Chesterton, a writer for all times. For the serene and joyful periods, for the stretches full of obstacles, for the dark nights of life, with its sorrows, shadows, fears. Every time I can – or my soul asks me to – I go to Chesterton (1874-1936). There is no shortage of editions of his books or anthologies of his writings, such as this recent one, No hay cosas sin interes (Palabra, 2024), on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. His optimism, sense of humor; his wit and intellectual acuity; the registers in which his pen moves make the things of the common man acquire new sparkles and twists. For many, as is my case, the kind and common sense-filled tone of his writings is fresh air to oxygenate the soul and sharpen the gaze. There remains a well of serenity and joy that not even the setbacks of life erase.
The book collects texts by Chesterton from here and there, a good appetizer to go in search of the author’s complete books of essays. I have noticed a few ideas about his vision of capitalism, which he knew at the end of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century. It is, to a certain extent, the capitalism of the greedy search for economic benefits, very focused on the producer and oblivious to the fate of the worker and the ordinary citizen himself. Of this capitalism that idolizes money, he will say that, parallel to the repugnance that the fashionable pessimism inspires in him, another of his intellectual passions has been his aversion to plutocracy, also so fashionable (see p. 15).
Chesterton is right in denouncing the spirit of profit that excludes all other purposes in companies. However, several of the diatribes he launches against capitalism are exaggerated and caricatured. The capitalism of that time probably had those savage traits that have not been lacking before or now. But the market society to which Saint John Paul II referred in his encyclical Centesimus annus has taken important steps towards humanization in our time.
In the face of soulless capitalism, Chesterton proposes distributism, a kind of economy of proportion. He states: “We do not offer perfection, but proportion. We wish to correct the proportions of the modern State; but proportion is given between different things, and a proportion is almost never a mold (p. 102). The key word is proportion. It moves away from the gigantic and uniform. All we maintain – he continues saying – is that the central power needs lesser powers to counterbalance and restrain it, and that these must be of many kinds: some individual, some communal, some official, etc.” (p. 103). That is, a version of the principle of subsidiarity proclaimed by the social doctrine of the Church: what the person or the smaller society can and should do, for itself, should not be done by the larger society.
At another point, he supports an idea that could very well be subscribed to by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, critic of the society of fatigue. Chesterton says: “We have no obligation to be richer, or to work harder, or to be more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way more attached to the things of the world, or more powerful, if this does not make us happier. Humanity has the right to reject the machine and live off the land if it really pleases it more, just as in reality, anyone has the right to sell his old bicycle and walk if it pleases him more. It is evident that the march will be slower, but it is not his duty to be faster” (p. 114). This freedom of spirit is refreshing and opens the mind to fundamental questions: to have more… for what? The film Other People’s Money (1991) (El dinero de los demás) is a funny critique of this excessive desire for wealth and economic power.
Is Chesterton’s proposal pure nostalgia for past bucolic times? A counter-current approach to the culture of success? It is certainly not a praise to the culture of success, but it is a call to a life of human dimensions, precisely those that have been disfigured by this tendency that confuses being better with having more.
