The Spectator's Notes

22 November 2008

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.

The book in question was Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, which was published 100 years ago this month. I have to admit that, despite being in favour of Chesterton in principle, I find him difficult to read. It is partly because his method, which is automatically to invert every conventional wisdom, is itself reductive. By asserting that everything is exactly the opposite of what it seems, he is cheating on behalf of Christianity. If this were so, it would be easy to discover the truth; but it is not easy. One gets sick of hundreds of aphoristic, paradoxical pages which keep saying things like ‘Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.’ He is right, though, in his central perception that ‘orthodoxy’ is a bigger, deeper, freer thing than making everything up for yourself. ‘I am the man,’ he writes, ‘who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.’ Our original sin is an obsession with originality — or does that sound too Chestertonian?

There was a widely reported ceremony at Verdun last week. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, exactly 90 years since the end of the first world war, the crowd, led by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, fell silent in commemoration. Except that it didn’t, because President Sarkozy and his wife Carla were 13 minutes late. The two-minute silence was delayed for their convenience. You have only to imagine the utter impossibility of the Queen being late for such an event to see what a strange, high-handed thing it was. But the ‘hyper-President’ seems to have attracted no more than a bit of muted tut-tutting. I sometimes wonder if Sarkozy, who is always rushing around and shouting into his mobile phone, might be the first head of state literally to have been driven mad by modern technology and its accompanying illusion that constant, frenetic work gets good results. It speaks well for the American way of doing things that one of the first acts of President-elect Obama’s officials has been to confiscate his BlackBerry.