Your Humble Blogger is reading (among other things) The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, © 1936) (although the in-print version appears to be from House of Stratus). I had remembered that Chesterton was, of course, quite mad, but I had forgotten just how well he fit in to that stuff I’m so fascinated by, England from around 1880 to 1910 or so. There’s so much going on; there are so many threads, movements, schools, and controversies. It really seems like it was an exciting time to be intellectually curious (although, I suppose, the point of being intellectually curious is that it’s always an exciting time to be intellectually curious).
Anyway, a couple of quotes from the early part. First, this line from a discussion of his time at art school in the nineties: “Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism.” (p. 87) A telling point about the shortsightedness of the individual in the Age of Progress, from the Apostle of Common Sense, yes?
The second one, after a discussion of his experimenting with the occult as a young man:
“The progress of the preternatural has gone on spreading and strengthening though my whole life. ... When I was quite a boy [b. 1874], practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write [1936], the thing has grown to a considerable religious movement ...” (pp. 80-81)Fifty years or so have given him the impression of seeing the direction of things, when in fact he is in the same position as the art school students, mired in their own perceptions of the universe, believing that their vision is more complete than it is, and that the future is predictable from the arc of the past. Spiritualism as a movement didn't last ten years beyond his death, and although we are not back at the turnip-ghost stage, we are, I think, at the mediums and moonshine phase. Which is not to say we're headed back, or forward, or sideways, or any other way; it's just to say that the future is not what it looks like; it's more complicated than that (thank the Lord).
I’m enjoying the book immensely, tho’ I can’t say I’ve found much I agree with him about. I’ve never trusted Common Sense, and I must admit that his views on what he calls the Jewish Problem make it difficult for me to like him. Still, he writes well, and he was in the middle of things, in a time when things had a juicy center.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
We don’t live in a time with a juicy center? I think we do, though I’m not convinced the center’s in North America (by either geography or mentality). Maybe our time is more like a Clemantime, juicy all through, imported, manageably-sized portion, and likely to squirt you in the eye as often as not.
Hm.
No, more like grapefruit, since I don’t think this is a time of manageable portions.
metasilk, dancing on the metaphors as usual
Well, as I live in North America, and am interested (in my parochial way) in the movements, schools and controversies current in North America, I can’t speak for the juicy center currently in the rest of the world. But no, other than the general way in which things are always interesting, I don’t think that we’re living in a time with a juicy center. I do think we’re living in a time with a gaudy exterior, and a lot of blood just underneath, but a bit of a hollow center. The big artistic movement of the last ten years or so concerns a fascination with the border between fact and fiction, between narrative documentary and narrative making stuff up. The other big thing at the moment is adjusting to the increased pace of technological change, which may force some philosophical tinkering but not, for the most part, fundamental rethinking the world. And, I suppose, the internet and its ease of broadcast communication could lead to some new ideas about how we identify ourselves and each other, but that hasn’t really happened yet, if it has begun.
Or I’m just cranky. Which is likelier.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I think that’s my point. If I were speaking of just the USA, I’d agree with your metaphor. Since I consider time as I consider geology (excessively large-scale, and nifty), I didn’t limit my metaphor.
I do find it very difficult to imagine you’re crankier than *me* though! More cudmedgeonly, perhaps *grin* And perhaps less prone to ridiculous one-offs when sleepy.
ghosts, how interesting. ghosts are what went out in boats to conquer the world and never came back. ghosts haunt hillside homes and decorate their incorpearlescent selves with antique imperial lace. can science really defeat this last strongest superstition? some say ghosts eat children and shoot fire from their eyes…
Chesterton “mad”? Judge not, lest you pass judgement on yourself. Still less should you “remember” ignorant title-tattle. Chesterton was humorous, and mad people don’t understand jokes.
“Common sense” to today’s Humean philosophers – unable to consistently think outside their own skulls and ignorant of how intuition works* – can only mean some conjunction of their own sense and feeling; whereas GKC could joke about this by controversially referring to its medieval “sense”, i.e. as the tried and tested tradition of the common people. Likewise, in his day he was able to joke good-naturedly with his Jewish friends just as we still do with Irish Paddies. He was not going to boast about that in his Autobiography, so try reading Ward’s biography. He was not only a Zionist, wanting earlier Jewish refugees from Russia to be enabled to settle in Palestine; he was the first celebrity in Britain to realise and react against Hitler’s insanity. Informed Jews thanked him. How was he to imagine pre-1936 that some Jews might catch Hitler’s insanity off him?
* Whereas traditional logic narrows down meaning by a sequence of switching circuits, intuition uses parallel-circuit error-correcting (cybernetic) logic. Logic is – equivalently – assumed true or contains no discernable errors.