Chesterton on neighbors (vs. humanity)

The set of quotes in this recent spate of posts come from an edited volume by Alvaro de Silva called "Brave New Family".

After talking about the diversity of families, Chesterton extends the argument to compare small communities vs. "cosmopolitan" large cities and travels to foreign countries-- of 100 years ago. Although our context is different, the observations still hold considerable water:

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....There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique....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....

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives....He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men....

The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really mean that they will not mind their own business....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. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it....

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....

And then the (huge) punchline:

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 a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour...

It's interesting that the Scriptures presume that we will know our neighbors and will treat them well-- vs. not knowing them or abusing them through various sins of omission and commission. Perhaps Christ anticipates modern life in broadening the definition of neighbor to anyone with whom you come into contact. (See: Buechner's "definition" of neighbor for a hilarious comment on this.) In any case, Christians are called to build both sorts of relationships and to enjoy the diversity of the true community we can achieve within the world.