Os 3 contributos de Chesterton para a Civilização - pt 1

Recentemente Pedro Arroja escreveu no seu blogue, num artigo sobre a obra de Chesterton, que "ninguém se converte ao catolicismo por argumento intelectual". No mesmo artigo é referido que o dom de Chesterton para a apologética, apesar de admirável, não é suficiente para levar as pessoas à conversão. Se é óbvio que a Fé, mais do que a Razão, é o factor principal para que alguém se junte à Igreja, a verdade é que o discurso de Chesterton não é meramente intelectual. A sua mensagem é, acima de tudo, uma mensagem do Bom Senso, do Senso Comum. Ao mesmo tempo, Chesterton recupera para o Senso Comum o sentido religioso, dogmático e anti-plutocrático da expressão - Chesterton é de facto do apóstolo do Senso Comum, ao mesmo tempo no sentido democrático e no sentido cristão da expressão. Mas a reabilitação do Senso Comum não é o único grande contributo de Chesterton, uma vez que a sua obra resgata para o Ocidente duas coisas que também lhe fazem falta: a Propriedade Privada e o Sentido do Inimigo.

O Apóstolo do Senso Comum

O Sèculo XIX, o berço histórico da obra chestertoniana, é um século de incrível movimentação intelectual para a Igreja Católica. Na teologia e na doutrina social, nomes como Joseph deMaistre, Bonald, Juan Donoso Cortés impediram que o mundo liberal pudesse acusar a Igreja Católica de defender posições obsoletas e inaplicáveis. Honoré Balzac e Juan Vázquez de Mella, cada um à sua maneira, atacaram a modernidade burguesa através da literatura e da crítica da sociedade. Politicamente, a Restauração Bourbónica, o Miguelismo e o Carlismo representaram esforços de reforma e contra-revolução que respeitavam a continuidade sagrada da Tradição. Do lado do pensamento contra-iluminista português podemos contar com José Acúrsio das Neves, insigne historiador e economista, Gama e Castro e o Marquês de Penalva. Do lado liberal católico, Tocqueville, Lord Acton e Herculano também produziram obra incrível que influencia ainda o estudo das Ciências Sociais e Humanas.

Quais foram as consequências de todo este rebuliço criador? O Concílio Vaticano I, onde a infalibilidade papal desejada por de Maistre foi finalmente estabelecida, e a bula Rerum Novarum, que estabeleceu com bases sólidas a Doutrina Social da Igreja Católica. Como ligamos Chesterton a todos estes fenómenos?

Chesterton é um dos principais nomes do Renascimento Católico Inglês. Esse movimento de intelectuais que reabilitou a imagem do catolicismo no Reino Unido teve inicio com o Cardeal Newman, conheceu o seu expoente em Chesterton e Evelyn Waugh e terminou na geração de Tolkien.

É na sociedade londrina contemporânea de Chesterton que este descobre a necessidade da ortodoxia - não aquela que intitulará, no futuro, uma das suas obras, mas da ortodoxia metafísica no geral. Numa sociedade que repele o dogma, Chesterton descobre o direito à ortodoxia. Numa sociedade em que as seitas cristãs mudam as suas crenças de acordo com o carisma dos oradores, o dogma é visto como o inimigo público, o vício dos fundamentalistas. Chesterton redescobre o dogma como fonte primeira dos valores morais de uma sociedade, que são ao mesmo tempo a estrutura e fundamento do Senso Comum, esse barómetro milenar com o qual nós medimos a liberdade racional e necessária ao bom funcionamento de um Governo em prol do Bem Comum - e esta liberdade racional é um espaço limitado de liberdade concreta e realizável, em vez da liberdade abstracta dos demagogos. É assim que Chesterton descobre o fundamento democrático do Senso-Comum, e é assim que constrói o seu anti-aristocratismo - a aristocracia, enquanto contrária ao Senso-Comum, é atreita a desigualdades, snobismos e perversões.

Chesterton and the Task of Women

Supposing it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

- What’s Wrong with the World? (1911)

Contra a instrumentalização do trabalho

Aqui fica mais um interessantíssimo artigo de Juan Manuel de Prada, originalmente publicado no "Religión en Libertad", em apoio de um dos pontos mais caros à Doutrina Social da Igreja - o da defesa da dignidade do trabalho contra a sua instrumentalização em mero factor de produção.

