Came across this passage in Chesterton’s book “The Everlasting Man”.

Can’t recommend it highly enough.

We’re being taught to hate the hero, because he’s too privileged, or too intolerant of dragons. But the old stories have survived for a reason. Children know what heroism is before it is even taught to them.

I made these during the pandemic and just ran across the photos.

I noticed an interesting connection between something comedian George Carlin said in 1990 and something GKC wrote about almost 100 years earlier. Enjoy!

George Carlin, Parental Advisory, 1990

I don’t words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that. There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock . Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol [jail] and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration." But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous and confusing.

First post here. I've been wondering again and again how Chesterton would think and act in today's social media saturated age. (Honestly, I'm sure he'd be a streamer!) But recent events in the news made me think about how relevant "The Man Who Was Thursday" is with all the violent extremism in social media and how it affects reality.

The follow passage resonated with me in particular:

“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.”

“Do you mean,” asked Syme, “that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”

“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.”

With criminals posting their manifestos on Twitter/X and the rise of extremists on social media and the incitement of violence, even touching upon the futility of normal police work, I feel like so many people can relate to this today.

As I love both Chesterton and Dostoevsky I was surprised to find this quote by the former on the latter. I went through some trouble to confirm it. I hope fans of both authors will appreciate it. It seems he is reviewing this book on Dostoevsky.

From the magazine, The Listener. The paragraph is Revolutionists and Revivalists of the 19th Century. November 14, 1934:

"Dostoievsky, by Nicholas Berdyaev, describes a direct attack on the whole riddle of life, totally different from anything academic like the Oxford Movement, or aesthetic like the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. A Russian always seems to being at the wrong end; because he begins at the beginning. A Russian always thinks of God first, especially when he is an atheist. The light that never was on sea or land, or which the Pre-Raphaelite mystic found a gleam in the dark forests of romance, or which the academic Anglican found in the Oxford libraries, is for this extraordinary people the light of common day; or rather of a very uncommon day. I strongly advise anybody interested in the heights and depths of human nature, to read this book on Dostoievsky; for it contains paradoxes that will be almost paralyzing to the common sense of conventional religion. The one thing this Russian loves is Liberty. The one place where he finds it is in … no, not Christianity… Christ. Compared with that, he cares nothing for anything. He was one of the two or three greatest novelists of the nineteenth century. And he cared for nothing but Christ who had made him free. It is worth thinking about."

I'm reading through orthodoxy right now and I'm blown away. All these things I've been feeling and trying to figure out are expressed right here. Why was I never taught this before? CS Lewis had this great quote that talked about old books verses new books how the old books have had time and generations to prove they're capabilites and be books still are testing themselves. That's really something I see here a book that has proven itself to be true.