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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (27866)	6/7/1999 11:11:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Re: Chesterton & Liberalism Neocon, I am not sure that DAR is the proper venue for Serious Political Discussions. This is a place where people come to take off their shoes, kick back and relax -- and talk about any kind of aimless foolishness that enters their heads without fear of reproof. However, since you approached me in the "correct way" <g>, I will make a stab at a brief response, hard as it is for me to be brief. I have not read the little book ("Orthodoxy") from which this passage was excerpted. And since, as I understand it, it is a polemical/apologetic work, aimed at defending Catholicism, I will have to tread warily. (I am an ex-Catholic, and about as tolerant of other beliefs and non-beliefs as it is possible to be.) In short, I would not want to be found agreeing with one thought, only to find it commits me to supporting another one, with which I actually disagree. (This is the ever-present danger when one is dealing with apologetic works.) <g> Ahem. On the whole, the little I know of Chesterton disposes me favorably towards him. I think his respect and concern for the "common man" was truly genuine, and that, consequently, his support for democracy -- "the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity" (nice phrase) -- was real. My problem comes, as you would suspect, with the term "traditions." In this particular passage, Chesterton does not define precisely what he means by "traditions" -- although no doubt he does elsewhere in the book. At times, by "traditions," he seems to mean the sum of convictions/habits/views/ways of doing things of the "common man", in which case I would agree that democracy cannot even exist unless these are respected. At other times, his stress on "tradition" as a way of "giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors" ("the democracy of the dead")could conceivably be used in the interests of obscurantism. I am also somewhat uneasy with his "first proposition" of democracy -- that "the things common to all men are more important than the thngs peculiar to any men." Yes and no. The yes part should be obvious. The no part is less so. In liberalism, the individual (or any group of individuals) is as important as the community. If the civil rights of an individual, or minority group, are violated by the "traditions" of a community (say, the right to free speech), liberalism must side with the former. (In the American South, for example, apartheid was "traditional.") And so forth and so on. It would be a lot easier to comment on Chesterton's views if I had read the whole essay/book. Even then, I suspect I might have trouble. Chesterton's style is a little too rhetorical for me, I confess. jbe