Why Chesterton? (ft. Wade Stotts)

On this episode of The Right Stuff, Pastor Jared Longshore is joined by Wade Stotts to discuss G.K. Chesterton. The two share their thoughts on Father Brown, "The Defense of Rash Vows," "The Drift from Domesticity," G.K.’s Weekly, Chesterton’s Fence, and more.

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So if you're familiar with the Chesterton, probably familiar with the Chesterton's fence illustration. Modern kind of a former walks up to the fence, and he says, doesn't make sense to me why this is here. So let's just tear it down. The more sensible kind of a former walks up and says, somebody thought that it was a good idea to put it here. They may have been wrong, but tell me why they're wrong and find out before he started tearing this thing down. One benefit of reading the Chesterton, he saw the whole story. He saw somebody eat the fruit, and then he saw the world collapsing. He's got the right stuff. Jared. There you go. And that's a great welcome. That's a great welcome. Thank you for having me on. We're going to put all of that on there, and welcome to the right stuff, everyone. Come on. Because it's Wade Stott, some of the Wade Stott's, the Wade show with Wade. Thank you for joining me. No one that's watching this needs any introduction to you. They know who you are. It's a thrill. Thank you so much for having me. You asked me to talk about GK at Chesterton. I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you something. I'll tell you something. It's a great pleasure to talk about GK at Chesterton. Yeah, we're talking about Chesterton. If you wake me up at 3 AM I'm ready to talk about GK at Chester, ready to moyens. Yes. It's pretty much the only thing I want to put on Twitter. I hope GK at Chesterton to quotes these days. 100 percent. It's, but it was clear. I actually jumped on the Canon Plus app and listened to you reading Chesterton. You read several essays. I really liked Chesterton. in a world full of shallow and vapid commentary. We should talk about Chesterton. Try to point people to Chesterton. I love it. Yeah, when people do think of Chesterton, they hear him at the sentence level and they know how great he is at that level. But getting into, and I think Dale Alquist has talked about this, like the first time you read Chesterton, the first time you read orthodoxy specifically, he's just like, you end up highlighting everything because every sentence is perfect. But you're grasping it at the sentence level. And then as you continue to read him or read that book over and over, you start to get like, oh, he's making an argument through the paragraph and then through the chapters and then you start to kind of see it because every sentence is just so dazzling and you want to tweet it immediately. But yeah, just spending time with Chesterton, you get to grasp that these great sentences are also kind of embedded. It's like, most quotable people, it's like, you find a little gold in a cave, but this is like a cave made out of gold. And you don't know this. Oh wow, we're having a good time. That's actually it. Yeah, I haven't thought about that, but that's so like favorite, so inductively, some favorite quotes. The mad man is not the man who has lost his reason. The mad man is the man who has lost everything but his reason. I love it. I end up in my teaching, I'm saying it all the time. This is from orthodoxy. Because we still live in like a rationalism world so to shake people loose and say, you human reason actually can't do anything without data, with a revelation. So that's one of my favorites. 100%. His chapter that that's in, the talks about his kind of picture of the mad man, generally, and what's great about it is like, he talks about like if you've argued with a mad man, you'll usually find that you're gonna lose. You lose the other. You're gonna lose, so bad. Because his mind, what is it? His mind, who's all the more quickly for not having the healthy hesitation that comes with good sense, a good taste, and like a sense of proportion. And that's anybody who's kind of argued with an ideologue or a rationalist or like someone who again just has no self-doubt at all is knows what that feeling is like. But yeah, that gosh, it's hard for me to pick quotes from that book because yeah, no, it's like my comfort book to the book I bring on airplanes. I do it all the time. And you mentioned the highlighting. Yeah, I really probably have highlighted 60 to 70%. And there's all these different colors. So I just grabbed whatever highlighters close by. But you get into all these, you can go inductively. So I know this is very inductive. If you want to know, it's Chester 10, lived 1874, 1936, English, apologist, writer type. I guess we should mention here maybe he, the newspaper that he ran, did he? It's weekly. So he dropped a weekly piece. Let's talk about that for a minute. Yeah, I got two things, but let's talk about this one. He dropped a piece. And what are they like? A thousand words. Yeah, yeah. Ish. Between, yeah, a thousand and two thousand would be the longest. Yes. So I would note here just the form I find human. He wants another quote. He said, I do not wish to be dehumanized in my study of the humanities. And I was like, yes. So like, AI is done. Like, I don't let it in my classroom for the freshman. I just told him, like, we're just not going to do AI. And I said, you're not going to do. You actually, we won't have any laptops, any phones. So we don't have anything. We just say, and I'm like, I don't even know if it's a good idea. Maybe I'm not saying I'm anti. I'm not a let-ite. I'm just saying we'll get rid of that stuff. A little experiment. Let's see what happens. And it feels better. I'm like hard copies. Forget the Kindle. No, you can't do this one on Audible. Nothing wrong with Audible. I listen to Audible. Or Canon Plus.com from a code weight, 99. OK, very nice. Very nice. Nothing wrong with audio books of Chesterton. Audio books. OK. So, but his form, a thousand-word piece, I was told by somebody that he could like drop these in an instant. So he could either write them, or I heard that he dictated some of them on the phone to a secretary. I believe like, press us go. And it's like, he just rattles it off. But the form feels right. He opens, you don't always know where he's going. And but you get to the end and you have this whole piece. Which is going to be, we're going to get into two essays shortly. Yeah, there's the