Science Quote by Ashley Montagu

Calling hell a "pocket edition of Chicago" is Montagu at his most mischievously compressive: he takes a grand metaphysical threat and shrinks it into something you could slip into a coat. The joke lands because it refuses the usual scale of damnation. Instead of fire and brimstone, you get the implied grind of a modern city - cramped, loud, impatient, morally ambiguous - rendered as a portable inconvenience. "Pocket edition" is the dagger: hell isn’t sublime terror, it’s petty, omnipresent aggravation.

The Chicago reference isn’t random scenery; it carries a 20th-century shorthand for industrial intensity and hard-edged urban life. In an era when American cities were routinely cast as laboratories of both progress and social fracture, Chicago could symbolize the whole package: politics with sharp elbows, machine power, crime mythology, stockyard brutality, and the relentless churn of people reduced to functions. Montagu, a scientist and public intellectual with a taste for humanist critique, uses the city as a satirical control sample: if you want to imagine eternal punishment, look at the pressures humans already engineer for one another.

Subtextually, it’s also a jab at moral melodrama. By rebranding hell as a recognizable human environment, he implies that damnation isn’t a cosmic verdict so much as a social design problem. The line flatters no one - not theologians, not urban boosters - and that’s why it sticks: it turns a theological concept into a civic punchline, then leaves you wondering whether the joke is on Chicago or on us for building pocket-sized infernos everywhere.