The Common Man
Chesterton's appreciation of the common man predates his college years. His
teenage notebooks are full of a reverence for ordinary people, expressed as a corollary
to his reverence for the most ordinary of objects and things. Chesterton's
respect for the common man was basically a respect for free will. He said that
the actions of a beggar are as momentous as the actions of a prime minister,
because the beggar's actions are no less free and have an eternal significance
surpassing all merely temporal enterprises, even those of prime ministers and
kings.
This is a view that contradicts the conventional way of looking at things. The
decisions and choices of beggars do not seem very momentous to us. We are
conditioned to believe that the lives of presidents and dictators, business
tycoons and financiers, newscasters and even entertainers, are more important,
more influential, more significant than the lives of nameless hobos and
panhandlers. Not so Chesterton, in spite of the appearances. As Father Brown
expressed it,
I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the
tapestry. The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean
something somewhere else.
Chesterton's admiration for the power of choice in the
least of us, made him an extreme democrat in politics, and a life-long Liberal,
if a Liberal is someone who champions individual liberty and democratic reform.
He called plain folks "the million masks of God" and praised
them for their common sense, common decency, and their humble institutions:
hearth and home, the family, the church, and the pub. He rejected every sort of
elitism, and he most especially denounced the meddlesome elites--the bureaucrats,
business tycoons, socialists, politicians, and philanthropists--along with all
of their progressive and uplifting ideas for bullying the common man.
[For further reading in Chesterton's
works, see "The Homelessness of Man" in What's Wrong with the
World; the title essay in The Common Man; and his poem, "Gold
Leaves"]. Selected
from Martin Ward's Chesterton page.