Words Worth Noting - January 4, 2023

“The Spirit of the Age, ironically, is the worst enemy of the Age. It is what destroys it. The first lesson of the book Orthodoxy [by G.K. Chesterton] is that a bad philosophy, when taken to its logical conclusion, when reduced to its essence, is insane. It is single-minded nonsense, ‘the clear, well-lit prison of one idea.’ Lesson two is that it ends not just in madness, but in self destruction. Thus, a society that gives him to frivolous divorce will have frivolous marriage. A society that tolerates cohabitation, contraception, and abortion, will find itself without families – and eventually without a society. And a society that gives into the fiction of transgenderism will end up not being able to define anything. The war on words will lead to meaninglessness, to blathering nonsense, the sort of dialogue one would expect to hear in a padded cell. The attack on language – emptying commonly understood words of their meaning, even to the point of making words mean exactly what they do not say, and giving meaning to words that are simply nonsense, and then to substitute catchwords for actual thinking – is part of the attack on reason that marks the Spirit of the Age.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)