St. Paul, Fighting and Friendship

This blogg has gotten quiet, a bit of a surprise for a Chestertonian blogg. Did someone stick his tongue to a lamppost? (hee hee) Well, since today (though Sunday, a name of power and awe) is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, I thought I might drop in here and provoke some comments by dredging up a bit of GKC's story from his days as a student at St. Paul. it's got a lovely fight in it, sort of like the strange warfare we read of "on the way to Damascus". Ever notice how we stick things into even well-known Bible stories? There aren't three kings, Veronica isn't on the way of the cross - and there's no horse mentioned when St. Paul is knocked off his h... - uh - when he encounters the Lord. In the same way, we might find it hard to imagine our loveable GKC as a young pugilist! Please read on, and comment at will...

Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy. There grows all over what was once the child a sort of prickly protection like hair; a callousness, a carelessness, a curious combination of random and quite objectless energy with a readiness to accept conventions. I have blindly begun a lark which involved carrying on literally like a lunatic; and known all the time that I did not know why I was doing it. When I first met my best friend in the playground, I fought with him wildly for three-quarters of an hour; not scientifically and certainly not vindictively (I had never seen him before and I have been very fond of him ever since) but by a sort of inexhaustible and insatiable impulse, rushing hither and thither about the field and rolling over and over in the mud. And all the time I believe that both our minds were entirely mild and reasonable; and when we desisted from sheer exhaustion, and he happened to quote Dickens or the Bab Ballads, or something I had read, we plunged into a friendly discussion on literature which has gone on, intermittently, from that day to this. There is no explaining these things; if those who have done them cannot explain them. But since then I have seen boys in many countries and even of many colours; Egyptian boys in the bazaars of Cairo or mulatto boys in the slums of New York. And I have found that by some primordial law they all tend to three things; to going about in threes; to having no apparent object in going about at all; and, almost invariably speaking, to suddenly attacking each other and equally suddenly desisting from the attack.

Some may still question my calling this conduct conventional; from a general impression that two bankers or business partners do not commonly roll each other head-over-heels for fun, or in a spirit of pure friendship. It might be retorted that two business partners are not always by any means such pure friends. But in any case, it is true to call the thing a convention in more than the verbal sense of a collision. And it is exactly this convention that really separates the schoolboy from the child. When I went to St. Paul's School, in Hammersmith, there really was a sort of convention of independence; which was in a certain degree a false independence; because it was a false maturity. Here we must remember once more the fallacy about "pretending" in childhood. The child does not really pretend to be a Red Indian; any more than Shelley pretended to be a cloud or Tennyson to be a brook. The point can be tested by offering a political pamphlet to the cloud, a peerage to the brook, or a penny for sweets to the Red Bull of the Prairies. But the boy really is pretending to be a man; or even a man of the world; which would seem a far more horrific metamorphosis. Schoolboys in my time could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name. And the deadly nature of this blow really consisted in the fact that it cracked the whole convention of our lives; the convention that each of us was on his own; an independent gentleman living on private means. The secret that each of us did in fact possess a family, and parents who paid for our support, was conventionally ignored and only revealed in moments of maddened revenge. But the point is that there was already a faint touch of corruption in this convention; precisely because it was more serious and less frank than the tarradiddles of infancy. We had begun to be what no children are - snobs. Children disinfect all their dramatic impersonations by saying "Let us pretend." We schoolboys never said "Let us pretend"; we only pretended.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:61-63]

UNL Chesterton Society Takes Off!

Hey!

We had three people at our meeting tonight, two of which had never read Chesterton before! Pray for us!

My Experience at Chesterton Conference 2008

“They do not want regular plenty, but irregular wealth…They want Surprise.”

--G.K. Chesterton, “The Surprise”

