Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Christmas and the Most Dangerous Toy

Christmas and the Most DangerousToy The last chapter of an obscure book I published in England was entitled “Of God’s Jokes,Toys, and Christmas Trees.”1 I was reminded of this chapter when I came across Chesterton’s  Christmas column in the Illustrated London News.2 What had occasioned my earlier reflections on Christmas and toys was an essay in the Wall Street Journal about the dubiousness of the idea that giving little boys toy guns for Christmas was somehow dangerous or immoral. I was delighted to see that Chesterton’s  column was entitled “On Dangerous Toys.” Already here, in , we find Chesterton concerned by the tendency to locate the problem of evil in things and not in wills, even in the case of children. In many ways, modern culture and society have almost completed the closed net by which individual human actions have no significance of their own or source in the individual person. The individual is not viewed as a being able to control his action by responsible choice or self-discipline, even if that discipline takes time and we can often err.The State is now in charge of our errors and seeks to counter them by its own policies and authority.Why we do wrong is not because we choose to do so, but because of our class, race, or gender or some other external cause.Things are out of our control, but they are in control of the State and those who manipulate its ideas about what can or cannot be expected of a human person. Chesterton, it seems, had been in a toy shop talking with the proprietor. He was told that not too many toy bows and arrows were made because bows and arrows were considered dangerous for little boys.To such a proposition, Chesterton remarked with considerable humor and not a little pointed criticism of a flawed 124 ideology, that certainly toy bows and arrows might at times be considered mildly dangerous. But it was always “dangerous to have little boys.”We will not stop the possible dangerous use of any toy by banning the toy.We can only eliminate this dangerous use by abolishing all “little boys.” Here, Chesterton found yet another classic example of modern mind’s inability to distinguish between “the means and the end, between the organ and the disease , between the use and abuse.” To examine this question further, Chesterton proposed scrutinizing this question of “the dangerous toy.” It turns out, of course, that just about everything a little boy runs into is potentially dangerous. In fact, “the most dangerous toy” is about the “least dangerous thing a little boy is likely to run into.” Thus, there is hardly a domestic utensil that is not more dangerous than a little bow and arrow—tea kettles, carving knives, or fireplaces; almost anything about the house that can be broken is more dangerous than a toy. Any little boy could do much more damage with a stone he picks up in the garden than with a toy bow and arrow. What is the cure for the danger that any little boy might find with a toy bow and arrow or the stone? Surely, the answer is not to empower the State to ban such toys, but rather to “trust your private relation with the boy, and not your public relation with the stone.”That is, if a boy does damage with a stone, the answer is not to abolish all stones.“If you can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him where to shoot an arrow; if you cannot teach him anything, he will always have something to throw.”3 These reflections are, no doubt, even more pertinent today than they were when Chesterton wrote them in . We are empowering the all-caring State to take charge of us in everything .The State is eagerly seeking this power to enter our homes and our minds to instruct us about what is dangerous for us, as if Christmas and the Most DangerousToy 125 we could not figure this out ourselves.“The notion that the child depends upon particular implements, labeled dangerous, in order to be a danger to himself and other people, is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any human mind can entertain it for a moment.” Yet, such nonsense today enters quite...