What's Wrong with the World
© 1910 G. K. Chesterton
200 pages
What’s wrong with
the world? Too many people are proposing answers to the wrong questions. What’s
Wrong is a curious collection of thoughts, voiced at the turn of the 20th
century, in response to the merry hell industrialism was wrecking on
traditional forms of human society as the fields became the province of
machines, not people, and the cities swelled with displaced farmers. Such urban
swelling led to mass movements – spectator sports, popular politics, and
the odd mob, and sociologists, economists, and the like began to view society
as one great machine, with ordered parts.
Written in opposition, What’s
Wrong is a defense for the human-ness of people, which examines flaws in the
way men, women, children, education, and
politics were being handled – and have been handled further, from our viewpoint.
What’s Wrong with the World is from the start an eccentric book, for its
author was an eccentric man, a personality given to wandering around in a cape
and swordstick. He is neither ‘conservative’ nor liberal, and not
moderate; unlike Russell Kirk-esque
conservatives, he scorns practicality and preaches the values of ideals and the
abstract. How can we change society, he writes, if we do not have a conception
of what it is supposed to look
like? What is the picture of health for
human society, and what prescription might be writ to achieve it? Chesterton’s goal here is not prescription,
however, but description, and in several sections he writes about the mistakes we have made concerning man,
woman, and child. The arguments he
builds are steeped in religion and tradition, and a kind of sexual psychology. They probably do not credit his reputation
today, for he writes in defense of traditional gender roles and against female
suffrage, but to dismiss him as an mere traditionalist is to miss the
point. The question, he writes, is not
whether women deserve the vote, but whether the vote deserves women.
The prevailing spirit
of What’s Wrong is, as its title
suggests, that there is something wrong with the world of progress the people
of the West were creating in the 19th century. Civilization is a forced endeavor in
specialization; at least since the
agricultural revolution, certain groups of men have had to make their life’s
work a matter of doing one thing; one man is a farmer, another a potter. This is sad, since the good life consists of
a variety of experience, but required. What is not required is the way industrialism
forced that monotask tendency to become so extreme that one man might spend his
entire day doing the same simple movement over and over again. Such work is not
fit for men, and the idea of taking
women from the home – where they are masters of many different tasks, from
sewing to cleaning to teaching -- and
forcing them into the place of a machine-cog is beyond the pale. The same applies to politics, and here
Chesterton plays the anarchist as he criticizes all governance as being based
on the use of coercion. It is bad enough that men have to participate in such
foulness; they at least can enjoy the war-like antagonism of party politics,
which allows them to bear it. The solutions to societal problems have been
in the main a case of more of the same, a case of eating the hair of the
dog; to counter the monopolization of
property by big business trusts, people
propose letting it be monopolization by the state. The issue is monopolization; the bigness of society itself has to be
addressed.
While Chesterton
doesn’t go into any solution, he does address the ideal form that society ought
to have: people need to be regarded as the image
of God, not a mass to be managed; property must be distributed more equally across the population so each
man will have his Home. The home is enormously important to Chesterton; it is a
sanctuary of natural law, of the order of ancient anarchy; it is where children
ought to receive their education, to learn from their father and mother’s
wisdom and trade; public education is
good for nothing more than becoming than little coglets. It is the accumulation
of trivial information, grounded in neither tradition nor skills. What’s
Wrong with the World is thus considered one of the fountainheads of
distributism, with its emphasis on decentralization,
locality, and widespread property ownership.
Although some of its points are moot now (women’s suffrage
is not a political issue these days), What’s Wrong still has lingering
relevance; we are more specialized these days than the 19th century,
not less; the gulf between the propertied and the poor is wider, not
diminished; education is wholly
institutionalized, and considering how much time adults spend at work and
children in school, even if parents knew a great deal about anything in
particular they haven’t the time to teach it.
We are even less the image of Chesterton’s god; even more ants on the anthill he predicted
with such dread. The book has its varied
flaws; Chesterton’s opposition to evolution is on ideological grounds, for
instance, as he abhors anything that looks on people as a mass, even as a
biological ‘population’. His enthusiasm for writing about something he clearly
does not understand (his perception of evolution resembles Lamarkianism, with
the rich breeding bow-legged stable boys and such) casts doubt on other criticisms, but he did
live in the age of the insidious dream of eugenics, so his intentions were not
terrible. Discussion of actual evolution
would have out of place in a work like this, loaded with literary references, chatty
social critiques, and aphorisms aplenty. (This is the source of his “Christianity
has not been tried and found wanting; it has
been found difficult and not tried.”)
What’s Wrong with the
World is a peculiar book, dated but relevant, hopelessly old-fashioned but
in an endearing way. The author’s convivial contrariness makes considering his
arguments possible, as does the fact that he is seemingly against
modern work and modern politicking in general, not just women doing them. But
in his day, the political and labor
arguments were a lost cause as far as men went, at least barring the
distributive revolution, but the women and children can or could still be
saved. I think he is serious in his
criticism, but I am predisposed to like him given my own contempt for inhumane
work and corporatism. Readers will find Chesterton odd, but personable and
thought-provoking, even if they have objection against his ideas. It’s not the
easiest read, but considering his chattiness
the work isn’t difficult, either; just look out for the flourishing
sword-stick and spectacular prose.