G.K. Chesterton and Modernity
by Stratford Caldecott - Published: Jan 17, 2014
So what was his critique of modernity, and what was the alternative he proposed?
First, here is a passage that will evoke a snort from Neoconservatives. “It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes. But so far as we are concerned, what has broken up households and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and power of Capitalism.”
He went on:
It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favor of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers— Chesterton’s “The Three Foes of the Family” in The Common Man
Then there is the following appeal on behalf of human intelligence.
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought… It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all…. There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own—Chesterton in Orthodoxy
final snip - Caldecott
Chesterton also saw that the next great heresy to undermine civilized existence “is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery not Puritanism not Socialism to hold them back…. "The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan” (G.K.’s Weekly, June 19, 1926). If man is an animal with no supernatural dimension or purpose, then entertainment can be his highest expectation, if he can afford it, and sexual indulgence being the most exciting form of entertainment, the present slide into decadence is equally predictable.
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/01/g-k-chesterton-modernity.html
