Some of the G.K. Chesterton in the new issue of Gilbert isn't collected anywhere else. Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski open with a 1933 essay on why the two usual arguments against communism fail, and why those arguments push the young toward communism rather than away from it. Then comes Chesterton on shapeless art, and a leisure state run by robots that he could only call all wrong.

In This Episode:

  • Why G.K. Chesterton thought both common ways of arguing with communists were wrong: insults win no one over, and sneering at a young person's ideals only sounds like a greedy old man forbidding them to be anything else
  • Chesterton's alternative: appeal to the natural desire for a home and a plot of land, and show that real private property protects everyone's fair share
  • Why, for Chesterton, the opposite of art is shapelessness rather than ugliness
  • Chesterton's 1927 claim that films are more unreal than portraits because they are more like life, read against today's AI-generated actors
  • A blended Chesterton essay on a leisure state where robots do all the work, and his warning that "Millions now alive will never live"

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Chapters:

  • 00:00: A new issue of Gilbert
  • 01:15: Dale Ahlquist's finds from the archives
  • 04:11: "How Not to Do It" (1933)
  • 08:32: The argument from liberty and private property
  • 10:33: Fulton Sheen and the third way
  • 15:08: More from this issue of Gilbert
  • 17:52: The Venus de Milo on the trombone
  • 19:50: Shapelessness, the antithesis of art
  • 26:35: Waxworks, films, and Felix the Cat
  • 28:53: Robots and the leisure state
  • 32:19: "Can't you see? It's all wrong"
  • 37:39: "Millions now alive will never live"

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

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