9/17 Political Identity & Political Culture (Part 2)

9/17 Political Identity & Political Culture (Part 2)

"Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.”(p.5).

In this passage Chesterton states that it is okay to laugh at something you may find unusual but it’s not okay to laugh at something you don't understand and then criticize it. I believe that in writing this passage Chesterton wants his readers to understand that a man should not conceive the fact that he finds something “incomprehensible” and then act as if he truly does understand by criticizing it. In other words Chesterton is saying that not understanding something should make us think about why we don’t understand instead of writing it off as inferior or wrong.