“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it….
“As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself….
“The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
In 1908, journalist G.K. Chesterton saw London society transforming around him. The age of European empire was collapsing due to its internal contradictions and intellectual attacks from within. Marxists demanded their new utopia and radical Darwinists demanded a world without religion. Modern artists scoffed at representational art and the cultural elites ridiculed millenia-old tradition.
In other words, Chesterton’s “new rebels” share much with the progressives of today. Endless insistence on new ways of living without an even rudimentary understanding of how the old ways came to be. And who cares if these fanciful moralities, politics, and culture simply don’t work? We’ll just change them all again in a few years.
Chesterton showed the simple reason these new ways were destined to fail — they didn’t make a damn bit of sense.
All police are racist murderers so only they should own guns. Trump is Hitler so we should give him power to define and ban “offensive” speech. America savagely abuses immigrants from Latin America and the Middle East so we need to bring in as many as possible.
When all tradition is abandoned, so is all reason.
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