like, the Aristotle quote about drama and endings. Is that an ending means to be surprising and yet inevitable? And that's how you feel at most Chesterton essays. Like, oh, this is what he's been working to. And it fit with the whole piece. And it fits somehow the title. It didn't understand the title until I started reading and until I finished the whole thing. And yeah, it can be because of that sentence level thing, it's amazing the structure that he could do. And I don't think I'd heard the story about him dictating him over the phone, which is, but I believe that. I mean, he was such a quick, because he did so many of these things. And you look at just this year number also of, I think he wrote probably, I need to look at the numbers on this. But I think he wrote as many father-brown stories as there are Sherlock Holmes stories. But that was just like one of the things he did. And he fired those off at just as quick a pace. And so sometimes you get the feeling in his fiction that he's like rushing a little bit, but that's he's a newspaper guy. And he just is used to filling up word counts, getting things done. But yeah, amazing that he, it's a peak not into, not just into like a really great writer, but also just his mind. This is the structure of his mind. These like thousand-word pieces. And I've said this before, but the vibe of Chesterton and the obsession with and clear love of just normal people, like a family, a man, woman, children in a house, that kind of thing. The central things of his writing, and a 2,000 year old religion, those are all the things that have been attacked. And it seems like the modern world is determined to make people as unlike Chesterton as possible. And so getting a peak and knowing not just how he conveyed himself or anything like that, but it wasn't a mask for anything else. This was just the structure of an argument that he naturally came up with. And I can imagine, I mean, the sort of denseness of these essays I can rattling them off, the denseness of essays, I can't imagine talking to that guy, the denseness of conversation that must have been just to sit around a chat. But the fact that he also was arguing with George Bernard Shaw, who's named a lot of people know that they were like friends and sort of sparring partners. But yeah, he was talking to these extremely intelligent people, but as a guy who never wanted to be known as like an intellect, he saw himself as this kind of subpar novelist. But he was, there's this temptation to think that the smartest people in the world are the rationalists. Because if you idolize reason, of course, like you're gonna love it the most and you're gonna be the best at it. But the fact that Chesterton was so anti-rationalist and was smarter than all the rationalists gives the light of that. And yeah, he's just having a good time. But yeah, I'm just going everywhere, but I love this guy. Well, that's what happens with him. So if he's a big help to anyone who would be kind of overdosing on rationalism, and by that we mean some way of thinking, basically a disenchanted world, that kind of thing. But I think more applicable to our problems are his, you said, his kind of, his familiarity or a home life and his pieces that are dense. And we were talking about some of his titles are not exactly snazzy, right? Yeah, it's the kind of thing that maybe it wouldn't hit on the propaganda machines that are out there. And I could see a student coming up that would start to read these and maybe not be able to, I don't know, not to get to the end because of how slick, quick, frictionless things have to be now. So we were talking about Super Bloom before we jumped into this. And he was talking about Zuckerberg and Frickialist. And I'm reading Chesterton, kind of just to stay human, not turn into a machine or, you know, hey, read all about it. Newsies, the yellow news thing that, that's, I don't know if that's in Super Bloom or if that was in Trust Me Online. But this idea of Chesterton, you feel like you actually ate something when you get done with him. Yeah. And he was writing to a different class of people, not in terms of like money, but just in terms of how literate they were. Like we just talked about, these are all many of them are newspaper articles. Like the tremendous trifles, I think, is a collection from his essays in newspapers. And yeah, he did a weekly column. He did a weekly column in other papers. He did his own column in his own papers. But yeah, like being the kind of person who can just pick one of these things up, we have a lot to get to to where this is our regular bread and butter kind of like, oh, you know, I'll pick up one of these for Nickel or whatever and read it on a train. It's not, yeah, like we have quite a bit of work just to get to the level, to the normal level of him again, dictating over the phone for a newspaper, which is much less being able to take on an extended argument from him or from somebody who wasn't just writing for newspapers. Yeah. So you, I can see Chester to come in out and all of your in your way show with Wade because of how stinking hilarious you are with your paradox and metaphor and turning things upside down. I don't think it's this one. And this, in tremendous trifles the front of this one, he's missing a shoe, you know, and he's definitely oversized, he's overweight there. But there's other pictures of him. That is a caricature, but not too much. Not by too much. So he's got, there's a piece of him with a boot on his head and the cigar coming out of his ear, you know, like that kind of thing. So there's very Wade show with Wade vibes that are happening there. And that's what I just did a talk with Doug. And I asked, they asked him about television. And, oh, it's the book. Read the story. The Lost Tools of Learning. He actually talks about television and he's all for it in its right place. But he basically says the images don't actually cultivate the imagination, a plot of a film, right. But the reading, and he did the forest floor thing, you know, like this Tolkien or whatever, all the things you have read are just down there and they form you, they pop up. And that's beautiful. That's what Chesterton has done. For me, he'll talk. Basically, if you're any kind of writer listening to this or you want to be a producer of content, content, terrible work, I don't want to abandon content. I think. But except for the Wade show. If you were the Wade show with the Wade content, great. And