Was reading Whats Wrong with the World by Chesterton, and thought this was a good statement about the fact that the middle can be just as rigid to being practical as ideologues are to ideas, and perhaps just as problematic if not more. our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we ask for something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word compromise contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word promise. Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle point is as fixed as the extreme point.” ~ G.K. Chesterton
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 12:29:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015