Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On Becoming Inhuman out of Sheer Humanitarianism

On Becoming Inhuman out of Sheer Humanitarianism In the summer of  (July  and ), Chesterton wrote two essays in the Illustrated London News on literature and novels.1 He began with some advice that I recall my old professor Rudolf Allers had also given some years ago, namely,“read even bad novels .” Allers’s point was that you will likely find in lousy novels some rather accurate insight into how people are thinking or acting that you will not find in good literature or in your own experience. It is not easy to imagine all of the silly and wrong things that we might perpetrate on one another, yet we need to know this if only to save us from a certain naïveté or ethereal innocence . Chesterton, with considerable amusement, put the case in this way:“I have always maintained that trash is a good aid to truth. I will venture to say that most of our historical ignorance, and even our literary ignorance, comes from our not having read enough of the trash of different times and places.”2 But it is often difficult to find the trash of other civilizations or times because that “terrible taste of mankind for preserving masterpieces has defeated us.” Neither Chesterton nor Allers, of course, was maintaining that trash was not trash, or that masterpieces were not masterpieces. The one helped to define the other and vice versa.The point was rather that we must indeed know what can go wrong in ourselves and in others.We do not know what is right without at the same time knowing what is wrong. Plato had insisted that to know the good we had also to know 190 the bad, not just the elegant bad of the sophisticated tyrant, but the ordinary bad of everyday life.Thus, Chesterton, for his part, maintained that “it would be very interesting to try to trace through popular stories some notion of the ideal of conduct which now prevails.” In such an effort, Chesterton thought, we would find out better which part of traditional morality remained and which part did not. In some sense, Chesterton had his friend Bernard Shaw in mind. In the popular tales,Chesterton observed, we will find that “it does not matter very much whether you are divorced. It does not matter very much whether you indulge in conduct calculated to produce a divorce.”3 What matters is that, like Shaw, we still behave in a certain gentlemanly manner, that we do not “attribute any faults to a lady” even though the metaphysical or religious reasons for not doing so are no longer held. What bothered Chesterton about this situation was that, if in rational principle there was nothing wrong with divorce or the acts that might cause it, we should not have to worry about the more general rules of conduct that were designed to support the vows of marriage. Shaw, for Chesterton, was a model of correct reasoning.“He would have said that, if the sexes were to be equal, the man would have as much right to blame the woman as the woman to blame the man.”What happens is that we have retained the vague notion of manners but not the idea of vows upon which manners were premised. The problem with divorce is not just that we are ignorant of its often dire results but that we do not discuss its alternative.The alternative to divorce is that a “dull, common-place fellow,” that is, the ordinary man, can think “that the oath he swore before God really meant something in the way of loyalty to his wife.”4 Moreover, Chesterton thought, “Christianity did succeed in making [this] loyalty comprehensible to a large number of common people.”The usefulness of the often trashy stories and novels “On Becoming Inhuman out of Sheer Humanitarianism” 191 that assume the opposite—that is, that vows mean little or nothing —is, in Chesterton’s view, to describe accurately what such disloyalty might entail. Chesterton then went on to discuss in the July th column “intellectual novelists.” Already in , he perceived the problem with compassion and sincerity theory that has become the instrument for overturning any conception of a stable and defensible morality.5 Chesterton was fascinated with “the modern mind,” with the way it can “almost destroy itself.” Chesterton, then, was struck with “the way in which people have become inhuman...