the right stuff, of course. The right stuff, the right stuff is pretty good. So it was my point. Oh, if you read him, the metaphors hit. So patriotism. You can say America first. Yeah. Okay, great. Or Chesterton has this hilarious little line where he says, I'm questioning on this mountaineering, just getting to the top of every mountain and seeing everything. Yeah. He said, Satan was the chief alpine guide when he took our Lord to the top of a mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the earth. Yeah. And Satan, he's going to the top of a mountain wasn't that he wanted to behold largeness. It was that he wanted to behold smallness. Everyone beneath his feet. And then Chesterton says, I will lift up my eyes to the hills from whence come with my help. But I will only lift up my carcass to the hills if it's absolutely necessary. Like patriotism, loyalties. That's the way to do it. Yeah. I mean, there's better than America first. And that thing comes through, at least when I read Chesterton. Yeah. His defensive patriotism, the essay in the defendant, is a great kind of picture of that where he talks about the kind of patriotism that was inculcated in Britain at the time or in England at the time was for a kind of a shallow patriotism that was based on expansion. So we're going out, we're getting territory. And he draws that back to and says, yes, that may be a good thing. But it's not the central thing. And the central thing is lost because we're not teaching our kids the English literature. They don't know how good the people are who came out of here. They haven't read the grates and haven't argued with the grates. And so they're going to be proud of something. And so what they tend to be proud of is the extremities. And he's like, but the nation that's proud of its extremities is like the man who's proud of his legs. It's just like the furthest reaches of him. Like I'm out there. I go real far, which is not quite as rewarding as going, like I'm from the people, the nation, I think he mentions, like Burke and Milton. And these brilliant guys who came out of England. And yeah, so his defensive patriotism is a great one. And that's also taken up in Orthodoxy whereas kind of the patriotism of Earth. We're going to love the place where we are. And he found himself with the same kind of patriotism. Before he's a Christian, he found himself having a sort of patriotism of planet Earth. And that was explained by Christianity in a way that wasn't by whatever skepticism he was holding onto at the time. Nice. Yeah, OK. So loyalty's allegiances and patriotism would be kind of a good segue to talk about one of these. I just said, hey, Wade, let's talk about a couple Chesterton essays. You, I said, let's do a defensive rash vows in the drift from domesticity. So let's do a defense of rash vows. Let's start with why'd you pick this one. What's he about? What do you love about it? I think, oh, I should have known for those who are on the camera. I printed these off at my house. Physical. I got seven kids. Yeah, it's busy life. I printed them off. I asked one of my sons to grab them, my young son. I said, grab them. And then we ran out of paper. And I said, throw some more paper. And he brought it up. And it was lined paper. He decided to put in lined, whole punched paper. So if anyone thinks what in the world is he looking at? There you go. All right. So part minor option, defensive rash vows. Yeah. His defense of the anytime he sees normal stuff that used to be taken for granted under assault, even if it's kind of a casual assault or a sort of unspoken assault, he wants to fight it. And so one of the chief example here he uses of vows is the vow of marriage. But he talks about this general feeling that throughout modernity, everybody was always looking for a back door that there was, that there's no, that the idea of making an appointment for yourself in the future and saying, I'm going to stick to this is something that the entire world is trying to get people out of. So the point where it was getting down into the family. So people saw people didn't want to make an appointment with themselves because they didn't, they accounted too much for their own weakness. Rather than the vow itself, rather than making a vow and keeping it and trying to live up to it and seeing your own weakness and living up to the vow anyway, you just back out of the vow. You just don't make any kind of promise. And so you're always able to get out of stuff, but not able to really experience the glory of lasting through a vow. That's the reason that these vows exist. And the reason that we take vows because we know that at some point we're going to get weak. And that the vow can be sometimes the only thing holding things together. And the people who back out at the first sign of resistance have never experienced the joy of going through roughness and then the joy on the other side of that, where you kept the vow and you find glory through the incompatibility or the difficulty. And yeah, so the fact that at bottom, people should get married and they should keep their wedding vows. He knew that that was under assault 100 years ago when he's writing this. I don't remember the exact date, but I think this is like 1908, something like that. And so one benefit of bringing a chest from back out a little bit is that he saw everything that we see in full bloom. He saw it just like peaking up. He saw where everything was going because he saw everybody's kind of turning little knobs that and he saw the whole story immediately. He knows this is where this goes. He saw somebody eat the fruit and then he saw the world collapsing. And that's a gift of sight that he had because I think he was trained by fairy tales and less so by rationalism. Because rationalism can't see that kind of consequence because they can go, well, if I take out this one little plank, the whole thing doesn't fall down immediately. And they can make a strong argument. And I can make a pages long argument when I'm pulling out this plank is actually a great thing. But he just sees, well, if you pull this out, he sees the whole fairy tale happening. And yeah, that's one of the reasons why I enjoyed this. But what stuck out to you? Oh, man, it's great. Just a grammatical take. So when I mentioned earlier, it's that if he dictates this, it's amazing. But if he, just the, I like, it's a nice length for my season of life at 41. And a defensive rash vows is a fun way to put