G.K. Chesterton...

ledge and his lone battle against the idea that someone with bad politics could be a great writer :D

I do dislike his fiction, and his pompously windbagful essay style, and of course his conclusions - all that I can dismiss as a matter of taste. His arguments though are truly dreadful, specious through and through. He's an armchair sociologist with a great many opinions and zero knowledge of those he is making grand pronouncements on behalf of - women, the working classes, families, 'savages'. Woke he ain't.

woke he indeed ain't, won't and can't argue with that

Doubtless he would scoff at the word, if not the notion, dismissing things based on their names being a favourite ploy.

I've been reading a compilation of Borges' essays and the write-up on Detective Fiction nudged me (as they have various ppl in the thread) to look out for the Father Brown Stories. I got a 'Best of..' at Oxfam and none of the stories mentioned here ("The Sign of the Broken Sword", "The Paradise of Thieves") are in it, which is annoying. I don't remember connecting or liking "The Man Who was Thursday" which is why it has taken me a while..

Father Brown stories are ace, gotta admit.

The Invisible Man (talked about here: G.K. Chesterton's 'Father Brown' vs Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes') is included -- its really good!

"Man Who Was Thursday" seemed to use a straw man definition of anarchism, of being against society. It didn't make me interested in exploring his other works.

a straw man? in chesterton? never! (caution: sarcasm)

So I read The Ethics of Elfland, finding the usual list of fallacies - straw men, false dilemmas, actual falsehoods hidden behind aphorisms. He's a terrible logician but a great rhetorician, using all these tricks to throw sand in your eyes. There's even some germs of good ideas, his defence of democracy starts well though never grapples with the actual problem; his defence of tradition not so convincing, "the democracy of the dead" he calls it, which is a great phrase, I'd happily carry it on a banner in a march against tradition. So maybe not so great a phrase if your opponents can get behind it 100%. He ends that part with a typically ridiculous bit of rhetorical theatre:

The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

Gag me with a spoon.

The stuff about fairy tales is good when it's about fairy tales, bad when he applies it to the real world. He acts like he's invented Hume's problem of induction, he seemingly has no idea about the actual philosophy, history, or practice of science. I am more than sympathetic to the idea that life, existence, consciousness, is MAGIC, but that is to *include* science, not dismiss it as fallacious or misguided.

Then I came across this paragraph and I thought, whoa, this is fantastic:

But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

And I wondered, is that how all Chesterton reads to people who are more intellectually or emotionally attuned to him? Ultimately he is a great sentimentalist, though he decries the tendency in others and describes himself as a rationalist; I don't share his sentiments, he doesn't persuade me of them, and I find nothing else worthwhile there.

he was a brilliant writer but all his writing was oriented toward discrediting modernity and affirming tradition. and the way he wanted to affirm tradition was to evade what was ghastly in it so there is a significant degree of dishonesty in his writing. "sentimentalist" is the key word--i think when he describes himself as a rationalist and his critics as sentimentalists he is being kind of ironic, downplaying his own obvious tendencies while also pointing out that wishful thinking animates the arguments of atheists/materialists too (which is correct, he is right).

Dishonesty is the word imo, and the criticism is that his joins are blatant

pleased to see ledge warming to GKC :)

If I read another of his novels, some essays, and a few dozen short stories maybe I'll find another good paragraph!

GKC fanboy by the end of 2021. Deploying pseudo-paradoxes with the best of them. Calling it.

i like his love letters/democracy analogy. I have been known to garble it hopelessly in the pub many a time.

Now having taken the trouble to read your post, ledge, i think i agree with all of that, and had noted the same paragraph, and otm about the better interpretation being including science, and also the preferable reading of the democracy of the dead. Agree with all of it apart from the 'nothing else to find worthwhile there'.

I need to think a bit more what it means to be 'attuned' to Chesterton to respond to your suggestion about the paragraph.

Well obviously it's a classy move to come on to a thread, call the guy a douchebag and then say 'but hey if you're attuned to him...'. Speaking just about that para, he's not as usual talking about some amorphous and over-generalised 'men of science' but materialists, in particular those who deny free will, consciousness etc, and yes they exist, they're still around today, and I agree that they're dicks. So when he gets to his argument I'm already on his side, and I find it persuasive and the analogy imaginative and apt. But if I were more of a materialist I don't think there's anything there that would convince me otherwise.

materialists, in particular those who deny free will, consciousness etc, and yes they exist, they're still around today, and I agree that they're dicks.

old-fashioned materialism and its claims for absolute determinism are imaginatively stuck in a Newtonian universe that has no idea of how weird and non-determinative 'material' really is.

yes, in the words of arthur machen:

I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the iterated dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of things there is no undiscovered land even beyond the remotest stars, where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that science itself but dallies on the threshold, scarcely gaining more than a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place.

*hp lovecraft sweating and puffing as he hurries towards a thread he probably won't be at all welcomed into*

slouches imo

image less funny

I think the appeal to me of Chesterton is that something like the Reading Gaol metaphor works as a piece of writing even if you don't understand what he's getting at, don't agree with him, or think his whole argument is manipulative bullshit. I don't really care if he's right or wrong or talking out his ass about materialists, he's good at atmosphere when he tries, and that metaphor of being free to roam a huge undifferentiated prison is a solid little bit of horror (that incidentally sums up how I feel about being able to walk around my neighborhood during covid.)

That said, I threw out my big book of Father Brown because one of the stories in it was really racist. But I do love "The Sign of the Broken Sword." One of the most chilling stories I've ever read.

so anyway i'm editing someone's book about a significant figure in the chesterton era -- very wicked, very entertaining, won't say who cz i'm superstitious abt my freelance projects until they enter print -- and all i can say is that GKC's fiction is a FUCKING DOCUMENTARY: some of the stuff going on in politics and crime between 1890 and like 1925 was just wildly nuts

like this guy (who isn't the subject of the book and i'd never heard of till it mentioned him this morning): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Grayson

also lolwhut really?

https://i.imgur.com/Ci7qNHf.png

i mean obviously yes, they both unreel paradox as a a key weapon -- the reverse slipknot of the dialectic blah blah -- but it;s funny just seeing that one name on the list

iirc zizek *loves* citing GKC.

but yeah wd expect to see eg borges

my boring favourite john dickson carr.

yeah odd it’s the one name.

Lol

The new Prime Minister of Italy.

Wow. pic.twitter.com/fkKTM8I9Fs

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) September 26, 2022

Same idea: "One must always strive to be as radical as reality itself" (Lenin)

🤔🤔🤔

I can see how she could sincerely believe all that bullshit and build a worldview from it, but it's because she lives in a narrow world that has no point of contact beyond its own confines. This allows her to make utterly confident assertions about the larger world, untainted by any trace of knowledge or experience that would provide the grounds for a sympathetic understanding of what she's slagging off.

Or rather, this would apply to those who respond positively to her bullshit, not so much to her. She's a straight up fascist.