What's Wrong with the World

I've been reading a lot of things lately and have been pretty much all over the place, only I keep coming back to my first serious positive encounter with Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

I've started Orthodoxy a couple of times but just can't seem to get into it, despite it being one of his most famous works (and always highly recommended to me). These repeated failed attempts left me pretty skeptical of ol' Chesterton. Now, I really don't think it was some sort of rivalrous Clive issue, just a matter of maybe not being smart enough to get Chesterton, at least until I read, surprisingly, not a Chesterton book, but Alice von Hildebrand's Man and Woman: A Divine Invention. In Man and Woman, von Hildebrand heavily quotes a Chesterton book called, you guessed it, What's Wrong with the World. I was so fascinated by the selections in Man and Woman that I decided to go straight to the source and re-attempt to read Chesterton. And here's what I have to say...

What's Wrong with the World gets off to a slow start, in my opinion, but quickly becomes incredibly fascinating, especially in Chesterton's section "Part Three: Feminism, or the mistake about woman". I love the way Chesterton just cuts to the heart of things. He certainly doesn't pretty things up for presentation. I love the matter-of-factness of this statement, "If Americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper' I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible." Uh huh.

Now this is incredible. Chesterton writes, "I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time." Thank you Gilbert Keith. He continues beautifully, "The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's."

Chesterton makes a very shocking statement a little later, saying, "Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage, was not so much being emotional as being unemotional." I balked at Chesterton when I first read that. Seriously? What does he know? But then, he absolutely convinced me when I turned the page and read this, "There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in anger is noli me tangere [don't touch me]." Doesn't that sound about right?

Hey, you should really check it out and see for yourself. The full text is actually available to download here with Project Gutenberg. Let me know what you think!