Outright opposition to modernity is often dismissed as backward-looking or “reactionary” and associated with a rigidly hierarchical or aristocratic outlook. But there is another tradition of resistance to the modern world that has very different ideals and can serve as the basis of an old-new radical philosophy of natural and cosmic belonging, inspiring humanity to step away from the nightmare transhumanist slave-world into which we are today being herded. In this important series of ten essays, our contributor W.D. James, who teaches philosophy in Kentucky, USA, explores the roots and thinking of what he terms “egalitarian anti-modernism”.
Strange things have happened, like never before
My baby told me I would have to go
I can’t be good no more, once like I did before
I can’t be good, baby
Honey, because the world’s gone wrong
– Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong
Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton (1874-1936) fortunately failed out of the Slade art school. I say ‘fortunately’ because he gave no indication of becoming a great artists but he became a hugely entertaining and provocative journalist as a fallback choice. In his day, Chesterton was a staple of the famed Fleet Street where many of the London daily and weekly papers were housed, not mention of several of the neighborhood pubs. Chesterton developed a very unique style by focusing his writings on paradoxes and was known as quite a character about town. At well over 300 pounds, he struck a dramatic appearance in the antiquated cape he habitually wore. It is said that his walking stick contained a hidden sword and that he traveled with a loaded pistol. I don’t know of any reports of him ever using either weapon, but he was ready. Ready for what? For whatever a modern-day knight along the lines of Don Quixote might be called upon to do (he wasn’t actually knighted until near the end of his life, by the Pope).
He wrote hundreds of pages per week for most of his long life, leaving a body of work that includes, in addition to journalism, numerous fabulist novels, epic poems, short verse, the hugely popular Father Brown classic detective stories, biographies of literary and religious figures, philosophy, apologetics, and probably several other genres I’m not thinking of right now. He publicly sparred with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, both whom he apparently liked quite a bit while disagreeing with their ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ views, and the affection was returned. His most famous intellectual ally was the writer and parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc. They worked so closely in tandem developing their criticisms of both capitalism and socialism that Shaw referred to them in the singular as The Chesterbelloc. Whatever he was writing and whomever he was sparring with, Chesterton always presented himself as the champion of the ‘common man’ and on the side of ‘common sense.’ In this essay we’ll look at his criticism of ‘the experts’ and their new-fangled ideas in his 1910 book, What’s Wrong With The World.
Long Hair
At the conclusion of this work, an all-out assault on the modern world, Chesterton brings the whole thing very down to earth. He writes:
I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate…. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair [vs hygienically clipping it short because in her poverty she is susceptible to lice] she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have a usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair (whom I have just watched toddling past my house), she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s. No, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her.i
QED.
The argument, such as it is, of the book centers around a family, whom Chesterton calls the Joneses, who just want a decent life in a decent home, only to find the forces of the modern world are arrayed against them. Those forces are many, but G.K. introduces fictional characters to personify some of them, with names representing a homage to Charles Dickens, whom he loved. Chesterton imagines a scene of modern urban poverty. Then “there are, let us say, two noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you prefer) of noble birth; let us call them Hudge and Gudge.”ii Hudge is a wealthy Tory and Gudge an idealistic socialist, but both are believers in modern technocratic governance.
Grudge set about creating a housing project for the impoverished denizens. Hudge donates generously, but the funds are still short, so the project has to be done “on the cheap”. Soon all the poor are bustled into their “Brick cells”. Both make reports to the government, Gudge reporting that the people are much better off now and Hudge arguing that they were happier where they were before. As the differently motivated technocrats argue it out, Grudge comes to believe “slums and stinks are really very nice things.”iii As if to say, look at the very nice programs our humanitarian government provides. Hudge, having footed the bill, likewise comes to think of what was originally meant to provide the most basic shelter is in fact more and more lovely and palatial. What was originally a good faith attempt to meet a real need under the demands of constraints, becomes in the eyes of those overseeing the project (all the powerful of the world), the epitome of what should be aspired to.
But Chesterton asserts that both have made a fundamental mistake: “neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instance what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians”.iv What Chesterton is getting at here is that if you approach things like a modern technocrat, whether ‘conservative’ or ‘socialist’, and not from the perspective of ordinary people and families, you’ll build a hell and be absolutely convinced it is heaven; for other people.
The Jacobin Reactionary
So, why do we need more idealists, and fewer technocrats, if we want to achieve practical improvement? G.K. asserts that social ideals have been replaced with a cult of “efficiency”. He holds that as a result of this:
There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy—the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an impractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all.v
In our modern world, no one bothers to think about what they really want but only about what they think they can get. Hence, nothing fundamentally changes or really gets done.