***

Hace casi un siglo, Chesterton, analizando la obra de Aldous Huxley Un mundo feliz, donde se nos describe una sociedad futura sometida a un feroz proceso de alienación, escribía:

—Pero esta misma obra se está realizando en nuestro mundo. Son gente de otra clase quienes la llevan a cabo, en una conspiración de cobardes. (...) Nunca se dirá lo suficiente que lo que ha destruido a la familia en el mundo moderno ha sido el capitalismo. Sin duda podría haberlo hecho el comunismo, si hubiera tenido una oportunidad fuera de esa tierra salvaje y semimongólica en la que florece actualmente. Pero, en cuanto a lo que nos concierne, lo que ha destruido hogares, alentado divorcios y tratado las viejas virtudes domésticas cada vez con mayor deprecio, han sido la época y el poder del capitalismo. Es el capitalismo el que ha provocado una lucha moral y una competencia comercial entre los sexos; el que ha destruido la influencia de los padres a favor de la del empresario; el que ha sacado a los hombres de sus casas a la busca de trabajo; el que los ha forzado a vivir cerca de sus fábricas o de sus empresas en lugar de hacerlo cerca de sus familias; el que ha alentado por razones comerciales un desfile de publicidad y chillonas novedades que es por naturaleza la muerte de todo lo que nuestras madres y nuestros padres llamaban dignidad y modestia.

Chesterton definía el capitalismo como una «conspiración de cobardes», porque tal proceso de alienación social no lo desarrolla a las bravas, al modo del gélido cientifismo comunista, sino envolviéndolo en coartadas justificativas más o menos merengosas (pero con un parejo desprecio de la dignidad humana). Lo vemos en estos días, en los que se nos trata de convencer de que una reforma laboral que limita las garantías que asisten al trabajador en caso de despido o negociación de sus condiciones laborales... ¡favorece la contratación! Es algo tan ilógico (o cínicamente perverso) como afirmar que el divorcio exprés favorece el matrimonio, o que la retirada de vallas favorece la propiedad; pero el martilleo de la propaganda y la ofuscación ideológica pueden lograr que tales insensateces sean aceptadas como dogmas económicos. Lo que tal reforma laboral favorece es la conversión del trabajador en un instrumento del que se puede prescindir fácilmente, para ser sustituido por otro que esté dispuesto a trabajar —a modo de pieza de recambio más rentable— en condiciones más indignas, a cambio de un salario más miserable. Pero toda afirmación ilógica encierra una perversión cínica: del mismo modo que de un divorcio se pueden sacar dos matrimonios, de un despido también se pueden sacar dos puestos de trabajo (y hasta tres o cuatro); basta con desnaturalizar y rebajar la dignidad de la relación laboral que se ha roto, sustituyéndola por dos (y hasta tres o cuatro) relaciones degradadas, en las que el trabajador es defraudado en su jornal. Y defraudar al trabajador en su jornal es un pecado que clama al cielo; lo recordaba todavía Juan Pablo II en su encíclica Laborem exercens.

Lo que subyace en esta reforma laboral es la conversión del trabajo en un mero «instrumento de producción»; en donde se quiebra el principio medular de la justicia social, que establece que «el trabajo es siempre causa eficiente primaria, mientras el capital, siendo el conjunto de los medios de producción, es sólo un instrumento o causa instrumental» (Laborem exercens, 12). La quiebra del orden social del trabajo, la «conspiración de los cobardes» que avizorase Chesterton hace casi un siglo, prosigue implacable sus estrategias. Y llegará, más pronto que tarde, la venganza del cielo.

Juan Manuel de Prada

O Último Rústico Radical

"Chesterton compôs um estudo de Blake e também uma biografia completa de William Cobbett, um outro dos primeiros opositores do industrialismo. «Na opinião do Sr. Chesterton» escreveu um crítico do último livro, «Cobbett defendia a Inglaterra: a Inglaterra não industrializada, auto-suficiente, que tivesse a agricultura e o comércio saudável como base da sua prosperidade, sem qualquer necessidade de inflação.» Chesterton considerava Cobbett o defensor da população rural inglesa expropriada, o último rústico radical: «Depois dele, o Radicalismo é urbano... e o Conservadorismo suburbano.»"

