'Other Normal Amusements of Mankind'

A publisher sent an email announcing the arrival of an “enchanting” new volume of sermonizing on a fashionable cause du jour. The centrality of religion in the twenty-first century may be in question but the urge to proselytize remains vital. No self-respecting child will be enchanted by this volume. In my experience, kids already have a strong, if not always nuanced moral sense. It tends to be binary, a matter of zeros and ones, bad guys and good guys. They also harbor a ready supply of silliness and a taste for the absurd, not necessarily in the Camusean sense. The Three Stooges will always be funny, despite our best pedagogical efforts.

A century ago, G.K. Chesterton was making a similar point. Published in the Illustrated London News on this date, Oct. 15, in 1921, “Child Psychology and Nonsense” is a nice defense of children and their essential good sense. Chesterton’s funniest line is made at the expense of Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, which probably deserves better, but it’s a good one: “The child who could really smile at that line would be capable of sitting down immediately to write a Gissing novel, and then hanging himself on the nursery bed-post.”

Chesterton makes the point that many children’s books are written not to entertain or even edify children, but as a form of what we would call virtue-signaling by the authors and, by logical extension, the parents who would buy the damn things. Such parents abhor nonsense, which is precisely what kids love. As Chesterton puts it:

“For there are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.”