I was recently searching for a Chesterton quote which I knew but couldn't remember which of his works it was from, and then found myself reading whole swaths of The Common Man, a collection of his essays published posthumously in 1950. The words of his essay "On Reading" really stuck with me afterwards; as with so many other of his writings, it's as if he looked into the future and saw what a mess we've gotten ourselves in. But of course, he just was a keen observer of human nature; times and technologies change... the inner man, not so much.
Chesterton starts out by stating one of the primary functions of classic literary works:
"The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone."
How often we see this attitude today from people who think modern sensibilities are always the correct ones, who believe that the ideas and philosophies they discuss- or shout about- are fresh and original, not age old issues which have been mulled over for centuries, generally by far better minds than their own. These are frequently the same people who go about virtuously proclaiming "their" truths: these are statements which don't have to be factually true- they just have to be narratives that the person is emotionally invested in and so believes are valid. Chesterton touches on this as well:
"The heretic (who is also the fanatic) is not a man who loves truth too much; no man can love truth too much. The heretic is a man who loves his truth more than truth itself. He prefers the half-truth that he has found to the whole truth which humanity has found."
Chesterton argues against the hubris of modern thinkers who believe, as mentioned previously, that their newfound beliefs and pieties have never been thought of before. Generally, he points out, these ideas have been carefully considered by writers of the past and then discarded as impracticable or just plain wrong.
"You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well."
He uses a couple of examples to illustrate his point, taking on both the writings of Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw (a frequent target for GK). I'll stick to talking about the Nietzsche example because the Shaw one is a little more involved, requiring the reader to compare/contrast the philosophy found in Shaw's 1905 play Major Barbara and that in Thackeray's 1847 novel Vanity Fair.
Chesterton discusses Nietzsche's philosophy of Master Morality, in which morality isn't a scale of good vs evil (he calls this "slave morality"); rather, morality is strength and power, while immorality is weakness and cowardice. Chesterton points out that a lot of people believed that Nietzsche was an original thinker who came up with this revolutionary definition of morality, but that this simply isn't true. Shakespeare, he asserts, summed up in one sentence what took Nietzsche an entire book (On The Genealogy of Morality) to explain- hundreds of years earlier, in his 1592 play Richard III. And then the Bard thoroughly debunked Nietzsche's thesis. Heck, I'm just going to quote this entire paragraph of Chesterton's because it's so good:
"Nietzsche, as every one knows, preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea. It is calmly and persistently supposed that the great writers of the past, say Shakespeare for instance, did not hold this view, because they had never imagined it; because it had never come into their heads. Turn up the last act of Shakespeare’s Richard III and you will find not only all that Nietzsche had to say put into two lines, but you will find it put in the very words of Nietzsche. Richard Crookback says to his nobles:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
As I have said, the fact is plain. Shakespeare had thought of Nietzsche and the Master Morality; but he weighed it at its proper value and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat. This rage against the weak is only possible in a man morbidly brave but fundamentally sick; a man like Richard, a man like Nietzsche. This case alone ought to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophies are modern in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them. They thought of them; only they did not think much of them. It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea; he saw it, and he saw through it."
It would behoove those who think that they've cornered the market on righteousness, who have nothing but contempt for what has gone before and consider that they have the moral authority to sit in judgement of past generations, to occasionally read something besides Harry Potter and/or The Communist Manifesto. If nothing else, they might discover that all their brilliant new ideas for a brave new world aren't all that new- or that brilliant. In the words of the inimitable GK Chesterton:
"What we call the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas. It was not that a particular notion did not enter Shakespeare’s head; it is that it found a good many other notions waiting to knock the nonsense out of it."