The Ethics of Elfland

Amy and I are reading the spiritual autobiography of GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, together this March. You can find Amy's succinct posts on the book here. My much longer posts are here, or you can find them under the "Chesterton" label somewhere down there in the left-hand column.

The fourth chapter is titled, "The Ethics of Elfland", and in it Chesterton deals with two principle ideas he learnt from his earliest days in the nursery about the way the world works. The only surprising thing is that he didn't learn them from the so-called real world, he learnt them from the wondrous world of faerie, through the stories most commonly known as fairy tales.

Chesterton begins the chapter with a defence of democracy, "the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men." He states that the first principle of democracy is "that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately." The second principle of democracy is "merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common." Chesterton says that there are some things, like blowing one's nose, which we want each person to do for themselves, even if they do them badly. Chesterton provides a brief list, writing that "the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves - the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed."

Just in case you are wondering (I was), Chesterton's defence of democracy does have a point. He uses is to lead in to his presupposition that the fables developed over generations have an element of truth and reality to them often not possible in the particular tales of a given individual author. But before we get to that (and we will), I'd like to follow up on his short list, which I quoted in the previous paragraph.

There have been quite a number of science fiction novels written to explore the possibilities of what might happen when the responsibility for "mating of the sexes" is taken from the individual parents and given to the state. The most notable, perhaps, is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, which begins

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

and ends with one of the main characters committing suicide after an orgy of self flagellation. I must admit, I don't particularly see why that novel is often considered suitable for senior grade English classes to study. But my point is that, even when it is used as a device in a romance novel, such as in Johanna Lindsey's Warrior's Woman, the seemingly pleasant and useful idea of having the messiness and what some would see as inefficiency of conception, pregnancy, labour and birth taken over by some form of scientific machinery never seems to end as well as doing it the natural way, by ourselves. It might be because sex is one of the great tenets of democracy, but Chesterton is definitely right when he says that people would prefer to see people doing this themselves, even if they do it badly (or only moderately well). Foster care and adoption are wonderful solutions to terrible situations, and far better than the orphanages of the past. But what almost anyone who debates this topic would agree is that generalised institutionalised rearing of the infants of our societies would not be a good thing.

Yet I use that "almost anyone" advisedly because this is exactly what many feminists argue for. According to this article, for example, which argues that families, and what have historically been deemed the family's prerogatives of sex and reproduction, should all be subjected completely to the political machinations of the state, states that

...the idea that “the personal is political” is the core idea of most contemporary feminism.

There is an obvious parallel also to the eugenics work of the Nazi era. "Social Darwinism" manifests itself in a wide range of situations, from preferential reproduction of selected people with a "valuable" genetic makeup and its equivalent in selective embryo implantation to selective killing or effective sterilisation of people with genetic traits which are perceived as "negative", even to the extreme of genocide, but also seen most commonly in the high incidence of abortion among certain social and racial groupings, often funded by governments, and heavily promoted by both feminist political groups and outspoken proponents of evolutionary humanism. And so we come back to the situation briefly alluded to in some of my previous posts reading through Orthodoxy where we see that both feminism and evolutionary humanism attack the individual rights of people, rights which, as Chesterton puts it, are core to "the faith of democracy".

I might post a few more detailed comments later, but for now I proffer a summary of what Chesterton had to write in the rest of Chapter 4:

"Tradition is only democracy extended through time." Therefore the voice of tradition, as heard through the fairy tales of the common folk, should be considered a valuable source of information about reality. "I would always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts."

Chesterton learnt two things from fairy tales:

1. Fairy tales taught Chesterton that what the "ordinary scientific man" relates as a "law" is really a miracle. "This world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful." Chesterton gives some lovely illustrations in this section, such as where he writes that the scientist is "swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none." And later, he concluded, "this world does not explain itself. ... The thing is magic, true or false."

2. "The wonder has a positive element of praise. ... life was as precious as it was puzzling." Chesterton presents therefore his "Doctrine of Conditional Joy": that, just as Cinderella was offered the joy of attending the ball with the prince, but constrained to leave by the arbitrary time of midnight, we experience joy in our lives only in so far as we do not rebel against the limits of those lives. "It seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited." Chesterton is quite willing to submit to the limitations of his experience which fairy tales have led him to expect: "before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness." Later, Chesterton wrote "I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons."

This feeling that the world was personal, as akin to a work of art, led him to consider the possibility of an artist: "In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician."

When Chesterton compared what he had learnt from fairy tales with the "modern creed" of his worldly peers, he realised two more things:

1. The determinists, or "scientific fatalists", seemed to think that everything had gone on as it always did at present times (the idea of chronological uniformity) and this did not at all agree with Chesterton's idea of the miraculous nature of Nature. I loved how he put this: "So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot." Chesterton admitted that his was an emotional response to the sceptic's laws relating to repetition, but concluded "the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition... perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possibly that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them." What a precious and wonderful thought! Later, "magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it."

2. Modern emphasis on the expanse of the cosmos also precipitated a sense of tension for Chesterton. He criticised, "It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man is always small compared to the nearest tree. ... these modern expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine." Chesterton, by contrast, describes himself as being "fond" of the universe: "about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift." The value to Chesterton was not in the enormity of the cosmos, but in the very existence of the cosmos at all. This finally led him to consider that "the proper form of thanks to it [the magician] is some form of humility and restraint... We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. ... all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin."

Chesterton called the above "the soils for the seeds of doctrine". You can see that he is already getting quite close to the fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy.

[Image source koorong.com.]