Proclaimer Blog
Knocking holes in the boat
I’ve been reading GK’s essays on divorce (The superstition of divorce). Interesting stuff. From another era, obviously and many of the arguments he was challenging seem hopelessly outdated. But his line of attack interests me greatly. He is especially keen that in focusing on divorce the proponents of a loosened law (in his time) were missing the point of what marriage was for! It’s not an unfamiliar issue today – whether it is the argument for same sex marriage or egalitarianism (I’m not saying these are equivalent issues, they just happen to be two I’ve been thinking about). It is very easy to argue your case without thinking or engaging with the bigger issues at stake.
Here he is.
“There is perhaps no worse advice, nine times out of ten, than the advice to do the work that’s nearest. It is especially bad when it means, as it generally does, removing the obstacle that’s nearest. It means that men are not to behave like men but like mice; who nibble at the thing that’s nearest. The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. Because he himself bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that holds up the whole roof over his head. He industriously removes the obstacle; and in return, the obstacle removes him, and much more valuable things than he…
“The chief thing to say about such reformers of marriage is that they cannot make head or tail of it. They do not know what it is, or what it is meant to be, or what its supporters suppose it to be; they never look at it, even when they are inside it. They do the work that’s nearest; which is poking holes in the bottom of a boat under the impression that they are digging in a garden. This question of what a thing is, and whether it is a garden or a boat, appears to them abstract and academic. They have no notion of how large is the idea they attack; or how relatively small appear the holes that they pick in it.”