Yes, I was one of the attendees of the 2008 G.K. Chesterton Conference, the
Orthodoxy Centennial, and I think that “Surprise” is one of the best one word
descriptions of it. Not that I came expecting nothing, and was gloriously
surprised. It was so good, that I could expect and expect and still be
surprised.
In the first place, I was surprised that I was able to attend at all. But
that does not pertain to the conference itself, so I will pass over it.
Second, I received a very pleasant sort of “Wake Up, you need to go to this”
when I saw that Dr. Jennifer Overkamp, a resident of the same city as myself,
would be on the program. I had met her just a few weeks before.
Third, I found the abundance of attendees quite refreshing--especially after I
saw a friend of mine, went to talk to him, and “got lost” in a large crowd of
homeschoolers that I had not met and probably would never had otherwise.
Apparently, I never found my way out. My membership on this blog is one of the
results, and they‘re not over yet.
Fourth, I was struck by the utter fascination provided by the speeches,
especially the ones that “expanded” Chesterton into the world of Pascal, Jane
Austen (I learned more about Austen from the conference than I did from Pride
and Prejudice!), and the Pro-Life movement.
Fifth, I was surprised by the utter accessibility of the conference
“dignitaries;” I was able to talk to five of the speakers (including Mr.
Alquhist) and eat with two of them.
Sixth, I got to serve mass outside my diocese for the first time in the most
beautiful cassock and surplice I have ever worn.
And last, but not least, I was shocked when I got home and found that one of
the books I bought was by a radical feminist. It made good firewood, which was
not a surprise. I got a very good replacement by Jacques Martain, and that WAS
a surprise.
In other words, unless you know you hate literary conferences or are an
anti-Chestertonian, you MUST go to the 2009 conference.

A Request

This actually came originally from Dale Ahlquist and hasn't really been fulfilled. I know this is a little funny to be asking about at this time of year, but I'd really like to have the Chesterton conference attendees on this blog write about their experience of the conference, particularly for the sake of those who weren't able to attend or those who might be thinking about attending this year's conference.

Fire away!

The Transition has Finally Begun

Thank you for your most generous and extreme patience! We've finally started our transition to transform the Chesterteens/Flying-ins in to two separate blogs. I've sent out invitations to everyone I could find who is a current contributor to this blog to join the new Flying-ins. http://theflying-ins.blogspot.com

All current contributors are welcome to contribute to both blogs. The Chesterteens blog will focused on discussions closely related to Chestertons writings and will be of particular interest and appropriateness for high schoolers. The Flying-ins is much more open-ended and can include lots of stuff more loosely related to Chesterton.

Thanks and God Bless!

Mrs. VH

The Joke's on Chesterton

Here's some Chestertonian humor (meaning about Chesterton, not from him).

1. Three Scots are going to play a musical trio. It is written for Bagpipe, Tuba, and Bells. Being a valuble family heirloom, the bagpipe is kept in an old trunk. The tuba of course is very heavy. One of the players, while asking the other two what instrument they want, stubs his toe. This is what he says:

"Dee yee want the instrument o' chest, or ton, or Bell...Och!"

2. Q. If Mrs. Chesterton had had a child, and they had gone to play at a playground, and Mrs. Chesterton had died from playing to hard, what would we call her?
A. St. Frances of A See-Saw.

3. A not-so-absurd sentence:

To the painted Ball, add a White Worse with A Piece of Chalk; make it Leap into a
fence, Or, though ducks be in it, a lake (for the purpose of removing insects from its hide; make sure the ticks are in the hair, not the Hair on ticks).

A "Job" for Frances Chesterton

I don't know if there is a patron saint of blogging yet. If Mr. and Mrs. Chesterton are canonized, however, Frances would make an excellent patroness. Her maiden name was Blogg, after all.

A Decision at Last

We've had to do a little thinking here in order to better define this blog and make it more usable and enjoyable for all.

What we've decided to do is a fairly friendly variation on an older idea. We will be splitting the blog into two - "Chesterteens" and "The Flying-Ins", but all current members will be invited to join both blogs.

The Chesterteens blog (which will remain at this present URL) will be focused on posts very closely relating to the writings of Chesterton and fun things slightly tangential to his writings, like the Gype game. I believe this will be very close to what the Chesterteens blog always was. It will be more heavily moderated content-wise and I think particularly appealing to the high schoolers around which the blog was built.

The Flying-Ins blog will move to a new URL and will be much more open and less moderated as far as content goes (I will still, as moderator, have high expectations regarding tones toward others - particularly guests of the blog). I'd still like to see some strong connectedness to Chesterton's writings so that the blog still retains some authentic Chestertonian focus. I think this will be especially appealing to the newer members of the blog - particularly those in college who are branching out and applying Chesterton's ideas elsewhere.

I think both blogs will be pleasant and beneficial to all of our members and I would encourage everyone to join both blogs as they desire. Further details will be pending and invitations to the new blog should be forthcoming to all members.

Thank you for your patience and God Bless!

