Everyone writes. Schoolteachers, doctors, accountants, engineers, etc… all have to write. They write by responding to emails, fulfilling work order requests, or writing instructions or prescriptions. This type of writing, at its best, is only useful and nothing more. I have yet to be inspired by a Toyota car manual. Another type of writing, however, reaches beyond the useful and touches on the inspirational, the sublime, and perhaps, the divine. A mark of this type of writing is its longevity. Do the author’s words continue to mature and grow as time advances, or do the words cheapen and become hollow after a few years? An example of the latter category is politicians’ autobiographies. Crack open an autobiography from an obscure politician from the ‘90s and you will uncover lifeless prose and boredom in its purest form. Those writers in the former category are difficult to find. Once you find one, it is like drinking from a thirst quenching cup of cold water after wandering in a desert.
G.K Chesterton is one of those underappreciated writers whose prose reads like poetry and whose words still ring clearly today. Born in 1874, Chesterton reached the pinnacle of both his literary and his physical girth in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote on an eclectic variety of subjects such as apologetics, literature, history, economics, art, religion, and that is only his non-fiction. Americans tend to know him primarily as the author of the Father Brown Mysteries, but he wrote several novels, short stories, poetry, and even an epic poem. He wrote so much within thirty years that a complete collection of his works has hit thirty-seven volumes with more volumes on the way.
Chesterton was a rare writer who published a significant body of work without sacrificing quality. Not only was he prolific, but his writings continue to influence people today especially his two most popular religious works Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. As with his other types of writing, his essays continue to be relevant in politics.
Take, for example, the most recent political topic that consumed the United States, Kyle Rittenhouse. Chesterton, though he was writing many years before this case, perfectly encapsulates the jury system in an essay. For this essay, the details about the case are less important than the jury’s decision to exonerate Rittenhouse. The circumstances surrounding the case make it difficult to know for certain how Chesterton would see the case. What can be known, however, is that Chesterton would have supported the jury’s decision no matter which way they ruled. In his essay The Twelve Men, Chesterton noted that society mistakenly views job specialization as always good, “We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better…specially instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on.” One institution that must not become specialized, said Chesterton, are juries.
Workers become desensitized to their jobs. What was once novel turns to normalcy after time. Chesterton continued in his essay that those trained in the legal profession “do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgement; they only see their own workshop.” Chesterton would strike down any attempt to remove the jury system or somehow incorporate trained juries. He was not afraid that a professional jury would always vote one way, but that they would lose sight of a man’s humanity.
Insipid news reporters, Twitter philosophers, and politicians can say what they would like about the jury’s decision in the Rittenhouse case. Arguments, however, that seek to remove or professionalize the jury system should not be accepted nor promoted.
I mentioned in the introduction that a criterion separating useful writing from a higher form of writing is longevity. Chesterton wrote The Twelve Men 112 years ago in 1909. A large portion of Chesterton’s writings are over a hundred years old, and yet, he still has much to say to the modern reader. Read Chesterton.
