Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in Culture — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Many years ago my great friend and teacher (or so I fancy) G. K. Chesterton wrote an essay of vigor and subtle prescience entitled “Babies and Distributism.” Now it was almost Chesterton’s vocation to write essays like these — that is, essays that reach out like vivid paintings from their antiquity to strike the reader with their freshness — but this one was unusual even considering its source.

First (and this a difficult irony to express properly), Chesterton in this case was writing essentially as a man of the Left. Distributism was a posture of opposition to capitalism, and indeed Chesterton reserved some of his fiercest polemics for industrialists and millionaires. He wrote, for example, a series of articles for a socialist paper that would make a good Republican’s blood boil today. But Chesterton, writing in 1925 a man of the Left, to our eyes scores so many blows against the Left that it is difficult to think of him as anything but a Conservative; indeed, a reactionary, for his arguments will assuredly not sit well with our right-wingers of today. If one were to imagine the typical American lefty and the typical American righty reading this essay, one would picture them both reacting with settled irritation.

For Chesterton is writing against birth control, and he is pulling no punches. And the fact that his arguments — not, to be sure, because of any confusion or internal disorder on his part (for Chesterton is a sharp as ever) — reduce our familiar ideological markers to a muddle, is simply evidence that he has, characteristically, transcended politics. He has brought us closer to the nature of political things, and shown us with greater clarity the destiny of our civilization. Such a concentration of mind is sure to discomfit.

For Chesterton, birth control was emphatically a thing derived from capitalism, and the ascendance of capitalism as a guiding principle:

There is a third, reason for my contempt [for birth control], much deeper and therefore much more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be “free” to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word “free.” By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires’ notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

But it is Chesterton’s second reason for contempt for birth control that reveals his remarkable prescience. I would like the reader to keep the Groningen Protocol* in Holland — the protocol, that is, for euthanizing infants — in mind as he reads these words:

Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all difference between animals and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.

The program has arrived, Mr. Chesterton. Indeed, it has nearly triumphed, and conquered outright in many precincts.

Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child’s life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12.

Now my point here is not to draw out the long, dirty road that led us from birth control** to the lawful execution of infants; it is, rather, to show that its lineaments at least were discerned and censured by the more perceptive of those who bore witness to its origins — among them G. K. Chesterton. My point, moreover, is to suggest, by way of the muddle Chesterton makes of our comfortable ideological framework, how far the poison has penetrated.

But Chesterton does not leave the matter at that. He concludes instead with a strange and stirring challenge: Stirring because any man who knows of what he speaks will not fail to be stirred to very his soul, and strange because so remote, like the distant sound of a trumpet, calling back to battle men who have grown soft with luxury and debasement — calling back by the words of the Apostle: O Death, where is thy victory; O Death, where is thy sting?

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

Today almost everyone is hugging the chains of an older slavery, and striving against the life and reality of the new world.

_______

* See Mr. Erickson’s essay below.

** Conservatives who criticize (as they should) the “judicial usurpation of politics” may want to note that the usurpation really began to pick up steam when the Supreme Court declared (in the infamous “emanations and penumbras” opinion) that every law against birth control, passed by duly-elected legislatures out across the several states, was unconstitutional on grounds of privacy.

[Cross-posted at Cella’s Review.]