Mrs. Van Hecke and Ria

My Blog: the real link =)

Don Pedro's Blog

Dr. Thursday on Gype (copied from the American Chesterton Society blog)

"It would be quite pleasing at this point to consult a short and simple guide in which Chesterton lists several rules, most of which happen to relate in an ontological sense to Gype, but which he rather pedantically uses to explain how to write a detective story. [It was in G. K.'s Weekly for October 17, 1925, and reprinted in The Spice of Life] The first, of course, is that detective stories are not about darkness, but about light - that is, not about keeping something hidden, but revealing a secret. (Gype is about fun, not about winning.) The second is that the pivot of the detective story, the cardinal, the hinge on which it turns (see Tolkien for deeper meaning of "turn" in fantasy & fairy tales) must be simple. In the same way, any single round, inning, hand or period of Gype, in any of the countless forms it may take, must also be simple, regardless of the cumbersomeness of athletic gear, the size of the board, the variety of its pieces, the number of players, and the rest. Thirdly, the thing must revolve on something familiar, easily forgotten or overlooked, which means why a broom must appear on a football field (No, Harry, for sweeping, not flying) or a queen (Alice asks "of spades? or white?") on a scrabble board.For the fourth, and perhaps most important of all these rules, I must quote GKC directly, and you must bear in mind that it applies to Gype as well as detective stories:
...the fourth principle to be remembered, as in the other cases, people probably will not realize that it is practical, because the principles on which it rests sound theoretical. It rests on the fact that in the classification of the arts, mysterious murders belong to the grand and joyful company of the things called jokes. The story is a fancy; an avowedly fictitious fiction. We may say if we like that it is a very artificial form of art. I should prefer to say that it is professedly a toy, a thing that children 'pretend' wish. From this it follows that the reader, who is a simple child and therefore very wide awake, is conscious not only of the toy but of the invisible playmate who is the maker of the toy, and the author of the trick. The innocent child is very sharp and not a little suspicious.[I gave you the ref. already.]That is, Gype is possible only if it remains what it was founded for: a joke. There will never be a NGL (National Gype League) or offical Gype sportswear. Thank God.Finally, GKC concludes by saying "Every good problem of this type originates in a positive notion, which is in itself a simple notion; some fact of daily life that the writer can remember and the reader can forget. But anyhow, a tale has to be founded on a truth." You can read "that the ref can remember and the player can forget" if you like - provided that the game called Gype is also founded on a truth. Which means, (pace my friend and commentor) that Gype cannot be a matter of absurdity. It belongs to the universe of reason, and hence is the only sport which is Catholic in its essence. (More on that in a future discussion.)If you want better rules for the game, quick, go buy the Collected Works. That's all the more you'll find these days, unless someone locates GKC's and Wells' notes... But by all means, play - and if you do play, please write it up (with full details of the score, etc) and send it to us. The Chesterton University team is ready to defend its title..."

---------Quoted from a Dr. Thursday post

On the Method of Making a Game

1. First, you must put the game into its proper categories and genus. (The Game itself is the species). Ask yourself:

A: Will this game be self-contained, taking no ideas from outside itself (sports, checkers, and card games fall into this category) or will it be based on a concrete reality (Monopoly and Risk fall into this category). I would say that word games are midway between the two categories.

B. If it is concrete or a word game, choose the reality on which it is based. For example, the game called "The Great Battles of Alexander" is based on...guess what. But it is slightly more involved than that, as that particular game is based on the realites of combat at the commander's level. If it is a word game, you already have the reality chosen for you, although we could play in Quenya instead of English. If it a self-contained game, you have to decide on the natures of the things that can be used in the game. For example, soccer requires a thing called a soccer ball, a thing called a soccer field, and two things called goals.

2. Next, decide on the object of the game. There are two types of objects. Quantum objects state that when a player achieves a certain state of game-being or fulfills certain steps in a certain order, they win/lose. Mathematical objects state that when a player demonstrates that they are the best at playing the game, usually by the accumulation of the most points by a certain time, they win.

This object must be translated (Algernon...) into terms relevant to the game. (This can be done by saying that certain things or states of game-being are worth points.) For example, chess has a quantum object that is stated in chess-relevant terms as checkmate. Life has a mathematical object that is stated in life-relevant terms as having the most money (can be seen as points instead of #$'s) by the time every player reaches millionare acres.

3. Next, write the rules. This is the hardest part. In a non-democratic game, I would go about it in this way:

A. In a concrete game, find how the real-life equivalent of the object is obtained and do research into the elements that go into this process. For example, in the game Soldier Kings, the object is to have the most money-giving territories by the end of the game. This translates into money-rich regions of the world in real life. Now in the Seven Years War, in which the game is set, this was done by military conquest and diplomatic wheeling. Both of these depend on a lot of factors, such as liquid assets, population, atttitude of the King of England toward the Doge of Venice, Native American Cannibalism, etc. Translate these back from real life into game terms.
In an self-contained game, you get to make all this stuff up yourself without translating, but i will give an example anyway. In Topple, the object is to gain points. The game makers decided that the method of gaining points is to stack as many discs as possible without toppling the delicately balanced board .

