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Leave Me Alone

Anyone who has ever protected a little boy from being bullied at school, or a little girl from some childish persecution at a party, or any natural person from any minor nuisance, knows that the being thus badgered tends to cry out, in a simple but singular English idiom, “Let me alone!” It is seldom that the child of nature breaks into the cry, “Let me enjoy the fraternal solidarity of a more socially organised group-life.” It is rare even for the protest to leap to the lips in the form, “Let me run around with some crowd that has got dough enough to hit the high spots.” Not one of these positive modern ideals presents itself to that untutored mind; but only the ideal of being “let alone.” It is rather interesting that so spontaneous, instinctive, almost animal an ejaculation contains the word alone.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

I just deleted the over 1,000 words I wrote about this quote. I don’t regret it. It’s difficult.

The fact of the matter is that we are made in the image of the triune God. God is one. God is three. We need to be alone. We need to be in community. Christianity, and only Christianity as far as I know, can truly account for the fact that we want to be alone and not be alone at one and the same time.

The fact is that, in our sinful condition, we have to encourage people to be both alone and not alone. We have to encourage the introvert to get out and the extravert to get in, realizing that both solitude and company are worthwhile. Neither is superior to the other. Both are vital for spiritual and psychological health.

The monk needs to get out of his cloister regularly. The social butterfly needs to lock himself up in a room from time to time. No hermits; no social complexes; no schizoids. No dependent personality disorders either.

The age is the issue. In some times and cultures, we must emphasize one over the other. But what about such a time as this? Hence the difficulty. We live in an age where we are never alone although we are often…well…alone. We need real community and real solitude. We lack both.

Mysticism is not the answer. Neither is a community group. We need balance…

The GOODS, the True, and the Lovely

Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods…

When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

As I am transitioning from pharmacy life into the field of education, I see this more and more. We really are at a point at which we think education is simply about learning a trade in order to ‘contribute’ to society. We are more concerned about the goods than the good.

It is an absolute must in this environment that the church, and individual Christians, strive to be different. We must not look at creation and culture and simply see ‘goods.’

This is one of the reasons why I focus on technology to the extent that I do. Technology can kill the existential. I am not saying that it always does. I am saying that it is capable of doing so. It can rob the beauty of ‘being.’ It can turn a beautiful sunrise into a mere photo op. It can turn friends into icons on a screen. It can turn wonderful things into internet equity – that is, into goods.

It’s not just technology though. We can turn anything into goods. Spouses, kids, art, whatever. As we brush back against this, the idea is to see the innate good of things without seeing them as things to use as a means of gaining equity. Enjoy the world and life without putting it on our socially constructed eBays.

Anyway, it’s a great quote from Chesterton.

Lust, Fertility, and Freedom

Chesterton is dropping bombs.

1) Modern humanity shows itself less human than its pagan ancestors by exalting lust while disparaging fertility:

It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility. The new Paganism literally merits the reproach of Swinburne, when mourning for the old Paganism: “and rears not the bountiful token and spreads not the fatherly feast.” The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast-to themselves. They are worse than Swinburne’s Pagans. The priests of Priapus and Cotytto go into the kingdom of heaven before them.

2) Our hatred of fertility comes from a failed notion of freedom, which is actually a form of bondage:

Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be “free” to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word “free.” By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires’ notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have. Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

So then, we have progressed, right? We know what people once worshiped Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. How laughable. We’ll cut down the idol of fertility. Pay no attention to the fact that we will exalt Lust to that primary position.

Give us freedom. Babies are like so many balls and chains. Forget the fact that it is a ball and chain that makes us not want children to begin with. We’ll replace the living and breathing kind with the shiny pixelated kind; with the career ladder kind; with the go on extra vacations kind – with the kind that doesn’t breathe. Maybe we can buy a new Prius. Freedom!

A Campaign Against Sleep

I share this one without comment.

Indeed I am always expecting to hear that a scientific campaign has been opened against Sleep. Sooner or later the Prohibitionists will turn their attention to the old tribal traditional superstition of Sleep; and they will say that the sluggard is merely encouraged by the cowardice of the moderate sleeper. There will be tables of statistics, showing how many hours of output are lost by miners, smelters, plumbers, plasterers, and every trade in which (it will be noted) men have contracted the habit of sleep; tables showing the shortage of aconite, alum, apples, beef, beetroot, bootlaces, etc., and other statistics carefully demonstrating that work of this kind can only rarely be performed by sleep-walkers. There will be all the scientific facts, except one scientific fact. And that is the fact that if men do not have Sleep, they go mad.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

A Secular Age is a Dated Age

They did not call themselves Atheists, they called themselves Secularists. Never was a more bitter and blighting confession made in the form of a boast. For the word “secular” does not mean anything so sensible as “worldly.” It does not even mean anything so spirited as “irreligious.” To be secular simply means to be of the age; that is, of the age which is passing; of the age which, in their case, is already passed. There is one tolerably correct translation of the Latin word which they have chosen as their motto. There is one adequate equivalent of the word “secular”; and it is the word “dated.”

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

C.S. Lewis once famously said that “all that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” Spurgeon said, “whoever marries today’s fashion is tomorrow’s widow.” To call yourself a secularist is to admit that your shelf-life is short.

 

Survival of the Fittest

In the days when Huxley and Herbert Spencer and the Victorian agnostics were trumpeting as a final truth the famous hypothesis of Darwin, it seemed to thousands of simple people almost impossible that religion should survive. It is all the more ironic that it has not only survived them all, but it is a perfect example (perhaps the only real example) of what they called the Survival of the Fittest.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows

Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, Chesterton says, has been abused. It leads to Capitalistic carnivores who devour the weak, Nietzchian Supermen who fly the swastika, and Eugenicists who decide who is worthy, or isn’t worthy, of life. The original idea, he says, is simply that of surviving. That is, does a species have the necessary equipment to survive the elements? If it does, it survives; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.

The great irony of all this understanding and misunderstanding of Darwinianism is that the Christian church is the great survivor. It has what it takes. Even the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. It is, he says, perhaps the only real example of Survival of the Fittest. Let the Beagle take a voyage to the last day and discover what the passenger will observe:

Who are these arrayed in white,
Brighter than the noon-day sun?
Foremost of the sons of light;
Nearest the eternal throne?
These are they that bore the cross,
Nobly for their Master stood;
Sufferers in His righteous cause,
Followers of the dying God.

-Charles Wesley, Who Are These Arrayed in White?