Chesterton on the arrogance of civilization
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detail from The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas COle
Last night I finally started reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an early Chesterton novel that I’ve just never gotten around to. The opening chapters are vintage Chesterton, and probably even a little more fresh and brisk than his later fiction. The novel is set in the London of far-distant 1984 (another underrecognized Chesterton-Orwell connection?), a sort of dystopia of efficiency where everything is regulated, everything is chugging along successfully, and everything is dull.
In the opening chapter, two bureaucratic functionaries, both dull men in black suits, are walking to work in the pre-dawn twilight when they run into the deposed President of Nicaragua. They are immediately drawn to the President not just because of his elaborate and brightly colored costume, but because of his magnetic air of regal authority. That he produces a pocket knife and soaks his handkerchief in his own blood, next pinning the bloody rag to his breast as a flag to commemorate the loss of Nicaragua, only cements their interest in him.
Nevertheless, the two fall into an argument with the President. Barker, the intellectual of the two (“He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man”), condescendingly argues that the President’s overthrow and the absorption of a once-independent Nicaragua into a North American superstate is not a bad thing, because Progress. That absorption brought education, science, and progress even if it meant the decline of the things that made Nicaragua unique.
The President, understandably, assumes that Barker’s sympathies are with the unnamed larger nation that took Nicaragua over. “My sympathies are with no nation,” Barker replies. “We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples.” Consumed, assimilated, brought up to some external standard, scientifically progressed into a deracinated copy of every other “absorbed people,” the Nicaraguans have lost even their once famous ability to capture and tame wild horses.
“‘I never catch a wild horse,’ replied Barker, with dignity.”
Such folk skills are, to him, “a mere barbarian dexterity.” But the President cannot help but feel “that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.”
“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”
“Something, perhaps,” replied Barker, “but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilisation.”
“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”
It is not the point of Chesterton’s novel, but this is a striking preview of the globalist blender—well before it was set to puree by the internet—complete with the self-satisfied moral superiority of the big as they wield their bigness against the small. And the President’s final line is a good reminder of the fate of all civilizations, no matter how confident, successful, and progressive. At the very least it is a warning against the tyranny of the present.
As for the President, he departs the story with an even sharper and more evocative line, and possibly one to live by:
“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”
And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.
For those of us who sense the going of “something” from the world with the advance of “civilization,” see this reflection on Paul Kingsnorth from back in January. For the “theological task” of the present age, that of making modern man have even “an inkling of what has been taken from him,” see this passage from Jünger’s The Forest Passage that I posted last year.
