Despite my tremendous and unfeigned admiration for, and enjoyment of, the writings of G. K. Chesterton, I’ve raised some people’s ire in the past by giving my opinion that, on the basis of my own reading of his work, I consider him an antisemite within a reasonable definition of the term. Perhaps I need to clarify that I don’t mean—as many people would—to suggest that he was a Nazi, or sympathetic to Nazism. His antisemitism was of an older and arguably more benign sort—the antisemitism of the Christian peasant who truly believes that the Jews are hoarding all the gold in the realm, and using it to manipulate the rulers.
That Chesterton was not by any stretch of the imagination a Nazi can be demonstrated by a single reading of Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
In Chesterton’s time, those pre-World War II years that seem comparatively gracious to us today, Eugenics was a massively popular movement. Some of the most eminent social reformers in the world, people of unquestioned philanthropy and integrity, thought it self-evident that the government ought to be given the power to “improve” the race through selective breeding and the sterilization of “inferiors.”
To all of this Chesterton, out of his “medieval” mindset, cried “Infamy!” To deny a basic right like marriage and procreation to any human soul, simply because someone in authority judges him unfit, was to him a denial of basic human dignity—dignity which, he believed, sprang from the image of God, not from some biologist’s checklist of desirable traits.
Further, Chesterton was deeply concerned that such a program would place in the hands of the state a power that would destroy liberty—power that no human being deserves or is capable of exercising innocently.
The first half of the book contains a wealth of quotations just as apt for our own time as for Chesterton’s:
Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.
The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.
A remarkable element of this book is that Chesterton warns in particular that Germany is likely to be the source of great Eugenic evil.
I liked the second half of the book less than the first, because I’m a reactionary capitalist and less poetic-minded than Chesterton. Chesterton hated Socialism, but he hated Capitalism (I think) more, and in the second section he traces all the evils of Eugenics back to the Capitalists and their presumed plan to organize society in such a way as to produce a more efficient source of labor. I don’t know if that’s true. It certainly is no longer the case, for today’s great Eugenists (Chesterton’s name for them) are overwhelmingly Socialists and Leftists.
But the first half made it all worthwhile. I highly recommend Eugenics and Other Evils.
I don’t think of Chesterton as an anti-Semite. Then again, my schooling in Israel attempted to make me hyper-sensitive to anti-Semitism. The result might be that I’m desensitized.
Chesterton believed that we Jews have certain cultural tendencies in common. But that is not such a far fetched belief. I think you told me a number of times that Norwegians have certain cultural tendencies too.
Ori, it is reasonable for you, as the offended party, to exercise tolerance (especially reasonable in this case, I think).
For me, as a representative of the offending party, it’s more appropriate to exercise diligence and to set a higher bar, I think.
I expect the same can be said of someone like T.S. Elliot.
Lars, you’re right, as usual. Although I find it hard to consider you a representative of the offending party. You’re both Christians, but of different kinds – especially when the matter is not religious.
BTW, did you read his New Jerusalem? He put his finger on an issue that the early Zionists didn’t realize, and had they listened to him Israel might have lived in peace.
Zionists of this era honestly thought the Arabs would be better off in a modern country. To an extent they were right. Arabs who are Israeli citizens tend to be richer and more educated than those in Jordan, Egypt, or Syria. But the process was bloody, and is not near to being done.
No, I haven’t the book. Doubtless there’s much of interest, but it’s a part of his workshop I’m uncomfortable entering.
I think Jews in the US are different than Jews in Europe. In the US, we are an integral part of the culture. In Europe, the feeling is that we’re kind of extras.
I disagree that Chesterton hated capitalism more than socialism. His Distributist philosophy led him to dislike both with equal fervor. If you are using the fact that he may have written more about the evils of unchecked capitalism and, what he referred to as, “wage slavery,” you may have a point. However, looking at things from his perspective and time, he wrote at a time when capital, the markets, and industry – especially industry wedded to the State – was in its ascendancy and had far more acolytes with much more power than did those advocating pure socialism.
On the one hand, I’ll admit I’m much more sympathetic to Distributist ideas than most. On the other hand, I recognize the difficulty presented in Distributism, of balancing on that razor’s edge between Statism and Corporatism. When I look out on the real world, however, I see what Chesterton saw; far more wage slaves chained to an office and a mortgage, than people free to live faithful lives in their own homes with control of their own property.
And concerning anti-Jewish statements he wrote, in the context of discussing a royal decree written by Edward I in 1290, one would be remiss to recognize that Chesterton’s views changed over time. Of note:
“In the biography Gilbert (Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 209-11), Michael Coren noted Chesterton’s profound literary and personal friendship with the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (not, by the way, his only such friendship), his cordial meetings with Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, and the important statement by the Wiener Library (London’s archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) that Chesterton was never seriously anti-semitic: ‘he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.’ “
Thank you. That’s useful information.
Interestingly, while the concept of Eugenics have been thoroughly discredited by the Nazis, we have a similar practice of auto-Eugenics.
I don’t know of statistics that relate this to individual characteristics, but some cities and countries appear to be Eugenicising themselves.