More Chestertonian stuff

I'm reading Chesterton's 1910 classic, What's Wrong with the World. So far, it is (as one expects from Chesterton) a very witty retort to common misconceptions of his age, often turning platitudes on their heads. But also, (as one expects from Chesterton,) many of his points remain just as sharp today as they were a century ago. For example:

But the difference between the two mental methods [of dogma and prejudice] is marked and unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creed is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our existing divisions. They keep out of each other's way; the Tory paper and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never interrupts; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.

In our current culture, it is almost impossible to avoid the Scylla of relativism without falling into the Charybdis of prejudice. That is, either one denies any real difference between one's opponents and oneself, or one judges them to be irrational and arguing in bad faith.

For example, I pointed out to a friend that, while health care of some sort is presented as a basic human right in Catholic social teaching, there is no requirement or expectation that the government will in any direct way provide such care. Rather, the role of the government is to ensure that health care is not denied to any who need it. His immediate response was to call me insane. No reasonable person, he said, could call for universal health care without at the same time making it a government department. In short, he was unable to actually make an argument in favor of government-run health care exactly because he could not accept any argument against it.

I don't know what it would take for our society to discover some other mode of debate besides shouting as loudly as possible, but until we do we will drown in our own increasing irrational prejudices.