On Newspaper Proprietors

THE weekly organ called the Nation might very well be called the Notion. For it really excels, apart from all the irony, in the suggestion of that sort of half-truth to which the word 'notion’ can be correctly applied. Its present name, I need hardly say, is simply a joke in large letters. It is, quite simply and seriously, as if the Church Times were actually called the Baptist, or as if the Morning Post were actually called the Fenian; as if the chief vegetarian organ took the title of the Butcher, or the chief teetotal organ were called the Bacchanal. There is no doubt about it, and certainly no disguise about it. The editor keeps the word ‘nation’ as a title; but he is almost invariably uses the word ‘national’ as a term of abuse. Nor does he narrowly confine his hatred to his own nationality; with a broader sense of the human brotherhood, he bestows it upon all nationalities, and sometimes rather specially upon certain small nationalities. I doubt whether he could claim to have sneered more persistently at English patriotism than at Polish patriotism. He is truly international; and does not limit his native and sincere loathing to the narrow boundaries of his own land.

But, as I have said, though the Nation has nothing to do with nations, it has a great deal to do with notions; and they are very interesting and valuable notions. I mean by a notion an incomplete idea; and half an idea is better than no intelligence. Mr. Massingham, the editor in question, is a man of great intelligence; and has distinguished himself very often by going further along the path of truth than any of his comrades or rivals, even if he never quite got there. He told too much of the truth about Marconi; and is the only Liberal journalist alive who is now kicking himself for having so successfully whitewashed Mr. George. He has the courage to mention the Secret Party Funds, in the days when nobody else mentioned them except ourselves. And he has recently made a somewhat similar movement in the same direction, in the particular passage with which I am concerned just now. In this case also the Nation got hold of half the truth; even half the truth is important, and this is a very important half. But in this case also what might have been an idea tailed off into a mere notion, which is ultimately fanciful and even false. A recent article, in the paper under discussion, actually recognized that the press is now the private property of an extremely small number of extremely rich men. That is, a newspaper is now about as much a popular organ as a coronet is a popular organ, or a ribbon of the Garter is a popular organ. The writer realizes that controlling journalism is now as narrow as the very narrowest aristocracy; and he proceeds to compare it with other and older forms of aristocracy. It is when he comes to this comparison that he rather abruptly misses the point. He says, truly enough, that there is a certain type of rich man who now tends to own newspapers, and, therefore, to order news. He says that this type resembles the type of the old brutal robber barons. This, it will be agreed, is a rather hard thing to say about the brutal robber barons. Nor do I believe that it would sound convincing to repeat the ballad of Chevy Chase with the names of Harmsworth and Hulton substituted for those of Douglas and Percy. The barons had some superiorities; including the fact that they were willing to be killed sooner. The primary peculiarity of the man who comes to the top, in our own plutocratic time, is that he need not necessarily have passed through any discipline, even a militarist discipline, and need not have any virtue, even a barbaric virtue. Anyhow, the experiment of putting two of our newspaper noblemen on horses in heavy armor, and throwing them at each other like thunderbolts in a tilting yard, is an experiment that has yet to be tried. It is possible that they would enjoy it; it is at least very probable that we should.

