Inkling Books

From the comments section to the Crunchy Con's thread on Gopnik and Chesterton:

In his day, there were a number of writers who liked Chesterton's fiction and poetry but, for ideological reasons of their own, were infuriated by his politics or religion. One talked of wanting to split Chesterton in two, to which Chesterton replied that a lot of people who saw him traveling on buses thought the same. Gopnik seems to be one of that number and, like many of the rest, it seems to lead him into irrationalities.

Those who'd like to explore Chesterton's relationship with the Jews might want to read a book I recently edited, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II. Someone has noted that the book is the ultimate refutation of those who, like Gopnik, claim Chesterton was anti-Semitic. They're right.

To understand why, you need to step back a bit over a century to an era when almost everyone who was well-educated believed what the major universities were teaching almost without exception, that humanity was divided into superior and inferior races, with the former building civilizations and the latter tearing them down. That's simply how history was taught at places such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford in the late 1800s and for decades thereafter. Margaret Sanger's 1922 The Pivot of Civilization is an example of the thesis applied to birth control. We need birth control, she said, to keep the inferiors (mostly Irish, Italians and Polish Jewish immigrants) from outbreeding us. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils was his attack on that idea as a domestic issue. Chesterton never collected under one cover his good articles on the same concept as an international issue, so I did it for him in Chesterton on War and Peace.

From his youth, Chesterton would have none of that racist nonsense. He poured scorn on the idea that there were racial distinctions that mattered among the various groups of Europeans (including Jews). He made it quite clear that ideas such as Teutons and Semities were totally nonsense, having absolutely no meaning at all. Chesterton was incapable of being anti-Semitic because he thought all ideas that Semities existed were bosh. He says that repeated. He says that clearly. He says that bluntly. And he says that in defiance of the conventional wisdom of his day.

As his pair of books, Heretics and Orthodoxy, indicate, he believed that what a nation, a people or a group believed mattered and determined how they lived not by who their ancestors were or trivial distinctions in how they looked. And in the realm of loathed beliefs, those of the Prussians, particularly Prussian professors and bureaucrats, ranked the highest. Call him anti-Prussian, and he would ;smile in delight. His loathing for all things Prussian (except their music) is why he was one of the first and definitely one of the loudest critics of the trends in Germany that became Nazism (hence my book's title). And he defined the distinction between civilization and barbarism in such a way as to include virtually all of academic Germany among the barbarians. Barbarians, he noted, see men driven by forces outside themselves. It matters not whether those forces are demons in the woods or historical nonsense like Teutonism.

I highly recommend the book. In it Chesterton was warning during WWI that there was something terrible wrong with Germany that, if not corrected, would lead to another and still more horrible war within a generation. In 1932 he went still further and warned that the next war would break out over a border dispute between Germany and Poland, precisely what happened in 1939.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace.

Chesterton's alleged 'anti-Semitism'
Chesterton and the New Yorker « All Manner of Thing