day no. 15,648: morality is a daring conspiracy

A friend of mine asked me to read over Chesterton's A Defense of Detective Stories paying particular attention to the final paragraph. A friend of his had sent him a snippet from this implying that Chesterton was opposed to morality and that social justice could cure temptation to sin.

"There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure; while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.
 -- G.K. Chesterton, A Defence of Detective Stories

Here was my response:

I think Chesterton is saying the opposite of what your friend wants him to be saying in his "defense of detective stories" essay. From what I can tell, and taking into account what I've read in Chesterton's other writings, I believe he is turning things on their heads (in typical Chesteronian fashion) to make a larger point. He is employing the terms in the opposite way we're accustomed to them being used. In other words, he's saying that we think of the world as "moral" and the outlaws as "immoral," so criminals are the "abnormal" and police forces the enforcers of "normal." But he's saying the world since the Fall of Adam is in actuality predicated on sin and immorality as "normal." Thus, criminals are the "norm." No sin has overtaken them which is not common to all men (1 Cor 10:13), and so the police officer is the "rebel," the "outlier," the one imposing this foreign thing called order and reason and morality. He is picturing the detective as the renegade because morality is abnormal in our world where sin and darkness are the norm. Morality is a conspiracy to overtake the immoral ruling elite. Law and order are a plot to assassinate the presiding darkness which casts itself in certain lights as the enlightened.

In other words, morality (in this scenario the detective/police) is the conspiracy against the immoral ruling elites. We experience the detective story confused and in the dark; we sit back in awe of the criminal who pulled it off, but the detective knows something we don't and proves to be wiser than either the criminal's or our own ideas of reality.