The Anti-Modernism of G. K. Chesterton

Neither Progressive nor Conservative: The Anti-Modernism of G. K. Chesterton

By Keith Preston

AlternativeRight.Com & http://attackthesystem.com

 

 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) bears the distinction of being a writer who resisted virtually all of the dominant trends of his era. He lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, precisely the time that modernity was fully consolidating itself within Western civilization more than a century after the apex of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Chesterton began his writing career as a young man and as the twentieth century was just beginning. As much as any other writer from his era, he predicted the horrors that century would entail.

 

A man of many talents and interests, Chesterton was a playwright, novelist, lecturer, journalist, poet, critic of literature and art, philosopher, and theologian. His work in many of these areas stands out as being among the very best of the era and continues to offer immense insight even in the present day. Among Chesterton’s circle of friends and intellectual sparring partners were such luminaries as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and George Bernard Shaw. His relationships with these men are themselves highly significant as each of them were among the leading “progressive” intellectuals of the era and fully committed to the modernist values of rationalism, secularism, and socialism. As these were all systems of thought that Chesterton adamantly opposed, it is striking that he could also count some of these figures as friends and engage them in amiable debate. It was during an era when the old liberal values of rational discourse and gentlemanly civility still prevailed, even among those who in many ways held polar opposite world views. It was before the time of the radical political polarization of modern intellectual life that began with the growth of the totalitarian movements of the early to middle twentieth century. The friendly exchanges between Chesterton and Shaw, for instance, even on topics of intense disagreement in many ways serve as a refreshing contrast to the rhetorical brutality that dominates much of today’s public discourse.

The dramatic changes that had occurred in Western society over the course of the nineteenth century had dramatically impacted the thinking of its leading intellects. The growth of industrial civilization has raised the general standards of living to levels that were hitherto not even dreamed of, and the rising incomes of the traditionally exploited industrial working class were finally allowing even the proletariat to share in at least some middle class comforts. The rise of new political ideologies such as liberalism and democracy had imparted to ordinary people political and legal rights that were previously reserved only for the nobility. Health standards also increased significantly as industrial civilization expanded and life expectancy began to grow longer. Scientific discovery and technological innovation exploded during the same era and human beings began to marvel at what they had accomplished and might be able to accomplish in the future. Religion-driven superstitions had begun to wane and the religious persecutions of the past had dwindled to near non-existence. Societies became ever more complex and out of this complexity came the need for an ever expanding class of specialists and more scientific approaches to social management. While only a hundred years had passed between the world as it was in 1800 and the world of 1900, the changes that had occurred in the previous century were so profound that the time difference might as well have been thousands of years.

The profundity of this civilization-wide change inspired the leading thinkers of the era to tremendous confidence and optimism regarding the future and human capabilities. If one surveys the literature of utopian writers of the era one immediately observes that many of these authors expressed a confidence in the future that now seems as quaint as it is absurd. The horrors of the twentieth century, with its genocides, total wars, atomic weaponry, and unprecedented levels of tyranny would subsequently shatter the naïve idealism of many who had previously viewed the advent of that century with great hopes that often approached the fantastic. The early twentieth century was a time of joyous naivete. Bertrand Russell would later insist that no one who was born after the beginning of the Great War which broke out in 1914 would ever know what it was like to be truly happy.

“Pick a star, any star” – the retro-futuristic optimism of the past

But G. K. Chesterton, while far from being a cynical or overly pessimistic figure, was not one who shared in this optimism. Indeed, he was one who understood the potential horrors that could be unleashed by the new society and new modes of thought as clearly as any other. To Chesterton, the progressives of his time were over confident to the point of arrogance and failed to recognize the dangers that might befall mankind as humanity boldly forged its way into the future. Perhaps one of Chesterton’s most prescient works of social criticism is Eugenics and Other Evils, published in 1917. [1] At the time the eugenics movement that was largely traceable to the thought of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, had become a popular one in the world’s most advanced nations such as England, America, and Germany. It was a movement that in its day was regarded as progressive, enlightened and as applying scientific principles to the betterment of human society and even the human species itself. Its supporters included many leading thinkers and public figures of the era including Winston Churchill, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John Maynard Keynes, Anthony Ludovici, Madison Grant, and Chesterton’s friends Wells and Shaw. Yet Chesterton was one of the earliest critics of the eugenics movement and regarded it as representing dangerous presumptions on the part of its proponents that would likely lead to horrific abuses of liberty and violations of the individual person which it eventually did.

