Orthodoxy Chapter 2: The Maniac

Chesterton begins this chapter by talking about “complete self confidence” as a moral failing. He describes an incident where a friend’s innocent remark prompted him to give the following response.

Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Superman. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. (7-8)

I like to think of Chesterton literally saying all this exactly as it is written down, complete with Shakespeare reference and transposed sentence structure, while the publisher’s eyes roll back in his skull and he begins wondering what urgent engagement of his can possibly take place within the next twenty minutes.

Actually the publisher does ask the pertinent question of whether all people everywhere who believe in themselves are actually in lunatic asylums. And Chesterton agrees that, sure, some have escaped that fate. But they’re all bores, debtors, failures, drunks and general “rotters.” (9) He urges his friend to consider humans in terms of his “business sense” instead of this “ugly individualistic philosophy” (9) (btw real charming move there, Chesterton). And for the rest of the paragraph he pretty much goes on to say that believing in yourself is the most sinful and stupidest thing you can possibly do.

(At the end of the conversation, the friend supposedly asks Chesterton “If a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?” which I don’t think happened. I think the friend said something more like, “Um….I just remembered my wife is in the hospital and I have an urgent meeting with my boss and my kid’s soccer game is happening literally right now.”)

Now, Chesterton muddies the waters a bit when he brings up “complete self confidence” for about a sentence, and then goes back to talking about regular old “believing in oneself.” So I’m not whether he’s telling us to avoid self confidence that goes to an unrealistic extreme, or if we’re just supposed to be doubting ourselves all the time.

I agree that “believe in yourself” doesn’t really mean anything when you don’t have the skill to back it up. On the other hand, I think negative thinking can really bite you in the butt and make you screw up even when things were going fine. So it’s better to focus on what you can do.

But this anecdote is more of a lead up to the chapter than a main point. Chesterton goes on to talk about the necessity of accepting original sin as a starting point for talking about the human condition. He goes on for a couple of paragraphs about how totally obvious sin is and how everyone has always believed in it since forever, without ever really giving us a definition for sin, or naming any theologians (besides one counter example).

The one sinful act he does mention is “skinning a cat” for fun (10) so I guess Chesterton is just talking about how humans tend to do really bad stuff for no reason. People doing bad stuff is important to talk about, but Chesterton glosses over the different interpretations people have to explain why people are this way. It’s all “sin.” His argument here is pretty much that either people are sinful, people are crazy, or you’re in denial.

Now, Plato also worked on teasing out the nuance between knowledge and virtue in his dialog Meno. So looking at the intersection between mental health and good behavior is nothing new. However, I am a little disappointed in the lack of nuance Chesterton gives in his view of sin. System and culture, two huge factors for human behavior, get left out entirely.

For example, we would judge the skinning cat man less harshly if he was hungry and elated at the idea of eating some fresh kitty (although the cat might not agree). He’s still bad, but if he’s a homeless guy with few food options, he’s not acting for the same reasons as a sociopath who tortures animals for fun. In another case, the skinning cat man might see a Christian father spanking a six-month-old and be totally shocked. In his culture, animal cruelty is fine, but hitting babies no matter what the context is evil.

Not that either of these two cases take out the idea of sin. They just locate sin away from the heart of the individual (as some inexplicable force that makes humans mean) and into the world in general as a thing that makes human relationships go wrong and demands an extra portion of virtue to combat. The problem with the skinning cat analogy is it’s too “other.” No one reading Chesterton actually likes skinning cats. So it’s very easy to skim the paragraph and think, “Oh, yes. Sin is a big problem…For other people.”

In the next few paragraphs, Chesterton takes up the idea of madness, saying that madness might look interesting from the outside but from the inside it’s very dull:

A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. (9)

(I got news for you, Chesterton, blind people are generally pretty sane and have average artistic sensibility in concepts other than sight. But carry on.)

The idea of madness being reminds me most of the memoir I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about a teenage girl with Schizophrenia. In many ways, the world in her head is fantastical, with gods and visions and beautiful landscapes. But it’s fundamentally a world of punishments and traps that she built to mirror the real world. When she begins to recover, she is amazed by the beauty of the real world.

Chesterton also defends the use of an every-person narrator in literature—a relatable hero who experiences weird shit (Labyrinth, anyone?). I think this is kind of a matter of taste, though. I’m not a huge fan of sociopathic narrators, but I do like ones that are a bit quirky, like Cassandra in I Capture the Castle.

Over pages 10 and 11, Chesterton defends imagination as a normal part of human life. He rejects the idea that imagination and mysticism cause people to go crazy. This is an argument people still need to hear today. Going back to I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the author says in the afterward,

The promulgation of this myth makes creative people reluctant to seek needed therapy because they fear their gifts will vanish. It also makes mentally ill people fear invoking what creative forces they have for fear of deepening their already substantial anguish.

Both Joanne Greenburg and Chesterton agree that art is not the cause of madness; instead it can be a powerful tool in the recovery of mental health (although Greenburg emphasizes the communal aspect of art more).

Chesterton does sprinkle some weird comments in these pages.  Such as “Odd people are always complaining of the dullness of life” (10) (it depends on what kind of odd people), “poets do not go mad, but chess players [and mathematicians] do,” (10) (what do you have against chess???) and, “only one great English poet went mad” (11). With the benefit of Google, Chesterton might have heard of Sir Thomas Wyatt or Lord Byron.

