What's wrong with the world

What Hacker News says

1. flanked-everglSep 2025
   I don't really enjoy the fiction of C. S. Lewis at all, really, and even G. K. Chesterton's fiction is not that good, it feels very contrived and it feels like preaching to the choir. As part of the choir there is a lot I agree with, but I don't quite get the point of his fiction.

   But Chesterton's non-fiction books, The Everlasting Man, Orthodoxy, What's Wrong With the World and Heretics are some of the best and most insightful books I have ever read, and they really took me by surprise because I did not expect them to be what they are. They are full of speculation, and misunderstandings, but they are also full of very deep insights into humanity.

   I do, however, think the fiction of Tolkien is historic and unsurpassed, nothing written since really comes close IMO.

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2. yesenadamSep 2021
   I read a page years ago mentioning in detail the enormous number of well-known 20th C figures inspired or called-to-action by Chesterton. Can't find it now, but this mentions a few -

   https://thefinalprojectchesterton.wordpress.com/the-influenc...

   Hitchcock, C.S. Lewis, Tolkein, Orwell, EF Schumacher etc. Maybe most remarkably, Chesterton's 1909 essay on Indian self-determination/nationalism gave Gandhi the idea of fighting for it himself.

   I've never thought his fiction compared at all with his non-fiction. A bit like Werner Herzog in that way–they're so good, fascinating, skillful at interpreting the real world in their works, it's a shame when their skills are restricted to a made-up story. Yet people often act as if Stevenson only wrote fiction, or Nietzsche's best is Zarathustra, or Chesterton's best The Man Who Was Thursday!

   (I've only read a small part of his huge output.. but) My favourite of his books maybe is Heretics, on some contemporary trends and errors of thought—Shaw, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, nihilism etc. It's just brilliant, and very funny, like most of his stuff, though more so. Endlessly re-readable. Also What's Wrong with the World. His Autobiography. Full of wonderful bits.

   Most of his books are collections of his newspaper articles, some good, some amazingly good. All worth reading. All Things Considered, Alarms and Discursions, Come to Think of It, All is Grist etc.

   There are a series of biographies, all of remarkable penetration. Stevenson, Shaw, Blake, St Francis, St Thomas etc. As if biography was his unique gift. He somehow gets inside his subjects to an astounding degree. Varied Types has about 15 short pieces on contemporary/recent figures, e.g. the first is on Charlotte Brontë.

   I love the first half of Orthodoxy—before it (unsurprisingly) gets too Christiany. I find his usual brilliant arguments often turn into very lazy, stupid ones where his religion is the topic. But every writer has their blind spots.

   An example of GKC being very funny while very serious: Even The Everlasting Man, about Jesus, has its moments of brilliance (from my atheist perspective). From its first chapter The Man in the Cave, about our prejudices vs what we actually know about early humans:

   'So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, "Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him," the novelist's readers would be very disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large portraits of cows on the drawing-room wall.'

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3. throw0101bJun 2024
   “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” — G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (XIV)

   * https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1717/1717-h/1717-h.htm#link2...

   * https://www.chesterton.org/a-thing-worth-doing/

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4. gredMar 2023
   > if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly

   I also keep coming back to this phrase. I believe this is the source (G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1717/1717-h/1717-h.htm#link2...

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5. throw0101aDec 2021
   Per a sibling, it is Chesterton, from his work What's Wrong with the World:

   * https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1717/1717-h/1717-h.htm

   An explanation:

   > Chesterton consistently defended the amateur against the professional, or the “generalist” against the specialist, especially when it came to “the things worth doing.” There are things like playing the organ or discovering the North Pole, or being Astronomer Royal, which we do not want a person to do at all unless he does them well. But those are not the most important things in life. When it comes to writing one’s own love letters and blowing one’s own nose, “these things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.” This, argues Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) is “the democratic faith: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves – the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.”

   […]

   > In What’s Wrong with the World, Chesterton foresaw the dilemma of daycare and the working mother, that children would end up being raised by “professionals” rather than by “amateurs.” And here we must understand “amateur” in its truest and most literal meaning. An amateur is someone who does something out of love, not for money. She does what she does not because she is going to be paid for her services and not because she is the most highly skilled, but because she wants to do it. And she does “the things worth doing,” which are the things closest and most sacred to all of humanity – nurturing a baby, teaching a child the first things, and, in fact, all things.

   > The line, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” is not an excuse for poor efforts. It is perhaps an excuse for poor results. But our society is plagued by wanting good results with no efforts (or rather, with someone else’s efforts). We hire someone else to work for us, to play for us (that is, to entertain us), to think for us, and to raise our children for us. We have left “the things worth doing” to others, on the poor excuse that others might be able to do them better.

   > Finally, and less heavily, we should also point out that the phrase is a defense of hobbies. […]

   * https://www.chesterton.org/a-thing-worth-doing/

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6. fennecfoxenSep 2021
   It's interesting to read some of Chesterton's more dated opinions in works like "What's Wrong With The World." Consider his take on feminism: one key fear was that a part of it was just a way to exploit more people in the workforce. He was, indeed, quite skeptical of "the workforce" generally, observing with wonder that never before had so many people been working for another man's business, dependent, instead of his own independent good. We see his remedy for many of these ills through his distributivist philosophy where he proposed "three acres and a cow" for every family. And in that, I do admire his passion, the strength of his convictions to support the good:

   "I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed."

   How well placed have these fears proven? Of what merit is his revolution? Many decades later, it's quite clear that if if you gave everyone who became an adult three acres in the middle of nowhere, most would sell them and move to the city, and even those who stayed behind would surely sell the cow. Working for others is what's normal now; seriously working your own land for staple foods almost unthinkable. In no doubt this was aided much by gains in productivity.

   And women's equality, of course, is rightly feted. Yet surely this shadow he foresaw was quite real, and still afflicts us, as we complain bitterly of inequality. The little girl may still, from time to time at least, find her hair shaved to combat lice — not quite so much because she has a dirty home, but because her mother is not free and leisured. Indeed, she works two jobs, without a father, and rent within our cities is far too dear — though homeowners must share much of the blame with landlords, this time.

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