Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

As people who know me in real life can attest, I have for the past fifteen years or so regularly joked that--despite being (by this point) nominally an academic expert with a PhD and a book from Oxford University Press on 4th century political theology--the area which I am actually most qualified to write on is Star Trek. However, in the dry, sober, unhumorous light of day, the single topic I am probably actually most fully qualified to write on is the life and thought of G.K. Chesterton.

Regular readers of this """weblog""" will note that pretty much every essay I have written for The Adventures of Captain Peabody since its inception has included at least a few credited or uncredited paraphrases of Chesterton. These citations, though, drastically underrate the degree to which I have stolen from Chesterton over the years. 

The truth is, there is more or less no thought I have had on any topic since the age of twelve that has not derived to at least some degree from a thought by Chesterton. This is not an exaggeration. Since the age of twelve, I have self-consciously and deliberately done everything in my power to adopt and assimilate Chesterton's approach to the world as my own. The basic structures of my reasoning on history, art, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, humor, enjoyment, and theology all derive to greater or lesser degrees from his own: as does by extension every thought or creative product deriving from those structures. In the scale of my various identities, "Chestertonian" comes just behind "Catholic Christian" and very far ahead of "American."

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

Beyond that, though, I have in fact read a shockingly large proportion of Chesterton's shockingly large corpus: and what is more (believe it or not!) remembered most of it. That, though, gives a perhaps unhelpful impression of my engagement with Chesterton, which has not been academic and systematic but constant and totalizing. Put simply, "reading Chesterton" is something I do every day, multiple times a day, on top of and alongside anything else I happen to be reading or doing. The vast majority of the works by Chesterton I have read I have read not once, but somewhere between a dozen and a hundred times.

Or, as Chesterton's close personal friend Hilaire Belloc put it:

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now *I* from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The 'World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
*I take them all because of Chesterton*,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,}
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called 'Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed'?
No matter--it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

I have naturally read many times all of his so-called "major works" of Christian apologetics and philosophy: namely, Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man. I have also, however, read and re-read his less well-known works on Christian topics, namely The Thing, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Well and the Shallows, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I have read and reread many times all of Chesterton's six novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying Inn, and The Return of Don Quixote), as well as more or less all of his short stories (including not only all 53 Father Brown mysteries, but also the one-off collections The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, and the early unpublished writings collected in The Coloured Lands and elsewhere). I have read nearly all of his poems that have been collected (some thousands), and memorized more than a dozen of them, including his famous epic poems Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara, and the book-length Ballad of the White Horse. I have read all those books covering his frequent travels and impressions taken from them: What I Saw in America, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, Sidelights on New York and Newer London, Christendom in Dublin, and The Resurrection of Rome. I have not read all, but at least a reasonable proportion of his works of literary criticism, including his Twelve Types, The Victorian Age in Literature, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his Chaucer. I have read most of his works of political and economic theory and polemic, including Utopia of Usurers, Eugenics and Other Evils, William Cobbett, What's Wrong with the World, and The Outline of Sanity. I have read his one and only Short History of England. I have read all three plays he wrote in his lifetime, namely, Magic, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, and The Surprise, as well as the mummer's play The Turkey and the Turk. I have also, relevantly to this essay, read most of his works of anti-German war propaganda, including The Barbarism of Berlin, Lord Kitchener, The Crimes of England, and the posthumous collection of his anti-Nazi columns and essays The End of the Armistice. 

(I left out a few books here because I missed them in the Wikipedia list of Chesterton works I found and/or wasn't 100% sure I had read them even though I likely did.)

While I have not read all his collections of essays, I have read at least a reasonable proportion of the weekly or more than weekly columns he wrote for most of his life and from which these essay collections were drawn. In particular, I have read and reread all of the weekly columns, reviews, and letters he wrote for the Daily News from 1901 to 1913. It is literally true that I do not know how many of the weekly columns he wrote for the Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936 I have read--as I used to simply read through volumes of them ad libitum without taking any particular notice of what the year was or which I had read before--but I believe upon sober reflection that I have read certainly the majority of them (including definitely all between 1914 and 1919 and all from 1930-1936, of which I made particular note), and consider it likely that I have in fact read something approaching all of them. I have also read everything he wrote (including both weekly columns and occasional anonymous leaders, easily distinguishable by his distinctive voice) for his brother's newspaper The New Witness from 1919 to 1922 (the only years, alas, currently available online); and am at the present slowly reading through everything he wrote for his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly in the available online archives: so far, I have only made it from Sept. 1925 to February 1926, but am making steady progress. This remains, for me, the true "frontier" of Chesterton reading, which will hopefully last me until death.

