Posted by Joe on: 07.07.2008 /
I have listened enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded. I have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. I have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on.
If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead. If the poor are this utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite practical to disfranchise them. If the man with a bad bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote. The governing class may reasonably say: “It may take us some time to reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute you say it will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance.”
If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them?
Only the Christian church can offer any rational objection to complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to the smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest - if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this - that rich men are not likely to be morally trustworthy.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
As an aside, it amazes me to read Chesterton because I invariably agree with him. Yet the church is found wanting. Is not the church also in the business of suggesting that rich and powerful men are by default moral - and that they have some divine right to rule others? Are we not in the business of giving the rich platforms to display their generosity and to muzzle and sideline the poor?
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Comment by: martin gugino
1 07/7/08 8:08 PM | Comment Link |Ah, yes.
Comment by: David H
2 07/7/08 10:31 PM | Comment Link |I have always been a big fan of Chesterton. When I was in college one of my favorites courses was called “Oxford Christian Writers.” Chesterton was one who I had never heard of until I took that course. He was a member of the Inklings, the seminal discussion group from which sprang the finished works of Tolkien and Lewis’ Narnia series. Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers were others.
I liked Sayers because she was interesting. She wrote detective stories and admitted that the murders at the start of each one was essentially a thought-exercise on her part in how to killer her lying, cheating husband and get away with it. Raised in a fundamentalist version of Christianity, that caught my attention almost as much as the Inkling’s habit of meeting in a pub.
But Chesterton always seemed the most accessible to me. His novel, “The Man Who Was Thursday,” was on the reading list for the class and it was oddly enthralling. A metaphysical, thriller-clash-police procedural with the hero and villain being poets caught up in a world-wide anarchist movement. All written with amazing wit and humor.
But he was much more than just a part-time fiction writer. Chesterton was a philosopher who seemed to see through so much of the dead-end sophistry (faith isn’t just what you think, it is largely what you do) and self-serving practices (why is the church so quick to embrace the rich and powerful?) of Christianity. He seems to have seen where and how supposed followers of Jesus were headed wrong nearly a century ago. And been able to explain it in language almost anyone could understand.