What's Wrong With the World

G. K. Chesterton

1910

March, 2024

8/10

Too much time is spent on providing examples of other times and places as opposed to elaborating on the ideas themselves. Similarly, the focus on England alone, while understandable given the context, is not "timeless."

For a book over 100 years old, however, Chesterton had great ideas regarding what it means to make progress, live a life, and engage with society. Covering everything from feminism to the educational system, he argues that change isn't enough: we should be gutting everything as we know it to build a more human world. He describes the current attitude of the world (still applicable to today) like so:

Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters.

Regarding change, Chesterton claims that the more modern the world becomes, the more of our humanity is left behind. He claims people would be much happier living in nature as opposed to driving around a city in a fancy car. Furthermore, the advancement of technology only serves to lesson our collective powers while offering only the illusion of happiness via convenience:

[D]emocracy has one real enemy, and that is civilization... The machinery of science must be individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace, but a mob cannot shout down a telephone.

I would summarize his humanistic thoughts with the following quote on how lucky we are to be born of women rather than men — a parallel to the need for balance:

Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a monster as a man that was born of a man.

The entire book can be boiled to one idea which Chesterton masterfully elucidates in a single, powerful paragraph:

This cry of “Save the children” has in it the hateful implication that it is impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private houses; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work; called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?