B. In a concrete game, the next step is to decide what elements to keep and how they are expressed in game terms. For example, the play-by-play movements of the squad commanders is not an element included in the World War II game Axis and Allies, but the realites of winning and losing battles are expressed by rolls of the dice applied to a "Combat engine" (I'm sure Dr. Thursday knows what a Combat Engine would be). Because the realites of combat in WWII are different from the realites of combat in the Seven Years War, the combat engine is different in Soldier Kings.
In a self-contained game, the next step is to provide your limitations that increase the game's playablility, fairness, etc. For example, in Topple, you are required to place the discs in dents on the board and the dents you may choose are limited by what roll you throw. You also may place only one disc per turn.

c. In a non-democratic game only, you must test the game and revise the rules. I have tested many games that I have made, and have not liked any of them except when I made Risk based on a map of Ancient Greece. But that time, the rules were all written for me by someone else...

4. Then, play the game!

In a democratic game, the steps are teh same, except that we get to vote on what all the elements are.

Gype...not yet

I did a google search for gype, to see if I could find the rules or compile them from all the Original Chestertonian sources. If you type in

"gype chesterton -"Dr. Thursday"" you get about 170 answers.

Paradoxically, if you type in "gype chesterton -"Dr. Thursday" -aaa" you get about 101 answers.

The sites that were excluded when you typed in -aaa were sites that seemed to be lists of all the words there are in alphabetical order.

I also learned that practically the only things you find on google are blogs that mention gype but tell you nothing about it, G.K. Chesterton's autobiography, and Maisie Ward's biography of Chesterton.

I also found:

Lawrence D PO Box 635 Chesterton IN 46304-0635 26421 Andersen Paul Frank ...... Olmsted OH 44070 50920 Gype Lawrence Keith 5980 Whiteford Dr. Highland ...

Apparently, someone has actually played this game within the last 10 years and it involved water pistols as a form of punishment for the outside version and scrabble letters for the inside version.

It is my personal conclusion that gype is a game for which the rules are to be decided democratically by the players. The idea of the game is absurdity. The game is meant to be adapted to the situation. Apparently, Chesterton's sedentary version was meant to be a visual-spatial strategy game. If you can find, in Chesterton's works, more descriptions of the game then the ones I found, I might try to give you a set of real rules.

It is my personal recommendation that we, as the Innocent-Smith style nation of "The Flying-Ins," form our own official set of rules so that we may play it over the internet or take it to the next convention.

Thank a computer scientist...

In response to Dr. Thursday's request, I have written a work of verse fiction. Please visit

A Request, a Falsehood and a Wishful Thought

to read it. It is very Chestertonian.

An Inquiry into the Distribution of the Wealth of Peoples

(it doesn't appear I can post the accompanying graph =/ )

An Inquiry into the Distribution of the Wealth of Peoples

Distributism is an Outline of Sanity. While laissez-faire capitalists attack it as socialism under any other name, and socialists are unable to understand the difference between the two theories, Distributism is quite distinct from both. Essentially, Distributism is the startling idea that there is more to life than raw, mathematical economic growth or equality of income.

The theory was originally developed by a small circle of friends headed by G.K. Chesterton and Hilare Belloc around the turn of the twentieth century. The foundational text of the theory is the Outline of Sanity, in which Chesterton lays out the key criticisms of the laissez-faire capitalist approach (as was being practiced in the England of his day) and discusses what a healthy socioeconomic situation should look like. However, Distributism was then, and still is, and nascent theory, and there are no dogmatic policy recommendations in the text, instead, today’s Distributists must approach the status quo with independent analysis in order to develop beneficial ways to arrive at Chesterton and Belloc’s vision.

While the theory was officially born of that circle of friends, the foundations and inspiration of the movement are found in the Papal Encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadregisimo Anno, which outline Catholic Social teaching. This being said, it is necessary to define the theory.

