The Pope and the Progressive Review agree on something

Sam Smith - The most stunning news of the day for your editor was word that writer-philosopher GK Chesterton is on the official path to sainthood. According to  the Daily Mail:

Just days before he was elected Pope in March, the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, wrote to a Chesterton society in Argentina approving the wording of a private prayer calling for his canonization.

The Pontiff is said to be a fan of the author, one of whose most admired books was a life of St Francis of Assisi – whose name the Pope adopted.

 Although admirers admit that Chesterton, a cigar-smoking journalist and writer, is not a typical candidate for sainthood, they say his personal character showed the author, who died in 1936, was a deeply spiritual individual.

It was not that I agreed with Chesterton on many things. After all, he wrote of George Bernard Shaw:

 After belaboring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.

But writers have a perverse fascination with those who put words together well even if in a cause they perceive as in error. I would much rather spend a weekend with GK Chesterton than with, say, Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddow.

Besides Chesterton and I both wrote for the Illustrated London News and Senator Durbin would probably not allow either one of us to be officially registered as journalists

Here some citations from the Review in which Chesterton was mentioned followed by some more of his quotes:

Progressive Review - Urban planners believe in sweeping physical solutions to social problems. The idea, Richard Sennett has written, goes back to the 1860s design for Paris by Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Sennett suggests, bequeathed us the notion that we could alter social patterns by changing the physical landscape. This approach was not about urban amenities such as park benches and gas lighting or technological improvements such as indoor plumbing but about what G. K. Chesterton called the huge modern heresy of "altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

Progressive Review - In 1910, G. K. Chesterton described two characters, Hudge and Gudge, whose thinking evolved in such a disparate manner that the one came to favor the building of large public tenements for the poor while the other believed that these public projects were so awful that the slums from whence they came were in fact preferable. Wrote Chesterton:

"Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely introduced as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery, men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. His second desire is, naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery.

"Neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians."

Much of American politics and planning follows the Hudge-Gudge model, producing failure for both conservatives and liberals -- the former offering us an army of the homeless and the latter presenting us finally with drug-infested housing projects.


More GK Chesterton quotes:

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it

Journalism consists largely in saying 'Lord Jones died' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

It was the very soul of our old aristocratic policy that even a tyrant must never figure as a tyrant. He may break down everybody's fences and steal everybody's land, but he must do it by Act of Parliament and not with a great two-handed sword. And if he meets the people he's dispossessed, he must be very polite to them and inquire after their rheumatism. That's what kept the British Constitution going -- inquiring after the rheumatism.

Dickens didn't write what people wanted; he wanted what people wanted

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong


A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish -
Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy. -

The modern English oligarchy does not rest on the cruelty of the rich to the poor - it rests on the unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is — well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.