it. This is to your point about the titles. Like you get to the end and you're like, OK, I get it. You're not sure what you're up to in the beginning. But he opens up with a few just examples. The guy who changed, he said, I will change two mountains together. So that's the value mix. I'm going to change two mountains together. And then he goes, this is actually the sane man. This is not the insane man. The guy who makes a weird, crazy promise to himself. Because I'm going to do it. And he says, the reason we don't do this is not because these actions would be crazy. But because we know that we're the kind of people that would get two steps down the way and then quit. So he goes, and in modern times, this terror of oneself, of the weakness and mutability of oneself, has perilously increased. And is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. And so this idea of a man changing, he's a different man all the time. And he's like, stop with all the changing of a man. Which does echo that thing. He says from orthodoxy about the real fairy tales had normal humans in them. And now everything is still a superman, spider man, bat man. You have to have some secret ability. Right. Well, can you just be a normal human that's going to burn the ships? The way he closes with that burn the ships, just another great kind of commitment to the task. I said I was going to do this. I'm going to do it. And you see that also, like, I mean, if you have concrete heroes, then you're able to try to live up to that. So like if one of my heroes is Robert E. Lee, right? So he sees, I'm going to defend Virginia. And he defends it, way past the rational point of exam. Yeah. So go see Lincoln. Yeah. He lives in earshot. So this is not a guy who's motivated, primarily, by calculation of odds and sort of self-promotion. It's like he sort of at some level knows I'm going to go join the losing side, because it's my side, because it's Virginia's side. And he wasn't forced to session. So this is a really messy situation that he's got himself into. But I'm not going to invade my home state. And having some kind of loyalty beyond the rational calculation of the odds at the moment, personal advancement, and having some attachment to something beside yourself. And even besides the safety of his own wife, right? That this is what I need to do. And having a hero like that, then you're able to make vows like that. You're able to have loyalty outside yourself. But if you don't, then you're just, if all you're thinking about is yourself, then you know your own weaknesses. And being obsessed with your own weaknesses, rather than being, rather than going, oh yeah, but I'm going to act like my hero in this moment. It slows you down and keeps you from being able to attain any amount of greatness that you could achieve. It does seem like this is particularly suited to younger generations as modernity as taking shape. I think most everybody that's going to listen to the kind of talk that we're discussing here is conservative and is going to understand the nature of marriage still. So our nation obviously doesn't. Doesn't hold marriage in honor. You have all sorts of illegitimate children, being born because of the breakdown of a burger fell and back to a no fault divorce. That's really a clear example of the whole mess that Chesterton was already talking about. And he wrote this piece, but I would challenge him to say, think of the other places where you actually don't, where you are tempted to always leave an escape route. So where you're not burning the ships and most people are going to get that in marriage. And as you think back to your own marriage, one of you, the marriage is fascinating. You watch you go to it and you start to go like, oh, this is here comes. Like here comes your few days before. Like here comes this for life. Like we're going there. Every man and woman and then in my pastoral work, I always enjoy watching them because like, you can tell they start to think they're like, okay, big things about to happen. Yes, a very big thing is about the avenue. And there's no like getting out of it. So yeah, that's what it is. And no matter how the series you think it is before, you can't predict. He's a great guy and then everyone has to say, but what if he gets an accident loses a leg? Yeah, he'll still be happy enough. All right, that's a wonderful experience for humans in a world of modern times where we want to find escape routes. But the other one that comes to mind is certainly education. Let's see, Carl Truman writes about this in Ryzen Triumph of the Modern Self that institutions used to be that which formed and shaped us. But in the modern, with the Ryzen Triumph of the modern self, institutions are now platforms upon which we express our personal identity. And it's like, yeah. On a stage. So we can't, I mean, we everything about your life. This is big. Like I've kind of talked to the kids about this, shaped this for college students. Spotify isn't helping me with my rash vows, okay? Because I pay monthly subscription and I've accessed everything. I have no commitment to a wreath of Franklin's new vinyl. You know what I mean? I'm just, I have all these options. That's the way the world works. Same thing with all of your subscription services that exist out there. If they're giving you access to everything without that ownership piece. And so colleges are like that. You enter in and it used to be, well, now I'm committed and if I were to drop out of college, I would, there'd be a stigma that I'm a quitter. Well, I think those days are gone and institutions have now shaped themselves to know that they're pitching. So they're pitching to keep, to make sure the student doesn't take all of the escape routes that are now available. So the structure of society, institutions, education, itself begins to be formed by this tendency of not committing to something and then writing it out to the end. Well, and the only commitment in Spotify, right? So if Spotify is the model, I don't buy a CD or whatever. But the only thing that keeps going is I make sure to pay my monthly subscription fee. And so it's everything, people are able to get money through the illusion of not having to, like you get to constantly make decisions about your own life and shape yourself. And Spotify, Spotify, YouTube, everything, Netflix, streaming just kind of takes ownership out of things. And yeah, I mean, I know the feeling of buying a CD and realizing