Benefit of Family and Your Neighbour

When I read G.K. Chesterton, I am thankful God created people and philosophers who believe and proclaim His truth with intelligence that dwarfs my own.  I feel I am doing well to merely keep pace with Chesterton's train of thought that in an instant speeds off and leaves me disoriented in dust.  Though times and scenery has changed, I find his observations are often timeless and easily re-skinned to relate for modern society and the church as well.  The wisdom that comes from God is timeless, for the eternal God does not change.  Mankind that forms societies and cultures around the globe, in the naturally lost and unregenerate condition, has not changed either.  Those who are born again by faith in Jesus are being transformed to be more like Him, and thus those who know God and observe men (not to mention having experience as one!) find solid footing in reality.

Chesterton wrote an essay in 1905 titled On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family, and he makes some brilliant points.  His ideas that caught my attention are relevant for the church, schools, government and media in our internet age.  Electronics and the internet were not on the radar of a man who probably wrote by candlelight in a house without electricity, yet Chesterton has much wisdom for us today.  Here are a few selected paragraphs from that essay on the topic of community, cliques and family:

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community.  We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas.  There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook.  The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world.  He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men.  The reason is obvious.  In a large community we can choose our companions.  In a small community our companions are chosen for us.  Thus in all extensive and highly civilised societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery.  There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.  The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan.  But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.  A big society exists in order to form cliques.  A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness.  It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.  It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge...

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.  Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is a strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain.  He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts.  That is why the old religious and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour.  The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable.  That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation.  We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.  The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice or a kind of taste.  We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy.  We may love negroes because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic.  But we have to love our neighbour because he is there--a much more alarming reasons for a much more serious operation.  He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us.  Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody.  He is a symbol because he is an accident...

 But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission.  If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential.  It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little.  But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act.  A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel.  But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.  And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events.  They are dull because they are omnipotent.  They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures.  The things which keeps life romantic and fully of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.  It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings.  To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings.  To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.  Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important.  Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty.  They think that if a man makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the sun should fall from the sky.  But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that is does not fall from the sky.  They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations--that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes.  There is nothing baser that than infinity.  They say they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves."  (Chesterton, G. K., et al. In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton. Ignatius Press, 2011. pages 10-20)