Chesterton’s Family of Nations

As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.—Pope John Paul II, 1986

In the modern world, the concept of the nation-state seems to be coming increasingly under threat; many persons on the political Left, of the “No Borders” persuasion, simply no longer view them as being valid constructs. Even Pope Francis does not do so these days, it would appear.

I am convinced that this is one reason for such persons’ frequent fanatical hatred for the State of Israel. Recent events in the country appear to have demonstrated quite clearly that, sometimes, sadly, defensible walls and borders are necessary. Take them down over there, and all that would result would be more mass slaughter. The Jews themselves, during their long years of diasporic exile, tested the idea of a truly borderless existence to destruction—almost quite literally, during their dark 1930s and 1940s. Israel and the wider Jewish people, therefore, stand as a living testament to the falsehood that a benignly borderless world is actually possible.

Nonetheless, the Nazi experience which proved once and for all to Zionist Jews that the possession and maintenance of their own national homeland was necessary has ironically since come to be used and abused by utopian globalists as “proof” of the idea that the nation-state is inherently illegitimate.

According to this view, an artificial construct like Germany or the “Zionist entity” of Israel alike can only ever breed racial chauvinism which ends inevitably in mass death and genocidal destruction of outsiders or persecuted internal minority groups—hence their frequent slurs against the Israelis to the effect that they have now ironically become their own shadow-selves and turned into Nazis, perpetrating supposed policies of extermination against the ghettoised Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. 

One key plank of today’s anti-nationalist agitators’ logic is their airy assertion that the nation-state is an artificial and arbitrary construct, whose inhabitants just happen to have been thrown together with one another through mere chance, making their attachment to one another as a polity of extended kith and kin nothing but empty sentiment. Ever since the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s influential 1983 work of the same name, internationalists have increasingly begun speaking derisively of nations as being nothing more than “imagined communities”, as if somehow there was no inherent difference between Belgium and Bahrain, or Japan and Jordan.

Instead, they speak of people of the future (their own fondly imagined future, anyway) as being universalised global abstractions, mere empty vessels, devoid of all innate and debilitating regional cultural content, if only they had not been brought up to believe in and unthinkingly accept “lies” like patriotism, religion, race and belonging—something which, if true, would make them all endlessly and infinitely interchangeable, mobile fungible non-residents of a globe-spanning Empire of Nowhere.

Such sublimely deracinated individuals appear equally sublimely unconscious of the fact that, whilst professing to despise imperialism as a basic point of political and moral principle, they act in a classically imperialist fashion themselves, by seeking to make their allegedly “universal” patterns of thought, governance and action extend across the entire planet. The anti-imperialists are the new imperialists now.

Critics of such ideologies often speak today of the Washington, Westminster or Brussels bubbles, where members of a clone-like political class move and mix only amongst their fellow kind, an entire non-race of non-persons who talk, think and act exactly like their fellow co-religionists, cutting themselves off from entire vast swathes of alternative (and often much richer) human existence. We think of this as being a characteristically modern phenomenon of twenty-first-century modes of detached and distant technocratic government, but the phenomenon has been observed long before, by the great English writer, thinker and Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton in his perceptive 1905 essay “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family”.

The family is in many ways akin to a state in microcosm, a comparison which has often been made—and then promptly criticised by sceptical internationalists. In order to demolish the much larger and wider macrocosm of the nation-state, therefore, the “progressives” of Chesterton’s own day, such as left-leaning writers like Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg, sought to portray the family as a kind of miniature prison or hell, into whose restricting confines one was unjustly born at birth.

This same basic idea was then later extended to the idea of the nation-state itself becoming the prison into which some poor souls sensitive enough to see its invisible bars were tragically born and hence later forced to flee abroad to a much wider and more congenial existence in exile, as seen in the works (and life) of writers like James Joyce, who fled his native Dublin seeking sanctuary from the burden of his own ancestral identity into European “world cities” like Paris and Zurich as soon as he could do so. If all the world were flattened out into glorious, liberal uniformity, and all places rendered identical and interchangeable, as seems to be the desire of many utopian dreamers, perhaps sensitive dissenters like Joyce would never need to escape.

