The New Hypocrite

From G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

"The old hypocrite . . . was a [person] whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. .... It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies."


"The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future. Evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl."

"The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. .... The goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of [human]kind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our fore[bears]. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. The future is a blank wall on which [I] can write [my] name as large as [I] like. .... I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity."

"These colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone those things we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do."

"It is very currently suggested that the modern ... is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. .... Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48? Are we strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared?"

"This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. .... The need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution."

"We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. .... The really courageous [person] is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be."

"There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, 'You can't put the clock back.' The simple and obvious answer is 'You can.' A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed."