...the modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing-cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

-May 29, 1926, Illustrated London News

The religious prophets, the Elijahs and the Baptists, the Savonarolas and the Bunyans, were the only real democrats, the only real disbelievers in the efficacy of fashion and station and wealth. They did conceive that the problem par excellence was not the problem of the poor, but the problem of the rich. They did go into kings' palaces and rebuke them as if they were the scum of the earth. They did speak to princes as the modern philanthropist speaks to costermongers. They did hope that there might be some real possibilities in peers and plutocrats, as we hope that there may be some real possibilities in vagabonds and thieves. They, I repeat, were perhaps the only real democrats that the world has ever seen. For it is no democracy, but only a foolish masquerade of aristocracy, when it is only possible for the aristocrat to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the plebeian. The real democracy is found when the plebeian may be genuinely interested in the welfare of the aristocrat.

-December 7, 1901, The Speaker

"The modern world is so broad that all its citizens are narrow."

The great curse of our civilisation is that it is so large that whole masses of its inhabitants never see any but one side of life, any but one phase of thought. The modern world is so broad that all its citizens are narrow. There were a great many advantages in living in a small State, one of them was that of living in a larger world. In Athens probably a man could not put his nose outside his door without hearing Mystics and Atheists talking at the top of their voices. Today there are whole tracts of country such as Brixton and Surbiton in which the householder might go out in perfect safety, in which great philosophers do not argue in the street, perhaps from one year's end to another. These vast herds of suburban citizens living perpetually among people like themselves, might, indeed, be rescued to some extent from ignorance of others and of current thought by the daily Press. But here again the party system frustrates us, and a man only reads in his daily paper his own prejudices embellished with other people’s arguments. Something must be done to shift and float these vast clogged and stagnant masses of human life. Unless this is done it will be no idle jest to say that our civilisation is melting away in an apocalypse which it has not even the sense to understand. We require, in short, first and foremost, a quicker circulation of the civic blood.

-November 2, 1901, The Speaker

"....the key-word of the Old Testament from beginning to end is the word "joy.' "

Again, one may ask, why should Hebraism be regarded as the expression of a dark self-effacement; why should the Hebrews be regarded as a gloomy people? They danced openly with delight in the goodness of God; the key-word of the Old Testament from beginning to end is the word "joy." Their sacred books blaze with gold and jewels just as they blaze with elemental gratitude and pleasure. They believe, more openly and professedly than any people has believed, in the primal fertilities, in the fact that the corn and the orchard are the signals of the ultimate beneficence, in the fact that children and the fruit of the womb are a heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord. They declared that God called all things good, the most stupendously daring thing that any people has ever said. Yet they said one thing more daring still; they said that all things called God good, that the blessing of the Seventh Day was hurled back again upon the Giver, that all created things praised the Lord. If this be the situation, it is at least striking. God declares that the leper is good, and the leper praises God in reply. It would cause no astonishment if such a people was accused of extravagant optimism, of grotesque exuberance, of hysterical hilarity. But that they should be accused of being sombre, and allowing no place for exhilaration, is perhaps one of the darkest and most ancient riddles of human stupidity. It is absolutely and genuinely, for all intellectual purposes, like accusing the French of a slow and heavy materialism, or the Vikings of an over-subtle aestheticism.

-December 28, 1901, The Speaker

Men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters; they alone lie open to all attacks...There is no detail, from buttons to kangaroos, that does not enter into the gay confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and sing in, in the glorious Carnival of theology.

-G.F. Watts (1904)

"It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments."

...the whole object of real art, of real romance- and, above all, real religion- is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination. I mean the power to turn our imaginations inwards, on the things we already have, and to make those things live. It is not merely seeking new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences. It is really learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments. As it is, we are surrounded by a riot which is excused as the only way of being young, but which seems really to be a rapid way of growing old.

-September 20, 1924, Illustrated London News

"...and even their own families are human."

Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human

-Robert Browning (1903)

"A progressive is always a conservative; he conserves the direction of progress. A reactionary is always a rebel."

The term "reactionary" is generally used as a term of offence, just as the term "progressive" is used as a term of praise; but only once in a hundred times is either of them used so as to convey any meaning or truth. Yet though the words have become a mere hackneyed cant, they have their proper use. Progress means persistence in the direction of one object maintained for a considerable period; reaction means some upheaval of disgust or contradiction, which overthrows the recent persistence and appeals back, perhaps, to its opposite. Thus we might truly say that English poetry from Cowley to Akenside progressed towards clearness and metrical accuracy. And we might truly say that Coleridge's Ancient Mariner was a reaction against this progress, the writing of a mere mad ballad in order to show how much more life there was in the old barbaric mysticism than in the recent easy-going rationality. Progress happens, in short, whenever men can endure one tendency for a long time. And reaction happens whenever some particular man can endure it no longer. These definitions are simple but I believe them to be comprehensive. A progressive is always a conservative; he conserves the direction of progress. A reactionary is always a rebel.

-Introduction to Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle (1909)

War

Most of our current journalism is written in a dead language...full of florid but faded conventions....One of the worst, for instance, is the application of the terrible terminology of war to all the pettiest purposes of politics.

