The Fallacy of Success

In the early 20th century Chesterton’s culture was in ideological upheaval, and these tensions weighed on Chesterton’s writing, beginning with the diminishing authority of the Christian faith. By the time Chesterton was writing, the theory of evolution had gained traction and popularity through rigorous debate, undermining the Christian belief that humans were the pinnacle of God’s creation—the top of a divinely ordained hierarchy. Chesterton often argued against the idea of evolution on philosophical grounds. More generally, with the beginnings of modernism came an emphasis on new values—individuality, reason, progress—that conflicted with the institutional authority of the Church, the primacy of faith, and tradition. Critics began to challenge religious doctrines and view biblical history with skepticism. By taking the side of Christianity, Chesterton resisted this secular ideological current. Yet the culture of Chesterton’s time also involved a fascination with the occult; seances and psychic experiments abounded. Chesterton himself was intrigued by the spiritual realm in his youth and even experimented with a ouija board. Whether or not Chesterton noticed the paradox, his writing proposes an explanation for it: The Instinct to Worship, which Chesterton regards as universal. In “The Fallacy of Success,” Chesterton implies that material wealth is one outlet for this instinct in a secularizing society.

The second important ideological pressure on Chesterton’s work came from the rift between higher culture and popular, “low” culture. The higher culture was the sphere of the intellectual elite: the distinguished, educated writers and critics of literature and art. The higher culture embraced the new values of modernism; it was experimental and esoteric, challenging traditional values. In the late 19th century, higher culture harbored the ideal of aestheticism, which promoted art for the sake of art (often meaning beauty and pleasure) and nothing else; Oscar Wilde was perhaps one of the most prominent English-language proponent of this position. By the first decade of the 20th century, writers associated with literary modernism had begun to publish (e.g., E. M. Forster). Such writers produced works that were sophisticated and erudite, sometimes alienating ordinary readers. Chesterton despised higher culture and thus always wrote for a common audience. His prose in “The Fallacy of Success” is accessible and his tone is familiar, while the traditional ideals undergirding his argument would have appealed to the masses. Moreover, his insistence on The Complexity of Falsehood and the Simplicity of Truth implies that the higher culture is needlessly abstract and convoluted—or rather, that it is abstract and convoluted to conceal the fact that it has nothing substantive to offer.

The last significant ideological influence on Chesterton’s writing generally and on “The Fallacy of Success” specifically was the capitalistic ideal of self-promotion exemplified by the wealthy leaders of the Second Industrial Revolution. In this essay and in others, Chesterton decries the worship of wealth and the setting up of the wealthy as role models.