Distributism mainly deals with the idea of property. While typical capitalists claim that their theory is the most supportive of private property, Distributism claims to supersede the laissez-faire doctrine. Perhaps the criticism is best explained by Chesterton himself: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” Everyone should own a reasonable amount of property. Socialism wants to abolish the ideal; Capitalism favors the concentration of property into the hands of an oligarchy. Both of these are the enemies of freedom, as they deprive the majority of humanity of their individual freedom and power that comes with property. While Capitalists rely on the expression of the “free market” in order to justify their theory, when this happens, Capitalism concentrates wealth more and more, until it begins to look suspiciously like Socialism, except that big business rules instead of big government. And after that, it becomes impossible to distinguish between big business and big government, and essentially, we have the exact same thing. Some will almost certainly respond to this with the assertion that “Socialism has failed; Capitalism has succeeded.” The Distributists warns that person not to be too hasty. Just because the U.S.S.R. lost the Cold War does not mean that the Capitalist can write off every other economic theory. Furthermore, who is to say that the United States will not crumble tomorrow? The Capitalist cause is not yet won. In the end, both Capitalism and Socialism work to end up in the same place. Distributism vehemently opposes this oligarchy.

However, Distributism must do more that simply oppose the twins Socialism and Capitalism and stand for something on its own. It does indeed fulfill this requirement. Distributism is the unabashed promotion of private property. Every man should own some property and some means of production. “Wage slavery” as Chesterton called it greatly inhibits the freedom of the individual and only serves to continue concentrating wealth. While this is not necessarily a bad thing on a small scale, almost all jobs today are wage jobs. The entrepreneurial class is dying, and this theory seeks to rejuvenate it. According to Chesterton, a large class of entrepreneurs and small business owners would be the most dangerous single socioeconomic arraignment to those who would concentrate power into the hands of a few. Big corporations have great influence in the U.S., while the government is a *tad* too influential in China. Both are enemies of the freedom and self-governance of the populace.

Some attack the theory by arguing that it somehow futility opposes the law of comparative advantage and the division of labor. Perhaps this is true to some extent. However, specialization would clearly continue; however, the theory does indeed oppose specialization to approaches the limits of insanity. For example, having five hundred people all doing one single task over and over and over again in order to make a pin is psychologically damaging. While some would argue that this is necessary to bring down the price and increase output, perhaps the world does not need so many pins. Perhaps if the process were unspecialized, pins would also be expensive enough to make a wage on, without creating an excess of the product. This allows the laborer to maintain his sanity while still meeting the world’s demand for pins.

As the graph demonstrates, a reworking of our economy could indeed make less efficient pin production quite sustainable. If the entire industry went back to smaller shops, the price would increase because of the shift of the supply curve; however, there would not be the drudgery of picking five hundred thousand pins of one production line, and then placing them on the next. Furthermore, if the entire economy switches, then there will be little to no actual change in PPP (purchasing power parity) as workers will both earn and pay more. Distributism does not destroy equilibrium, but it does re-center it with new a new equilibrium price and equilibrium quantity.

Here, it is necessary to note that Distributism is a normative economic theory, not a positive economic theory. Chesterton and Belloc do not claim to be able to buck the stars and control the invisible hand. Instead, they simply realize that there is more to life than what might appear most economically beneficial, and so justify innumerable actions with the shallow claim that it is best for the markets. Furthermore, the Distributist movement reminds the world that “Not all that glitters is gold.”

Distributism has no track record, and so its solvency in the real world is still theoretical. While I believe the Distributist cause is unlike in most of the world’s superpowers, many of the currently marginalized regions hold great promise. Hopefully Distributism will be enacted before they can hurdle themselves down either the Socialist or Capitalist trail of folly. The most promising countries for the implementation of Distributism lie in the Caribbean and the South Pacific islands. While neither capital nor economic growth is particularly noteworthy in these regions, they are smaller and geographically more isolated than their continental counter parts. This already creates an atmosphere of small property holdings and reasonable economic independence from other lands. Furthermore, the island culture also lends itself to Distributism.. Distributism will most likely have to enter the U.S. at the local or state level, as attempting to do so at the Federal level is not only ridiculously unlikely, but also contradictory to the Distributist tendency towards the devolution of powers. Furthermore, the current level of centralization in the U.S. is very high, and fighting the mega-corporations must come from the bottom up.

Distributism is a novelty in economic theories, perhaps because it is not extremist in either direction. The Distributist model fits the socioeconomic lock of life and threatens the theories long upheld by the world. Thus Capitalism and Socialism both attack Distributism desperately, hoping to retain their deathly grip on the freedom of humanity. Only then do they run into a surprising Distributist who never knew that he was one: Thomas Jefferson.

But When You Look at Something for the Thousandth time...

I know that Chesterton found joy and entertainment in many things that others would not even think to look at, but should I worry for my sanity becasue my heart started racing with joy when I heard someone recount their nightmares as an administrator at a university with 20000 students?