Unevenly Yoked
This morning I discovered the MBTA’s clever scheme to keep the new Green Line trains running. They’ve split them up so that each new car is attached to an old car. This makes the new “trains” go somewhat faster, but still not as fast as two old cars together. All sorts of similes come to mind, but I’ll spare you.
Someone sent me a Chesterton quote that’s appropriate for these warblogging times. The following is from The Daily News, September 19, 1903:
The saying that good men are the same in all religions is profoundly true, if it means that the attitude of doing one’s best is the same everywhere. But if it means that they will all do the same thing it is not true; it is not common sense. A man from a distant continent or a remote century may be as good as any of us–self restrained, aspiring, magnanimous, sincere. But we must not complain if he has a slight penchant, let us say, for human sacrifice. It will altogether depend upon the nature of his philosophy. And that is how the case stands at the root of the horrors of the Near East. The Moslems are not without creditable qualities in the least–courage, sobriety, hardiness, hospitality, personal dignity, intense religious belief. These are fine qualities. The thing we will not face is the enormous fact that they have along with all this, not merely from personal sin, but by ingrained, avowed, and convinced philosophy another quality, a total disregard of human life, whether it is their own or other people’s. Therefore our civilisation is and must be at war with them, and that war is a religious war, or, if you prefer the term, a philosophical war. We are allowed by the modern mind to call the Moslems en masse thieves, beasts, devils from hell, though it is manifest to common sense that no people can be so entirely composed. The one thing we are not allowed to say against them, the one thing that amid all our curses it would really be thought illiberal to say, is exactly the thing which is really our case against them. Our case against them, that is, is that they both think and act, that they think and therefore act against everything for which we stand.
April 7th, 2003 at 4:46 pm
The thing we will not face is the enormous fact that they have along with all this, not merely from personal sin, but by ingrained, avowed, and convinced philosophy another quality, a total disregard of human life, whether it is their own or other people’s.
Which is kind of a weird thing to claim, when the part of the world that is theoretically Christian - I mean the US and Europe - that has killed people by the millions in the 20th century. Samuel P. Huntington wrote: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”
April 7th, 2003 at 10:29 pm
The quote is from 1903, so Chesterton didn’t have the horrors of the 20th century in mind when he wrote it. Communism, while certainly Western, is not Christian. I don’t think Chesterton would have been surprised at its total disregard of human life, either.
April 8th, 2003 at 6:20 am
Actually, when referencing the millions of people killed by the “Christian” countries, I wasn’t even thinking of Communism: I was thinking of WWI, WWII, the death camps of Nazi Germany, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and so on. It clearly didn’t occur to Chesterton to think of the millions of native Americans killed by the white settlers, or the millions of Africans bought, shipped, and killed in the slave trade, as evidence of the Christian disregard for human life. Given his social background, there’s no reason why this should occur to him: but every reason why it should occur to us.
April 9th, 2003 at 11:50 am
Soldiers get killed in wars all over the world. Europe’s wars are no worse than those elsewhere, morally speaking, though atrocities like the Holocaust get more press than, say, the Armenian holocaust or Japanese offenses in Korea.
As for the indigenous population of the Americas, disease did more towards exterminating them than Europeans did. Europeans had the technology to kill more people, and to extend the African slave trade beyond Africa and the Middle East (which, nevertheless, still consumed more human chattel than Europeans did and still continues today), but that doesn’t translate immediately into a wholesale disregard for human life, the way Communist starvation of millions of peasants does. The quote wasn’t about a headcount of the dead, but philosophical differences between civilizations.
Chesterton doesn’t mention Europeans as having a total disregard for human life because they didn’t, not in the way he meant it. His social background is no excuse, because he needs none. He would have stood by his opinion, whether or not you considered yours more enlightened.