Chesterton on Besant - a Critique on Law of One?

[rva_jeremy]

So first of all, I have a soft spot for Chesterton and the Distributism that he and Hillaire Belloc devised, which is kind of a third way system in between capitalism and socialism that incorporates Catholic social teaching.

Second, I find myself in a kind of agreement with Chesterton. It's a similar argument to the one Stephen Tyman made in A Fool's Phenomenology:

You fancy you have chosen, then? And you seek to serve the Other? First, beware that the Other is not a subtle projection of the self! Too often it turns out to be so.

When we love another because we identify with that other, we are placing a condition on that love. It is not easy to love the things that resemble you, indeed, but it is even harder to love the things with which you don't identify at all, that are alien and other. That is real, unconditional love: not to love that which is the same, which is comprehensible, which elicits or reflects that which you love within yourself, but instead to love that which is wholly and categorically different, which does not reinforce your best concept of selfhood.

However, I think it is possible to love oneself. The problem is Chesterton's rather narrow view of the self as just more or less the outer personality. What he doesn't seem to grapple with is the extent to which we are strangers to ourselves in third density, and therefore the priority of relating to the self in a similar way that he conceives of relating to different others. His Catholicism or some other philosophical limitation appears to require him to reduce all the spiritual meaning of love to outer behavior and surface thinking, and like most Catholics (sorry, but it also applies to the broader definition of catholic as "universalist") he insists that we construct that matter in his way and his way only, almost on quasi-empirical grounds. That the kind of unity described by Besant must go deeper than this surface, and that he might have to reckon with a denser reality than what scripture can describe, seems to elude him.

It's only a person who thinks we're all ultimately separate selves to whom the adjective "selfish" could have no connotation but unqualifiedly pejorative. Besant's insight would require him to think more liberally and fluidly about the self, but Besant's view doesn't emphasize how much accepting we must accomplish if we are to apply that approach in third density. However, if you cling to the concept of the individual as irreducible, then Chesterton's admonition to love the other qua other is wise indeed. You can polarize via either perspective; it just goes to show that perspectives have blind spots built in.