One of Chesterton’s most persistent targets was the growing secularism of his era, a trend which continues to the present time. That Chesterton was a man of profound faith even as religion was being dwarfed by science among thinking and educated people during his time solidifies Chesterton’s role as a true intellectual maverick. It is this aspect of Chesterton’s thought that as much as anything else continues to win him the admiration of those who remain believers even during the twenty-first century. Chesterton was always a man of spiritual interests and even as a young man toyed with occultism and ouija boards. The development of his spiritual thinking later led him to regard himself and an “orthodox” Christian and Chesterton formally converted to Catholicism in 1922 at the age of forty-six. His admirer C. S. Lewis considered Chesterton’s writings on Christian subjects to be among the very best works in Christian apologetics.

In the intellectual climate of the early twenty-first century, religious thinking has fallen into even greater disrepute than it possessed in the early twentieth century. In relatively recent times, popular culture has produced a number of writers whose open contempt for religious believers has earned them a great deal of prominence. While intelligent believers who can offer thoughtful defenses of their views certainly still exist, it is also that case that religious belief or practice is at its lowest point yet in terms of popular enthusiasm in the Western world. Less than five percent of the British population attends religious services regularly and even in the United States, with its comparatively large population of religious fundamentalists, secularism has become the fastest growing religious perspective. Chesterton would no doubt be regarded as a rather anachronistic figure in such a cultural climate.

Abandoned church

The contemporary liberal and left-wing stereotype of a religious believer is that of an ignorant or narrow-minded bigot who is incapable of flexibility in his thinking and reacts with intolerance to those holding different points of view. Certainly, there are plenty of religious people who fit such stereotypes just as overly rigid and dogmatic persons can be found among adherents of any system of thought. Yet, a survey of both Chesterton’s writings on religion and his correspondence with friends of a secular persuasion indicates that Chesterton was the polar opposite of a bigoted, intolerant, religious fanatic. In his Christian apologetic work Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote,

“To hope for all souls is imperative, and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable…In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man ‘damned’: but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.” 

Of his friend Shaw, he said, “In a sweeter and more solid civilization he would have been a great saint.”

In his latter years when he knew he was dying, H. G. Wells wrote to Chesterton, “If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.’s. Bless you.” Chesterton wrote in response:

“If I turn out to be right, you will triumph, not by being a friend of mine, but by being a friend of Man, by having done a thousand things for men like me in every way from imagination to criticism. The thought of the vast variety of that work, and how it ranges from towering visions to tiny pricks of humor, overwhelmed me suddenly in retrospect; and I felt we have none of us ever said enough…Yours always, G. K. Chesterton.” [2]

It was also during Chesterton’s era that the classical socialist movement was initially starting to become powerful through the trade unions and labor parties and virtually all leading intellectuals of the era professed fidelity to the ideals of socialism. Yet just as Chesterton was a prescient critic of eugenics, he likewise offered an equally prescient critique of the totalitarian implications of state socialism. Because of this, he was often labeled a reactionary or conservative apologist for the plutocratic overlords of industrial capitalism by the Marxists of his era. But Chesterton was no friend of those who would exploit the poor and workings classes and was in fact a staunch critic of the industrial system as it was in the England of his era. “Who except a devil from Hell ever defended it?” he was alleged to have said when asked about capitalism as it was practiced in his day. [3]

Indeed, Chesterton’s criticisms of both industrial capitalism and state socialism led to the development of one of the most well-known and interesting aspects of his thought, the unique economic philosophy of distributism. Along with his dear friend and fellow Catholic traditionalist Hilaire Belloc (Shaw coined the term “Chesterbelloc” to describe the pair as inseparable as they were), Chesterton suggested the creation of an economic system where productive property would be spread to as many owners of capital as possible thereby producing many “small capitalists” rather than having capital concentrated into the hands of a few plutocrats, trusts, or the state itself.

