hand antiques. Charming, to be sure, and wrapped in cleverness, but once the present is unwrapped, we are left with the same mirthless negation of his Catholic forebears.
The sovereign cure for a Chesterton mania is a few evenings reading Robertson Davies. All the eloquence, more humour and less of the Catholic claptrap and all shall be set to rights.
John Holbo 01.04.11 at 2:55 am
Thanks, Tim! That was quite clear and proper (and I just wanted to make sure you knew that I actually read it.)
BlaiseP, I actually went through a premature Robertson Davies stage myself, so I tend to regard it, too, as an ailment seeking a cure – albeit a mild one. Davies, I think, could use a bit of Chestertonian bombast to keep the whole thing from becoming too Canadian quiet. Chesterton shows us there are, after all, other ways of being perhaps a tetch too smug and self-satisfied about one’s Catholicism. Possibly they are like yin and yang, eternal opposites.
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