The Man Who Thinks Backwards / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed, if

he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes

nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific or

skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and

Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But

especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the

writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For

the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.

Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and, perhaps,

the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as possible, and from

it illustrate the two modes of thought: the right mode in which all real

results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which is confusing all our

current discussions, especially our discussions about the relations of the

sexes. Casting my eye round the room, I notice an object which is often

mentioned in the higher and subtler of these debates about the sexes: I

mean a poker. I will take a poker and think about it; first forwards and

then backwards; and so, perhaps, show what I mean.

The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin

somewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this star

the queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird,

comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only

naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his

shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He

might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone bathing

and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat upon the

beaver and his coat upon the sheep. The rabbit has white warmth for a

waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has no

heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must look

for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is cast.

This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the one creature

that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a spiritual

sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal sense he has

been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external need of his

has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion, so it has lit

in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red flower called

Fire. Fire, the most magic and startling of all material things, is a

thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime externalism. It

embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that is divine on his

altars. It is the most human thing in the world; seen across wastes of

marsh or medleys of forest, it is veritably the purple and golden flag of

the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous and rejoicing thing an

alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its presence is life;

its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessary to have an

intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; to have a priest

to intercede for us with the god of life and death; to send an ambassador

to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made of a material more merciless

and warlike than the other instruments of domesticity, hammered on the

anvil and born itself in the flame, the poker is strong enough to enter

the burning fiery furnace, and, like the holy children, not be consumed.

In this heroic service it is often battered and twisted, but is the more

honourable for it, like any other soldier who has been under fire.

Now all this may sound very fanciful and mystical, but it is the right

view of pokers, and no one who takes it will ever go in for any wrong view

of pokers, such as using them to beat one's wife or torture one's children,

or even (though that is more excusable) to make a policeman jump, as the

clown does in the pantomime. He who has thus gone back to the beginning,

and seen everything as quaint and new, will always see things in their

right order, the one depending on the other in degree of purpose and

importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man and the man

for the glory of God.

This is thinking forwards. Now our modern discussions about everything,

Imperialism, Socialism, or Votes for Women, are all entangled in an

opposite train of thought, which runs as follows:--A modern intellectual

comes in and sees a poker. He is a positivist; he will not begin with any

dogmas about the nature of man, or any day-dreams about the mystery of

fire. He will begin with what he can see, the poker; and the first thing

he sees about the poker is that it is crooked. He says, "Poor poker; it's

crooked." Then he asks how it came to be crooked; and is told that there

is a thing in the world (with which his temperament has hitherto left him

unacquainted)--a thing called fire. He points out, very kindly and

clearly, how silly it is of people, if they want a straight poker, to put

it into a chemical combustion which will very probably heat and warp it.

"Let us abolish fire," he says, "and then we shall have perfectly straight

pokers. Why should you want a fire at all?" They explain to him that a

creature called Man wants a fire, because he has no fur or feathers. He

gazes dreamily at the embers for a few seconds, and then shakes his head.

"I doubt if such an animal is worth preserving," he says. "He must

eventually go under in the cosmic struggle when pitted against

well-armoured and warmly protected species, who have wings and trunks and

spires and scales and horns and shaggy hair. If Man cannot live without

these luxuries, you had better abolish Man." At this point, as a rule, the

crowd is convinced; it heaves up all its clubs and axes, and abolishes him.

At least, one of him.

Before we begin discussing our various new plans for the people's welfare,

let us make a kind of agreement that we will argue in a straightforward

way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modern movements may be

right; but let them be defended because they are right, not because they

are typical modern movements. Let us begin with the actual woman or man

in the street, who is cold; like mankind before the finding of fire. Do

not let us begin with the end of the last red-hot discussion--like the end

of a red hot poker. Imperialism may be right. But if it is right, it is

right because England has some divine authority like Israel, or some human

authority like Rome; not because we have saddled ourselves with South

Africa, and don't know how to get rid of it. Socialism may be true. But

if it is true, it is true because the tribe or the city can really declare

all land to be common land, not because Harrod's Stores exist and the

commonwealth must copy them. Female suffrage may be just. But if it is

just, it is just because women are women, not because women are sweated

workers and white slaves and all sorts of things that they ought never to

have been. Let not the Imperialist accept a colony because it is there,

nor the Suffragist seize a vote because it is lying about, nor the

Socialist buy up an industry merely because it is for sale.

Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want, not what recent legal

decisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies proved

that we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shall

some day want. If there must be a British Empire, let it be British, and

not, in mere panic, American or Prussian. If there ought to be female

suffrage, let it be female, and not a mere imitation as coarse as the male

blackguard or as dull as the male clerk. If there is to be Socialism, let

it be social; that is, as different as possible from all the big

commercial departments of to-day. The really good journeyman tailor does

not cut his coat according to his cloth; he asks for more cloth. The

really practical statesman does not fit himself to existing conditions, he

denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some deeply planted

tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at last into tiny twigs;

and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us is trying to bend the tree

by a twig: to alter England through a distant colony, or to capture the

State through a small State department, or to destroy all voting through a

vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise who resists this temptation of

trivial triumph or surrender, and happy (in an echo of the Roman poet) who

remembers the roots of things.