A Sufficient Defense?

The Catholic Herald reviews Chesterton and the Jews.

Posted by Angelico Press on Saturday, August 8, 2015

To Bear Arms in Defense of Others and Self

Crisis: Chesterton: Patron Saint of Handgunners by Patrick Toner

Some Libertarians Would Disagree that Distributism is Non-Statist

Distributism Isn’t Outdated by James Mumford
G.K. Chesterton offers a non-statist vision for economic and social change that's still relevant in the age of the iPhone.

Chesterton on Liberal Arts Education

Post by The American Chesterton Society.

Post by The American Chesterton Society.

The Ballad of the White Horse

Post by The American Chesterton Society.

Recommendations from the Folks at CiRCE Institute

Post by CiRCE Institute.

Items of Interest, 13 December 2011

Peter Hitchens, David Cameron’s Phoney War, or A Curse in Disguise
Kelley Vlahos, Iraq: No Comfort in Being Right

Rod Dreher, Russell Kirk, stranger and prophet


FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Why the US & Israel May Agree to Bombing Iran

Fabius Maximus, Why Americans should love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – we live there

Distributism:
Some recent posts about "Distributism"
Christopher Ferrera, In Defense of Distributism
Why Socialism and Distributism are Wholly Antithetical

Relocalization:
John Robb, Contagion: The communication of disease from one person to another by close contact.

Transition branching out? Land reform: losing and recovering the Commons
by Justin Kenrick (EB)

Economics:
Economics and the Pursuit of Happiness
Rod Dreher, More on the cult of Wall Street
The Journey Home-Wilhelm Röpke & the Humane Economy by Roger Scruton
Commentary: Oil, climate, agriculture and learning to love limits by Sharon Astyk (original)

OWS:
Kevin Carson, Revolution 2.0: Is Occupy Reaching a Takeoff Point?

Peak Oil:
Talkin’ peak oil blues: The new KunstlerCast book
Top 10 Peak Oil Books of 2011

Water:
As Global Population Grows, Water Matters More - interview

Wes Jackson:
Can We Restore the Prairie—And Still Support Ourselves?

The Atomic Bombings:
The Least Evil Option: A Defense of Harry Truman (via MoJ)

Diet and Health:
Karen De Coster, Austrian Economics Meets Primal Blueprint?

Feminism:
The reduction of masculinity
Decoding the Female Happiness Paradox

Catholic:
Msgr. Gherardini: Vatican II is not a super-dogma
The importance and the limits of the authentic Magisterium

Marshall McLuhan & Chesterton: New Touchstone

Adam Schwartz's review of Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 by by William Oddie.

Interview with Fr. Ian Boyd

Zenit: Setting the World Right, With G.K. Chesterton's Help
An Interview with Father Ian Boyd of the Chesterton Institute

KK reminds us that the St. Anthony of Padua Institute is holding An Evening with G.K. Chesterton -- Dr. John Chuck Chalberg will be portraying Chesterton. (Surprise, surprise, he performed at Baylor this past Spring.)

via Mark Shea: Chesterton is Now Downloadable onto MP3

William Oddie: G K Chesterton was not an anti-Semite

(via Damian Thompson)

It has been noted that boys will usually associate with one another in groups, while girls pair off. (See, for example, Chesterton in "Two Points of View": "Your co-educative playground for pupils in their teens will not be a place of sexless camaraderie. It will be a place where boys go about in fives sulkily growling at the girls, and where the girls go about in twos turning up their noses at the boys.") Pairing off does seem to be more common among boys when they are younger, but as they get older, especially during adolescence, they associate more and more in groups.

While working in the classroom, quite a few girls (and one boy) have come up to tell me that their friend "doesn't want to be friends with me anymore" or "doesn't want to play with me." It happened again on Thursday. Jealousy is also another common occurrence, when a girl spends more time with another girl, instead of her 'best friend.'

Just recently I heard several people assert the modern dogma that 'gender is a social construction." While the choice of signs may be conventional, the underlying psychology is not, but natural.

What is the ultimate purpose behind the different ways friendships manifest themselves among men and women? I do think that they underscore the different functions of men and women (as the emotional and behavioral development really is a preparation for specific tasks in adulthood.)

G. K. Chesterton's Works on the Web
Kim Anderson Arts -- Romantic greetings and love funpages

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

Adam Gropnik has a critique of G.K. Chesteron in the July 7 issue of The New Yorker. There is an abstract available. He argues that Chesterton (and Belloc) is anti-Semitic for recognizing that there is a tension between Jewish identity and integration into European (or Western) society, and advocating certain measures as a way of resolving this tension. He is also too localist, etc. etc.

Chesterton Academy

website

via The Blue Boar: Chesterton Academy faculty announced!

Socialism and Communism

For EJK... these should be better than anything I can tell you...

Catholic Encyclopedia: communism. socialism.
wiki entries on socialism, communism
Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Socialism
Frederick Engels, The Principles of Communism
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day on Economics: Neither Socialism ...
Dave Armstrong's Chesterton photo page; M. Ward's page

His books: Project Gutenberg, alt

Theodore Dalrymple, The Roads to Serfdom

Chesterton, The Ideal of a Leisure State

The Ideal of a Leisure State
G. K. Chesterton

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Among the strange and rather stiff antics of the rather antiquated art of party journalism is the duty laid upon the good party man of trying to disagree with his opponents when they have the impudence to agree with him. He not only has to insist that they are wrong; he has to deny their right to be right. Even when you have to admit that your antagonist is talking sense, even when you pride yourself on talking exactly the same sense, you have to deny that it is sensible of him to talk sense. Or you deny that it is sense in the same sense; or sense in the true sense of the word. More often you simply imply that it is inconsistent and irrational in him to talk sense, because it is his whole duty and high function in State to talk nonsense. It is his business to be wrong; it is his business to be beaten; he is the invisible playmate, who sides with the Frenchman and never can win. That he should suddenly side with his own country, or win the approval of his own critics, is regarded as a form of cheating. Twice lately I have noticed a party leader saying things that any sensible person would say, but not allowed by the Opposition Press to say them, because he was not supposed to be a sensible person. One of them was when Mr. Baldwin pointed out the appalling peril of directly declaring war on all Trade Unionists at the very moment when we are supposed to be persuading them not to be Bolshevists. The other was when Mr. George Lansbury said to the effect that the dole was a deplorable necessity, because every man in the world ought to grow up expecting to work. But the conventional journalists, instead of agreeing with Mr. Landsbury, sneered at him for agreeing with them.