But the writer in the Nation not only compares the press monopolists to robber barons, but adds a phrase which interests me even more. He says that the type in question by its nature sees no further than national boundaries. It is by no means altogether true even of the mediaeval lords; and it seems to me singularly untrue of the modern lords. Touching the practical and personal test once more, there is one question that must occur to most people in most cases. If the great plutocrats have grown up only in a narrow patriotism, what is their patriotism, and for what are they patriotic? The Harmsworths, for instance, are of Irish origin, I believe; and if they are Nationalists, they must be Irish Nationalists.  If they are fanatics, we must look for them among the Fenians or Sinn Feiners; though it has hitherto been rather for a family than a nation that they have borne the motto of ‘Ourselves Alone.’ Anyhow, we should expect them to be concentrated on the cause of the Green Island; whereas, in truth, it has rather been Great Britain that has proved an exceedingly green island for their own pasturage. Lord Northcliffe has not concentrated on a national idea or any idea; he has concerned himself with a series of schemes and scoops as fleeting as music-hall songs. The banjo that was once in Tararaboomdeay’s halls the soul of music shed, now hangs silent if not exactly amid silence; and from the offices in Carmelite Street it is really a long way to Tipperary. Lord Beaverbrooke is not very likely to be a narrow Nationalist; but if he is, I suppose he is a Canadian Nationalist, among whom there are many very interesting and enthusiastic people. Indeed, his choice of a title carries picturesque localism to quite a peculiar length; it somehow suggests not so much an American as an American Indian. The beaver seems more fitted for a totem than a crest. Nevertheless, the reader may be surprised to hear, I cannot believe that he is singly sworn to champion the Canadian nation against all the nations of the earth; any more than I believe that he wields a tomahawk for the Ojibways against all the tribes of America; that he would die for the Dakotas, or knows no loves outside the wigwams of the Blackfeet. There are many other cases that could be followed out if space permitted. There are newspaper proprietors who, if they are Nationalists, must be Zionists; and I am sure I hope they are. But I do not believe it of the general types treated above; and I do not believe it because the Nation’s notion of these men, who rule modern journalism, happens to be, from first to last, a hopelessly wrong notion.

The modern newspaper proprietor is much more progressive than the Nation supposes; in fact he is a product of the progress that the Nation supports.  He is generally an uneducated man; but for all that he is an outcome of modern education. Most outcomes of modern education are uneducated men. Our education is uneducation; its whole tendency is to unteach people the traditions of their fathers. And it is this negative character, in the second-hand and second-rate culture of uneducated people in our time, that is more determining than any positive thing, especially so positive a thing a patriotism. The truth is that the mind of a man of this sort has been swept clear of all positive convictions by the skepticism at the end of the nineteenth century. It is true that such a skeptic gets his skepticism from authority; only it is, first, the wrong authority and, second, an authority he has not really consulted. He does not arrive at his free thought by thinking or even by reading, but by rumor. He has not read Darwin; but he has a vague idea that Darwin has shown that men are monkeys who have left their tails behind them. Therefore, you will invariably find that he flings wide his hundred newspapers to receive anything about eugenics or evolution, or the suggestion that men can be bred like beasts. He has not read Ibsen; but he has a vague idea that Ibsen has shown that every house is a doll’s house, and that can be taken to pieces. Therefore, the press plutocrat will always placard the world with the need for divorce, and with every interference with domesticity; especially with those small houses which look most like dolls’ houses and might easily become unglued. Chatsworth or Stafford House were toys rather too big to be broken. He has not read Tolstoi, the prophet of Mr. Massingham’s religion; but he has a vague idea that Tolstoi has shown that the cross-hilted sword is a contradiction in terms; that there is some incompatibility between the cross and the crusade. Therefore, concluding that chivalry is as irrational as Christianity, he decides that war must be unchivalrous. Seeing only a compromise and a contradiction in the straight sword of the crusader, he prefers to conquer with the crooked sword of the Sultan. That notion, and not any national sentiment whatever, is responsible for anything called imperial or piratical in his foreign policy. He is a Jingo, but he is not a patriot; least of all an extreme or an extravagant patriot. For patriotism must at least be a love, even if it as wild a lust. There is nothing so positive as a love or lust in the stale and yawning cynicism of the yellow press. It is wholly negative and even nihilist; what is left in a dull mind after the destructive criticisms of the nineteenth century. Like the men who made a solitude and called it peace, they make an emptiness and call it enlightenment. It has already been noted that an open mind often means an empty mind; and Mr. Massingham will find that the millionaire newspaper proprietors have very open minds. The rich man who rules the world to-day looks like a man with an open mind; that is, he looks very like a man with an open mouth. Some would say he looks like a silly fellow; I am content to say that he does not look at all like a passionate and fanatical patriot. The diagnosis is incorrect; and the error of the newspaper trusts is not identical with the error which destroyed the Zealots in the fall of Jerusalem, or the Sinn Feiners of that awful Easter that was red rather than white.

