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The New Yorker article on Lewis

The man. The myth.

Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby rusmeister » April 30th, 2010, 1:37 pm

If Gopnik (check out the meaning of THAT name in Russian!) couldn't get Chesterton right, what makes you think he could get Lewis right?
"The British are embarassed by Lewis" - a more unreasonably expansive generalization that screams drama queen to me would require a lot of effort to imagine.
His main goal seems to be to say that these men - true giants of faith and intellect - were no better than anyone else (while true in a sense, the effect is to say that they are of greater value than, say, Phil Pullman).

I left his building after the first few paragraphs.
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Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby larry gilman » April 30th, 2010, 1:52 pm

Ah, you saw Gopnik's article on Chesterton too? What I noticed is that he wrote essentially the same article about both men. Gopnik's bottom line in both cases: Both CSL and GKC were twisty little jerkoffs who have been amplified into Great Men by the selective memory of their tiny-brained Christian fans. Whatever good there is in either author's writings -- Gopnik particularly admits it in GKC's fiction, which personally I find almost unreadable, outside of the Father Brown stories -- exists despite their stupid religion. If they would have dumped the stupid religion they would have written much better books. Plus, their religion was funny and dumb and stupid. (You get the idea . . .)

What kills me is that the New Yorker, in which a thousand actually good authors would love to publish and many actually do, gives a bully pulpit to Gopnik's mean-spirited, repetitious inaccuracies. Where the hell are their fact-checkers?

The editors are basically just suckers for the myth-buster pose. They understand nothing about the more complex Christianity represented by writers like GKC and CSL but love to see tomatoes thrown at it anyway. I love good secularism (think George Orwell, Walter Kaufmann, many others) but this is just lazy crapola.

Regards,

Larry
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Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby rusmeister » April 30th, 2010, 5:47 pm

I claim responsibility for first putting this article onto wikipedia - my knowledge of the Russian term met irritation at Gopnik's middle-brow Chesterton article - I've spent that last several years studying GKC and haven't got to the bottom of him - and claims of anti-semitism really ARE based on surface readings looking for that sort of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopnik
Since then, a number of people have contributed to and clarified a lot.

It's like watching a man criticising Einstein's work or Dr Johnson's dictionary - the really arrogant thing is his placing himself above and judging two men that were a heckuva lot more humble than he.
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Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby larry gilman » April 30th, 2010, 7:57 pm

Yes, Gopnik's shallow charge against GKC of anti-Semitism -- Jew-hating, to use the less polite term -- is irksome. GKC held views on Jewishness that were unquestionably somewhat weird by contemporary standards, but that doesn't make him a Jew-hater. In his context, he was no such thing, and as soon as large-scale, real-world Jew-hating raised its ugly head in Germany he knew it for the enemy and named it as such. Chesterton also, embarrassingly for his latter-day admirers, used the word ":censored:" and could easily be portrayed as a rank racist by selective quotation sauced with historical amnesia, but in Chesterton's formative Victorian/Edwardian British context ":censored:" was not the hate-charged signifier that it has always been in American language: its connotations were frivolous and condescending rather than white-supremacist.

[In editing this piece, I note in Preview that the word ":censored:" is automatically replaced by the string "[censored]." Fascinating! Repulsively, Orwellianly fascinating! As if mere syllables had a magic power and must be banned lest innocent souls be polluted . . . Let me make it clear then that I am talking about the "N word," what in American speech is the two-syllable hate-word for "black person."]

Not to absolve GKC entirely: he was truly brutal in his bitterness toward the Suffragettes, and clung to stubborn oddball rhetoric about Jews and non-whites that is now pretty embarrassing to see in print, though it does not make him a "racist" or anti-Semite. He was, taken all in all, a very great essayist and a decent, gentle chap, and my head lights up like a Christmas tree when I read good Chesterton -- as I've been doing since my preteens, over 35 years.

He was right-on about Eugenics at a time when all progressive, right-thinking folks were wrong about it, but got worse and worse about Evolution after a promising start: I have blogged on this in detail:

(part 1)

(part 2)
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Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby rusmeister » May 1st, 2010, 11:10 am

"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."
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Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby larry gilman » May 3rd, 2010, 3:40 pm

Well, Chesterton simply opposed suffrage: he thought that women should not have the vote. He made the claim (debatable) that voting was “unfeminine” (p. 224, What’s Wrong with the World, 1920 Dodd Mead edition) -- made it before and after suffrage was actually achieved, made it eloquently and at length and from a variety of angles and in many books and essays. And to that claim he adjoined the independent and additional assertion that allowing women to vote and run for office was akin to forcing women to vote and run for office -- could be construed as imposing political involvement on women, which would in turn be tantamount to “destroying womanhood” by giving women “unwomanly powers” (same citation) -- i.e., forcing them into the violence and scrum of politics. A more classic form of imprisoning women atop a pedestal could hardly be found. (The higher a pedestal is, the more effective a prison it is.) “I respect you! I adore you! You are far too fine to sully yourself with all this grubby real-world power stuff -- whether you want to or not! Only high atop that pedestal will all your feminine qualities remain safe!”

Despite his never-failing eloquence, all this was profoundly silly even if one were to grant GKC's sweeping essentialist claims about the nature of men and women. Extending the franchise to women did not place one whit of obligation on any individual woman to dump her infant on the floor and rush off to a voting booth or run for high office. And many or most women don’t, fact, bother to do these things. That’s up to them. Before suffrage, it wasn’t up to them. (Though they always could dump the infant on floor, and sometimes did.) That’s the nub. Whatever one thinks of “femininity” (where I disagree with Chesterton) or the limits of voting itself as a form of democratic expression (where I agree with him, as on a thousand other things), to argue that giving women a right would be to impose on them an obligation was illogical and false to fact. But it was the crux of his argument.

The anti-suffragists like GKC wanted to maintain a concrete, legal, sweeping prohibition on women’s direct involvement in politics, a prohibition that some women, whether a majority or not (Chesterton claimed not), thought unjust. The anti-suffragists wanted to prevent certain women from doing something those women wanted to do and that all men could do: the pro-suffragists, on the other hand, wanted to allow those women to do what they wanted to do -- and at the same time never forced any other woman to do or not do that thing. GKC tap-danced very hard and he was always good to watch but in elementary justice there was only one way to go, and I am glad we went it. Voting is a form of power: if there dwells somewhere today a woman who thinks that the exercise of that power is demeaning to her sex, she is as free to not exercise it as she would have been in 1850.

Universal franchise: a panacea for society’s ills? Not even close. But then, no single act of elementary justice is.

PS. The claim of GKC's "bitterness" against Suffragettes I would have to support by quotation, and I clearly have not yet done so. I could, but I admit that so far this is just a bald assertion. But I have to go do some paying work . . .
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Re: The New Yorker article on Lewis

Postby rusmeister » May 3rd, 2010, 6:49 pm

"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."
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