THE BIGOT

New Zealand Tablet, 6 April 1911, Page 623

THE BIGOT

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition (writes Mr. G. K. Chesterton). It has nothing -whatever to do with belief in the proposition itself. A man may be sure enough of something to be burned for it or to make war on the world, and yet be no inch nearer to being a bigot. He is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true. Persecution may be immoral, but is not necessarily irrational; the prosecutor may comprehend with his intellect the errors that he drives forth with his sp«ar. It is not bigoted, for instance, to treat the Koran as supernatural. But it is bigoted to treat the Koran as natural as obvious to anybody and common to everybody. It is not bigoted for a Christian to regard Chinamen as heathens. It is rather when he insists on regarding them as Christians that his bigotry begins.

One of the fashionable forms of bigotry exhibit itself in the discovery of fantastic and trivial explanations of things that need no explanation. We are in this cloudland of prejudice (for example) when we say that a man becomes an atheist because he wants to go on the spree; or that a man becomes a Roman Catholic because the priests have trapped him; or that a man becomes a Socialist because lie envies the rich. For all these random and remote explanations show that we have never seen, like a clear diagram, the real explanation : that Atheism, Catholicism, and Socialism are all quite plausible philosoEhies. A man does not need to be driven or trapped or ribed into them: because a man can be converted to them.

Again, it is not impossible (though it is now rare) for an intelligent man to feel certain that Irish Home Rule would be disastrous. But it is impossible for an intelligent man to maintain seriously that the desire for it was imposed upon the Irish by ' agitators.' An intelligent man need not gratify the Irish national sentiment; he need not even admire it; but he must see that in such a case a national sentiment would exist, or he is not an intelligent man at all.

True liberality, in short, consists of being -able to imagine the enemy. The free man is not he who thinks all opinions equally true or false; that is not freedom, but feeble-mindedness. The free man is he who sees the errors as clearly as he sees the truth.

The more solidly convinced a man really is, the less he will use phrases like ' No enlightened person can really hold' or ' I cannot understand how Mr. Jones can possibly maintain —' followed by some very old, mild, and defensible opinion. A progressive person may hold anything he likes. Ido understand quite well how Mr. Jones maintains those maniacal opinions which he does maintain. If a man sincerely believes that he has the map of the maze, it must show the wrong paths just as much as the right. He should be able to imagine the whole plan of an error: the complete logic of a fallacy. He must be able to think it if he does not believe it.

It is admitted, even in dictionaries, that an example assists a definition. I take an instance of the error of bigotry out of my own biography, so to speak. Nothing is more marked in strange epoch of ours than the combination of an exquisite tact and a sympathy in things of taste and artistic style, with an almost brutal stupidity in the things of abstract thought. There are no great fighting philosophers to-day; because we care only about tastes; and there is no disputing about tastes. A principal critic on the New Ag-e, who reviews books over the signature of ' Jacob Tonson,' which covers (I believe) the identity of one of our ablest younger writers, made a remark about me a little while ago which amused me very much. After saying many things much too complimentary, but marvellously sympathetic and offering many criticisms which were really delicate and true, he ended up (as far as I remember) with these astounding words: But I never can really feel a man to be my intellectual equal who believes in any dogma.' It was like seeing a fine alpine climber fall five hundred feet into the mud.

For this last sentence is the old, innocent, and stale thing called Bigotry: it is the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind. The unhappy Mr. Tonson is among the poorest of the children of men; he has only one universe. Everyone, of course, must see one cosmos as the true cosmos; but Mr. Tonson cannot see any other cosmos even as a hypothesis. My own intelligence is less fine, but at least it is much more free. I can see six or seven universes quite plain. I can see the spiral world up which Mrs. Besant hopefully crawls; I can see the clockwork cosmos in time with which Mr. McCabe's brain ticks so accurately; I can see the nightmare world of Mr. Hardy, its creator cruel and half-witted like a village idiot: I can see the illusive world of Mr. Yeats, a gorgeous curtain that covers only darkness; and I have no doubt that I shall be able to see Mr. Tonson's philosophy also, if he should ever give himself the trouble to express it in intelligent terms. But as the expression 'anyone who believes in any dogma' means to a rational mind no more or rather less than ' Yip-i-addy-i-?iy,' I regret I can only at present include Mr. Tonson among the great bigots of history. »