Orthodoxy

The third chapter is, as Chesterton notes, the most rhetorically tedious. While the purpose of the book spreads far beyond the material in this chapter, it is a necessary stop along the way. Namely, he spends most of his time reviewing the opinions and theories of many contemporaries so as to spend the rest of the book in clarification by contrast. Affirming his disbelief in these opposing theories early on means that he can spend more of the rest of the book focused on his own perspectives and their justification.

To start, he begins by laying out what he sees as the modern destruction of thought itself. The first way this is accomplished is by changing particular virtues into caricatures of themselves, thereby making them vices. The prime example he uses is that of humility, where genuine humility about one’s place in the world becomes a false humility that distorts reality. It is one thing to be genuinely humble about one’s intellectual capabilities—this is seen as a virtue of self-knowledge. False humility, however, is in essence a lie, for it states something that is not true.

Chesterton’s evaluation is so scathing because he sees false humility as vicious rather than virtuous, going beyond self-deprecation and actually disparaging the act of accumulating and using knowledge. This radical position of doubt and skepticism is not a healthy humility and sense of self; instead, he views it as a dark and somber declaration about reality and the ability of human beings to understand it. It appears to him as inherently self-destructive, weakening what is otherwise perceived as common knowledge and creating generations of people skeptical not only of religion but also of any other rational ideologies.

Various intellectual maladies contribute to this sort of worldview, says Chesterton, and he lists them off: materialism, evolutionism, rationalism, progressivism, and pragmatism. The false notion of progressivism is a representative of the whole that receives particularly harsh criticism thanks to its intrinsically contradictory nature. On the one hand, the idea of progressivism holds that humanity is continually making progress as time moves forward. On the other hand, the problem lies in the fact that one person’s definition of progress may be different than the definition held by another, and so it’s difficult to reconcile views when the same changes in the world may be regarded as progressive or regressive depending on the person.

Additionally, the idea of progress demands—though often implicitly—that there be a standard against which all change is measured. There is no notion of true progress if there is no standard against which a culture or a people can be measured. When someone says that they have made progress on a project in which they are engaged, for instance, they mean that they have progressed toward a certain goal from a starting point. The question becomes, according to Chesterton, to what goal or what end are we progressing? Often, he views progress to mean only that things have changed and that the current attitude judges the change to be a welcome one.

This occurs in part thanks to the Enlightenment assertion that human willpower reigns supreme over the intellect—a position often called voluntarism, from the Latin voluntas, meaning “will.” This contrasts with previous philosophical theories that the intellect is meant to guide the will. The modern world, says Chesterton, has instead put the human will on the throne, and it is enough for a person to will something, to desire and choose it, without any reference to why a thing is chosen or whether or not it is objectively good.

Chesterton’s short comments on the use of satire serve as an illustration for how the implicit existence of standards comes into play even in art and humor. The satirical work of art is justified on account of the fact that the common person who will encounter the art—be it a book, television show, political cartoon, etc.—can recognize the incongruity between what is being satirized and the standard against which it is being set. Satire is effective because it so starkly highlights the absurdities of certain ways of thinking in ways that make the standard so blatantly obvious that it cannot be denied.

The fourth chapter, “Ethics of Elfland,” focuses on the truths that are present in fables and children’s literature, which stand as classics due to the fact that they are so in touch with reality. The ways many children’s stories serve to spark wonder and joy are not childish things to be ignored when maturity comes, but they are fantastic in ways that help people to remember the positive attributes of the world they inhabit. This contrasts the dour way in which Chesterton presents more intellectual or materialistic ideologies, playing into his portrayal of Christian Orthodoxy as Exciting in Comparison to Heterodoxy. He believes that acknowledging reality itself as a gift for which one must be grateful is a profound turning point in any intellectual or spiritual conversion.