Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Humanism

Humanism A gentleman in Ireland sent me a copy of Humanism:TheWreck of Western Culture, by the Australian philosopher John Carroll.1 The thesis of this provocative book is simply that western humanism is dead, that its premises of complete human autonomy have proved to be impossible to maintain and dangerous to mankind. The major sign of this death is no doubt the contradiction that exists between our stated ideals and our practices.We cannot, say, abort millions of human beings a year and still maintain that all men are created equal with a right to life. Eventually, we come to affirm that not all of what is born of us is human.And if the simple fact of human existence does not suffice to create sufficient awe in us to guarantee our dignity, then we must look elsewhere for this guarantee—usually to the state that can continually rede fine what it is willing to call and protect as human. In a posthumously published essay, Russell Kirk remarked on his having run across a review that Flannery O’Connor did of his Beyond the Dreams of Avarice.2 Kirk cited these words of Flannery O’Connor:“It [politics] is .l.l.a rethinking in the obedience to divine truth which must be the mainspring of any enlightened social thought.”Though wholly orthodox, this blunt statement surprises us. We are wont to think that enlightened social thought needs no “obedience to divine truth.”Yet, there is this record of modern social thought that has somehow slipped first into pure humanism and then into a kind of practical anti-humanism precisely within the culture in which humanism originally arose. Humanism itself is now pronounced to be precisely dead. What are we to make of these remarks? In Chesterton’s  book, TheThing:Why I Am a Catholic, I happened to notice again 159 the chapter entitled,“Is Humanism a Religion?”3 The purpose of this chapter, of course, was to explain why true and elevated things that Chesterton had always believed eventually came to be denied in the movements that embodied them. The validity of these principles, however, remained central in the Catholic tradition . The question that Chesterton posed was whether humanism could “function as a religion.” Chesterton did not think that it could.“I do not believe that Humanism can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism.” The reason for his position was one of experience. He had noticed the peculiar fact that modern movements were largely isolated segments of one or another central Christian truth, but now, since the Reformation, broken off and left to develop on their own.What Chesterton noticed was that after a generation or two, each of these break-off positions in turn either died or so radically changed its basic position that it was no longer recognizable in terms of the original reasons for its separation from the whole. Chesterton’s central theme was that the modern world was living “off its Catholic capital.”This capital, including the capital that Christianity itself subsumed from the ancient cultures, is being used up.The example of this tendency that Chesterton proposes is his own memory of the democratic tradition, especially fromWaltWhitman. In this tradition,“real men were greater than unreal gods.l.l.l.A glory was to cling about men as men.”Whitman even “adored Men. Every human face, every human feature, was a matter of mystical poetry.”4 However, by the end of the nineteenth century, this almost mystical memory of the dignity of each man was practically gone. Science in particular did not support this dignity. Chesterton, to prove this exhaustion of the initial humanist, quotes from H. L. Mencken:“They [he means certain liberal or ex-liberal thinkers] have come to realize that the morons whom they sweated to save do not want to be saved, and are not worth 160 Humanism saving.” Gone is that premise of human dignity, of the visions of human camaraderie that we found in Whitman. Chesterton even wondered whether the conditions of modern science would not also have changed Whitman’s idealism had he known of them. What does Chesterton say to this death of the humanist ideal? Simply, “it is not dead in me.” The reason it is not dead in Chesterton was that he did not hold the worth or dignity of each human person as a kind of sentiment, that can easily be...