like, oh, this single was the only good song. Yeah. I'm committed now. I paid 10 bucks for that. But like, yeah, and that's obviously a different level of commitment and marriage. But yeah, having to make calls and going, this was a bad call, this is a good call. And living with the consequences of it is something that everything's trying to get you out of. Everything's trying to, again, try to get a backdoor and not that everybody needs to burn their boats on their CD purchases. But the fact that everything is conspiring to make you uncommitted and not take ownership of anything, that you don't live in a place that you own, you can't do anything to it, you can't, like if your backdoor breaks, it's not your backdoor. So you get to wait around for somebody else to fix it. Yeah, it seems like the whole world doesn't want you to take ownership of things and then have to deal with the consequences of it. And so yeah, there's a certain sense in which that's relieving to people who want backdoors. I guess I'm using backdoors in two different senses here. But it also just caves out your humanity. It just hollows you out. Yeah, he talks about the backdoor and has a few quotes. Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint. Like yep. And then he says, there are thrilling moments, doubtless for the spectator, the amateur and the astheet. But there is one thrill that is known only by the soldier who fights for his own flag to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And holding out the virtue and the blessing that's going to come from enduring it, and parenting, you know, and your kids get older. I mean, they don't make a ton of like real decisions when they're a little toddler's, but they're going to get in that middle school era, that high school era, they're going to commit to something, some kind of project, some kind of hospitality thing that they're going to do or whatever. And it's going to go awry, some kind of sports team. Yeah, it's going to go awry. The coach is not going to be all that great of a coach, whatever. And you're going to have a decision to make. Like are you going to cut bait? And teach them. Or are you going to be like, no, you made a decision. You wanted to do this at the beginning, and we were going to stay in here and be like, finish it. You know, that you cultivate it from the beginning, that kind of thing. Hey, how about let's switch the drift of domesticity? This is a little bit longer one. Yeah. Most people, so if you're familiar with Chesherton outside of having read him, you're probably familiar with the Chesherton's fence illustration, and that comes from this one. Yes, this is the famous fence. But what's it about? What's the whole point? Yeah. The, this is one of the things I was talking about earlier where he doesn't just see things in terms of where the hostility is, but he also just sees general drifts. So this is called the Drift from domesticity. He doesn't see like a war on the family at his point. He just sees a kind of, it seems like we're moving away from this. And, yeah, so the opening of it, he talks about like, imagine there's some kind of, let's take, let's think it's a law, a custom, whatever you want to call it, but imagine it's a fence and somebody walks up, a modern kind of a former walks up to the fence. And he says, I don't see the use of this one. It doesn't make sense to me why this is here, so let's just tear it down. And he said the more sensible kind of a former walks up and says, first before you go do that, go find out as best as you can the purpose of the, you know, why it was put there in the first place. And then I'll let you tear it down. It once you've decided based on why this is, like this fence wasn't set up by like sleepwalkers. It wasn't, it didn't grow up out of the ground. Somebody thought that it was a good idea to put it here. And they may have been wrong, but tell me where they're wrong and find out before you start tearing this thing down. And yeah, his, as usual, goes straight to the family to talk about the people tearing down the family because they don't see the real use of it anymore in this modern world. But they don't know what they're doing, he says in there, because they don't know what they're undoing. And that that's the, there's no real way for people to know how much of the world family is holding together until they take it out, until they take it apart. There's no way to figure out how load bearing this wall actually is until you pull it out or until you talk to the architect where you look at the building plants and figure out why was this wall put there? And that's, so that's the illustration people have probably heard generally, but having it applied to the family I think is helpful, because we now are so many years on into having an all out sort of attack on the family. And I mean, you just talked to Scott Yanner recently. And we all sort of see it from our own point of view, but yeah, he saw it early and warned and nobody listened to him. And that's the kind of, I'm reading theater, Dalrymple in his book, In Praise of Prejudice. And he talks about the, if you were to go to a time where it was the idea that everybody had a family dinner. So everybody sits around the table at the end of the day and that's what you do. Most people who did that probably couldn't give you a PowerPoint presentation on why that was a good idea or what would happen if you didn't do that or if it wasn't practiced in a general way, even like a Kantian imperative kind of thing like, well, if you stopped doing it, what if everybody stopped doing it, nobody could even really conceive of what you would lose if everybody stopped doing this. But now it's been replaced with a prejudice of sort of either indifference or of hostility to a family meal. Like, oh, that's where dad yells at the kids or that's only negative impressions of what that kind of looks like. And what he says is like, wouldn't you rather live in a world where there was a prejudice for eating a family dinner than a prejudice against it? So not all prejudices are alike. But I think it illustrates the same kind of point here. We don't know what we're losing when we just say like, what if we didn't do this? Unless we, even if even the modern reformer who decides like, oh, I am gonna find out why this was put here, sometimes we don't know. We don't know the damage we're doing. And that's one of Burke's points. So Chesterton wasn't a big Burke fan, but I think that