What’s Wrong with the World

“The subject matter is grave, as the title suggests. It was published in 1910, an ebullient moment, when the high industrialism and intellectual topsy-turvy of the 19th century still promised only good things, only “progress.” Few in the West could see the brewing ideological storms that would soon make landfall not just in the form of world wars and totalitarianism-but the pervasive modern dehumanization that consumes us to this day. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was one of those few, a veritable cultural meteorologist. Yet you will never encounter a more genial guide to What’s Wrong with the World. He bears his lamentations with good humor, studs his polemics with little gems of passing insight that are worth the price of admission alone (“Heaven does not work; it plays”). To read this work is to share the company of a witty friend who trusts your intelligence and addresses you at eye-level. Scholars consider What’s Wrong an early expression of his “distributism.” Here he embraces widespread property ownership as the key to a just social order. Though his conversion was still a decade away, the book’s arguments-above all, its hostility to capitalism and socialism-are unmistakably contoured by Catholic teaching. (A historian like Christopher Lasch might have added that something like distributism was also the Ameri- can social ideal for much of our history, but that’s a debate for another day.) Yet speaking of the book in such terms risks framing Chester- ton as the proponent of some “system” or other, when he was the furthest thing from a systematic thinker. Rather, he proceeded largely by moral intuition and common sense. His intuitions and sense were, in turn, the products of a sensibility at once profoundly English and profoundly Catholic. The one impelled him to champion the English smallholder’s garden; the other reminded him that the garden (and the pub and the Parliament) are only truly sensible and legible, as it were, when set against the transcendent horizon of a truly Catholic civilization. If you detect a tension or pressure point between these two Chestertonian principles-let’s call them the garden and the basilica for a sort of shorthand-you are, well, frankly mistaken. For insofar as a single idea united his massive literary output, it was his insistence on limits as a source of freedom. Both the Englishman’s garden and the Roman basilica represented for him the kinds of limits without which true liberty, the liberty to be fully human, was impossible”–