Visiting the Central Catholic Library puts me in mind of the Belloc Society, which had its meetings in this space, along with the Chesterton Society in which I was involved.
It's a strange memory and, somehow, makes me aware of how hard it is to appreciate anything for what it's worth. At least, for me.
Myself and my friend Angelo set up the G.K. Chesterton Society of Ireland in 2010 and we had our first meeting in the Library Bar in the Central Hotel, a wonderfully cosy little place which no longer exists.
For our next meeting, we were invited to assemble in the Central Catholic Library, where we had all our subsequent meetings.
I really suffered from "imposter syndrome" with the Chesterton Society. I was frightened nobody would turn up (as sometimes happened), then when people did turn up (as sometimes happened), I was frightened they would be bored or exasperated by my chairing. I was always trying to calculate how much investment they had in the proceedings.
It's a problem that's perplexed me all my life, as it possibly perplexes other people. How much of a "big deal" should anything be?
For instance, is it permissible to be excited about snow? Is that childish? Does my friendship mean as much to my friend as his does to me? Can I reveal that I remember some trifling detail a fairly distant acquaintance told me about themselves ten years or twenty years ago? Or is that "creepy"? Should I care that it's my birthday? How pleased should I be at a compliment? Does this person watch movies to pass the time or do they take them seriously like I do? Should I pretend to be interested in the details of a person's commute, a subject that seems to fascinate other people endlessly but which bores me beyond endurance? All that.
I always feel like I'm studying the behaviour of humans to masquerade as one of them. Maybe everyone feels like that.
(Here's an example. I went to the pub one night with some work colleagues and their friends, many many years ago. There was an argument and somebody stormed off. Not being a seasoned pub-goer, I assumed such things happened all the time and it would be gauche of me to "make a big deal of it". No, I should be totally blasé. I later learned someone else had written a blog post about the incident.)
I was always scared of being either too ceremonial or formal at Chesterton society meetings, or too little.
Anyway, at some point, a Belloc Society formed, presumably inspired by the Chesterton Society. I remember being surprised by this at the time. I remember being even more surprised that there were Belloc fans who took Belloc as seriously as Chesterton fans took Chesterton, and enough to assemble a meeting. This really surprised me in a way it's hard to explain. I'd assumed Belloc was the poor relation today, no matter how celebrated he was at the time.
And there was definitely a difference, even though both groups were small and had some overlap. Bellocians seemed rather more militant than Chestertonians. I remember feeling slightly shocked at some of the criticisms of Pope Francis I encountered at a Belloc meeting, and even more at a (fairly mild) less-than-complimentary reference to John Paul II.
After one Belloc meeting we all went to a nearby pub, and after another one we all went to the café in the National Gallery. I remember thinking: "This is becoming quite something." It was even getting a small amount of funding from some benefactor.
It was at a Belloc meeting I first met Roger Buck, the author and YouTuber, probably familiar to most of my readers. We have had extensive correspondence since. Indeed I think it would fill at least one book.
Both groups petered out after a few years, although in the last year there have been a couple of Chesterton Society events, entirely on the initiative of my co-founder. It's clear there's still an interest out there.
One of the two guys who ran the Belloc Society died in 2023, God bless his soul. He looked a bit like Frank McGuinness but could hardly have been more different in outlook. I remember him saying once: "If being Catholic was a crime, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"
Here's the thing about such "little platoons", formal or informal. I've realized that they're actually a bigger deal than I thought they were.
They might feel like a bunch of people sitting around talking. Well, they are exactly that. So what? People make connections at them, and friendships, and they raise morale by making us realize that other people are thinking and caring about the same things as us. It's not a given they'll exist, in any particular case.
In a country where there's over thirty-four thousand NGOs, many (most?) of them pushing an anti-Christian social agenda, any group pushing in the opposite direction will have an outsize importance.
My general reading, especially of history and politics, has emphasized to me that ideas really do matter. For instance, Russell Kirk and William Buckley seem to have really played a role in the conservative movement that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan. Eoin MacNeill's article "The North Began" is generally credited with inspiring the foundation of the Irish Volunteers, without which 1916 would never have happened, without which Irish independence would never have happened. Those are dramatic examples, of course.
The hegemony of the liberal left today seems to have begun with various small pressure groups in the sixties and seventies.
Arguments repeated patiently again and again do seem eventually to have an effect, as mind-numbing and pointless as their repetition can seem at the time.
I think that, unfortunately, many of my own semi-instinctual assumptions are rather Marxist. I really do tend to assume that the structure determines the superstructure-- that the ideas current in a society are really just an expression of economic and social interests and tensions. But this doesn't actually seem to be the case when you investigate it. At least, not wholly the case.
Anyway, I hope I'm not making too much of a big deal of my Belloc Society memories. But should I be worried about that?
I went through a stage when I read as much Belloc as I could get. And wouldn't necessarily be unhappy to read it now. I could suggest that his style of history would attract people who had a militant view of the influence-of-the-individual,or who might even be become so- Belloc will sometimes speculate on the significance of the lesser noticed points of history, some of which may be unattractive today;a couple I recall are his insistence that the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have survived had it stayed completely Western European, he believed that integration with eastern Christians watered down the identity; And he also speculated that the Cromwellian republic would have never have happened if Britain had had alpha males on the throne, stating that the last of the Tudors were a boy,a two women, one of them elderly. A bit frightening at my age when you realise that Queen Mary 1 ascended in her early-40s
ReplyDeleteMight he have meant Elizabeth by the "elderly" queen? She was elderly by any standards when she died.
DeleteIt's always seemed extraordinary to me, although Belloc was a poet who wrote many fine poems, his prose seems to me as flat as tapwater. He seems to deliberately write in a flat, almost bored-sounding style when it comes to prose. Maybe I just don't get it.
However, I'm continually told that his historical books are not at all what you'd expect, not fitting the stereotype one might have of Old Thunder. Chesterton says the same thing of the Servile State, that it's not at all the book people assume it to be. I haven't read it, nor have I read any of his historical works except a brief look through one of his books on the French Revolution.