they would have agreed underneath all the disagreement. Yeah, I remember hearing recently that he kind of wouldn't work like that. But the, yeah. Yes, not only do people not know about it, but it's lovely. Like, an intensive domesticity is, this is where life has lived. So he does this. I'll read a portion of, basically he, in it reminded me of another piece that he did, but let me, I'll give you like a full paragraph here, right? But the other advantage of the small group is now not so much neglected, it's simply not realized. Here again, we have some extraordinary delusions spread all over the literature and journalism of our time. Those delusions now exist in such a degree that we may say for all practical purposes, that when a thing has been stated about a thousand times, is obviously true, it is almost certainly to be obviously false. One such statement may be specially noted here, there is undoubtedly something to be said against domesticity and in favor of the general drift towards life and hotels, clubs, colleges, communal settlements and the rest. Or for a social life, organized on the plan of the great commercial systems of our time, but the truly extraordinary suggestion is often made that this escape from the home is an escape into greater freedom. The change is actually offered as favorable to liberty. All right, now he just sets it up and talks about it a bit in the next paragraph. I'll go ahead and give it to you in his next paragraph. The main point is that the world outside the home is now under a rigid discipline and routine and it is only inside the home that there is really a place for individual, individuality and liberty. Anyone stepping out of the front door is obliged to step into a procession all going the same way into a great extent, even obliged to wear the same uniform, busyness especially or business, especially big business is now organized like an army and he goes on and on. And he talks about this in another one about, the only way place that a man could lay on the floor and eat on the floor is in the home. And you can't go to a restaurant and just be like, I think I'm typing me right here. Yeah, you can't do it. And you can't, and he mentions this when it comes to discipline, punishment, discipline of children, punishment of crimes. It's only in the home where discipline can be particularized, where you can know, well, they stole that for this particular reason and so all adapt to whatever disciplinary measure or even he says, even to maybe have humor in it. Right. And I've experienced that all the time in my home. I, I mean, my, what's weird is my life really is that and I can see that modernity is not. But I'm like, yeah, I gotta work because I have to. I put on this jacket. Do you think I really like wearing this jacket? You can't play it on like wearing it. It's clear I don't like wearing the tie. That's why I hold it. I'd never button the top button except on Sundays. Like when I'm having the preacher teach, you know. Just because I have a family. Yeah, right. And then when I go home and the fireplace is on and I'm reading a book in a big comfy chair and the tater tots are scattered about doing homework or the little ones bouncing on me. This is it. Like this is, this is the freedom. And then feeling that, we moved also out of this interesting season where our youngest of seven is now in school. Okay. So he's now in kindergarten, which is a weird deal for say on the wife run and on our front. That's an interesting moment. We've gone through 17 years of one in tow and then watching like domesticity at this age, at this genre where you have big humans in the house that can drive vehicles and schedules. But still having the home be this central place of like we're happy to be here. Right. You think how would you ever sell that? Well, I'm not selling that. It also takes a lot of work. So I can understand why people don't want to do it because you have to cultivate it. The dinner has to be prepared, time, effort, all of that kind of thing. But anyways, it's a lovely, it's the place of true freedom, true individuality. Yeah. Yeah. In another essay, it talks about the, like there's a real distinction between even the, like one family, like the Johnson's hosting the Smiths and the Smiths hosting the Johnson's. Like the way that these two families are hosting it, like there's, I go to your house and it's different than if you kind of I house, you know. And because you're not just going from McDonald's to McDonald's. And like if you're, there's, I mean, Walter Kern's woke up in the air is basically about the guy who gets totally comfortable with the sort of order of hotels and airplanes and lounges at airports. And he does, like this is where he feels most comfortable. And every one of his relationships that he's tried to cultivate that's not this extremely ordered. And he's kind of a slave to this system. But he's found out the little pockets of pleasure that he can have at the airport lounge, you know. Every other relationship that he has is a mess. But and that's, it's like, I think Kern's picture of the George Clooney character in the movie is much more, is like the opposite of Cheshireton's like normal guy who just at the end of the day. There's in the way he talks about also like work. So yes, and there used to be this, the case that the man was the guy who, the one in the family who submitted himself to the kind of like heavy order of a sort of somebody else's rules. And then, but came home so that this kind of world of anarchy or at least like the closest thing to total liberty in the world can be preserved. So he's the one, he takes it on himself and then he comes home to where this, he's the king of the castle and like, and like the wife has created this environment. Whereas now everybody, everything's been to use Sam Francis's term, massified. And so that everybody then gets plugged into these sort of mass systems where we're all just, and I forgot the name of the guy from the up in there thing. But like, that's just a cartoon character version of all of us where everybody's constantly submitting to rules they didn't make and there's no haven at the end of the day or like, because you're not, if you, you're not sleeping in something in a house that you own, you're not sleeping in, you're like, you're constantly attached to other people's rules and having to live by everything there. And which is not a bad thing, I'm not saying that rules are bad. I'm not