"Starting Afresh"

STARTING AFRESH

By G.K. CHESTERTON

An excert from:

Is it a New World? A Series of Articles and Letters Contributed by Correspondents to the "Daily Telegraph" August-September, 1920 (published in 1921)

This was Chesterton's contribution in response to a question that appeared in the Daily Telegraph, his response emphasizing the need for engaging in self-criticism, both as individuals and as a society

It may appear somewhat impertinent, and even grotesque, for a layman to put the Dean of St. Paul's into a pew and preach at him; but I am moved to take his sermon for my text, precisely because he is so admirably right up to a particular point, and after that so lamentably wrong. Nothing could be more right, and at the same time more rare, than his realisation that any facing of the facts at this moment is bound to be irritant and alarming. So far as that goes, I will be as gloomy as any dean. Indeed, I think the present generation loves him much for protesting against a spirit of facile and futile evolutionary optimism. But when we come to the spirit which is to be opposed to it, then it is that I leap into the pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral and lift up my voice against its late occupant. For instance, in that quarrel of Labour and Capital which Dr. Inge himself takes as typical, both sides invoke essential elements in the Christian tradition. The more revolutionary say that the Christian spirit should specially protect the poor and denounce the tyranny of the rich; and this is profoundly true. The more conservative say the Christian spirit should specially protect the pieties and loyalties of a domestic tradition; and this also is profoundly true. But surely there is a third thing in which the Christian spirit is more unique- I might almost say eccentric- than even the democratic or the domestic virtues. Even the pagans were often kind to their household slaves, and were almost always respectful to their household gods. Everybody knows that he can find pity in the Iliad or piety in the Æneid. There is something more peculiar and provocative in the Christian idea, and it was expressed in the words repentance and humility. Or, to put it in more topical terms, it means that when we face the facts of the age, the first facts we face should be the faults of ourselves; and that we should at least consider, concerning any fact, the possibility that it is our fault. Now, of course, the most important form of this is too individual for this public problem; indeed, it cannot in its nature be a criticism of anybody else. But there is another form of it in those more corporate cases in which a man speaks for a class, or a country, or a school, or a social type. In this public sense, also, there is no value in any pessimism that is not penitence. And I do not think that the pessimism of Dr. Inge bears the smallest resemblance to penitence.


EDUCATED ERROR

The academic authority always starts out by assuming that everything is the fault of the bricklayer or the coalheaver, simply because nobody could possibly mistake him for a bricklayer or a coalheaver. It never occurs to him to ask whether it is, I do not say his own fault, but even the fault of the instructed and secure social class to which he belongs. Now there is one thing, I think, which is written in enormous letters across the whole history of modern times; it is the great and ghastly mistakes made by that educated class. Dr. Inge is educated in a much more scholarly sense than I am, but it is broadly true that we both belong to a certain world which has leisure to learn and even some opportunity to teach. And we have taught horribly and hopelessly wrong. We have, as a class, landed our less educated fellow-citizens in catastrophe after catastrophe, solely by the priggish fixity of our own delusions. For instance, in my early youth I believed, because all educated England believed, in the Anglo-Saxon, or Teutonic, theory of English history. I may have mentioned it to people, and swelled ,with my small words what turned out to be the triumphal march of Prussia. For Prussia came so near to triumph because a vague belief in a Teutonic brotherhood led us to regard the defeat of the Poles and the French as the inevitable fall of inferior and decadent races. This was emphatically not a popular error. It was solely and entirely an educated error. I never met a bricklayer who occupied that ample leisure (so much lacking in academic circles) on which Dr. Inge insists by comparing the craniological curve of Celtic and Teutonic types. It was rare to meet a coster or a cabman who traced the origin of his family to the Folk-Wanderings of the world-conquering Germanic tribe. A costermonger would laugh at a German as a foreigner, exactly as he would laugh at a Frenchman as a foreigner. And the costermonger would be right. It was all the great historians and philosophers and men of science who were wrong; and the end of whose blunder was blood and darkness and the desolation of countless homes. Ought the educated class to talk in quite so arrogant a tone? Does it not owe the world something like an apology?

Now it is exactly the same with the problem of Labour. The first important fact about trade unions is that they were created by a dim historical instinct among the uneducated, at a time when the most hideous, unhistorical barbarism was being taught to them by the educated. The philosophy then being taught in Parliament, in the Press, and among the professors, especially of economics, was by far the most half-witted and wicked nonsense that has ever been tolerated among men nominally Christians. It was the poor who were moved, by some faint tradition, once more to build the guilds that had built the cathedrals; though they had scarcely seen the cathedrals and never heard of the guilds. It was the cultured class which told them that all such brotherhood was sentimentalism, and that men must fight for food like wolves. In this case as in the other, the poor were ignorant and right, and the rich men were instructed and wrong- so wrong that facts have forced them (in both cases) to retreat, to reversal, indeed, to revolution, to everything, in fact, except repentance, or even confession.

