GILBERT Keith Chesterton wrote a book in 1910 that reads like it has been written yesterday only. His uncanny description of what was wrong with his world back then will sound familiar to those who find so many things wrong with their own world today.
Hundred years ago Chesterton warned about greater disparity than ever between rich and poor. He talked about families falling apart, schools being in utter chaos, and basic freedoms being under assault. “What's wrong with this world?” is the title of his book.
Is there anything wrong with this world? A compromise answer would be to say the answer is as good as the question. The world changes in form, but not in substance. Many centuries ago volcanoes erupted, rivers flooded and droughts scorched the earth. Those things still happen, frequencies and intensities at variance.
We're the same human beings in the high noon of history as we were in its early dawn. We may have outwardly changed, but inwardly we're still seething with the same old genetic rage. We still kill, steal, snatch and rape. We still lie, cheat, conspire and hide. Have a good laugh at our sophistication. It's just a pretension that we're what we're not.
Chesterton tells us that idealism is what the common man knows is right. It means idealism is a condition of life where this man wants his family, his home and protection for both. At this point the English writer introduces his three characters. Hudge is Big Government, Gudge is Big Business and Jones represents the common man.
Hudge and Gudge are enemies, and Jones gets crushed between them. Jones wants ordinary things for which he pays extra-ordinary price. He marries for love. He wants to build a small house. He also wants to practice his religion, be a grandfather, become a local hero and die a natural death.
But Hudge and Gudge conspire and they take away from Jones his property, his independence and his dignity. Thus, the world has never changed for the common man. It has never changed for him since he was thrown out of Eden.
In so much as the history of the world is the history of the common man, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the enlightenment, conquests, inquests, revolutions and rebellions have emerged out of common man's unwavering ambition to find his way out of the cosmic chaos. This man always knew or believed he knew he was going to find the way he was looking for.
Then Chesterton draws the most chilling conclusion: If the common man previously lost his way, he has now lost his address. Religion is banned from the classrooms. So are parents. So is common sense. Each subject is taught in a vacuum. Each profession is increasingly narrow. People know more and more about less and less.
Hundred years later that still holds good. Hudge and Gudge are still hatching their plot against Jones, while he doesn't know what to do. Once he didn't know where he was going, but now he has forgotten where he was before. If the common man is disillusioned in this century, he was also disillusioned in the previous centuries. Ideologies have been always based on his idealism, but an ideal world forever eluded him.
The world moves in circular motions. Need and greed, fear and anxiety, privation and plenty, subservience and supremacy, birth and death, victory and defeat turn the wheel of life as much today as they did hundreds of years ago. Is there anything wrong with the world, then? The answer is it's more an existential refrain than actual complaint. That's perhaps how the world has been since the dawn of mankind. That's perhaps how it will remain until the last star falls from the sky.
It's part of human destiny to live and languish. It's part of human destiny to moan and groan. But nothing is wrong with this world in this century that wasn't wrong before. It's the same paroxysm of withdrawal and return that has repeatedly renewed the old. It's the same inexorable illusion that all that glitter is obviously gold.
Eighteen hundred years ago Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius had a striking realisation. “All things from eternity are of like forms and come around in a circle,” he said. This world has been repeated, like the same show runs in a theater at different times to different audiences.
If birth and death are two doors of life, pain and pleasure are its two windows. People have invented fire, they have invented electricity and they have invented technology. All their inventions have, however, failed to find the human beings within them.
This is what is wrong with the world. We forget the doors and focus on the windows. Then blame everything on the room.
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