 Herald of the change GK Chesterton, the great English Catholic writer, was prolific and many-talented: He wrote “novels and short stories, poetry, art and literary criticism, philosophy,” and many other things, although he is best known for his novels, such as The Secret of Father Brown, and his works of Christian apologia. On Mind & Mythos, the psychologist Dan Ackerfeld hosts an essay club, and recently, he looked at Chesterton’s short essay A Defence of Heraldry. “Don’t let the length fool you,” warns Ackerfeld. “Chesterton manages to say quite a lot in so few words, and does so with his characteristic style and wit.” In the essay, the traditionalist Chesterton laments that the great flattening of society, the move away from the idea that kings and lords were great and the rest of us common, came with an “appalling mistake… of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it.” Instead of saying to “the common citizen, ‘You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk, [they] used that meaner democratic formula, ‘The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.’” But that magnificence — the pomp and ceremony of the British royal family or ancient Rome — still has a lasting appeal. The mind’s eye When someone says “picture the scene,” do you assume it’s a figure of speech? The journalist Katie Herzog always did — during a conversation with family, she was startled to learn that other people literally visualized scenes in their heads — that they “could see actual pictures in their minds.” She is, she realized, an aphantasiac, someone with no visual imagination. “It was as though I’d just found out that my entire family could fly if they flapped their arms fast enough,” she writes on Blocked and Reported, “while I was down here crawling.” Investigating, she found it was a reasonably common experience, and online sources reassured her that it was not a disability. “The hell it’s not, I thought… I started thinking about all the hidden ways my inability to visualize may have affected my life.” She’s trying to remodel her house, and wondering about new shelving or bookcases: “Would that look good in my house? I had no idea. I quite literally could not picture it.” State of control The sociologist James Scott died recently. He was, writes the political scientist Ben Ansell on Political Calculus, “one of the two or three greatest minds in the social sciences of the past half century.” His vision was of “states imposing order on people and people resisting that order” — his most famous book Seeing like a State revealed Scott’s “deep distrust of the ambitions of central states, of technocrats, or market-makers.” Human affairs are messy and ad hoc; cities and civilizations grow in tangled, unplanned ways. But states need visibility, so they try to impose order: New World cities and reformers of Old World ones “replaced curves with straight lines, alleys with boulevards, local knowledge and custom with the needs and desires of central government.” That local knowledge and custom, though, often served vital purposes — a fact also recognized by GK Chesterton, mentioned above — and too often, states’ central designers would “fall afoul of facts on the ground, or simply smash those facts into dust.” |