~G.K. Chesterton

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Originally published in The New Witness (Nationalist and Chestertonian Weekly). Republished in The Living Age; Vol. 300, March 1, 1919; pp. 546-548.

Resource pages for names mentioned in this article:
• Marconi
• Mr. George 

• The Nation

• Mr. Massingham

G.K. Chesterton

"To train a citizen is to train a critic"

"TO train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the unreformed institutions. And if any one asks, as so many are asking: ‘What is the use of my son learning all about ancient Athens and remote China and medieval guilds and monasteries, and all sorts of dead or distant things, when he is going to be a superior scientific plumber in Pimlico?’ the answer is obvious enough...."  Continue reading this essay: On Business Education

~G.K. Chesterton

"There is much more sham wisdom than there is sham wit"

"A JOKE is always a thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally thoughtless. This applies to jokes when they are not only quite verbal but quite vulgar. A good pun, or even a bad pun, is more intellectual than mere polysyllables. The man, the presumably prehistoric man, who invented the phrase, "When is a door not a door; when it's ajar," made a serious and successful mental effort of selection and combination. But a Prussian professor might begin on the same problem, "When is a door not a door; when its doorishness is a becoming rather than a being, and when the relativity of doorishness is co-ordinated with the evolution of doors from windows and skylights, of which approximation to new function, etc. etc."—and the Prussian professor might go on like that for ever, and never come to the end because he would never come to the point. A pun or a riddle can never be in that sense a fraud. Real wisdom may be better than real wit, but there is much more sham wisdom than there is sham wit."

~G.K. Chesterton: "The Romance of Rostand." (in The Uses of Diversity)

 1905 photo of Chesterton by photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882 - 1966).

"Educational English is not at all the same as educated English"

“WHAT is the matter with English Education is that it is discussed in Educational English. Even criticism of Education, even complaints of Education, even confessions by educationists of the inadequacy of education, are all uttered in educational English. Educational English is not at all the same as educated English. It is a curious sort of technical jargon, possibly necessary and suitable to a science or a trade, but casting, as do all such terminologies, a curious air of coldness and unreality upon all that is discussed. It is not the style in which anybody talks, even when it is the style in which somebody unfortunately speaks. It is not the style in which educationists themselves talk, when they are talking as educated people and not as educationists. This can be felt in the way in which the very words used tend to contradict their own meaning; as in the word “individual” in some sweeping generalisation about “giving individual attention.””

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, April 4, 1936.

"The used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy"

"THE best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Revival of Philosophy—Why?

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"Surplus population"

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Logic and Lawn Tennis

WHEN we say that we doubt the intellectual improvement produced by Protestantism and Rationalism and the modern world, there generally arises a very confused controversy, which is a sort of tangle of terminology. But, broadly speaking, the difference between us and our critics is this. They mean by growth an increase of the tangle; whereas we mean by thought a disentangling of the tangle. Even a short and simple length of straight and untangled wire is worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement. That there are more topics talked about, or more terms used, or more people using them, or more books and other authorities cited—all this is nothing to us if people misuse the terms, misunderstand the topics, invoke the authorities at random and without the use of reason; and finally bring out a false result. A peasant who merely says, "I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs," is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs. Now for that sort of intellectual instruction and advancement we have no use at all; and in that sense only it is true that we prefer the ignorant peasant to the instructed pedant. But that is not because we think ignorance better than instruction or barbarism better than culture. It is merely that we think a short length of the untangled logical chain is better than an interminable length of it that is interminably tangled. It is merely that we prefer a man to do a sum of simple addition right than a sum in long division wrong.

