Volume > Issue > Those Heartless Social Scientists

Those Heartless Social Scientists

HOMELESS VOYEURS?

By Thomas Martin | May 2001
Thomas Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Chesterton thought a man could only understand himself — and Mankind — by going home, and that there are two ways for a man to go home: He might get home by staying home, or he could walk around the whole world until he came back to the same spot.

A home is different from a mere house; a home is the oldest of communities — it comes before straw, sticks, bricks, and politics. The home is best explained as a place of the heart — the place of our bearing and the place where we receive our bearings.

Chesterton’s advice to the man who would seek to understand Man by traveling about the world and observing other peoples is that it would do him well to be snowed in on his own street, where he would “step into a much larger and much wilder world [than he had] ever known.” This will come as no surprise to those who understand the home to be the place where we have been cast with many people we did not choose. The home is the wildest of kingdoms.

My home is such a kingdom. It has a population of six, and comes with a budget, a nutritionist, a foreign policy, 07a crucifix, a garden, transportation, education, music, quarrels, games, births, picnics, funerals, livestock, technology, laundry, sewing, a fence, a few gallons of milk a day, and loyalty.

Enjoyed reading this?

READ MORE! REGISTER TODAY

SUBSCRIBE

You May Also Enjoy

The Prolife Movement: Dead or Alive?

Jeremy Bentham, apoplectic over what he took to be the philosophic conceits of the French…

The Crypto-Catholic & the Jansenist

Is there such a thing as "Catholic drama"? William Shakespeare and Jean Racine, compared and contrasted, provide two fascinating case studies.

Reading Lettered Ecosystems

At an abandoned Ohio farmhouse I knew our search was done. What I didn't know was the land we had chosen was situated by a wasteland that had no precedent.