Of course, for those who cling stubbornly to the old ways of attachment to nation and kinfolk, the prospect of a truly globalised and homogenised world would mean that they instead would become the ones trapped in an all-embracing invisible prison. The utopian globalist reformers of arts and letters and nascent globalist political bodies of Chesterton’s day seemingly did not see this possibility (or at least pretended not to).

Chesterton approved of small, coherent and cohesive nations—like the Ireland Joyce tried to escape from—and disapproved of the way some such lands sometimes grew strong and arrogant enough to begin to conceive of their values as being “universal”, and hence fit for spreading across other less powerful lands worldwide via force of arms and treasury, as had occurred during his own lifetime with Great Britain. When a nation becomes an empire, said Chesterton, that is the point at which it truly becomes illegitimate, not beforehand.

And, when he was writing around the turn of the twentieth century, Chesterton perceived the national empires of the West had recently begun to morph into a new, and even more dangerous, form—one of universal and universalising empire, one whose own internal value-systems were arbitrarily and delusionally branded as being somehow common to all men, and so fit for export abroad to every last corner of the planet, whether such corners’ actual inhabitants wanted to receive such generous civilisation-warping gifts or not.

Nascent globalist clubs like the League of Nations (which Chesterton hated) were, it would appear, just contemporary Westernised recrudescences of the old idea of the Islamic global caliphate—political religions of conquest and forced conversion in disguise. 

How did such arrogant thought-patterns of imperial hubris come about? For Chesterton, their seeds lay partly in the earlier-planned denigration and destruction of the age-old traditional family unit. “It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas,” Chesterton explained. Yet:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilised societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery

—hence those contemporary cliques called the Washington, Westminster and Brussels bubbles we mentioned earlier.

These “men of the clique”, continues Chesterton:

live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

This expansive imperial or globalist impulse is the natural consequence of such self-styled progressive persons’ initial abandonment of what Chesterton sees as the necessary confines of the traditional family unit, and the small, organic, local and national communities within which they were originally embedded:

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo.

Yet, whenever a man of such an unthinkingly expansionist mindset does sail out towards such a far-off distant land, all he is really in search of is himself in mirrored disguise: otherwise why would he expend so much effort on trying to make the natives act and think just like he does? Instead of trying to homogenise others, says Chesterton, we should try and compromise with them, to learn to live and let live. When today’s leftist elites begin hymning “diversity”, what they actually mean is transforming everybody on the planet into someone like them. Instead, said Chesterton, other nations should be left alone as much as possible and allowed to get on with things in their own chosen way, as they see fit, just so long as that does not entail them harming anyone else.

The best thing to do for the globalist utopians might be to reacquaint them with the natural and beneficial narrowing confines of the family:

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born … So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men.

Writers like Ibsen may well have viewed the family—and later consequently the nation too—as a trap to break free from, but for Chesterton it was more like a trap to be embraced:

The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue.

Restricting (not restrictive) limitations like borders and the bonds of the family are necessary not only to provide otherwise unmoored individuals with collective security, but also to give shape to our wider life:

Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty … They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations—that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.

Is that really what we wish for our own world today, a century or more after Chesterton wrote these words? This year marks the 150th anniversary since the great man’s birth in 1874. That our leaders—political and cultural alike—are still busily making precisely the same mistakes now as they did then is sure proof that their fantastic dreams of human “progress” are nothing but the pipe-dreams of the hookah. If what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023, once its external walls came tumbling down at the hands of Hamas, does not teach them that their ideal of a happily borderless world is a delusion, then perhaps nothing will.

Steven Tucker is a UK-based author. His latest title, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, exposes how the ideological abuses of science once perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets are being repeated anew today by the Left