Now what we observe about the whole current culture of journalism and general discussion is that people do not know how to begin to think. Not only is their thinking at third and fourth hand, but it always starts about three quarters of the way through the process. Men do not know where their own thoughts came from. They do not know what their own words imply. They come in at the end of every controversy and know nothing of where it began or what it is all about. They are constantly assuming certain absolutes, which, if correctly defined, would strike even themselves as being not absolutes but absurdities. To think thus is to be in a tangle; to go on thinking is to be in more and more of a tangle. And at the back of all there is always something understood which is really something misunderstood.

For instance, I read an article by the admirable Mr. Tilden, the great tennis-player, who was debating what is wrong with English Tennis. "Nothing can save English Tennis!" he said, except certain reforms of a fundamental sort, which he proceeded to explain. The English, it appears, have a weird and unnatural way of regarding tennis as a game, or thing to be enjoyed. He admitted that this has been part of a sort of amateur spirit in everything which is (as he very truly noted) also a part of the national character. But all this stands in the way of what he called saving English Tennis. He meant what some would call making it perfect, and others would call making it professional. Now, I take that as a very typical passage, taken from the papers at random, and containing the views of a keen and acute person on a subject that he thoroughly understands. But what he does not understand is the thing which he supposes to be understood. He thoroughly knows his subject and yet he does not know what he is talking about; because he does not know what he is taking for granted. He does not realise the relation of means and ends, or axioms and inferences, in his own philosophy. And nobody would probably be more surprised and even legitimately indignant than he, if I were to say that the first principles of his philosophy appear to be as follows: (1) There is in the nature of things a certain absolute and divine Being, whose name is Mr. Lawn Tennis. (2) All men exist for the good and glory of this Mr. Tennis and are bound to approximate to his perfections and fulfil his will. (3) To this higher duty they are bound to surrender their natural desire for enjoyment in this life. (4) They are bound to put this loyalty first; and to love it more passionately than patriotic tradition, the presentation of their own national type and national culture; not to mention even their national virtues. That is the creed or scheme of doctrine that is here developed without being defined. The only way for us to save the game of Lawn Tennis is to prevent it from being a game. The only way to save English Tennis is to prevent it from being English. It does not occur to such thinkers that some people may possibly like it because it is English and enjoy it because it is enjoyable. There is some abstract divine standard in the thing, to which it is everybody's duty to rise, at any sacrifice of pleasure or affection. When Christians say this of the sacrifices made for Christ, it sounds rather a hard saying. But when tennis-players say it about the sacrifices demanded by tennis, it sounds quite ordinary and casual in the confusion of current thought and expression. And nobody notices that a sort of human sacrifice is being offered to a sort of new and nameless god.

In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.

The Modernists were peculiarly unfortunate when they said that the modern world must not be expected to tolerate the old syllogistic methods of the Schoolmen. They were proposing to scrap the one mediaeval instrument which the modern world will most immediately require. There would have been a far better case for saying that the revival of Gothic architecture has been sentimental and futile; that the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art was only an eccentric episode; that the fashionable use of the word "build" for every possible sort of social institution was affected and artificial; that the feudalism of Young England was very different from that of Old England. But this method of clean-cut deduction, with the definition of the postulates and the actual answering of the question, is something of which the whole of our newspaper-flattered society is in sharp and instant need; as the poisoned are in need of medicine. I have here taken only one example which happened to catch my eye out of a hundred thousand that flash past every hour. And as Tennis, like every other good game, has to be played with the head as well as the hand, I think it highly desirable that it should be occasionally discussed at least as intelligently as it is played.

~G.K. Chesterton: from The Thing.

The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 3: Where All Roads Lead / The Catholic Church and Conversion / Why I Am a Catholic / The Thing / The Well and the Shallows / The Way of the Cross

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