"We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end"
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Chesterton is needling a modern reflex: the way we flatter ourselves for being “open-minded” while treating conviction as a moral failing. His barb turns the usual insult inside out. “Bigot” and “slave of dogma” are supposed to describe mental laziness, the person who stopped thinking and started repeating. Chesterton suggests the opposite accusation is often at work: we brand someone a bigot precisely because they did the hard, unfashionable thing of thinking all the way through, choosing a destination, and refusing to pretend the journey is the point.
The subtext is a critique of a certain liberal temperament (then as now) that confuses uncertainty with sophistication. To arrive at “a definite end” is to violate the social contract of perpetual provisionality. In a culture that treats beliefs as accessories, commitment reads as aggression. Chesterton’s Catholic apologetics hover behind the line: he’s defending orthodoxy not as a dead weight but as an endpoint reached by argument, imagination, and moral reasoning.
Context matters: early 20th-century Britain was soaking in secular modernity, scientific prestige, and a growing suspicion of creeds. Chesterton’s wit is to concede the charge while redirecting it. If dogma is slavery, he implies, then the freest minds are those who never decide anything at all. The irony lands because it exposes a status game: “tolerance” can become a way to delegitimize rivals without engaging their conclusions.
The subtext is a critique of a certain liberal temperament (then as now) that confuses uncertainty with sophistication. To arrive at “a definite end” is to violate the social contract of perpetual provisionality. In a culture that treats beliefs as accessories, commitment reads as aggression. Chesterton’s Catholic apologetics hover behind the line: he’s defending orthodoxy not as a dead weight but as an endpoint reached by argument, imagination, and moral reasoning.
Context matters: early 20th-century Britain was soaking in secular modernity, scientific prestige, and a growing suspicion of creeds. Chesterton’s wit is to concede the charge while redirecting it. If dogma is slavery, he implies, then the freest minds are those who never decide anything at all. The irony lands because it exposes a status game: “tolerance” can become a way to delegitimize rivals without engaging their conclusions.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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