G.K. Chesterton, Prophet
Colin Powell died last week. I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead, so I won’t give you my assessment of his long and storied career. I will say this in his favor, though: he wasn’t a neofascist.
That, you may remember, is what the Left called Gen. Powell in the early Noughties. The same smear was used against all members of George W. Bush administration. References to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four abounded.
(Of course, today, most of those same leftists are hailing the late General as a great American statesman because he came out against Donald Trump. Strange bedfellows, etc.)
It was all rot. I knew that even as a boy. Actually, I was about seven when Dubya was sworn in and fifteen when he left office. By then, I’d gleaned enough history to know that the United States was nothing like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. I’d choke on every references to “Orwellian” this and “Big Brother” that. I still do.
Now, I don’t doubt that America is primed for a tyranny of one sort or another. And certainly there are lots of useful things in Orwell’s lexicon: Doublespeak, Two Minutes Hate, etc. But what’s most striking about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it never happened. Orwell’s prophecy never came true. He could hardly have been more wrong if he tried.
Again, not knock the dead. But few know that another dysopian novel that succeeded everywhere that Orwell failed. It’s called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and its author is one G. K. Chesterton.
Curiously, Chesterton’s novel is also set in the year 1984. But that is where the similarities end.
Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. He predicted a complete global takeover by three totalitarian superstates. Our perception of reality would be entirely determined by ideology. And, sure, there are some interesting parallels to our own country. (2 + 2 = 5; man + man = marriage.) But the top-down enforcement of this ideology is very different than the self-indoctrinization favored by the modern Left. We don’t have Big Brother: we have TikTok.
Aside from the catchy lingo, we have very little to learn from Orwell. On the contrary: those exhasperating references to “Big Brother” during the Bush years probably did more to discredit the President’s legitimate critics—and there were lots of them.
Chesterton, meanwhile, was writing in 1904: forty-five years before Orwell. And, unlike Orwell, his prophecy came true. What did he predict would happen? Why, nothing at all.
At the beginning of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, we find England ruled by a vast and all-powerful (but inobtrusive) bureaucracy. The state is nominally headed by a king—an absolute monarch, as it happens. But the king isn’t born of the House of Windsor. Instead, he’s chosen totally at random from among the people.
Of course, there’s a big dollop of satire here. Chesterton was trying to show that, as we destreoy traditional heirarchies (like the monarchy), we’re apt also to erode our traditional liberties. But the general scheme Chesterton describes—a vast technocracy masquerading itself as a radical populism—is spot on.
Today, every man and woman in the Western world has a vote. Come to find our votes don’t actually do anything.
The most striking contrast between the two novels isn’t the political system they depict, though. It’s the atmosphere of the novels. Orwell’s book is charged with paranoia, horror, and madness. We’re presented with an unreliable narrator. Hell: by the end, the reader can’t trust himself.
This would make sense had Nazi- or Soviet-style totalitarianism triumphed in the 20th century. But it didn’t.
The “mood” in Chesterton’s novel is exactly the opposite, and so much more compelling. The protagonist Adam Wayne describes it well at the beginning of book three, chapter two. One of the shopkeepers has just told Wayne that things have been “terribly quiet,” which sends our hero on a reverie:
A great saying, worthy of a man whose merchandise is human history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age, as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror. I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the débris of the great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly quiet.
That’s the modern world in a nutshell.
Irving Kristol made the same point in 1995, when he said that America’s “bourgeois civilization” is
uninterested in such transcendence, which it at best tolerates as a private affair, a matter of individual taste and individual consumption, as it were. It is prosaic, not only in form but in essence. It is a society organized for the convenience and comfort of common men and women, not for the production of heroic, memorable figures. It is a society interested in making the best of this world, not in any kind of transfiguration, whether through tragedy or piety.
Peter Viereck put it better yet when he called the modern man “unhappy and untragic.” That’s one of my all-time favorite lines from a work of political philosophy. Incidentally, it comes from Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited, which was published in 1949—the same year as Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This is the most important fact about the modern world: that it’s designed to stifle any feelings we might call trandcendent: real happiness, real tragedy, real gratitude, real humility, real love. These sentiments are the wellspring for every great epic and sacred hymn. But epics lead to acts of heroism, and hymns to worship, which isn’t good for business. So, they must be silenced.
Still, they can’t be silenced forever. The human spirit—the Divine Spark—is more powerful than any state, however powerful. That’s the lesson at the heart of The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
I don’t want to spoil the book’s ending, and I don’t want to give the impression that it’s some sort of political tract. But it’s still one of the most prescient and penetrating books I’ve ever read. What’s more extraordinary is that Gilbert wrote it when he was just thirty years old.
If our culture was capable of introspection, our schools would teach Chesterton instead of Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-four tells us that tyranny will come in jackboots and jumpsuits, waving flags and blaring anthems. Our despots wear navy suits and listen to Lady Gaga. That would’ve surprised Orwell, but not G.K.C.
[Psst… Friendly reminder, my book The Reactionary Mind is out now. Order your copy today!]