Joseph Pearce, Tolkien - O Homem e o Mito

A Filosofia da Árvore - A Paixão da Tradição

Quero dizer, uma árvore nunca deixa de crescer e, consequentemente, nunca deixa de mudar, mas a sua orla rodeia sempre algo de imutável. Os anéis interiores da árvore são ainda os mesmos de quando era um rebento; deixaram de ser visíveis mas não deixaram de ser centrais. Quando lhe nasce um ramo lá em cima, não se separa das raízes no fundo; pelo contrário, quanto mais altos se tornam os seus ramos, mais precisa das raízes para se agarrar com força. É essa a verdadeira imagem do progresso vigoroso e saudável de um homem, de uma cidade ou de toda uma espécie.

G. K. Chesterton, Church Socialist Quarterly, 1909

GK Chesterton (Londres, 29 de maio de 1874 — Beaconsfield, 14 de junho de 1936)

"Do anything, however small, that will prevent the completion of the

work of capitalist combination. Do anything that will even delay that

completion. Save one shop out of a hundred shops. Save one croft out

of a hundred crofts. Keep open one door out of a hundred doors , for

so long as one door is open, we are not in prison."

Chesterton in "Outline of Sanity"

Ideias Distributistas

“A Distributist View of the Global Economic Crisis”: A Report

“The winner in all this,” I continued, “will be the Servile State: Hilaire Belloc’s label for a system where monopoly capitalists, financiers, and government bureaucrats merge into an entity practising state capitalism. Under its terms the capitalists and bankers gain order and protection of their wealth and property while property-less workers receive welfare benefits specifically tied to their wage labor, such as unemployment insurance, which provides security but also confirms their servile status. For his part, Chesterton called this arrangemnent a ‘Business Government’ which, he said, ‘will combine everything that is bad in all the plans for a better world…. There will be nothing left but a loathsome thing called Social Service.” The balance of my talk included examples of the Servile State at work in America, Russia, and China. It also explored the curious new subjegation of women found– most remarkably– in Scandinavia, where the Business Government has essentially socialized “women’s work”: “women find servility in their strange, new, functional marriage to the state.”

“Servile World: How ‘The Big Business Government,’ ‘The Loathsome Thing Called Social Service,’ and Other Distrubutist Nightmares All Came True

At a still more troubling level, there is evidence that shifts in federal housing policy were actually coming to favor family break-up. In brief, by 1970 most married-couple American families with children were in their own homes. To keep up housing demand, regulators subtly shifted mortgage subsidies away from intact traditional families toward “underserved,” “non-traditional,” “non-family” households: single persons; sole-mother households; unmarried couples; the divorced. In fact, two analysts showed that as early as 1980, the American population was “diffusing itself” into a still expanding housing supply; the number of housing units was growing at nearly twice the rate of population increase. Put more bluntly, the new availability of subsidized mortgages for the non-married actually appears to have encouraged divorce and other forms of modern post-family living.[7] In a manner that Chesterton would have deplored, lawmakers and regulators had stripped American housing policy of normative content. No longer family-centric, with a special focus on the needs of children, it would now be “neutral” as to lifestyle. In practice, these changes blended the U.S. mortgage market together with certain emerging social pathologies and unstable speculation to create a precarious system: again, a problem already evident to some observers as early as 30 years ago. The wonder is that the contradictions in this system took nearly three decades to work themselves out as part of the current crisis.

Leiam Chesterton, seus babacas!

Recomendado por nossos camaradas da Chesterton Brasil

Religion Today - Theatre Of The World Inc.

Under God and the Law

But most certainly medieval men thought of the king as ruling sub deo et lege; rightly translated, “under God and the law,” but also involving something atmospheric that might more vaguely be called, “under the morality implied in all our institutions.” Kings were excommunicated, were deposed, were assassinated, were dealt with in all sorts of defensible and indefensible ways; but nobody thought the whole commonwealth fell with the king, or that he alone had ultimate authority there. The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school. There was an idea of refuge, which was generally an idea of sanctuary. In short, in a hundred strange and subtle ways, as we should think them, there was a sort of escape upwards. There were limits to Caesar; and there was liberty with God.

The Well and the Shallows

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

- The Well and the Shallows (1935).

Cartago e a Adoração do Dinheiro

Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men the first fact is their notion of the nature of things; their idea about what world they are living in.

And it is their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the world is evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature.

It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea table es or talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of Carthage. The Punic power fell, because there is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral it denies what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army.

It fancies that money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hope less? Their religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they were weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should they understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless things, money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts?

They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained too much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flames; that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost;

and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan.

The name of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon the sand.

The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton