Much as I hate to mention that word again, the ironic twist on the original concept is just too good not to mention – what word? what twist? Well, see, I keep running into people who could be described, with some justice, as neotenous traditionalists
People who see old-fashioned upright Christian living, even with the scary bits left in, as a cozy sparkly whimsical thing, the only last place remaining for silly, innocent souls. John C. Wright is one, of course. (”He presently works (successfully) as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children: Pingping, Orville, Wilbur, and Just Wright.”)
But there’s also N. D. Wilson, son of Douglas Wilson (who is all about the “scary bits” of Christian tradition). NDW’s book “Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World” is, among many other things, written in a voice too cutesy even for me, which is saying something:
What is the world? A large (compared to most malls), moist, inhabited, spinning ball. What kind of place is it? The round kind. The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off. The kind with sharks, and nose leeches, and slithery parasitic things (with barbs) that will swim up you like a urinary catheter if only you oblige by peeing in a South American river. The kind with people who kill and people who love and people who do both. The kind with people who think water from the Ganges is good for them and people who think eating the heart of their enemy will ward off death, and other who think they can cure their own failing brains if only they harvest enough uncommitted cells from human young.
This world is beautiful but badly broken. St. Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning. I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and the comedies of history. I love it with all of its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers. I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children encountering their first butterfly. I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story. I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be.
Suffering is not here – it is far away, and it exists to entertain us, as part of the cool exciting drama we watch from this cozy place, under our warm blankets, our faces locked in expressions of permanent stoned wonder. We look at thousands of years of history, at billions of years of biology, at everything that has ever captivated or uplifted or eroded or crushed a human soul, and we respond: it’s all sort of … cute, and quirky, isn’t it? Sooooo random. I like it.
Do you think Chesterton could have written that last paragraph (”This world is beautiful…”)? Does he strike you as weird in the same way?
It’s funny – I was originally going to write something like “Chesterton seems like the best possible version of this type,” but wasn’t sure if he quite fit, and considering how much JCW models himself on Chesterton it seemed like padding the list in an unfair way. But he at least is somewhere close to this cluster.
I think Chesterton could have expressed the sentiment of the last paragraph, but he would have done it with much more skill, so that the underlying weirdness of the sentiment would be less naked. In particular, Chesterton can often get away with saying absurd things by very bluntly noting the counter-intuitiveness of his position without actually overcoming it through argument. This is one thing his famous paradoxes are doing – by reversing some common idea he makes it clear that he is aware of the common idea, and that he is saying something that goes against what the reader is likely to believe, leaving the reader to feel like they are being inducted into some sort of “higher-order” wisdom rather than simply being fed bad ideas.
So Chesterton might have done something with, I dunno, the idea that if the world were just uniformly great all the time the phrase “I love the world” would be a near-meaningless truism, and that it is really only the great awfulness in the world that allows us to, potentially, love it in a meaningful and nontrivial way? Or something. He would have sounded a lot more self-aware, is what I’m saying.
I’m trying to picture this and wondering whether we cut Chesterton more slack because we expect older writers to be more bombastic (eg Carlyle) and when a modern writer tries to sound the same way it automatically sounds weird.
Alternately, when a modern writer says it, it almost sounds like a truism - like “Yeah, we know that the world is both horrible yet also strangely beautiful, people have been feeding us that aesthetic for decades, get to the point”, whereas with Chesterton it’s hard to be sure whether this was a new idea during his own time.
Alternately, this is part of what David Foster Wallace likes to talk about regarding how modern writers have to sound cynical and ironic.
I could see somebody like Terry Pratchett writing something almost like that last paragraph too, but it would be funnier and more ironic and more self-aware and padded in a “ha ha, this is a young adult book about a giant turtle so don’t bother me”.
I take issue with the idea that Chesterton’s justification is unhooked from his actual beliefs. The times when he goes against the “common wisdom” are common, but he doesn’t only do that - saying “_ piece of common wisdom is absolutely right because…” are just as common, and I think the justifications are often his real reasons for accepting his conclusions.
Chesterton did in fact write on basically this subject; here he is. You can judge for yourself if it counts as “neotenous traditionalism”
We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.
More below.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “justifications” here. What I was trying to say was that sometimes Chesterton doesn’t seem to have an argument so much as a way of boldly acknowledging that his claim flies in the face of the common wisdom. One reads that and thinks, “well, then, he must have a good reason for it,” and maybe he does – in his head – but it isn’t always there on the page.
I like the passage you quote (without exactly agreeing with it), but it seems very different from the N. D. Wilson quote, and has none of the problems I found with the latter. Chesterton isn’t saying he loves the world because it is so varied and “amazing” in the manner of popular science TV programs (which is what Wilson’s first paragraph brings to mind, for me). He’s saying that in some sort of abstract, original sense the basic things of creation are all good.
Wilson’s attitude toward the urethra-attacking Candiru fish is “dude, isn’t that crazy? The world is amazing!”, where Chesterton’s would, I imagine, be something more like “it is not good when the Candiru attacks someone’s urethra, but the basic existence and drives and life-force of this fish are good things, although in this case they have bad consequences.” This still strikes me as a weird rationalization, but it’s not repellent to me in the way Wilson’s attitude is; in particular, Chesterton’s positivity doesn’t extend to the moment when a urethra is actually attacked, while for Wilson the actual urethra attacks are just part of the groovy diversity of God’s amazing creation.
Likewise, Wilson and Chesterton both reconcile themselves to violence by comparing something broad (the universe, living) to something more particular (a story, “a raid or great adventure”). But in Wilson’s comparison, violence exists for the purposes (so to speak) of good creative writing, which to me smacks of a vast detachment from others’ suffering, and doesn’t seem compatible with the excess of violence in history from a narrative perspective (surely, God, we don’t need another poorly and pettily justified war, we’ve gotten the point by now and could use a change of pace). In Chesterton’s comparison, violence simply exists, and we can’t run away to a hypothetical non-violent universe, so we have to keep our heads up and face this dangerous world head-on – which seems pretty sensible to me.
In sum, Chesterton doesn’t strike me as a “neotenous traditionalist” here, although he does in some other places. I don’t entirely agree with the attitudes he expresses in the quote, but there’s nothing childish about them.
(If I don’t point this out someone else will, so: the standard story about the Candiru and urethras is almost certainly a myth, although there’s one documented instance of it happening, probably by coincidence.)
(via bulbous-oar)