Oh yes, and I have also naturally read a decent amount of scholarship and writing on Chesterton: including most notably Chesterton's own Autobiography, and Ian Kerr's voluminous and magisterial G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, my copy of which is in tatters from reading it in the shower too much. I have also read many times the initial biography written by Maisie Ward, a personal friend of Chesterton: as well as owning and frequently rereading the rare and hard-to-find supplement Return to Chesterton, a delightful and profound book consisting of dozens of largely unedited accounts and anecdotes of Chesterton by personal friends and people he took under his wing as children and adolescents.

All this might well make me seem like a rather crazed monomaniac, the proverbial "man of one book" spoken of by Aquinas. I can assure my readers that this is not the case: as, for instance, the many books on diverse topics reviewed in this space might indicate. Besides getting a PhD in Classics and writing a book on 4th century political theology, I flatter myself in thinking that I read rather widely. In the past few months, for instance, I have read an academic book on Ottoman political theory, another on modern Islamic movements to revive the Caliphate, another on Medieval European social organization, and another on the internal economy of the contemporary Pakistani military, in addition to a few works of fiction. Still, all the while, I have been also and on the side reading and rereading G.K. Chesterton.

It is, in fact, Chesterton who led me to become such a generalist, and my general reading that leads me back to Chesterton. He himself read and wrote rather widely on very different topics all throughout his life: and a close personal friend compared him to a house with large windows opening in every direction. I have, to a much smaller extent, aspired to be the same.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I should point out that my knowledge of Chesterton extends not merely to his text, but to his context. I would venture to say that I have a fairly decent working knowledge of all of the major authors and politicians, intellectual and religious and political movements, major world events, and journalistic fads of Chesterton's lifetime. A decent amount of that knowledge, it is true, comes via absorbing and researching the references to these events and fads and figures found in Chesterton's voluminous writings--while some more comes from reading a decent proportion of the non-Chesterton writings and reviews and columns and leaders of the weekly popular newspapers Chesterton wrote for. But I have also directly read a decent number of other contemporary authors and/or scholarly works on the period. 

Hence, while I would never profess to be a scholarly expert on the Victorian Era or the early 20th century or WW1 or the '20s or the '30s, I can speak with reasonable facility on and around, for instance, the Eugenics movement in Germany, England, and America, the Celtic Revival, the Decadents, the WW1 German military, the lead-up and results of the Russian Revolution, the introduction of Russian literature into England, the birth and early development of the English Air Force, the rise of Imperialist Jingoism and Mafficking in England, the Darwinian debates over evolution, Teutonist racialism in England and Germany, the Victorian debates over Birth Control, the Great Strikes of the 1900s, Orientalism as a cultural movement, the French syndicalist movement and its American and British offshoots, the place of Jews in England and France in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anarchist dynamite attacks and assassinations, the economic downturn in England, France, and Germany after WW1, the birth of modern policing, the origins of science fiction, the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and '30s, detective fiction in Britain and America, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and so on and so forth. More than this, I am intimately familiar with the language and cast of mind of people in these times and places and could give, I fancy, a pretty decent approximation of how different groups wrote and thought. I have also read or read about a great number of the authors and topics from earlier history written about by Chesterton, including such diverse figures as William Cobbett, William Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides.

Future Political Trends: A Study

Future Political Trends: A Study

For roughly the past six months, I have been repeatedly mentioning, in my posts on this blog, my intention to write up something about current and future political trends. I have not done so for a number of reasons, including (in no particular order) disinterest, boredom, anger, disgust, Lent, Easter, the death of Pope Francis, the election of Pope Leo, my desire to write short stories, a school field trip, my birthday, and the onset of spring. Central to my delays, however, has been the fundamental grimness of the topic itself.

Another thing that happened in the interval, however, was Easter; which is, properly considered, the only thing that has ever really happened. It struck me, on Easter night, that Easter is, perhaps, the best standpoint from which to consider present political realities. It is certainly the best standpoint from which to consider the sweep of human history and human life as a whole. 