Bolshevism is not justice, but it is judgment. It is not what we desire, but it is not far from what we deserve. Considered as a paradise it is absurd, but considered as a deluge it has its serious and even its moral side. It is the nemesis of nonsense; especially comfortable nonsense. For those who merely say that the main truth of education is a trust in evolution, that progress is excellent because it is slow, and that a cultured class will lead us step by step to the New Jerusalem, fitted up with filtered water and electric lamps- to them I know of nothing to be said, except certain strange and mysterious words, which float only in my memory, but which come, I think, from some passage of dark irony in one of the Hebrew prophets: "Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord. Wherefore should you desire the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light. "


A NEW DIRECTION

Now, with a full consciousness of the danger of incurring this curse, I would say here that I myself do, in a special sense, believe in a New World. And with a full sense of the danger of the arrogance I deprecate, I will add that I am, as it happens, possibly the only person taking part in this discussion who does believe in a New World. That is to say, I believe that if the world is to be good, it really will have to be new. I do not believe the thing can be reached from where we stand by mere progress along the same path. That path of the immediate past is not a progress to be made better; it is a mistake to be unmade. For instance, Socialism may be represented as the next stage in the modern centralisation of wealth; that is why I do not believe in Socialism. Socialism is evolutionary; Socialism is natural and gradual; it is the natural evolution of Capitalism. But my New World would be the destruction of Capitalism; that is, the distribution of property. And the New World would have to be really new; it would have to begin at the beginning. This does not mean in the least that we ought to begin abruptly and anarchically; on the contrary, any attempt to found the State on a more general experience of property must avoid wantonly insulting the remaining traditions of property where they are genuine. In that sense- of the need for sympathy and what some would call sentiment- it may be true that a true reform would not be a catastrophe, but a tendency. But the fact we have to face is that it would be the opposite tendency. Whether we call it evolution or revolution, it would be contrary to the course of our history at least for the last two hundred years. The whole tendency of law, literature, political philosophy, and popular science has been towards the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. It seems to me to matter very little whether the few handling the money are called capitalists with large incomes or officials with large salaries. Nor will I here discuss the actual complication by which even the trend to a Socialist State is being deflected towards a Servile State. The point is that we must undo all this work, and drop all the nonsense that defended it, for the only thing that has been steady has been the steady growth of inequality. There has been the wildest variety in the excuses for inequality. While the rich were growing rich there must be competition; now they have grown rich there must be no competition. A political philosophy is promptly provided for each. The iron laws of economics are remarkably flexible.

Anything worth calling a new world will mean not a new step but a new direction. We must reverse the whole of our present tendency, which is still the Prussian tendency, and get rather into line with tendencies which we used to contemn as Latin or even as Celtic; not that these words meant very much at any time. Like the prince in many romances, we must learn from the peasant; and among all princes those who have most to learn are the merchant princes. Certainly we must not merely lecture the working man, who has, historically speaking, been as approximately right as was consistent with our systematically teaching him wrong. The working classes have in some cases been so much corrupted by culture as to ask for Nationalisation, which would indeed only mean Kultur or Prussian officialism. Indeed it would be exceedingly like the present capitalist officialism. But the working classes will not abandon it until we have a strong alternative policy of democratic distribution- the scattering of the monstrous heaps of the last hundred years.


THE UNWELCOME TRUTH

Now the war ought to have been a signal of all these simple truths; but we seem to have misread the signals in a most mysterious way. We have seen the ruin of Prussia, but we go on believing in the practicality of Prussianism. For all our talk of organisation and efficiency and social hygiene is pure Prussianism. We have seen the miracle of the Marne and the miracle of Warsaw, and still we cannot believe that the French or the Poles can fight or think or govern, or do anything except "decay" picturesquely. We still believe all the prejudices of the nineteenth century against all the facts of the twentieth. In one sense, indeed, the war remains eternally just and necessary, not because it produced a New World, but because it prevented a New World. Prussia would have rejoiced to establish a New World; and Prussian progress was far more inhuman than Prussian reaction. But, on the positive side, we can only say that the war has done its best, as well as its worst, to tell us the truth about peasants and officials and many other matters, and we have simply refused to listen. And the reason I believe to be the very simple one with which I began- what used to be called spiritual pride. We simply cannot bear to admit that a truth dimly felt by the poor was densely hidden from the superior, or that a truth which has so long been missed in England has been found in France, and even in Ireland.

In short, I am quite "optimist" enough to believe in progress in the future, so long as I may peremptorily refuse to believe in progress in the past- I mean especially, of course, in the immediate past. One would have thought the ghastly collision of 1914 would alone have been enough to make people suspect that we have recently been on the wrong side of the road; and now crash after crash is coming on every side. "When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the book of dates for the meaning of the omen." So said the philosophical Chinaman in that great masterpiece, The Wallet Kai Lung. One would think so; but many of our friends are still consulting it busily, and reading out extracts to the effect that evolution and not revolution is the key to everything. But I think their book of dates is a little out of date.