If we want to really get something done, we can look mainly to the past or mainly to the future. The future is a blank slate on which we write ourselves large. Chesterton argues that our vision for the future, if divorced from the past, is actually very narrow. If I have to reject everything that is past because it is past, what is really left for me to affirm in the future? Chesterton demands “complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.”vi He will not abide “the unnatural sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen.”vii Besides, past ideals have a certain epistemological advantage. If I want to reach some purely future ideal of X, not having experience X, how do I really know if I’m moving toward it or away from it? If I adopt a previous ideal, one attempted, I and the rest of my neighbors have some good sense of what it was, where we approached it and where we failed, and hence might make some reasonable attempts to get closer to it yet. Chesterton does not hesitate to affirm his being a reactionary, in that he affirms the mad faith that what we have once done, we might choose to do again.
What might these past ideals be that we should consider picking up again and continue to work on? Chestrton calls them “The Unfinished Temple.” They are Christendom and the French Revolution!! Or, we might say, ‘holiness’ and ‘democracy’. Of course, every other modern ‘reactionary’, from Joseph De Maistre (1753-1821) forward, would hold these are utterly incompatible: it was the latter which was the enemy of the former. Not so for Chesterton, ever the aspirant Christian knight and ever the radical democrat (perhaps he understood more than most the core of the ideal of chivalry, that the powerful should serve God by using their power to shield the weak). He observes that we really haven’t ‘outlived’ these old ideas, as the inveterate progressive would hold:
Of course I mean that Catholicism [Chesterton was currently an Anglican; his conversion to Catholicism would come a decade and a half later] was not tried; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through churchmen…the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived) but by not being lived enough… the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.viii
As regards the other ideal, he observes that representative government is only a shadow of the “full republican ideal.”ix For Chesterton:
The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things which it achieved at the time…. The first of these was the idea of honourable poverty: that a stateman must be something of a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity….The old democratic doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of State, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses, that mobs might throw stones.x
Chesterton demands the right to be old fashioned. To be anti-modern. So as to realize worthy human ideals.
Let’s Just Undo it!
Sixty years later, Ivan Illich (1926-2002), in his seminal work Deschooling Society (1970), made many of the same criticisms of technocracy as his predecessor. Illich was a priest, often associated with ‘liberation theology’, who traveled through much of North and South America, gravitating toward the poor and their communities.
He understood that, in the modern state, the ‘poor’ exist as a group to be ‘administered’ by technocrats. On his view, the ‘institutionalization’ of values always leads to their betrayal. Regarding institutionalized education, he observes:
They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the ore treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends…xi
He called for a “deinstitutionalization of values” in response. Technique operates in the mode of “expectation” (one can expect, predict, the outcome of a process) while the alternative operates in a mode of “hope”. Illich clarifies: “Hope, in its strong sense, means trusting faith in the goodness of nature, while expectation, as I will use it here, means reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man.”xii We need to move from treating people like “products” to treating them like humans. Expanding the spheres in which we operate on human, versus bureaucratic or institutional, bases should be a fundamental egalitarian anti-modernist tactical objective.
‘The Science’
Originally, the technocrats actually had to prove themselves. Frederick Winslow Taylor could actually increase efficiency in production. A relatively small cadre of bureaucrats actually could administer a large multi-ethnic state. Over time, the technocracy became institutionalized and proven competence was replaced with credentialling. One gained their spot in the technocracy not by actually proving competence but by obtaining a credential of competence. However, people still expected that the technocracy would work technocratically: that it would operate according to data and results. At least there was some sort of tradeoff you got.
We’ve now moved to a new stage. Technocracy has become separable from the actual results it produces. We are to accept the assertion ‘technocracy is good and technocrats are legitimate’ without any evidence. Technocracy has become fetishized. Technocracy is holy and the technocrats are its high priests; neither must be questioned. The technocracy completed this development during the COVID pandemic. Whereas before, we would have said ‘science says’ and then would be able to point to empirical scientific research to support that assertion, now it was ‘the science says’ and that meant the issue was beyond the need to provide actual evidence or test actual hypotheses. The priesthood, the WHO, the NHS, the various national health agencies, were simply to be believed. Any scientist who wanted to operate according to actual scientific methodologies and maintain a scientific skepticism was immediately declared a heretic, a class traitor.
While Chesterton could grant that the budding technocrats were at least well intentioned, I’m not sure we can maintain that level of credulity any longer. All ruling classes seek to evade transparency and accountability. Makes it hard for the mob to become righteously indignant. Yet, a class that can no longer give reasons for its predominance is nearing the end of its tenure.
i G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World, Sherwood Sugdon, 1910 (originally), pp. 215-216.
ii Ibid, p. 47.
iii Ibid, p. 48.
iv Ibid, p. 49.
v Ibid, p. 9.
vi Ibid, p. 25.
vii Ibid, p. 26.
viii Ibid, p. 29.
ix Ibid, p. 29.
x Ibid, pp. 30-31.
xi Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Marion Boyers, 1970, p. 1.
xii Ibid, p. 104.
organic radicals 