Chesterton on generalists

I recently read a post, at Miscellanies. a Cross-centered blog, about the need for 'generalists' in the church today. Here is how that post starts:

The Well-Informed Generalist

…is a fitting title for Ken Myers, the man behind the Mars Hill Audio Journal, which a sort of Christian version of NPR I guess. And a new interview of Myers by Walter Henegar is very interesting. Here’s how Henegar opens his piece, “The Well-Informed Generalist: Why We Should Listen to Ken Myers”—

What do eating habits, film noir, reptiles, human cloning, Facebook, economics, and poetry have to do with the Christian life? “Everything,” Ken Myers would argue, and does, thoughtfully and audibly, at least every other month. For Myers—the living library behind the Mars Hill Audio Journal—what the church needs today is not more specialists, whether in theology or philosophy or church growth, but more “well-informed generalists” who are interested in understanding all of culture in order to live more faithfully in God’s world…

I’m thankful for the specialists, but I agree with Henegar, the church could use a few more articulate generalists, like Ken Myers. The entire interview is very interesting and I commend it.

You can read the rest of the post here.

I was reminded of this post by Tony Reinke while reading G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense by Dale Ahlquist. It seems that Chesterton was of the same opinion as can be seen in this quote:

You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him…. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. Zulus, gardening, butcher’s shops, lunatic asylums, housemaids and the French Revolution — all these things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He really lives and reigns...Now if Christianity be...a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, the, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over. But if Christianity should happen to be true-then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything...Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. (Daily News, December 12, 1903)

Chesterton valued the generalist over the specialist. Interestingly, for Chesterton, the generalist par excellence is the mother. Consider this excerpt from the FAQ section on the webpage of The American Chesterton Society:

Chesterton consistly defended the amateur against the professional, or the "generalist" against the specialist, especially when it came to "the things worth doing." There are things like playing the organ or discovering the North Pole, or being Astronomer Royal, which we do not want a person to do at all unless he does them well. But those are not the most important things in life. When it comes to writing one's own love letters and blowing one's own nose, "these things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly." This, argues Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) is "the democratic faith: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves - the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state."

As for "the rearing of the young," which is the education of the very young, this is a job not for the specialist or the professional, but for the "generalist" and the amateur. In other words, for the mother, who Chesterton argues is "broad" where men are "narrow." In What's Wrong with the World, Chesterton forsaw the dilemma of daycare and the working mother, that children would end up being raised by "professionals" rather than by "amateurs." And here we must understand "amateur" in its truest and most literal meaning. An amateur is someone who does something out of love, not for money. She does what she does not because she is going to be paid for her services and not because she is the most highly skilled, but because she wants to do it. And she does "the things worth doing," which are the things closest and most sacred to all of humanity - nurturing a baby, teaching a child the first things, and, in fact, all things.