The prevailing trends of the twentieth century were towards ever greater concentrations of power in large scale, pyramid-like institutions and ever expanding bureaucratic profligacy. Chesterton’s and Belloc’s economic ideas were frequently dismissed as quaint and archaic. However, technological developments in the cyber age have once again opened the door for exciting new possibilities concerning the prospects for the decentralization of economic life. Far from being anachronistic reactionaries, perhaps Chesterton and his friend Belloc were instead futuristic visionaries far ahead of their time.

It is clear enough that Chesterton was in many ways a model for what a public intellectual should be. He was a fiercely and genuinely independent thinker and one who stuck to his convictions with courage. Chesterton never hesitated to buck the prevailing trends of his day and was not concerned about earning the opprobrium of the chattering classes by doing so. He was above all a man of character, committed to intellectual integrity, sincere in his convictions, tolerant in his religious faith, and charitable in his relations with others. In his intellectual life, he wisely and quixotically criticized the worst excesses of the intellectual culture of his time. The twentieth century might have been a happier time if the counsel of G. K. Chesterton had been heeded.

NOTES:

[1] Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Eugenics and Other Evils. Reprinted by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1st edition (November 20, 2012). Originally published in 1917.

[2] Babinski, Edward T. Chesterton and Univeralism. Archived at http://www.tentmaker.org/biographies/chesterton.htm. Accessed on March 12, 2013.

[3] Friedman, David D. G. K. Chesterton-An Author Review, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism. Second Edition. Archived at http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf. Accessed on March 12, 2013.

Originally published in Chesterton: Thoughts & Perspectives, Volume Thirteen (edited by Troy Southgate) published by Black Front Press.

We Anti-Moderns

Michael O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Antoine Compagnon
Les antimodernes:
De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes
Paris: Gallimard, 2005

“Ce qu’on appelle contre-révolution ne sera
point une révolution contraire, mais le
contraire de la révolution.”
—Joseph de Maistre

Though Antoine Compagnon’s eloquently written and extensively researched essay won a number of prizes and set off a stir among France’s literati, there is little to recommend it here—except for its central theme, which speaks, however implicitly, to the great question of our age in defining and classifying a form of thought whose mission is to arrest modernity’s seemingly heedless advance toward self-destruction.

The antimoderne, Compagnon argues, was born with the birth of liberal modernity. Neither a reactionary nor an antiquarian, the anti-modernist is himself a product of modernity, but a “reluctant” one, who, in the last two centuries, has been modernity’s most severe critic, serving as its foremost counter-point, but at the same time representing what is most enduring and authentic in the modern. This makes the antimoderne the modern’s negation, its refutation, as well as its double and its most authentic representative. As such, it is inconceivable without the moderne, oscillating between pure refusal and engagement. The anti-modernist is not, then, anyone who opposes the modern, but rather those “modernists” at odds with the modern age who engage it and theorize it in ways that offer an alternative to it.

Certain themes or “figures” distinguish anti-modernism from academism, conservatism, and traditionalism. Compagnon designates six, though only four need mentioning. Politically, the antimoderne is counter-revolutionary; unlike contemporary conservatives, his opposition to modernity’s liberal order is radical, repudiating its underlying premises. Philosophically, the antimoderne is anti-Enlightenment; he opposes the disembodied rationalism born of the New Science and its Cartesian offshoot, and he sides with Pascal’s contention that “the heart has its reasons that reason knows not.” Existentially, the antimoderne is a pessimist, rejecting the modern cult of progress, with its feel-good, happy-ending view of reality. Morally or religiously, the antimoderne accepts the doctrine of “original sin,” spurning Rousseau’s Noble Savage and Locke’s Blank Slate, along with all the egalitarian, social-engineering dictates accompanying modernity’s optimistic onslaught.

The greatest and most paradigmatic of the antimoderns was Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). Prior to the Great Revolution of 1789, which ushered in the modern liberal age, Maistre had been a Freemason and an enthusiast of the Enlightenment. The Revolution’s wanton violence, combined with Burke’s Reflections, helped turn him against it. Paradoxically indebted to the style of Enlightenment reasoning, his unorthodox Catholic critique of the Revolution became the subsequent foundation not only for the most meaningful distillations of Continental conservatism, but of the antimodern project.

