History Wobbles
In 1905, G.K. Chesterton made a prediction: philosophers of the future would no longer be called upon to expand the horizons of our knowledge; they would be tasked instead with upholding the most basic tenets of reality. “Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four,” he envisioned. “We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge and impossible universe that stares us in the face… We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with great courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.” Chesterton reiterated this prophecy in 1926, projecting a mad future for the West in which a ballooning unanimity would lead to a world where people are “howled down for saying that two and two make four”, persecuted for “calling a triangle a three-sided figure”, and hanged “for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green".
Chesterton is famous for his powers of prognostication. He predicted how the second World War would start; how technology would alter war; how civilian deaths would become a normal part of warfare. He was among the first to warn of Hitler’s violence against the Jewish people. He imagined something of how global communications would transform society, as well as how extensive surveillance and speech restrictions would become more pervasive. He knew that the sexual revolution was on its way forty years before it happened, and even predicted (in advance of sociologists like Philip Rieff) how Freud’s thinking would shape the collective imagination of the West. He saw, too, how reproductive health would become politicized. He had already critiqued the blend of capitalism and sexual identity politics now pervasive in the West in his book What’s Wrong with the World, published in 1910, and had sensed that medicine and politics might become bedfellows in Eugenics and Other Evils, published in 1922. He even foretold the erasure of the category of biological sex through a misuse of the notion of equality.
How was Chesterton able to see our future so clearly? Did he subscribe to some kind of historical determinism, perhaps? Surprisingly, despite his brilliant guesswork, Chesterton was skeptical of the possibility of seeing into the future at all, denying outright that history followed any predictable pattern. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not think of progress as inevitable. To him, progress was merely “a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” Still, tendencies and trends do emerge, and he was rather good at spotting them. “A fashionable person in the twenty-first century,” he wrote in 1930, “may end up in shoes with such high heels that he (or, rather, she) practically cannot walk at all.” Such a person, he suggested, “may carry the same tendency so far as to walk on stilts, or to be unable to walk on stilts.” This prediction proved right when James Syiemiong won the Guinness Book of World Records award for designing 20-inch high-heeled shoes in 2004, and again when Noritaka Tatehana designed for stilt-like, nearly unwalkable shoes for Lady Gaga in 2011.
Pondering this possible future, Chesterton jokingly proposed that at the heart of the modern world was a tendency to neglect “the sacred duty of Thinking About Boots.” Rather he half-joked. For he meant by this something quite serious: the sacred duty of thinking about the essence of things. In his prediction-making, we find Chesterton trying to get a feel for “the superlative,” a sense of what things ought to be and not just a sense of what they could be. As a metaphysical exercise, "Thinking About Boot” becomes the Platonic task of walking “backwards in your moral and philosophical boots till you find the ancient archetypal boots from which all boots have come.” This, then, was Chesterton’s true method for seeing so far ahead: by contemplating the form of things, he saw more clearly how things might be deformed.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that Chesterton had no intention of being proven right. His guesses about the future were often wild and unruly because he wanted to warn people of where certain trends might lead. He would have been truly alarmed, in fact, to discover just how often he has been correct. “Like all healthy-minded prophets,” he wrote in Utopia for Usurers (1917), “I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in the hope that my prophecy may not come true.” If there is a single reason why Chesterton despised historical determinism it would be this: to assume that history is going in only one direction is to assume that it is merely a machine and that human beings are powerless against it. Only dead things float down a stream; to assume that people will always go with the flow of history is to render them dead. According to historicist inevitability, people are helplessly caught in the cogs of progress or decline, as we see symbolized in that famous moment from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
Against all this, in The Well and the Shallows (1935), Chesterton argued, “The world is what the saints and the prophets saw it was; it is not merely getting better or merely getting worse; there is one thing that the world does; it wobbles. Left to itself, it does not get anywhere; though if helped by real reformers of the right religion and philosophy, it may get better in many respects, and sometimes for considerable periods.” Human history is human above all other things, and human beings are not merely predictable. “Human history,” writes Chesterton, “is so rich and complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement or retrogression.” And that, he suggests, is why we should be cautious in our trend-spotting and forecasting. Looking for trends and speculating about futures, we may simply be reading ourselves and our limited viewpoints into the text of the world.
In our own time, somewhat in contrast with Chesterton’s, the watchword decline is more prevalent than progress. We commonly hear of managed decline—although in many instances it does not seem to be managed at all. We still hear of progress, of course, but pervasive political precarity makes progress less trustworthy as a popular category. Chesterton’s philosophy offers a healthy antidote to any historicist fatalism, though, whether it happens to be overly pessimistic (as it is for declinists) or overly optimistic (as it is for progressives). He believes that by attending properly to the forms of things, by clarifying their best possible conceptions and applications, we can become more creatively involved in making things better. This creative involvement is key: for if we leave things alone, we do not really leave them as they are. Rather, “[i]f you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.” In this particularly precarious time, in this constant see-sawing away of history, I believe Chesterton would have asked us to attend again to the form of things—to “archetypal boots,” and to communities and institutions and people; to archetypes of human flourishing.
Chesterton’s response to this strangely wobbly world—and especially the modern tendency to suppress big metaphysical questions—is not to dwell too long on historical contingencies. Rather, he calls for a return to metaphysical realism. We can only know what is true when we see the essences and ends of things; when we perceive the deep reality behind all appearances. Instead of wondering simply whether things are getting better or worse, Chesterton asks us to return to the question of form, the “superlative” that sits behind all “comparatives.” For it is only with this “reference to form” that we can achieve anything like “reform.”
Duncan Reyburn is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts, University of Pretoria. He is the author of “Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning.”