The Chestertonian Moment II

We easily forget that racism, as we think of it today, is actually a relatively new thing in human history. This is not to say that some people didn't hold crude judgements about others who looked different from themselves. But no one ever had the sort of bold rationalizations for racism that we find in the mid-nineteenth century. Slavery, of course, had been abolished in the United States as well as in the English empire in the name of natural rights; racism, though, developed because of the sophisticated opinions that rejected those rights in the name of progress. It did not seem to be the kind of thing that raised much ire in England, at least not among the educated classes. Darwinism, of course, had established a "survival of the fittest" outlook, which seemed like the perfect rationalization for some dominating others on the basis of race. Yet it was not this aspect of Darwinism itself that gave rise to modern racism. It was instead the thing that Darwinism rendered impossible: a view of things as fixed and unchanging.

John Dewey understood this well in his famous essay on Darwinism. The Western intellectual tradition was centered on the pursuit of the forms, as Plato first introduced them ― a view of each thing as it truly and eternally is.

The conception of eidos, species, a fixed form and final cause, was the central principle of knowledge as well as of nature. Upon it rested the logic of science. Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes, holding them thereby within the metes and bounds of fixed truth. Completely to know is to relate all special forms to their one single end and good: pure contemplative intelligence.

But plainly Mr. Darwin changed all of that: species, he taught, are not timeless, fixed, and eternal. They are perpetually changing, and nothing about them is ever the same.

The Darwinian principle of natural selection cut straight under this philosophy. If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful in the struggle for existence that is brought about by excessive reproduction, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to plan and preordain them.

If there is no such cause, then the only thing to guide evolutionary force is power, and to understand that power in the context of racial characteristics. And we all know where it goes from there. Dewey's point, though, is how permanent this new way of thinking was in the modern mind.

Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the " Origin of Species."

G.K. Chesterton, though, knew precisely what was really going on ― particularly when many called the "Nordic race" the new and true religion. Many proposed this, not only because the Nordic race was rising, but also because religion was declining; given the spiritual needs of human societies, it was best, in their minds, for modern sophisticates to follow Auguste Comte's proposition that they should all worship themselves ― and that meant worshiping the race. (It was, of course, the Nazis who would take this to the final extreme in later decades.) The absurdity was glaring, of course, and Chesterton fulfilled his usual duty by pointing it out.

Crusaders believe that Jerusalem was not only the Holy City, but the centere of the whole world. Moslems bow their heads toward Mecca and Roman Catholics are notorious for being in secret communication with Rome. I presume that the Holy Place for the Nordic religion must be the North Pole. (220)

He reminded us of who the "Nordic" peoples really were in the early histories. They were the societies who the Greeks and Romans regarded as barbarians, in the extreme sense of the word. Those who looked to the supremacy of Nordics in Chesterton's time had, of course, completely forgotten this ― not to mention the long-term consequences of blond-haired, blue-eyed people ruling, as they did in Europe.

If the Dark Ages were a nightmare, it was very largely because the Nordic nonsense made them an exceedingly Nordic nightmare. It was the period of the barbarian invasions; when piracy was on the high seas and civilization was in the monasteries. You may not like monasteries, or the sort of civilization that is preserved by monasteries; but it is quite certain that it was the only sort of civilization there was. (222)

Chesterton wrote this, of course, in light of the open hostility that the advocates of Nordic racism had for Roman Catholicism. It was a grand and confusing superstition, as far as they were concerned, and it still very much in the way of the sort of progress they hoped to see. Protestantism did not ― in fact, it stepped right out of the way of such vast social undertakings as Nordic self-worship by limiting the relevance of faith to only the individual believer. But this, Chesterton wrote, did no favors for the faith, much less society ― certainly not when compared to the contribution of the monasteries.

As this history of ideas shows, modern truths are always exclusive. The earliest ones, from the Enlightenment Era, were certainly put forward in hopes that all would come to see them; but that, of course, depended on the ability of "all" to bring themselves to the level of the Enlightened ones. As time passed, it became clear that truth was scientific truth ― that even the most fundamental truths of society depended on those who were in the know, and all of the little people would depend on their pronouncements.

The progressivism that grew out of Darwinism represents the end of the line when it came to this sort of exclusivity. It is not a matter of what the few know; it is a matter of who they are ― and in Chesterton's time, those few were the Nordics.

Such men get into a small social circle, very modern and very narrow, whether it is called the Nordic race of the Rationalist Association. They have a number of ideas... The point is that those ideas, whether true or untrue, are the very reverse of universal. They are not the sort of ideas that any large mass of mankind, in any age or country, may be assumed to have. (223)

This, as we know, is precisely how the very same progressives view the Catholic Church: the few in the know, and the many who are clueless dolts ― the knowing of the former more a matter of how to control and manipulate the latter. But this is not the case at all, if we consider the modern attitude toward truth.

Public opinion, taken as a whole, is much more contemptuous of specialists and seekers after truth than the Church ever was. (Ibid.)

The Church, with its monasteries in particular, has always been the last holdout for reason. (Though the Hebrews did much the same thing, in their own way.) There was far more than Christian Revelation alone, tucked away in the safety of its corridors. There was instead a beautiful, rich, and life-affirming philosophy that looked to nature rather than convention ― to "species" rather than "change," as Dewey would put it. The Christian intellectual tradition was open to all, so long as each individual soul humbled itself enough to study it carefully, to know its logical methods, and to desire more than anything else the glory of its end. The carefully reasoned arguments for the natural equality of all people, despite race or class or gender, was ― can we believe it? ― just one of many of its blessings.