The tenor of Maistre’s anti-modernism is probably best captured in his contention that the counter-revolution would not be a negation of the Revolution, but its dépassement (i.e., its overtaking or transcendence). Unlike certain reactionary anti-revolutionaries who sought a literal restoration of the old regime, the grand Savoyard realized the Revolution had wreaked havoc upon Europe’s traditional order, and nothing could ever be done to undo this, for history is irreversible. The counter-revolution would thus have to be revolutionary, going back not to the old regime, but beyond it, to a new order representing both the Revolution’s completion and transcendence. In this sense, the anti-modern project—by rejecting what is decadent and perverted in the modern, while defending what is great and necessary in it—holds out the prospect of rebirth.

Between the Great Revolution and the Second World War, as anti-modernists were excluded from the leading spheres of French political and social life, they took refuge, Compagnon argues, in literature and letters—their “ideological resistance [being] inseparable from [their] literary audacity.” Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Péguy, Céline—to name those most familiar to English-speaking readers—are a few of the great figures of French literature who, in implicit dialogue with Maistre, resisted the modern world in modernist ways. (Not coincidentally, for it was also a European phenomenon, the great Welsh Marxist scholar, Raymond Williams, makes a similar argument for English literature in his Culture and Society, 1780–1950 [1958], though in anti-capitalist rather than anti-modernist terms.)

But if Compagnon develops a suggestive term to designate the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resistance to modern liberal dogmas, he himself is no anti-modernist—which is what one would expect from this professor of French literature occupying prestigious chairs at both the Sorbonne and Columbia University. For anti-modernism is not simply modernity’s aesthetic auxiliary, as Compagnon would have it, but an ideological-cultural tradition frontally challenging the modern order. Given, moreover, the anti-liberal and frequently anti-Semitic implications of the anti-modern temper, as well as its uncompromising resistance to the reigning powers, no feted representative of the system’s academic establishment could possibly champion its tenets. Thus, despite Compagnon’s invaluable designation of one of the great figures opposing modernity’s destructive onslaught, he not only characterizes the antimoderne in exclusively literary terms, missing thereby its larger historical manifestations and contemporary relevance, he never actually comes to term with its defining antonym: the “moderne.”

The concept of modernity, though, is crucial not only to an understanding of the anti-modern, but to an understanding of—and hence resistance to—the forces presently threatening the European life world. There are, of course, a number of different ways to understand these anti-white threats. In an earlier piece in TOQ, I argued that they stem ultimately from the ontological disorder (“consummate meaninglessness”) that marks the foundation of the modern age. Others in these pages have pointed to the Jewish “culture of critique” and the managerial revolution of the Thirties, both of which throw light on the subversive forces threatening us. At other venues, there are those emphasizing the predatory nature of international capitalism, the suicidal disposition of our secular, humanist civilization, or the complex and perplexing forces of modern structural differentiation, to mention just a few of the contending interpretations. Because the historical process is a complicated affair and rarely lends itself to a single monolithic interpretation, the wisest course is probably an eclectic one accommodating a variety of interpretations.

However, if it were necessary to put a single label on the historical process responsible for the “decomposition and involution” preparing the way for our collective demise as a race and a culture, the best candidate in my view is the admittedly imprecise and difficult to define term “modernity”—and its variants (modernism, modernization, modern times, etc.). Over the last century and a half, some of our greatest thinkers have wrestled with this term, offering a variety of not always compatible interpretations of that “certain something” which distinguishes modern life from all former or traditional modes of existence. Compagnon adopts the view of Baudelaire, who invented the term, defining “modernité” as an experience “which is always changing, which does not remain static, and which is most clearly felt in the [bustling] metropolitan center of the city [where everything is] constantly subject to renewal.” The Baudelairian conception, like other interpretations of the modern stressing its fleeting, fragmented, and discordant nature, relates back to the Latin modernus or the early French modo, meaning “just now”—that is, something that is of present and not of past or “old-fashioned” times. In this sense, it is associated, positively, with the new, the improved, the unquestionably superior; negatively, with the ephemeral, the fashionable, and the superficial.

