| Yeah, your Mom's an Anarchist! |
The fun of reading Chesterton is his reveling in the
seemingly absurd only to have it realized on further discussion as the pinnacle
of sanity. For example, anarchy is held up as an ideal and routine is cautioned
against. However, Chesterton is not rejecting order, but is instead calling for
a higher order. He draws a picture in which aristocratic decadence devolves
into boredom and the card trick that seems to go unnoticed is that while the oligarchy
talks about preserving tradition, it is in reality blazing a trail of
superstitious progress for the sake of progress. So it is the case that most
revolutions are not the peoples’ revolution but are instead foisted on society
by the insanely rich and the pathetically bored and it is the home and the
family that ultimately suffers as they are set upon with an imposed and alien
control.
For Chesterton “the [aristocratic] sort of reform as
routine is a failed proposal.” Instead, he proposes that what is needed is the
wildness of the domicile and a healthy dose of feminine anarchy. This feminine
anarchy would propose that “people should not be treated as the rule, but all
of them as exceptions.” Chesterton hints at his framework for a Distributist antidote to
landlords and usury that would craft a society of “monomaniacal” specialists
who must realize success in one particular function by giving “his all.” Contrast the tyrannical world of the specialists with the home, which serves as the cultivator of wildness. We gain as sense of how the tragedy
of the suffragette seems to be in the loss of herself as woman rather than any
shackles of the household.