-June 21, 1924, Illustrated London News

I guess I should say that I'm gone from my GKC blog for Lent. (Yeah, a little late in stating that, but....)

"I have not the rudiment of anything resembling a conscience (I mean in this respect)..."

In a leading article in a leading paper, insisting on the need of vaccination in face of the small-pox scare or menace, the writer observes, "Is it really worth while being obsolete and retrograde by resisting vaccination when, at regularly recurrent intervals, that resistance brings such penalties?"- referring to the quarantine of Gloucester. I select this subject because it is one of the very few subjects on which I have no opinion whatever. I know nothing against vaccination. I know nothing about vaccination. I have not the rudiment of anything resembling a conscience (I mean in this respect), far less a conscientious objection calculated to impress a magistrate. I should certainly be vaccinated every other month or so, if any really responsible authority insists on it; for where conviction makes no express objection, civic obedience is the rule. I am therefore taking a case in which I have no controversial bias one way or the other, so that I can protest on impartial intellectual grounds against a certain controversial method. I protest against one bad argument which makes a botheration about a hundred different questions, but which is best represented by calling the anti-vaccinationst's position "obsolete and retrograde."

Now, what is wrong with this argument is that it always means a refusal to discuss a question on its merits. I do not propose to discuss anti-vaccination on its merits. I do not know whether anti-vaccination has any merits to discuss. I do not propose to discuss it at all. But I am quite certain that people ought to discuss it on its merits, if they do discuss it at all. If I were called upon to consider the subject I should try to consider the subject itself, and not these rhetorical recriminations about whether a thing is old or new. I should not ask whether the anti-vaccinationist was retrograde, but whether he was right. I should not ask whether the neglect of vaccination was obsolete, but whether it was wrong. The case of the word "obsolete" especially gives the argument away, for it is obvious that if a sufficient number of people did wrong it would cease to be obsolete, however clearly it was wrong. It is obvious that the controversialist is not really convinced that anti-vaccination is obsolete; on the contrary, he is fighting against some alleged danger that vaccination  will be obsolete. If he were not fighting against that, it would not be worth his while to fight at all.

And it is obvious that if a new theory appears later than vaccination, the latter does become relatively obsolete, or at least relatively retrograde. But it remains exactly as right or wrong as it was before...

I have taken this very elementary example to illustrate a very elementary truism, because it is exactly this obvious truth that needs to be repeated to the point of tedium in answer to half-a-hundred heresies today. This talk about progress and retrogression is to be resisted, not because progress is never to be achieved, not because retrogression is never to be deplored, but because the talk about these two abstractions always hampers the discussion of the intrinsic truth involved....What we want to know is whether vaccination does, in fact, prevent small-pox. We may not be in a position to know; we may not have the training to know; it may not lie in our own line of business or duty to know; we may not even very much want to know; but that is the only thing that is worth knowing. To be told in a vague way about the chronological order in which the two things happened to appear in history, or to be told that each of them is called by its enemies retrogressive and by its friends progressive is to get no nearer to that nucleus of the matter at all...The questions we really want to ask are in any case difficult enough to answer. When they are questions of scientific evidence, they would in any case put an ordinary person to a great deal of trouble in order to collect the evidence. But his only intelligent course is either to collect it or leave it alone, as I leave vaccination alone. To discuss whether one thing is really more old-fashioned than another, or more new-fangled than another, is a sheer waste of his time. And to throw himself thoughtlessly on to the side of whatever he has heard is new-fangled against anything he has heard is old-fashioned will be something worse than a waste of his life; it is very likely to be the positive poisoning of his life with all sorts of sophistry and insanity.

This very simple fallacy, which I have here once more indicated in equally simple language, is indeed applied not only to question like vaccination, about which I have the lofty impartiality of ignorance, but to many questions on which I have the strong partisanship which commonly comes with a certain amount of knowledge. But I am more interested for the moment in the fallacy itself than in even the most important problems to which it is applied. It seems to me that if we could get this one drivelling digression out of the way, we should establish something like a short cut to the heart of every problem. Let us not discuss whether it is best to go back or best to go forward, but what is really the best place to go to. Let us not discuss whether it is best to stay wherever we are, but whether we have really found the best place to stay in. The infantile simplicity of this distinction does not seem even yet to be made clear to many critics discussing matters in which I happen to be more interested than I am in anti-vaccinationists, and about which I happen even to know a little more than I know about small-pox....

Anyhow, the first step to sanity and stability of action is this step of considering institutions and proposals intrinsically and on their merits. If the Chinese invented fireworks, we need not ask in what Chinese dynasty it was done before we consent to send up a rocket to save a sinking ship. If the ancient Egyptians had surgical instruments, we need not verify the exact date of Tutankhamen before we cut off a man's leg to save his life. It may be sentimental always to regret the past; it is even more sentimental always to regret any regret of the past. What we want is to be free to take our pick of the past for the necessities of the present.

-July 28, 1923, Illustrated London News

The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe [...] The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking the offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base.

-The New Jerusalem (1920)