The Debater of the Age

What does Mr. Chesterton think about it?

I want to know, not only because of the public importance of his opinions,

but because I have always followed  Mr. Chesterton with extraordinary interest and enjoyment, 

and his assent to any view of mine is a great personal pleasure, 

because I am very fond of Mr. Chesterton.

-George Bernard Shaw, in a debate with G.K. Chesterton.

George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton are a study in how to be human beings who disagree.  If you have the time and the inclination you can read this, and enjoy the actual commerce of two amazing minds and admirable if irascible personalities.  That Chesterton and Shaw could engage in such dialogue might actually make you mourn for the state of public debate in our day and age, where we can say so much, but just seem to do it so badly.

There was a time when dialogue and debate was not done in soundbites.  There was a time when ideas between great thinkers were exchanged in public forums, and people were interested enough to crowd into a hall to listen for a good long while.  There was an age where scholars wrote theses and other scholars responded in well thought out and premised argument.  It could get salty to say the least, but for either one of them to resort to the crude "gotcha" style of rhetoric so prevalent these days?  It would have been a disgrace, as indeed it should be.

I guess I'm just sort of pining our loss. We have so many pressing issues: human rights, poverty, wars, healthcare, terrorism, violence run amok, and the best of us can't even get a hearing.  The stage is dominated by the most rigid and dogmatic, and perhaps even criminal sorts, who seem to honestly be trying to make the problems worse.  In the debate above, Mr. Shaw says in his opening remarks that both he and Chesterton are mad men.  They are writers, traffickers in ideas and stories, but that that doesn't mean they don't have something valuable to say.  Shaw says:

Obviously we are mad men; and in the East we should be reverenced as madmen.  The wisdom of the East says: "Let us listen to these men carefully, but let us not forget that they are madmen."

Chesterton and Shaw had this humor about them, and humility of a very peculiar sort, that may have just been a product of their era and Britishness, but it is something that seems utterly absent from the discourses of our day.
Beyond that though, they both had a desire that the world they lived in should become a better, more just and decent place as a result of their argument.  In the debates they had they focused their sharp intellects on the real merits, and weaknesses of their own assumptions and approaches to the problem.  They had profound disagreements, but they never let that get in the way of being rather fond of one another.  They actually seemed to enjoy the product of the other's intellect, even if they thought it was wrong.
I have seen both Chesterton and Shaw quotations used on the interweb to express certain values and ideals in the present political situations.  The purposes to which these quotes are being put would make both men give a disgusted harrumph. Chesterton has become a darling of political and religious conservatives, as well he probably should be, if conservatives were at all concerned with being what society most needs them to be: the voice of orthodoxy and stability, instead of anger-mongers.  Shaw lends himself to rationalist and liberal causes, but he is not soft in head or heart, he is a rigorous proponent of common sense and humanist ethics that actually present a positive challenge to people of faith to shun their hypocrisy in a way that rings prophetic.
At the conclusion of the debate, Hillaire Belloc, the moderator, offers this observation about the subject of the debate (growing inequity in industrial society and the possible remedies thereof, sound familiar?):

In I do not know how many years--five, ten, twenty--this debate
will be as antiquated as crinolines are.  I am surprised that
neither of the two speakers pointed out that one of three things
is going to happen.  One of three things:  not one of two.
It is always one of three things.  This industrial civilization which,
thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we
are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore
end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude,
leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs,
complicated but based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens.
Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert.
Or it will lead the mass of men to become contented slaves,
with a few rich men controlling them.  Take your choice.
You will all be dead before any of the three things comes off.
One of the three things is going to happen, or a mixture of two,
or possibly a mixture of the three combined.

 That was written almost 100 years ago.  Surely everyone who heard it is now dead, but I do not think the judgment has been transmuted.  We're still suffering from the monstrous wickedness, folly and ineptitude of the wanton consumption of resources and lives.  There has been no restoration of sane ordinary human affairs.  The desert option is still very much in play, as is the plutocracy option.  We need voices, true conservatives like Chesterton, true liberals like Shaw, and we need them to talk to each other and work with each other, we need the madmen who know their madness.  We need the return of civil discourse and the iron-on-iron sharpening of ideas. Without it, we are going to continue shouting at clouds, jousting at windmills and repeating all of our mistakes.