In any case, I firmly believe that eternal novelties like Easter are a much better means of understanding than the faded abstractions of political and economic ideology that dominate so much of discourse. 

As Chesterton said in the Daily Herald, quite rightly, political ideologies and analyses nearly always lag at least a half-century behind actual political systems. In the 1910s, he pointed out how profoundly unsuited the 18th and 19th century categories of Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, and the like were for the era of syndicalism and great strikes and great states and secret societies and global warfare. In a similar vein, but even more so, the categories that we use for unraveling the tangled events of our time are practically all hoary 20th century abstractions such as Fascism, Naziism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, and the like--when they are not the same, even more faded 19th century abstractions such as Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Liberalism, and so forth. 

I would suggest that one of the greatest threats to our political life today, a threat that has again and again allowed evils to burgeon and flourish undetected, is simply the enormous gap between reality and our ability to analyze it. This may seem a rather distant and abstract threat, but is in reality among the most practical causes of the practical evils of our time. The year 2025 does not lack for crimes and tyrants--but it does profoundly, I am tempted to say unprecedentedly, lack for both practical recognition of these evils and practical efforts to counter them. And a foremost reason for this lack, I increasingly think, is simply that people cannot understand these evils, cannot recognize them, frequently do not even seem to notice them, because they happen to fall into gaps in their abstract, categorical understanding of such things. 

For some bizarre reason, the real estate developer, media mogul, and brand icon Donald Trump continues to be analyzed, again and again and at ever greater length and with ever greater portentous seriousness by ever more prestigious intellectuals, entirely by comparison with a mid-20th century Italian movement of ex-socialist, WW1-veteran-populated paramilitary squads turned revanchist dictatorship. Like any historical comparison, there are certainly truths to be drawn from this one--but the gap between reality and analytical abstraction is, nevertheless, so vast that nearly the whole of Trump's actual ideology and program and even legitimate crimes can be, and have been, and continue to be buried within. 

Nevertheless, in carrying out an analysis of present trends, and their likely future results, I would like to be absolutely clear about what I am doing, and why. I am not a historicist, let alone a historical fatalist: I do not believe in memetics, or Hegelian dialectics, or progress. When I speak of trends, I am speaking ultimately of either ideas or habits residing in the actual intellects and wills of actual people: ideas and habits which exercise great power over those people's actions, but never fully determine them. 

People can and do reject ideas they have held, especially when they are ideas that they have never consciously understood, but only passively absorbed from their environments. People can and do change their habits, including habits that have become deeply engrained in their minds and hearts and wills over many years. 

On the most abstract level, I consider history to be first and foremost the study of human actions and the motivations behind them; so that the fundamental historical question is not merely the positivistic query of "What happened?," but the much more intrusive demands "What did they do?" and "Why did they do it?"

What is true for historical actions writ large is even more true for the subset of human actions that make up political systems past and present. Governing, particularly in the modern world, is a highly complex and technical set of actions attempting to shape and respond to constantly shifting conditions. Still, it always depends first and foremost on conscious, considered human action; and conscious, considered human action depends first and foremost on rational ideas and goals. 

Yet people are not always, or perhaps even often, aware of the ideas and goals underlying their own actions, let alone the broader social conditions and trends to which they are responding. It is for this reason, above all, that this kind of analysis is useful. As anyone knows who has ever tried to change a deeply-engrained idea or habit, one of the most important steps is often merely recognizing the actual ideas one unconsciously holds, and the actual habits that one unconsciously possesses. Only then, as a rule, can one then set out to change them.

Hence, while I am engaged in this essay in modestly claiming to understand contemporary trends and their likely future impacts, I am not engaged in actually trying to predict the future. To do so would be to fall under the curse of Chesterton's game of Cheat the Prophet: the game whereby smart people predict the future by extending current trends indefinitely, and the human race thwarts them by the simple expedient of going and doing something else. In this post, I am quite self-consciously teeing up to play a round of this game with the human race, providing them with a helpful listing of the trends they will need to know about in order to defy them. In this, I heartily encourage the human race to cheat me: nay, I demand it. That is, in fact, the entire point of this exercise. If all my predictions are vindicated, I will be deeply, profoundly disappointed in you all.

