GK Chesterton Against Abstract Practicality

GK Chesterton once remarked that “For the man of action there is nothing but idealism.” This sounds puzzling to a modern ear: We’re so used to hearing that we need to put aside ideals and focus on the practical. If we want to get anything done, let’s forget the big ideas and get down to brass tacks.

We have a horrible tendency to think that believing things and doing things are opposites. In politics, idealists are daydreamers who will inevitably fall to shrewd opponents. In working life, passion is opposed to practicality. Sticking to your principles is a nice theory, but when you get to The Real World, you need to think about real things instead.

But what happens when we focus so much on the practical at the expense of our ideals? Soon after that remark, Chesterton wrote:

the present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself.

What fills in the gaps when we get rid of ideals? As Chesterton shows, it’s an odd form of scavenging: We take what we can get without remembering what we’d like.

A young student who wants to study history might be told to choose a practical subject instead. This student could reasonably ask, “Why? If what I really want to do is study history, then what’s the point of doing something practical instead?”

Of course, there are real reasons to study something else—for one, $150,000 of debt poses a major obstacle to enjoying your preferred subject. Certainly, many teenagers don’t realize that they’re not the sort of single-minded person who can live and die for one thing. You could reasonably argue that in choosing this one ideal, a young person would sacrifice other worthwhile parts of life. Not every ideal is compatible. A good life demands that we choose what to emphasize and what to ignore.

All of these are sensible objections, but they’re rarely the objections we see. Rather than arguments in favor of one ideal or another, we so often see people fall back on practicality—paradoxically, abstract practicality. People value What’s Practical entirely for its own sake.

As odd as it sounds, we really do forget what they want. At some point, all of us have found ourselves suddenly aware of life and asked, “Why am I doing this anyways?” At some point or another, we let mere practicality take over and forgot why we cared to work in the first place. That’s the first step to living life on autopilot: Acting without any overarching purpose.

We rarely think about how nonsensical this is. Efficiency is only meaningful in relation to a goal. Who cares how fast you can go if there’s nowhere worth going?

Chesterton argues that efficiency is only meaningful in retrospect. It’s simply a label for anything that’s already worked:

There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the murder was efficient.

The perfectly practical actor has to hide away from the world until the action’s done. Practicality on its own brings us nowhere. It’s a vehicle. Who’s driving?

I’ve argued before that we’re all driven by passion—ideals, to use Chesterton’s language—whether we realize it or not. Plenty of people who claim to live and work without passion are feeding a passion for money, power, and recognition, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Pure practicality isn’t undesirable. It’s just impossible. We always have ideals and passions floating about despite our best efforts to ignore our humanity. And we’re far better off acknowledging where we stand than running around hiding and changing our opinions. As Chesterton puts it:

One can only find the middle distance between two points if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will not even tell us what they want…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.

To be reasonable, we have to acknowledge that we won’t always get what we want. Not every dream will come true and not every hope will be fulfilled. Accepting that the world won’t always be what we want is necessary.

But the opposite mistake—pretending to want nothing—will get us nowhere. Abstract practicality can’t do anything for us. At some point, we’ll have to stake out a real ideal.

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