Well, that way of working against Bolshevism will have its Nemesis; the Nemesis of all nonsense, which is neglect. A new generation will go straight to the problems and forget all about the party quarrels. If we want to know what the future will be like, as far as anybody can know it, we must begin at the springs of thought and theory, the sources of the river, and not merely potter about in the swamps where it straggles away into its last labyrinthine delta of lobbying and intrigue. We must consider what ideas there are in the world at present, and in what way they are likely to mould the future. Now Mr. George Lansbury, whether consciously or not, really touched on one of the most important of these intellectual conflicts, which so often precede political and even military conflicts. And the position which he took up upon that matter was that of a conservative or a traditionalist; or as some on the otherside would say, of a Tory.

The controversy I mean has nothing to do with Socialism or Capitalism. It is a question about the nature of human life, even of ideal human life, which cuts across all these things and would probably divide Socialism into two camps. It is something which some speculators have already begun to discuss under the name of "The Leisure State." It is something which was suggested, perhaps, in the title and work of Mr. H.G. Wells called "The World Set Free." It does not mean the world set free from the sceptre or the sabre; it means the world set free from the spade and the ploughshare. It means that it might be possible so to organize machinery that the whole life of man on the earth should be one of leisure and not of labour. I will not pretend to discuss whether it would be mechanically possible. But it is time we began to discuss whether it is morally desirable. I am entirely at one with the Socialists in wishing to give most men less work and some men more work. But the abstract question propounded here is not that question; it is whether, if we could, we would give nobody any work. It assumes for the sake of argument the dark and dubious principle that labour-saving devices will save labour. It asks whether, even then, we always want to save labour. We talk of paying too much for labour; should we or should we not pay too much for idleness?

Many of the idealists can only conceive of an idle humanity as an ideal humanity. They talk as if no man could ever rest until he reached Utopia; or as if a really long holiday were something like heaven, utterly distant and divine. Their social philosophy is that of the hearty and humorous epitaph of the charwoman, who had gone on to do nothing for ever and ever. But even now it is by no means certain that those who are not charwomen really become any more hearty and humorous by doing nothing for ever and ever. A vast amount of stuffy and sentimental humbug has been uttered in favour of the Gospel of Work. As it was said that Carlyle talked a great deal in praise of silence, it may also be respectfully affirmed that he idled away a great deal of his time meditating on the virtues of labour. Work is not necessarily good for people; overwork is very bad for people; and both often begin with a bad motive and come to a bad end. Many a modern industrialist has prided himself on being as industrious as he was industrial. And it meant little more than that he was ready to sweat himself, as well as his neighbors, when he wanted to swindle his neighbors. Many a modern man has lived by the Gospel of Work, when it meant the spirit that will always work against the Gospel. A great deal of harm has been done by setting up these oily machines as models for mankind. I would not point to these ideal industrious men; I would turn away men's eyes from the painful picture of the Industrious Apprentice; I would veil their faces lest they should be disturbed by the repulsive appearance of the man who Attended These Classes and Is Making Big Money Now. I would hastily remove this deplorable person; but would gently remind the Utopians that he is not the only kind of person who is deplorable.

Now, the Leisure State exists already. It can be represented at any sort of function such as is called a State Banquet or State Ball. The World Set Free exists already. It exists in the world that specially claims to call itself the world. It exists in the world which Socialists and Utopians specially claim to call worldly. We are in a position even now to judge pretty well, in a general fashion, what is the effect on human beings having nothing particular to do. The "world" is already set free, if that is freedom; but is it exactly what the Utopians want to demand as freedom? It is undoubtedly an idle society, but is it an ideal society? Is Utopia to be found in Belgravia any more than in Bohemia? Are the rich all good or better than anybody else? Are they all clever or cleverer than anybody else? Are they even all free and happy, or all freer and happier than anybody else? And though there are good and clever and free and happy people among the idle rich, as there are among the idle poor, not to mention the industrious poor, I think it is broadly true that most of us have found that the most sincere and sensible people were people who earned their own living. I agree therefore with Mr. Landbury in differing from those who would perpetuate eternal unemployment combined with universal doles, and who call that ignominious combination The World Set Free.

But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master; for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced. A free man would rather be a peasant rising at dawn to put more work on his own field. In other words, in the social formula to which we are all accustomed, the peasant has control over the means of production. The occasional adjunct to the intermittent machine would have no control whatever over his own leisure, but less over his own life. Machinery organized in that fashion would have to be organized from an official centre; and no more controlled by its adjuncts than the tiniest of the little wheels can wind a watch. The leisured persons might be many things in their long hours of leisure. It is not impossible, by the parallel of plutocracy, that they might be profligates, perverts, drugtakers, dram-drinkers, pessimists, and suicides. But they might all be poets and artists and philosophers. They would not be citizens.

-from The Illustrated London News, March 21, 1925

Marian Crowe on Chesterton and Austen

G.K. Chesterton and the orthodox romance of Pride and Prejudice