arguing against Carl Truman here. But there's some kind of personality and individuality that means like you can paint your house whatever a colleague wants. Or like you can, and that within, that's the sacred thing that a man was going and submitting himself to these set of stringent rules to preserve. He was trying to preserve liberty by going out there and putting on a suit and tie or working on a, on a assembly line, whatever it kind of turned out to be. But yeah, so like his, him seeing that this is the central, and he's not a, he's not a sort of libertarian in thinking that like this is the way everything should work all the time is that everybody, but the fact that liberty can be preserved because of a certain like level of order and the way it's expected to go and order in society. Yeah, there's a real Christian understanding of the relationship between order and liberty. Yes, man. And then in your home, so for like dads, you have to know your home is not the assembly line. Don't make it, don't make the assembly line. And yes, still no chaos. I mean, there's gonna be rules in order, but that freedom, your home is a home. And it's not like if you have all day long been like interacting in transactional world where everything you do is about economics, and it's really tempting to just be like, okay, now we're still spreadsheet time when I walk in the front door, or as both mom and dad have gone into the workplace, you've got two people who have all day long been thinking about things in terms of spreadsheets. And then it's really difficult to get anywhere where economics or like supply demand kind of stuff isn't the rule of the day. Like and to not think of your kids as either a benefit or like an asset or a liability or like all the kind of economic calculations that you have to deal with out here don't happen here. And Chesterton for all of the arguments people have had about his economics understood there's a place where economics, we're not doing like standard, we're not doing Adam Smith economics. This is all budget stuff. Yeah, absolutely. We're investing and yeah, you can call it a long term investment whatever, but it's like is this particular diaper change, whatever, like that's, we're not doing an economic transaction here. This is me taking care of somebody because that's what needs to happen. And like yeah, so a man goes out and deals in economic world where it is kind of cut throat and a little bit, you know, not, not, it's cozy so that that co-siness and non economic, non supply demand, not, you know, doggie dog thing can exist. 100% so good. What's wrong with the world is where that line about a man can eat on his own. Leading the floor, okay. Yes. Oh boy, it's so good. And it's actually just, I mean, he's just proven so true in the second wave of feminism. And these ladies are not happy. They're just not. But anyways, and there's all sorts of qualifications we can make there. I do have one other fun. I thought this was a great line. I'm not sure where to pick up here, but let's go. We'll kind of pick up in the middle of an idea. In practice, the pursuit of pleasure is merely the pursuit of fashion. The pursuit of fashion is merely the pursuit of convention. Only that it happens to be a new convention. The jazz dancers, the joy rides, the big pleasure parties and hotel entertainments do not make any more provision for a really independent taste. Then did any of the fashions of the past? If a wealthy young lady wants to do what all the other wealthy young ladies are doing, she will find it great fun, simply because youth as fun and society as fun. She will enjoy being modern exactly as her Victorian grandmother enjoyed being Victorian. And quite right too. But it is the enjoyment of convention, not the enjoyment of liberty. It is perfectly healthy for all young people of all historic periods to herd together to a reasonable extent and enthusiastically copy each other. But in that, there is nothing particularly fresh and certainly nothing particularly free. The girl who likes shaving her head and powdering her nose and wearing short skirts will find the world organized for her and will march happily with the procession. And then he goes on and out. So, you know, I'm sure it's about the age of my own kids or whatnot and to teach eating in the classroom, but I find studies of trends fascinating, you know? And of course, what came to mind now is the broccoli haircut. If you don't even know the broccoli, the boys are doing the broccoli. And a little bit of like a mullet, but a respectable kind of thing, you know, it's just getting a little, those seem to be the two vibes that are going on. And that he quickly says, nothing wrong, like this is the way of all flesh. So just go for it, you know. I'm just saying it's not about individuality, it's not about liberty, it's a perfectly fine thing, but liberty individuality is something different. Yeah. And I guess trying to think of your, just appreciating that. And recognizing that a lot of the individuality is something that is not going to, yeah, it's not going to fold into trends and it may not be something that everybody knows. So like the ways in which you're an individual might be the way that you shape your home. And so maybe like eight people know that about you. And the kind of culture that you create when you have total freedom as to what your home's going to be like. Under God's authority, we're all clear on that. But and like when you invite people into that, then they find out something about you that doesn't go on Twitter. And you can't, like we can't give people over an app or you can't write in a book. Oh, this is the vibe of his house. Or like that's the kind of, so wanting to express your individuality kind of takes away some of it. Because most of the time when you're expressing something publicly, it's a way of kind of feeding into that procession. But the individuality is the thing that might be most private to you. And that's a good thing. And it's good that there are things that your wife, that your kids know about you, that are so you. And you don't feel anxious to, it's a healthy thing to not feel anxious to express that publicly. Because again, this is my world. This is like what I've been able to create. And if you don't have that, then you just have, again, a bunch of people trying to feed into trends and maybe have their tiny little take on it. I was, there was a video in Minneapolis of this church, it was like