The Complete Thinker by Dale Ahlquist
Author:Dale Ahlquist [Ahlquist, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586176754
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-10-16T16:00:00+00:00
12
Buying and Selling
Let me touch on that terribly delicate matter, the relation between Truth and Trade.
—New York American, July 1, 1933
People are drawn to Chesterton for many different reasons. But some who are drawn to him for a specific reason are also driven away from him for another reason. There are people who feast on his literary criticism but who want nothing to do with his Christian apologetics. There are people who enjoy his Christian apologetics until it becomes Catholic apologetics. There are people who like his prose who hate his poetry. There are people who love his essays who dislike his fiction. There are people who think he is right about the Bolshevist Revolution but wrong about the Industrial Revolution—or prophetically right about the Sexual Revolution but historically wrong about the French Revolution. There are people who crave his detective fiction but absolutely nothing else. There are people who want only his quotations and avoid his extended treatment of anything. And, in every case, vice versa. Very few writers present such a wide range of genres and subject matter to produce such a variety of reactions, such a mixture of fans and foes of the very same things. But there is one topic where Chesterton’s ideas draw perhaps the fiercest loyalty and also the loudest opposition: economics. This, after all, is not something a man takes lightly, like morality or the fate of the soul. Now we’re talking about money!
But even though there are many who would like to compartmentalize Chesterton, it is the thesis of this book that Chesterton is all of a piece, that he is truly a complete thinker, whose ideas are woven tightly together so that his art does not contradict his religion, his politics do not contradict his philosophy, and his economics do not contradict his morality, and so forth.1 Unlike “the wild divorce court”, which is the modern world, Chesterton is the model of a thinker whose thoughts present a happy marriage of ideas, a true unity.
One of the reasons that people who agree with Chesterton suddenly stop agreeing with him when it comes to the topic of economics is that they really do not understand what he is saying—or worse, they do. (Comparisons are odious, but the Pharisees did not understand who Christ was, and the demons did.)
The main problem is that too many readers assume that since Chesterton is a critic of capitalism, then he must therefore be a socialist. They simply do not know that there is another option, which, of course, we will attempt to explain. The minor problem is that there is a famous quotation attributed to Chesterton: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is twenty, he has no heart. If he is still a socialist when he is forty, he has no mind.” Chesterton did not say this. And after years of research, I have come to the conclusion (until someone can prove otherwise) that no one knows who said it. Well, actually lots of people have said it.
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