Ross Douthat assesses Adam Gopnik’s recent essay on Chesterton in the New Yorker (not available online).
But the whole point of the “in the context of his times” argument is precisely that by the standards of the ’20s and ’30s, it was morally impressive for a political writer to reject both fascism and communism, to praise Zionism, and to speak out forcefully against Nazi anti-Semitism – and not in its eliminationist phase, but in its very earliest stages. (Chesterton died in 1936.) This does not excuse Chesterton’s anti-Semitism by any means, but it makes him an odd target, out of all the writers and thinkers of that period, to single out for particular opprobrium. Here I think Gopnik is indulging the chauvinism of hindsight: The assumption that everyone who partook of the attitudes that helped make the Holocaust possible should be judged and condemned on the basis of what we know now, rather than what they knew then. It’s the Goldhagen approach to assigning culpability, in which even people who opposed Hitler – even people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died fighting him – are to be judged, and harshly, if they failed to live up the standards that Western society only adopted after the Holocaust provided a terrible example of where these thoughts and impulses can lead.
This strikes me as about right.