Of course, the trends I discuss below are not uniformly positive or negative. Some are in my judgment evil, some few are good, some are, in themselves, merely neutral. Nonetheless, my modest claim is merely that if we wish to exercise some control over our collective destinies, it is helpful to know what is happening: only then can we choose to aid what is good, to resist what is evil, and, hopefully and above all, to repent and seek the good. This is my exhortation.

The 2024 Election

THE 2024 ELECTION

I went to the polls this past Wednesday to vote in the 2024 Election. 

I think we can all, regardless of our political beliefs, agree that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, perhaps in the entire history of our nation, even of the human race. Hence, I wanted to make sure to participate fully in the event by voting early.

The week before, I had received in the mail a missive from the pro-turnout Super-PAC "Democracy in Action." The ad featured a grainy photograph of me, taken apparently from across the street near my house, and pinned to an ordinary piece of lined paper. Above the photograph, scrawled in black marker, was the message: "IF YOU DO NOT VOTE WE WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY." 

Since the Pandemic, the roads I would ordinarily take to get to the polling site have been "Closed for Repair," blocked off with yellow tape and barbed wire and barricades and medical checkpoints. To get there now means a dangerous journey down the River; and as I lacked the requisite funds to hire the well-armored personnel transports that serve most voters in my generally upscale neighborhood, I had to make do with one of the "General Admission" voting ferries sponsored by Bain Capital, LP as part of a get-out-the-vote effort ultimately masterminded (according to Internet rumor) by Kamala Harris' husband's aunt's former accountant, now the CEO of an Albanian arms company with ties to the UAE. 

I set out just before dawn so as to arrive at the jetty in time for the scheduled 7:15 AM departure time; but as it turned out, the ferry was nearly three hours late, arriving just after 10 AM. When I first arrived at the jetty, there were only a few elderly women there, apparently Kamala Harris campaign volunteers, in oversized, lime-green t-shirts worn down to their ankles, clustered around a large pot of stew stirring and adding herbs from fanny packs around their waists. One of them offered me a cup of soup, but as I had already eaten breakfast I declined. 

After about half an hour, a few apparent voters arrived, one an old man dressed in rags, barefoot, with a long grizzled beard, wearing a MAGA hat on his head; the other a tall, thin young woman bundled up to her eyes in blue-tinted furs, who (after eagerly accepting a cup of soup) eyed me suspiciously and crossed to the far end of the jetty to sit crosslegged on the planks. The morning was cool and dim, and fog shrouded the banks all around us. From time to time, I pulled out and checked the sample ballot in my pocket, or sat and watched the huge, dark shapes moving in the water below. 

When the boat had still not arrived at 9:30, I found myself hungry once again, and belatedly approached the old women, who eyed me eagerly, licking their lips. "C-could I have some soup please?" I stammered. 

The tallest of the old women, with rank, black hair that might have been dyed, dipped a cup of the soup out of the cast-iron pot, began handing it to me, then stopped, her eyes going dark, and hissing out of suddenly pressed lips: "Which side are you on?" I said nothing, and after another moment she smiled again and handed me the cup of soup. There was no spoon.

The soup had been cooking on an open flame for hours, and by this time had something of the consistency of glue--but its pungent flavors of sage and rosemary reminded me irresistibly of long summer evenings on the patio at Luigi's Pizza, and I wolfed down the whole cup in a matter of minutes. 

A few minutes after 10 o'clock, the jetty was abruptly flooded with passengers, all, male and female, clad in the loose brown tunics and smocks typical of peasants in the lowlands, many with campaign buttons pinned onto the smocks, and all bearing pilgrim's staves and large rucksacks. A few led mules or donkeys, and all pointedly refused the old women's offer of soup. Some wandered sociably around the jetty from end to end, while others sat with their feet swinging off the end and throwing stones or pieces of bread from their rucksack into the water for the creatures below; but all talked loudly with each other about the election, the journey, and the latest poll forecasts and modeling from FiveThirtyEight. 

The young woman, meanwhile, had gotten up and fled to stand with the old women, who spoke to her and stroked her hair comfortingly while (almost imperceptibly) pulling off small pieces of it to add to their pot. 

A few minutes later, when the ferry at last came into sight, the assembled passengers broke into raucous applause, cheering and throwing their rucksacks and bits of bread into the air. The day was cool, dark, and misty, so at first the yellow light streaming from the ferry was so overwhelming that I had to shield my face with my hand.