In conclusion, Chesterton makes artistic sensibility, which enjoys the world, opposed to logical or scientific thought, which analyzes the world.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. (11)

Chesterton spends the rest of page 12 and 13 explaining that an overabundance of reason is what makes people go mad, because then people don’t have any imagination or humility. Which seems very odd to me. I really don’t think you have to lose your imagination to be a good scientist. Hell, it’s because people see world as strange and wonderful that they want to study it. As Richard Dawkins said,

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

But in Chesterton’s world a skeptic and atheist can’t feel the joy of being alive. It only took me two minutes on Google to find that quote.

In pages 14 and 15, Chesterton goes on to describe a kind of person who’s arguments make perfect logical sense in that they are perfectly consistent but which fail to encompass the complexities of reality.

“A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but…it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.” (14)

Which actually does sound like a real type of person. I’ve listened to debates with the presuppositionalist theologian Sye Ten Bruggencate, for example. His schtick is that if you just assume God is always right and humans are just too stupid and sinful to understand, then everything makes sense. Why is there evil in the world? Phhh. Don’t question God. That’s sinful. Just agree that God’s plan is perfect, and everything by definition will be perfect.

However, while these types of jerks usually pay lip service to logic, I don’t think they abound more within scientific communities necessarily. Sure, they will assume they alone are totally rational while everyone else is influenced by emotion, while simultaneously being totally blind to their own raging ego. But that just sounds more like your run-of-the-mill asshole than some scientist run amok. Assholes use science as an excuse to justify their own whims. They’re not actually interested in discovering everything. Being a scientist actually requires a certain amount of humility. You have to be willing to put aside your prejudices and listen to the facts, even when they prove you wrong.

I find it ironic that at this point the ultra orthodox Chesterton is babbling on about modern science, while I’m just shrugging and going “People are assholes. Didn’t you notice?” It’s sort of like we switched positions.

Then Chesterton spends the rest of the chapter talking about the materialist worldview in a way that makes it clear he has never talked to any real materialists. He keeps referencing Joseph McCabe but never actually quotes him. (Google tells me McCabe had a strange obsession with “ether.”) His main argument is that materialists are all crazy (“I am not now discussing the relation of these creeds to truth, but…their relation to health” (18)) and a purely material universe is boring (“if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos” (18)).

The interesting thing is that a lot of the materialists I’ve listened to or read have pretty open minds about the supernatural. It’s not that “they are not allowed to admit into [their] spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle” (19). More: “OMG You have a real speck of miracle????? Let me see it! Let’s run tests on it! Stop the presses! I’m so freakin’ excited cuz this changes everything!!!!!” As the skeptic blogger Seth Andrews is fond of saying, “Show me the evidence.” Many people adopt a materialistic worldview not because they don’t think the supernatural could possibly exist, but simply because it’s a waste of time to look for supernatural solutions to problems when material causes and solutions are so much more logical and useful.

Later on the same page, Chesterton sells his own religion short with a weird analogy.

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. (19)

This is diametrically opposed to everything I heard in church growing up. What comes after death was the entire driving force behind every sermon and Sunday school lesson. We kids were obsessed with getting out of hell and viewed it as our first duty to force people have the kind of faith that would save them as well. We very much “need” to think about it.

And for the next few pages Chesterton goes on about fatalism and determinism and how you can’t possibly have free with without an omnipotent god who foresees everything because that makes a ton of sense…Supposedly materialist beliefs,

…right or wrong, they gradually destroy…humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. (19)

(Did Chesterton just admit he thinks the materialists might be right?)

Basically Chesterton waxes dull on the evil of materialism for another couple of pages. And then he gets into “Eastern” symbolism taken up by “many moderns:” the circle, which Chesterton calls “the very symbol of this ultimate nullity.” (22) For example, the serpent eating its tail (which supposedly the moderns use to represent infinity) is “a degraded animal who destroys even himself.” (22)

Quick! To the Wikipedia!

The snake eating its tail is Ouroboros, and represents self-reflexivity, introspection, and cyclicality. It originally came from Egypt, but has been used in Indian and Greek philosophy, and Norse legends, as well as Gnosticism and Alchemy. Not strictly an “Eastern” symbol, and not only a symbol of infinity.

But we can be sure that circles are an entirely pagan symbol and completely unfit for Christian thought. As a debased sultan once wrote in his barbaric rhymes,

That circle which appeared—in my poor style—

Like a reflected radiance in Thee,

After my eyes had studied it awhile,

Within, and in its own hue, seemed to be

Tinted with the figure of a Man…

Whoops. That was Dante Alighieri, Paradise canto 33 lines 127-131.

And here in a nutshell is the problem with using symbols. Symbols carry meaning because of their interpretation. Chesterton’s earlier analogy of a closed mind being like a circle works because he takes a neutral shape and draws a comparison that clarifies his. He doesn’t just say, “madmen are like circles, and by the way circles are Eastern and eeeeevil!” like he’s doing here.

And then the rest of the chapter is all about the importance of mysticism, which we already read about in the introduction, with some added stuff about embracing contradictions. It’s kind of thrown in at the end of the chapter, so I won’t go into it in too much detail.

The ordinary man…has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. (23)

My best guess is that Chesterton is talking about the variety of lived experience here. Like, “I’m straight and attracted to men, but my friend is bi and in a relationship with a woman. That’s weird to me but I’m not going to deny her relationship because the evidence is right in front of me.”

And he closes with some more “I don’t think you know how symbols work.”

“Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal.” (23) I think on the first day of classes Chesterton stumbled into a physics class while thinking it was Religion 101 and never figured out his mistake. Also centrifugal force is just applied inertia.

And, “The cross…can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing…the cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.” (24)

You know what the cross is a symbol of? DON’T FUCK WITH ROME.