Is Jon Stewart Reading Chesterton?

If not... is he ready to?

Here he is talking about Glenn Beck (from a recent NPR interview);

The beautiful thing about what he does is, it's very difficult to argue with his facts. It's the conclusions [that are problematic]. ... It's that slippery slope. ... So what you do is, you just grab together facts and put them together and then do a grab bag of conclusions. Everything is discovered as evidence of secret plots, of secret things that could be occurring.

This reminds me of a classic passage from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy;

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

Disclaimer; I am not saying Glenn Beck is a lunatic. However, he does have what seem to be some pretty looney ideas, which a disturbing number of people seem to accept as real explanations of the world and the state of our Republic at present. Why is it that, far from tempering the excesses of the other,  the Right and Left so often end up mirroring one another's most ghastly mental traits?

Oh, wait. C.S Lewis nailed that one;

Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate each other.

Or, as he noted regarding his semi-biographical allegory The Pilgrim's Regress;

The attack on the soul from north and south represent, in Lewis's words, "equal and opposite evils, each continually strengthened and made plausible by its critique of the other."

So... evil is a two party system, where we are allowed the tormentor of our choice. And that passes for freedom.

Incidentally, The Pilgrim's Regress was my first exposure ever to C.S. Lewis and the first chapter had me howling with laughter, in recognition of my own confused religious upbringing. Not that this was anyone's fault, but so much of my boyhood grasp of the Gospel boiled down to this (from the aforementioned chapter 1);

...it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext.

Comments

[Der Wolfanwalt]

I won't say that Beck is a lunatic, but he is most definitely a carrier, and equally definitely a demagogue.

Also, I read the reference to the two-party status of evil and laughed a mighty laugh.

[Greg]

Fantastic analysis...

[Del]

Age is making you wise, Tim!

I don't watch enough television to know Stewart or Beck.... but one thing is clear: They would benefit from reading Chesterton.

[The Cobbler]

I actually tend to think something a little reversed. Beck has the right general idea but is too careless with the details to present/hold it with prudence and balance. Lots of people realize we need to get back to our roots; few people convince me they know the roots half as well as they think they do.