The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream & the Decline of the American Empire

The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream and The Decline of the American Empire 

Here's a "personality quiz" of sorts for you:

(1) Which film released in 2010 did you enjoy more: (1) Unstoppable or (2) Alice in Wonderland? Or if you didn't see either, which do you think (based on Wikipedia descriptions and posters) you would enjoy more?

(2) Which song released in 2023 did you enjoy more: (1) Last Night by Morgan Wallern or (2) anti-hero by Taylor Swift?  

(3) Which television show released in 2015 did you enjoy more: (1) The Big Bang Theory or (2) NCIS? 

(4) Knowing nothing more, you are asked to choose between watching either (1) a new Adam Sandler film, or (2) a new Lin-Manual Miranda musical. Which do you pick?

(5) You can choose between watching two shows tonight, (1) a Law & Order series featuring a tough-as-nails black woman as lead prosecutor, or (2) an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice. Which would you enjoy more?

Congratulations: if you can answer these questions, you now know whether you should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

The Millennial Sovereign, The Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

The Millennial Sovereign, the Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma

What is it that makes a human person more than just another human person?

This is a rather important question, to which many highly conflicting answers have been given. 

We are, most of us, surrounded by people day in and day out, both in person and through media and social and political structures. Most of these people we do not, really, know particularly well. Some of these people want things from us; from some we want things; and some of these people will not just want something from us: they will want us. So how do we decide, among all these people, who we will pay attention to or not pay attention to, trust or not trust, listen to or not listen to, obey or not obey? How do we decide who we give ourselves to, as friends, lovers, helpers, leaders, followers, servants? 

This is a crucial question when it comes to individual relationships and individual lives; but it is in many ways even more crucial when it comes to the lives and destinies of whole groups and peoples and nations and Empires. In our personal lives, we can (if we choose) exercise prudence and wisdom and take our time and think our way through who we trust and who we give to and who we give ourselves to. When it comes to the realms of public culture, political culture, especially mass-media culture, we frequently are under far more pressure, and have far less to go on. How do we decide who is telling the truth in a public war of words between two politicians or influencers or apologists or academics talking about something we know nothing about? How do we decide who to trust, to whom to give our money, our time, our attention, our vote, our obedience, our trust and love and devotion, when our choice actually matters, for ourselves and others?

There are many answers to this basic question, ranging from the rational to the romantic to the utterly insane. One common answer throughout history is charisma. 

Pope Francis and the Third World War

Pope Francis and the Third World War

In the far-off year 2014, the sun shone, Barack Obama was President of the United States, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was released, and the top-selling song of the year was named "Happy." And the Pope of the Catholic Church announced the beginning of the Third World War. 

Amid the ever-repeated excitement of such scintillating mass-media events that year, few people in America noted or marked the centenary of World War I. While in Britain and France, this war is still clearly remembered--if nothing else for its devastating toll on the population and landscape--in America it has always been a forgotten war, a mere footnote on the path to World War II and global dominance. Still, events were held, here and there, most in Europe and a few in America, and to one of them the recently-elected Pope Francis came. While a South American by birth, he is also the descendant of Italian immigrants, who no doubt passed on some of the legacy and legend of the Great War to him. And so, in September, he visited a cemetery where soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that great rival of united Italy, were buried, and mourned the dead, and prayed for them, and said a few words in reflection on the conflict in which they died, as Popes have done for many decades now in regular succession.

In doing so, however, Francis, as he so often does, went off script, and began reflecting on contemporary events. "Perhaps," he mused, "one can speak of a third world war, one fought piecemeal."

This is, so far as can be told, the first time Francis mentioned the concept, only a little over a year after his election. He has since used the phrase and concept of "a third world war fought piecemeal" over and over again, dozens if not hundreds of times, mentioning it with greater and greater frequency as time has gone on and the world has grown more unstable.

Many things could be said about Pope Francis, for good and for ill, in many different dimensions. I hope to eventually write more about him and his significance.

The point of this essay, however, is to say that about this, at least, he is right, and has been since 2014. Something fundamental has changed, and the world has begun to look back to and recapitulate the horrors of the 20th century. And this must be understood, and stopped, while there is still time.