On Loving Our Neighbors (Selections from "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family" by G.K. Chesterton)

The common defense of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one.  But there is another defense of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defense is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.


The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbors is that they will not, as we express it, mind their own business.  If our neighbors did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbors.  What we really mean when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much deeper.  We do not dislike them because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves.  We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well.


Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority.  It it is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out.  Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues.  Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere--a very powerful description in the purely literary sense--of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds.  As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic...When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus.  Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man.  Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell.  But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth.  It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
   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 as 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 religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp as 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...But we have to love our neighbour because he is there--a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation.


The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb  down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside.  And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day he was born.
   This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family.  It is romantic because it is a toss-up.  It is romantic because it is arbitrary.  It is romantic because it is there.  So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere.  It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men.  The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, buy its nature, a thing that comes to us.  It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose...The supreme adventure is being born.  There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap.  There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before.  Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush.  Our uncle is a surprise.  Out aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue.  When we step into our family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made.  In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy tale.