Here is not the place to review the history of this key term. Suffice it to note that the modernist sees life in the present as fundamentally and qualitatively different from life in the past. In contrast to traditionalists, who view the present as a continuation, a transmission, and a recuperation of the past, modernists (and today we are all, to one degree or another, modernists) emphasize discontinuity, favoring reason’s endless capacity to create ever more desirable forms of existence, opposing, thus, the historic, organic, and traditional orders of earlier social forms and identities. Racially, culturally, and in other ways, modern civilization cannot, then, but pursue its abstract, disordering cult of progress in a manner that contests who we are.

There is also a geography to modernity. It began as a European idea, but its fullest historical realization came in lands where the European tradition was weakest, specifically in America (“the home of unrelenting progress . . . where tomorrow is always better than today”) and, to a lesser extent, Soviet Russia. Thus it was that up to 1945 anti-modernists dominated European literature and letters and anti-modernist principles not infrequently found their way into the European public sphere. Since das Jahre Null, however, all has changed, and anti-modernists have been largely exiled to Samizdat and marginal publications—a sign of modernity’s increasingly totalitarian disposition to regulate, level, and homogenize for the sake of America’s modern “way of life.”

Flawed as it may be, Compagnon’s book not only helps us rediscover the anti-modern tradition that stands as an antidote to a runaway modernity, it comes at a time when modern civilization, in the form of globalization, faces its gravest crisis. Phillipe Grasset (at dedefensa.org), arguably the greatest living student of modern, especially American, civilization, claims that a triumphant modernity is today completely unchained, drunk on its own power, as it remakes the planet and transforms our lives in ways that destructure all known identities and beliefs. Like earlier French Jacobins, who exported their revolution to the rest of Europe, American Jacobins in the White House and on Wall Street are today imposing their revolutionary disorder on the rest of the world, as they turn it into a monochrome, amorphous herd of consumers shorn of everything that has traditionally been the basis of our civilization.

A single force compels the spiritless modernism of these latter-day Jacobins: the chaos-creating imperatives of their techno-economic cult of progress, which runs roughshod over every organic, historic, and traditional reference. Evident in Iraq, along our southern border, and in the antechambers of the European Commission, they thrive not just on the illusion that the past is discontinuous with the present, but on a “virtualism” whose artificial and self-serving constructions bear little relationship to the realities they endeavor to affect. As one White House official said to a New York Times reporter (October 17, 2004) on the subject of Bush’s “faith-based community”: “When we act, we create our own reality.” The modernist is prone, thus, to taking refuge in the illusory idea he makes of reality. This “virtualist” affirmation of illusion as reality inevitably leads to chaos, madness, and a world which is no longer our own.

Because our age’s defining conflict increasingly revolves around the battle between a destructuring modernity, in the form of globalism, and the anti-modernist forces of order rooted in the cultural and genetic heritage defining the European, the anti-modernist project has never been more pertinent. In Grasset’s view, what is at stake in this conflict is “the consciousness of existing as a specific phenomenon”—that is, identity. For as the modernist impetus of an American-driven globalism imposes its virtualist identities (based on creedal abstractions, not history, nature, or tradition), it clashes with the anti-modern project of forging an identity based on a synthesis of primordial identities and modern imperatives, as the temporal and the untimely meet and merge in a higher dialectic.

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, anti-modernists commanding the cultural heights of modern civilization were able, at times, to mitigate modernity’s destructive import. Since the American triumph of 1945, especially since 1989, as liberals and globalists subjected the spirit to new, more iron forms of conformity, this has changed, and anti-modernist writers and critics have been systematically purged from the public sphere.

The anti-modern, though, is not so easily suppressed, for it is the voice of history, heritage, and a reality that refuses to adapt to the modernist’s Procrustean demands.

Banned now from literature and letters, it is shifting to other fields. With the terrorist assault of 9/11, fourth-generation war in Iraq, the European referendum of 2005, etc.—the anti-modern forces of history and heritage continue to make themselves felt, for as our clueless modernists fail to understand, the past is never dead and gone.

TOQ, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008