very, just this beautiful church. And it was a bunch of kind of live protestor people singing some song about like a song in Spanish for the immigrants. This was a, and it was not led by anybody in a robe or anything like that. But everybody there had paper hearts. They had all drawn red paper hearts. They were holding them up and singing this little song. And one of the ladies drew her heart with a little broken, like broken in the middle, right? And you have to imagine that she just, when she was drawing that she was just like, I'm gonna pull one over on, like everybody else, I'm gonna have a, but it's like in, or like somebody else looking over it and going, like, oh, I wish I would have thought of that. Cause my heart is also broken for the immigrants or being mistreated. So like, but it's all this like weird social play. Like no matter like even your little individuality is just your way of going, like I'm, yes, I'm in the group, but I'm a little bit different, a little bit better. But in the end, it's just, she's a part of a big crowd with paper hearts over their heads. And that's, yeah, that's a different vision of individual. I'm gonna do the trend, but have a little twist on it. Yeah, there's, expression of individuality. I think that like the expressive individuals and the Carl Truman talks about wouldn't be as much of an issue if there was places for like real expression. Yeah, man. And expression within bounds and within like vows, right? So we all have the same last name or like, you're in my house and this is how we talk at my house or this is like the way things go. And yeah, I think that having wanted to do a trend but a little bit different is so such as like bad substitute for having a place where this is, this is my house. This is we decided to paint it this color. Your wife decides like this is where the furniture is and that's where it is. Yes, it's so creepy. The getting on a trend, changing a little bit. It's all just market. So it's just market action, which is not a defensive domesticity. Domesticity is domestic. And to your point about having to place to express it, having a place to share like a genuine personal exchange of your individuality, it made me think of Capon's book, we're in separate the lamb. And he goes hard against cocktail parties. Like he just blisters cocktail parties. And he's got quirky stuff in the book that I think is a little quirky, but in the main, he's got a good point. And the cocktail parties you show up and everyone's, no one knows any, you're not meeting any of these people. Right. You have the sense that the action's always somewhere else and then he's like in the big joke is that the action's not anywhere. There's no action. He's just all these people and he's like, and when you throw one of these, it's just a mass mailer and he compares it to hospitality. Like when you do hospitality, you think about where you're gonna have people sit. You fret over whether Johnny's going to make it or not, and how that's gonna change the night. And you plan out like, I think these people and these people should meet each other. I don't think they would run into each other naturally. Let's bring them all over and we'll have a good time. Exactly. Exactly. And then you're having a good time and you get to the end of that night and you've actually had exchange, you've actually the particularities of that particular household have been adjoined and appreciated by other humans. And that little bit there would guard against what you're talking about, which is weird. If you add the tech piece to Truman's thesis. Yeah. Well, sure, everyone is individually expressing themselves, but it's all broccoli haircuts. Right. All broccoli haircuts with slight modifications. Right. And you're like, ooh, that's scary. Like, there is no individuality, at least on the market, on the scene. And the only way in which you can see how ridiculous it is is having one foot out of it at the time, right? So if you have a home, then if you have a healthy, thriving home life, then you can go like, these are ways you can analyze the trends that are happening. Or time. So later on, I follow up on Billy Pratt. I think he's really funny. But there was a picture of, I think, from a thrift store with like Bugs Bunny. Those old Bugs Bunny and like, Taz shirts, where they had like, thug clothes on. Okay. You remember these? Yeah, it was like white t-shirts or black t-shirts usually and like, Taz with like a spray can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one gene like rolled up. Yes, yes. And he was like, for some reason, there was a time where everybody wore these. And nobody knew why. And he's like, having to explain this, like a millennial thing to people who weren't there. But yeah, you look at it later on, you go like, why are we all wearing like Bugs Bunny, like thug clothes? Like everybody did it. Why are you picking about me and my broccoli haircut? I can hear somebody coming back. The routine. Yeah, so it's a funny, yeah, we can see it with time. But if you're seeing it at the time, then usually it means that you have some form of health outside of this system you're just trying to keep up with. And Chesterton will do that for you, thus this whole discussion. Terminus Triples is a great place. What else would you point to people? Quick points to Chesterton. And then any where people, we all know about the way it shows the way anything else you want to tell them about ways to track with what you're doing. I'll just fold them into one. I did, I'm doing a bunch of the essays, reading one at a time, hoping to release those a little more regular than I have been. But also, I did, what's wrong with the world? It was one of his more political books, but not dealing with partisan politics, but just the place of home and family in this whole thing. What's wrong with the world? I narrated the whole thing on Canon Plus. And you can also, if you do watch the way it shows, the way you can hear me quoting Chesterton constantly. But what's wrong with the world? I love Orthodoxy, I already said that. And his fiction. So the father-brown stories are so fun. And they're not frivolous, but he makes them really fun. So I'd recommend all those places to go. We need to do, I need to do audiobooks for some of his fiction though. I wish I had a British accent, maybe it can fake one. Oh yeah, fake a British accent. Oh yeah, that's what the world needs. Thanks Wade, thank you. Thank you. So the thrill.